Kids need it for education. Families also need it for child care.
When Covid-19 first hit, teachers were praised to the skies, recalled Maria Salinas, who teaches fifth grade reading in Florida. “You know: ‘Hey, you guys are doing a good job. It’s so wonderful what you’re doing.’”
Now, she’s hearing the polar opposite: “Teachers are lazy. They don’t want to work.”
Also a mother of four, Salinas finds herself at the center of an ongoing conflict among parents, lawmakers, and educators in which no one is satisfied and everyone is mad. Parents blame teachers for keeping schools closed. Teachers counter that the blame is misplaced — after all, it’s hardly their fault if a school has to shut down because so many staff are sick. At the same time, teachers have concerns about keeping their own families safe amid an ongoing pandemic, and about the burden society seems to be placing on their shoulders.
At the core of the conflict is the fact that parents don’t just need school to educate their kids — something that can, in many cases, be accomplished virtually (though some studies suggest that remote learning is less effective than in-person class time). They also need school, controversial though this may be, as a source of child care — it’s a supervised place kids can go while parents work, and at least in the case of public school, it’s free. This is the function that has truly broken down in the pandemic, with hard lockdowns giving way to rolling quarantines and intractable staff shortages that have left working parents constantly on edge, wondering when the next closure notice will send them scrambling for a backup plan.
The conflict between teachers and parents, however, obscures the crucial fact that school was failing as a source of child care long before the pandemic. The average school day ends before 3 pm, in a country where many parents are working until 6 or later. Kids are out of school for months in the summer, weeks in the winter, and many, many days in between. The result is stress for parents, expenses many families can ill afford, and in some cases, kids going unsupervised when they are too young to safely be alone. “We all act as though child care no longer becomes all that critical once kids enter kindergarten,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University who studies the economics of child care. “That’s not right.”
Like many problems exposed by the pandemic, this one is fixable. The solution is pretty simple: lengthen school, shorten work, or both. Doing that, however, will require a level of political will that hasn’t always been in evidence where families and care are concerned, even when the upheaval around the virus shows how necessary it is.
The conflicts over school started long before the pandemic
Americans tend to draw a stark distinction between child care and school. “Child care,” the thinking goes, is something for infants and toddlers. For most parents, its purpose is “to provide a safe and healthy environment for my kids so that I can work without having to worry,” Herbst said. Child care is also extremely expensive. While some subsidies and programs for children of low-income families exist, most parents have to pay out of pocket, a cost that can be more than the average rent. Proposals for universal child care have been floated in the past, but they’ve failed, in part because of an abiding American belief, especially among conservatives, that young children should be cared for at home, by their mothers.
Then there’s school. Public education in America was conceived as a way of creating a more informed citizenry, as Bryce Covert writes at the New York Times. Despite various controversies, public school has generally enjoyed wide support in this country. It starts when kids are about 5 (though public preschool starts earlier in some areas), and it comes at no direct cost to parents, since it’s paid for by tax dollars. Teachers and other adults who work in schools are often adamant that they are not child care workers, perhaps in part because child care is controversial and looked down upon in America, and child care workers are paid extremely poorly.
In reality, however, there’s always been a lot of overlap between the two realms. “School is — whisper it — a form of child care,” Covert writes; “child care, at its best, fosters children’s development.”
Children are learning from the very beginning, whether from parents, family members, nannies, or day care workers. On the flip side, they don’t suddenly stop needing to be cared for once they turn 5. Kindergartners may be ready to learn to read and write, but they also need someone to keep them safe and supervised; most social workers say children aren’t ready to be on their own for extended periods of time until they turn 12.
Because of this, parents have always relied on school as a form of child care. “School plays an enormous role in parents’ labor supply,” Herbst said. Economically speaking, you can think of public school as a “100 percent child care subsidy” — for the hours of the day that kids are in school, parents’ direct child care costs go down to zero. As a result, parents often rejoin the workforce or start working more hours when children are old enough to go to school because they suddenly have a source of free, reliable care.
There’s always been a catch, though. Child care exists to support parents’ work, so day care centers are typically open year-round, often until 5 or 6 in the evening. Schools … aren’t.
As of 2016, the median school day in America ended at 2:50 pm, according to a report by the Center for American Progress (CAP). Nearly all schools were closed by 3:30. Meanwhile, the largest school districts were closed for an average of 29 days during the school year for holidays and other reasons — some schools, for example, close on the first day of hunting season. That’s not even counting summer vacation, which typically lasts more than two months.
