You used the word "campus", because you didn't want to say that the students wanted to hear someone speak. You didn't want to say that, because it's clearly false: students are the ones who invited the deplatformed speakers in the first place. Sure, some other students didn't want them to be able to speak, but then we are just talking about differing opinions and a right of a minority students to hear voices that the majority wants deplatformed. By using the word "campus", you attempted to imply a presence of a non-existent consensus.
There's also a second reason why you used the word "campus": because when anyone speaks on a campus, the inanimate campus always hears it. If you said that the "students campuses don't want to hear someone speak", the obvious retort is that nobody is making them do it, they just don't have to attend. Of course, what is actually happening there is not that the majority of students don't want to hear those speakers, instead they don't want the speakers to be able to speak, and they don't want the minority to be able to listen. That's why deplatforming is so pernicious and evil, and why people like to play language games to minimize the illiberalism on campuses.
Even worse, it's "deplatforming attempts". If someone complains about a speaker, even if the institution doesn't agree, it seemingly goes on the list. In that context it feels even more ridiculous.
I believe it is also per-speaker-at-event, not simply per-event. So if there is a panel of ten people, that counts as ten deplatformings.
So something like this from their recent list:
> Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.
Oh good catch. Ok, so nationally, if each campus held only one event per week, we're saying 0.07% of all meetings had someone speak up against it. Less than a tenth of one percent.
I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.
Yeah, it appears that several recent incidents that they highlight proceeded anyway. I would expect students to protest a Turning Point event at a university; that doesn't make it "deplatforming," especially if the university allows the event to proceed as planned.
Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts, using their position to demand that universities listen? Because increasingly that’s happening as well, as reported in the second half of the article.
Government officials applying pressure on cultural outlets is nothing new, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had them leaning on universities to reject certain on-campus speakers.
What’s important is the overall trend, the increasing involvement of government officials in deplatforming attempts, and the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan. This dovetails with recent polls showing increased support for using violence against speech by political opponents, across the spectrum.
I don’t have the data, but my own experience is that the left wasn’t using deplatforming much from Bush to Obama I, and the right wasn’t using it much from Obama II to Biden. Although that could just reflect who held institutional/cultural power at the time. So it could be cyclical.
When Biden asked Twitter to stop spreading the Good News about horse paste during the pandemic, it broke conservatives' brains somehow. I mean, they are furious about that. A lot of what has happened since then can be traced to their efforts to redress this perceived injustice.
I'm very much for free speech but FIRE here is cataloging "attempts to oppose invited guest speeches" at a time where actual students have been expelled or sent to guantanamo for political speech. Have some perspective.
I cannot be bothered to care about this kind of thing. A student group submitted a proposal that an event be canceled but the proposal didn't succeed? That sounds like something that happens a normal democratic society. How is that newsworthy in a world where we have actual students being expelled for partaking in protests or e.g. arrested for an op-ed in the student paper.
It’s a trend that reveals attitudes about hearing opposing perspectives in younger cohorts. It’s an early signal for what future politics may look like.
Or it's a trend which reveals how FIRE's ability to identify these incidents has improved, and even give a false signal if the actual attitudes have improved.
This is the first reasonable criticism I’ve seen. This could be a problem! Their data starts in 1998, and before the social media era, incidents like this probably wouldn’t even be reported.
However, recent polls regarding support for free speech make me think it’s not an anomaly. Pew has some troubling data here especially regarding support for violence against speakers.
"This original database only recorded attempts to disinvite speakers from speaking at campus events. FIRE announced the expanded Campus Deplatforming database on February 8, 2024, and detailed how the expanded database now includes records of attempts to cancel performances (e.g., comedy shows, plays), art exhibits, or film screenings, in addition to speaker disinvitation attempts"
How much of the recent change is due to that expanded coverage?
I tried to download the data, but got a "Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: a.has is not a function" in Firefox. I can see though that the first few entries include a staged reading of a play, an artistic work on display, and Night of Drag fundraiser, so I know it's showing the expanded coverage.
I also can't figure out how to search the data. How many times is Kissinger in the database?
Does it include, for example, https://nyunews.com/2018/10/16/10-17-news-kissinger/ from 2018? ("Once it was made public that he would be a guest at the Stern speaker series, “In Conversation with Lord Mervyn King,” over a dozen student groups organized a protest against him titled “No War Criminals at NYU” and wrote a letter calling on the university to cancel the event.")
I have a really tough time with any "database" which offers downloading and search, but where both are broken (at least for me), making spot-checking very difficult.
Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers. We know this because we've read about the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. I know this, because I went to college ca. 1990 and these happened.
But gathering this data would require expensive and slow scholarly effort.