When kids aren’t in school but parents are at work, families either have to pay for care or leave kids alone. Child care for school-aged children can be costly — summer camp, for example, averages $76 per day — and hard to find, with only around 45 percent of elementary schools offering before- or after-school care as of 2016. The cost is especially unaffordable for low-income workers, who are also more likely to have unpredictable schedules and lack paid time off, according to CAP.
A lack of formal care, meanwhile, can shift the burden to older siblings, who then miss out on their own homework or after-school activities, said Khalilah Harris, CAP’s managing director for K-12 education policy. If younger children have to be left entirely alone before or after school, they may miss out on meals, baths, or clean clothes for school. “The lack of supervision can cause children to have a school day that isn’t as productive as it would be if there were an adult just kind of checking in on them,” Harris said.
Parents, meanwhile, are left with constant worry about their kids, which can make it hard to be productive at work. Not only that, but leaving kids alone can expose parents to legal consequences, even if they have little choice in the matter. This is an especially big concern for Black and other parents of color, who are disproportionately likely to be investigated by child protective services and potentially separated from their children.
For decades, the lack of accessible child care options before and after school was forcing parents to make “very tough decisions” about how to support their kids financially while still keeping them safe, Harris said. Then the pandemic hit.
Covid-19 sent an already precarious system into full collapse
If school had once functioned as a child care subsidy for parents, Covid-19 essentially reversed the situation. With classes remote, “the burden of caregiving sort of shifted from school to almost exclusively parents,” Herbst said. Parents had to be on call not just to provide care but also to assist in education, since younger kids often couldn’t fully participate in virtual learning without a parent directing them.
Remote learning added the equivalent of another full-time job onto the average mom’s workday (fathers also did more child care, though not as much as moms). Some parents, especially single moms, ended up having to drop out of the workforce. Others just got really, really burnt out.
The situation has gotten better since 2020, but it’s still pretty bad. During the week of January 10, for example, more than 7,400 schools closed their doors for at least one day, according to the data service Burbio. Even when schools are open, the ever-present threat of an omicron case or exposure hangs darkly over parents’ plans.
Salinas, the Florida teacher, has seen it from both sides of the desk, as it were. She’s frustrated when parents send their kids to school sick, exposing others to the virus. At the same time, she understands that they often have little choice because they have no time off to stay home with a sick kid.
She and her family got Covid-19 last year, while she was pregnant, and she had to take more than two weeks off to care for her youngest child. All of that came out of her maternity leave, she said. “None of our time was covered.”
Now, with omicron continuing to drive quarantines and staff shortages, Salinas faces blowback from parents who think school closures are teachers’ fault. In some places, like Chicago, teachers unions have pushed for stricter Covid-19 protocols or a return to remote learning during virus surges. Some have also pushed back against the idea that it’s teachers’ responsibility to provide child care — potentially putting their own families at risk — so other parents can work.
However, teachers have more bargaining power in some places than others, and not all unions have pushed for more remote instruction. Meanwhile, many school closures during the omicron wave had less to do with teachers’ concerns than with the simple fact that with so many staff out sick, it became impossible to operate a school. “Some things are out of our hands,” Salinas said. “We’re trying to make everything normal again, in a sense, and it’s not.”
There are ways to fix the problem without overburdening teachers
If omicron continues to recede, then schools might return to something closer to normal as spring approaches. But normal wasn’t very good — working parents were already stretched thin long before the pandemic. As we continue to navigate (and, hopefully, one day emerge from) the public health crisis, families and educators need something better.
One way to fix the mismatch between kids’ school and parents’ work would be to make school longer. For example, CAP has proposed the creation of a 9-to-5 school day to better align public education with parents’ child care needs. That doesn’t mean kids would be sitting at a desk for eight hours, Harris said — rather, the extra time would be spent on art, sports, and other areas of interest for kids. Many middle-class and wealthy students already participate in after-school activities based around their interests; an extended school day would allow public schools to offer these for free.
Teachers, who are overworked and underpaid as it is, shouldn’t be expected to bear the burden of a longer school day, Harris said. Instead, other community members could be hired to lead arts or sports programming according to their strengths, or schedules could be staggered so that some educators worked from 9 to 3 and others from 12 to 5, for example. Such a setup would ensure that “all students have proper care, but that they also have the type of academic enrichment and programming that more affluent students have,” Harris said.
The question is how to pay for it. Districts could use money from the CARES Act or other pandemic recovery funds to expand their school days, Harris said. However, there’s yet to be a real concerted push, at the state or federal level, to change school schedules. A few school districts and charter schools have done experiments, but for a broad-based reform of school hours, “you would need certainly more public awareness about how this can work,” Harris said.
The other path to matching up children’s school and parents’ jobs is to help parents work less. Paid leave is certainly part of that conversation: The US still lags far behind other wealthy countries in this area, and while the pandemic led to more generous offerings by some employers, some of those have since been scaled back. “When we got the virus, there was no help from the government like there was last year,” Salinas said.
Beyond paid leave, shortening parents’ work hours would require fundamental changes by employers, policymakers, or both. A universal basic income could reduce the hours parents need to work in order to support their families. Employers also need to be involved in the conversation by ensuring that the schedules they ask of their employees are compatible with family life, Harris said. While some white- collar jobs have offered more flexibility, days off, and the ability to work from home since the pandemic began, companies that employ lower-paid, service-sector workers have not necessarily followed suit. “There are a number of ways that industry is not being called to the mat in the way that they ought to be,” Harris said.
In an ideal world, both school and work would change to help families live more sustainable lives. In this world, however, we’re forced — at least for now — to navigate a broken system, frequently turning on each other when it inevitably fails. Until we can make broader changes, what many working parents and teachers have been asking for throughout this pandemic is a little understanding of the challenges they’re going through and how hard they’re working to make mismatched pieces fit. As Salinas put it, “Everybody needs to give each other a little bit of grace.”
Brazil put its trust in vaccination programs, even as President Bolsonaro tried to undermine confidence in it.
Franco, a 28-year-old Brazilian, agonized over getting the Covid-19 vaccine up until the moment the shot went into his arm. “I was skeptical in line,” he said. “Like, playing chicken, you know? Am I going to take it or not? It’s my turn.”
He went through with it; once, then twice, for his Pfizer doses. “I have decided to get vaccinated after having a sit-down with my physician, and we did our checks and balances regarding my health issues,” Franco said. (Vox is withholding his last name to protect his privacy.)
Franco also decided to get vaccinated in case of possible mandates for air travel, which have not happened. But one thing did not really factor into his decision: politics.
Franco is a supporter of President Jair Bolsonaro — he’s been with Bolsonaro “all the time.” And Bolsonaro just happens to be the most prominent vaccine skeptic in Brazil.
Bolsonaro’s skepticism might sound familiar, but in Brazil, vaccination has not become an ideological or political issue the way it has in the United States. More than 70 percent of Brazilians have been fully vaccinated, surpassing places like the US, which started its campaign much earlier.
Bolsonaro himself has said he is not vaccinated, and he has challenged Covid-19 measures from the start, even as Brazil dealt with devastating waves. Bolsonaro has dismissed the severity of the virus, touted unproven cures, and battled lockdown measures. He raised doubts about vaccines, claiming they could increase the chance of contracting AIDS (they cannot). His administration tried to undermine the approval of vaccines for kids. Broadly, Bolsonaro has tied vaccination to the idea of freedom. “If a citizen does not want to get the vaccine, it is his right and that’s it,” he said in October.
Brazil’s health regulatory agency (Anvisa), the World Health Organization, and health agencies around the world have concluded that Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing severe disease outcomes, like hospitalization and death.
Franco said he doesn’t see Bolsonaro as attacking vaccines; he thought some of the president’s phrasing was unfortunate, or taken out of context by the media or political opponents. Instead, he thinks Bolsonaro wanted more testing — that the president was just saying, wait a second. “Everybody is looking at what Bolsonaro used to say back in the day, and realizing that he was just raising up the question: Is that a safe thing? Is it going to make everybody well enough to go back to work?”
There are plenty of others who see things differently. They point to Bolsonaro promoting vaccine misinformation and taking steps to undermine inoculation efforts, and doing so from the most powerful seat in government, in a manner that impeded Brazil’s Covid-19 response.
Yet, some places, like the city of São Paulo, say they have fully vaccinated the entire eligible population. About 90 percent of adults say they will get the shot.
Public health experts credit the trust in Brazil’s primary health care system and national immunization programs. The country has conducted mass vaccination campaigns in recent memory, including for diseases like polio, which was eradicated there in 1989.
“Despite this anti-vax approach that Bolsonaro took on, we had some benefits from our culture of vaccination,” said Wasim Aluísio Prates-Syed, of União Pró-Vacina, a pro-vaccination union.
Raphael Augusto Teixeira de Aguiar, a professor in the preventive and social medicine department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, added that Brazil has “built up the system for so many years. It’s not easy to destroy it.”
That has muted, if not entirely eliminated, the influence of anti-vaccine sentiment and misinformation. But although Brazilians’ trust in the country’s public health and vaccination programs may have survived Covid-19 and the president’s efforts to unravel them, Brazil has not emerged unscathed. “Today we don’t have to worry. Covid will not be a problem. But I’m worried about the future,” said Natalia Pasternak Taschner, a microbiologist and president of the Instituto Questão de Ciência.