The database issues are a problem, agreed, hopefully they get it fixed. You shouldn’t publish something claiming to be based on data without making sure access to the data is available.
Also a great question about Kissinger.
> Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers.
Actual disinvitations, yes, but I imagine that it would have been harder to find examples of unsuccessful pressure. Not everything makes into the paper, depending on who the editor is, and an unsuccessful pressure campaign may not be considered a real story. I don’t see how that past data could even be collected now in a convincing way.
With regards to past violence, I would say that the early instances were indicative of the later trend. But obviously not every trend continues forever (most don’t). I don’t think it’s something to panic over, but it shouldn’t be ignored.
I take this as a stronger signal that too many people with shitty opinions have a microphone these days, and they make it their entire career to "tour" and manufacture outrage. We're really complaining that students objected to Tim Pool speaking on their campus? Freedom from association can be as strong of an argument as freedom of expression. Negative / positive rights and all that. Hopefully we're hitting peak podcast / ragebait culture and Gen Alpha will call out their elder Gen Z cohort as "cringe" for listening to so many low-signal podcasts.
No. I think there’s a baseline level of rejection of speakers that an NYT journalist would usually be a part of. I think we’re above that baseline because of podcasters with shitty opinions.
And it’s not so much that the opinions themselves are shitty, but that the methods of expression are designed (and through algorithms, optimized) to enrage and incite.
Ok, that’s fair, I do think that there’s a lot of intentional ragebait and controversy right now in the media.
However, ragebait isn’t a new thing. Think of Fox News hosts in the 2000s, Bill O’Reilly and the like. They made their living making outrageous and controversial statements to millions of viewers. And the radio “shock jocks” alongside them.
I worked at a regional state uni in middle of nowhere Midwest for 10 years. A non negligible number of ultra right provocateurs would come to campus and say hateful culture wars shit for no purpose but to "own the libs" and post about it on social media.
The fact that some students complain about it is not surprising -- it's pretty much the intended effect. And I guess now that goes on a list so that right wing groups can fundraise off of it.
I was more trying to say this metric is meaningless because being "deplatformed" has become a point of pride these people actively seek. And I did read it.
I stand corrected, sorry for jumping to conclusions. Based on your comment it wasn’t clear that you were aware of the trend on the right. Everyone seems to be talking past that part of the article, acting as if it’s complaining about Biden-era trends.
> Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression.
First comment:
> Democrats are Fascists, they hate free speech, hate private property and individual rights, support massive wealth redistribution, and they always have.
If the comments here are anything to go by, everyone now assumes that “deplatforming” automatically means “left wing activists versus right wing provocateur” and tunes out without reading.
Academic campuses are just a specific battleground for this sort of thing with a highly motivatable group of people with sufficient time. To be honest, campus speakers are rarely of value. Most content is better transmitted through text than through speech. The latter has substantially more density per unit time and allows for per-reader sophistication with modern interrogation tools.
The reason for campus speakers falling out of favour so that only unthreatening ones are accepted is perhaps troubling but the outcome isn’t so bad. The utility of a college is primarily certification because pedagogy for a motivated learner is superior with an LLM. So few who desire to learn will be impeded by this process and few who wish to be certified will either.
This society being a democratic republic, there is quite some risk in the sort of purity seeking combined with a weakness against external nations becoming the cultural norm, but so be it. The tribe of Mankind is an evolving creature and if the democratic republic faction burns itself and the autocracy does not then that’s as much natural selection as melanin adaptation in Africa.
It's not deplatforming if campuses don't want to hear someone speak. This seems like a bonkers term to use.
200 deplatforms in a year? (There were 75 in 2003, the 30 year trend is gentle at best.)
There's almost 6000 higher education institutions in the US. This is fabricated outrage.
How can a "campus" not want to hear someone speak? Can you explain how that works?
Ask me a question in good faith and I'll gladly answer.
You used the word "campus", because you didn't want to say that the students wanted to hear someone speak. You didn't want to say that, because it's clearly false: students are the ones who invited the deplatformed speakers in the first place. Sure, some other students didn't want them to be able to speak, but then we are just talking about differing opinions and a right of a minority students to hear voices that the majority wants deplatformed. By using the word "campus", you attempted to imply a presence of a non-existent consensus.
There's also a second reason why you used the word "campus": because when anyone speaks on a campus, the inanimate campus always hears it. If you said that the "students campuses don't want to hear someone speak", the obvious retort is that nobody is making them do it, they just don't have to attend. Of course, what is actually happening there is not that the majority of students don't want to hear those speakers, instead they don't want the speakers to be able to speak, and they don't want the minority to be able to listen. That's why deplatforming is so pernicious and evil, and why people like to play language games to minimize the illiberalism on campuses.
Even worse, it's "deplatforming attempts". If someone complains about a speaker, even if the institution doesn't agree, it seemingly goes on the list. In that context it feels even more ridiculous.
I believe it is also per-speaker-at-event, not simply per-event. So if there is a panel of ten people, that counts as ten deplatformings.
So something like this from their recent list:
> Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.
Oh good catch. Ok, so nationally, if each campus held only one event per week, we're saying 0.07% of all meetings had someone speak up against it. Less than a tenth of one percent.
I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.
Math: 200/(50*6000)
Yeah, it appears that several recent incidents that they highlight proceeded anyway. I would expect students to protest a Turning Point event at a university; that doesn't make it "deplatforming," especially if the university allows the event to proceed as planned.
Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts, using their position to demand that universities listen? Because increasingly that’s happening as well, as reported in the second half of the article.
> Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts...
Absolutely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
Government officials applying pressure on cultural outlets is nothing new, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had them leaning on universities to reject certain on-campus speakers.
What’s important is the overall trend, the increasing involvement of government officials in deplatforming attempts, and the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan. This dovetails with recent polls showing increased support for using violence against speech by political opponents, across the spectrum.
> the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan
They were always bipartisan.
McCarthy. The Dixie Chicks. Teletubbies. Hell, the American Revolution saw people tarred and feathered for supporting the wrong side.
Humans have done this as long as there've been humans. Other ape species exclude shits from the troop just like we do.
I don’t have the data, but my own experience is that the left wasn’t using deplatforming much from Bush to Obama I, and the right wasn’t using it much from Obama II to Biden. Although that could just reflect who held institutional/cultural power at the time. So it could be cyclical.
When Biden asked Twitter to stop spreading the Good News about horse paste during the pandemic, it broke conservatives' brains somehow. I mean, they are furious about that. A lot of what has happened since then can be traced to their efforts to redress this perceived injustice.
Committed partisans will always put political tribe over fairness and equal treatment under the law.
I'm very much for free speech but FIRE here is cataloging "attempts to oppose invited guest speeches" at a time where actual students have been expelled or sent to guantanamo for political speech. Have some perspective.
Which "actual students have been...sent to guantanamo for political speech"? And please provide some documentation.
It’s a trend that represents what future politics may look like.
Also, maybe you didn’t read closely, but an increasing number of deplatforming attempts are coming from the right, which may be important for you.
I cannot be bothered to care about this kind of thing. A student group submitted a proposal that an event be canceled but the proposal didn't succeed? That sounds like something that happens a normal democratic society. How is that newsworthy in a world where we have actual students being expelled for partaking in protests or e.g. arrested for an op-ed in the student paper.
It’s a trend that reveals attitudes about hearing opposing perspectives in younger cohorts. It’s an early signal for what future politics may look like.
It's barely a trend, and is vastly overshadowed by the corresponding trend of students getting sent to actual jail.
One bad thing existing doesn’t invalidate a different bad thing existing.
Or it's a trend which reveals how FIRE's ability to identify these incidents has improved, and even give a false signal if the actual attitudes have improved.
This is the first reasonable criticism I’ve seen. This could be a problem! Their data starts in 1998, and before the social media era, incidents like this probably wouldn’t even be reported.
However, recent polls regarding support for free speech make me think it’s not an anomaly. Pew has some troubling data here especially regarding support for violence against speakers.
I’m glad someone is tracking it now, regardless.
So here's a question for you. If you look at the methodology at https://www.fire.org/research-learn/campus-deplatforming-dat... you'll see:
"This original database only recorded attempts to disinvite speakers from speaking at campus events. FIRE announced the expanded Campus Deplatforming database on February 8, 2024, and detailed how the expanded database now includes records of attempts to cancel performances (e.g., comedy shows, plays), art exhibits, or film screenings, in addition to speaker disinvitation attempts"
How much of the recent change is due to that expanded coverage?
I tried to download the data, but got a "Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: a.has is not a function" in Firefox. I can see though that the first few entries include a staged reading of a play, an artistic work on display, and Night of Drag fundraiser, so I know it's showing the expanded coverage.
I also can't figure out how to search the data. How many times is Kissinger in the database?
Does it include, for example, https://nyunews.com/2018/10/16/10-17-news-kissinger/ from 2018? ("Once it was made public that he would be a guest at the Stern speaker series, “In Conversation with Lord Mervyn King,” over a dozen student groups organized a protest against him titled “No War Criminals at NYU” and wrote a letter calling on the university to cancel the event.")
I have a really tough time with any "database" which offers downloading and search, but where both are broken (at least for me), making spot-checking very difficult.
Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers. We know this because we've read about the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. I know this, because I went to college ca. 1990 and these happened.
But gathering this data would require expensive and slow scholarly effort.
Are you sure it was Pew? https://nypost.com/2026/09/21/us-news/record-number-of-us-co... says it was a FIRE, and I gotta say I'm not impressed with them so far.
Going back to your suggestion that this may be an "early signal for what future politics may look like." I remind you that we used to have firebombings at colleges (examples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing , https://www.nytimes.com/1969/11/12/archives/firebomb-set-off... and https://las.illinois.edu/news/2021-07-13/fire-protest-braver...), as part of the protests against Vietnam. How well did those protests predict the future?
The database issues are a problem, agreed, hopefully they get it fixed. You shouldn’t publish something claiming to be based on data without making sure access to the data is available.
Also a great question about Kissinger.
> Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers.
Actual disinvitations, yes, but I imagine that it would have been harder to find examples of unsuccessful pressure. Not everything makes into the paper, depending on who the editor is, and an unsuccessful pressure campaign may not be considered a real story. I don’t see how that past data could even be collected now in a convincing way.
> Are you sure it was Pew?
I think you’re right, I have also read the FIRE article and I may have confused it with an earlier poll from Pew about political violence, along with a more recent one about free speech and the media. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/23/americans... https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2026/09/15/americans-...
With regards to past violence, I would say that the early instances were indicative of the later trend. But obviously not every trend continues forever (most don’t). I don’t think it’s something to panic over, but it shouldn’t be ignored.
I take this as a stronger signal that too many people with shitty opinions have a microphone these days, and they make it their entire career to "tour" and manufacture outrage. We're really complaining that students objected to Tim Pool speaking on their campus? Freedom from association can be as strong of an argument as freedom of expression. Negative / positive rights and all that. Hopefully we're hitting peak podcast / ragebait culture and Gen Alpha will call out their elder Gen Z cohort as "cringe" for listening to so many low-signal podcasts.
Do you include the NYT journalist mentioned in the article as someone with a “shitty opinion”?
No. I think there’s a baseline level of rejection of speakers that an NYT journalist would usually be a part of. I think we’re above that baseline because of podcasters with shitty opinions.
And it’s not so much that the opinions themselves are shitty, but that the methods of expression are designed (and through algorithms, optimized) to enrage and incite.
Ok, that’s fair, I do think that there’s a lot of intentional ragebait and controversy right now in the media.
However, ragebait isn’t a new thing. Think of Fox News hosts in the 2000s, Bill O’Reilly and the like. They made their living making outrageous and controversial statements to millions of viewers. And the radio “shock jocks” alongside them.
I worked at a regional state uni in middle of nowhere Midwest for 10 years. A non negligible number of ultra right provocateurs would come to campus and say hateful culture wars shit for no purpose but to "own the libs" and post about it on social media.
The fact that some students complain about it is not surprising -- it's pretty much the intended effect. And I guess now that goes on a list so that right wing groups can fundraise off of it.
Another person who didn’t read the article. Deplatforming attempts by the right wing now exceed attempts from the left, as the article makes clear.
I was more trying to say this metric is meaningless because being "deplatformed" has become a point of pride these people actively seek. And I did read it.
I stand corrected, sorry for jumping to conclusions. Based on your comment it wasn’t clear that you were aware of the trend on the right. Everyone seems to be talking past that part of the article, acting as if it’s complaining about Biden-era trends.
Article:
> Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression.
First comment:
> Democrats are Fascists, they hate free speech, hate private property and individual rights, support massive wealth redistribution, and they always have.
Sigh.
If the comments here are anything to go by, everyone now assumes that “deplatforming” automatically means “left wing activists versus right wing provocateur” and tunes out without reading.
[dead]
FIRE does excellent work.
Academic campuses are just a specific battleground for this sort of thing with a highly motivatable group of people with sufficient time. To be honest, campus speakers are rarely of value. Most content is better transmitted through text than through speech. The latter has substantially more density per unit time and allows for per-reader sophistication with modern interrogation tools.
The reason for campus speakers falling out of favour so that only unthreatening ones are accepted is perhaps troubling but the outcome isn’t so bad. The utility of a college is primarily certification because pedagogy for a motivated learner is superior with an LLM. So few who desire to learn will be impeded by this process and few who wish to be certified will either.
This society being a democratic republic, there is quite some risk in the sort of purity seeking combined with a weakness against external nations becoming the cultural norm, but so be it. The tribe of Mankind is an evolving creature and if the democratic republic faction burns itself and the autocracy does not then that’s as much natural selection as melanin adaptation in Africa.