How Brazil has overcome Bolsonaro on Covid-19
On January 14, Brazil started vaccinating kids, ages 5 to 11 — almost a full month after Brazil’s federal health regulatory agency, Anvisa, approved the vaccines for that age group. Bolsonaro and his administration spent that month trying to stymie any vaccination efforts.
“Kids are something very serious,” Bolsonaro said after Anvisa’s approval. “We don’t know about possible adverse future effects. It’s unbelievable — I’m sorry — what the agency did. Unbelievable.” He also threatened to release the names of the regulators who had made the decision. (Studies show that side effects are rare.)
Bolsonaro and his administration tried to push a policy to require a doctor’s prescription for childhood vaccination, a process that would have slowed the inoculation campaign. Bolsonaro’s government launched an online survey and tried to get its supporters to flood the results. The questions were also confusingly worded and, some critics said, phrased that way to get the outcome the government desired.
That gambit failed. Of the tens of thousands who participated in the survey, the majority opposed prescriptions for childhood vaccines, and supported a much simpler process. The Ministry of Health finally put a campaign in place to vaccinate kids.
Lorena Chaves, a researcher at Emory University, said this showed Brazil’s success at fighting vaccine misinformation, with doctors and health institutions rejecting anti-vaccine efforts. Throughout the Brazil’s vaccination campaign, groups like Prates-Syed’s pro-vaccine union worked alongside others, like Rotary International’s #INFORMAÇÃOSALVAVIDAS (Information Saves Lives) campaign, to debunk misinformation.
But in general, experts said, Brazil doesn’t have a powerful anti-vaccine movement.
“Brazil is really unique when it comes to vaccination history and vaccination tradition,” Pasternak said. “And that puts us in a very privileged position, because it’s been 50 years of an excellent vaccination program. And during this 50 years, vaccine confidence was built in the Brazilian population.”
“So residents are very favorable to vaccination, and that, it makes them kind of immune to vaccine misinformation,” she added.
In the 1980s, Brazil conducted a massive campaign to eradicate polio, vaccinating more than 10 million people in one day. There is even a vaccination mascot, Zé Gotinha. Brazil has also conducted large-scale efforts for measles and for yellow fever. There is a living memory of life before, and after, vaccines. “A whole generation really grew up with this tradition of being vaccinated,” Aguiar said.
“I think most fathers and mothers and grandparents, they can remember how awful the situation was before the vaccines,” he added.
Aguiar said underlying this is Brazil’s primary health care system, with clinics throughout the country and other community-based programs. Together with vaccination, this health care infrastructure helped dramatically improve Brazil’s health outcomes for things like the child mortality rate and life expectancy. And Brazil has experience fighting epidemics of tropical diseases like dengue and Zika.
For these reasons, Brazilians largely still have faith that their health institutions are working. This is especially true for technical agencies — like Anvisa, which approves the vaccines. These agencies were somewhat insulated from the politicization of Covid-19 that permeated other parts of Bolsonaro’s government, like the Ministry of Health.
“We, all the Brazilians, truly trust it,” said Renata Vasconcelos, who, along with her husband, Henrique Vasconcelos, works with Rotary International to combat Covid-19 vaccine misinformation. Renata said that if regulators say more shots are recommended, “we are going to respect that and have it.”
Beyond trust in the system, Brazilians witnessed Covid-19’s devastation for themselves. More than 625,000 Brazilians died from Covid-19, the world’s second highest death count behind the United States. That toll was extraordinary, and the population wanted a way to avoid deadly wave after deadly wave. “Everybody has someone that we lost,” Henrique Vasconcelos said.
Maurício Terra Dias, a 59-year-old from Goiânia who voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 — but who says he will not vote for him again — put it another way in an email: “People [were] too scared to follow that insanity.”
Brazil’s health system was resilient — this time
By many metrics, Brazil bungled its Covid-19 response. A Brazilian Senate panel has alleged Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic is more than negligence. Instead, they argue, it was deliberate mismanagement to try to achieve herd immunity with a large amount of Covid-19 cases, something lawmakers suggested could amount to crimes against humanity.
Bolsonaro’s government also mishandled the vaccination campaign. The administration was late to secure doses, and reportedly ignored overtures by Pfizer to buy doses. Other efforts were tainted by allegations of corruption, with officials trying to get kickbacks from suppliers. All of that undermined Brazil’s vaccination program, delaying the start of the rollout until mid-January 2021, and leaving the country short on supply.
But the campaign picked up in the middle of last year, hitting rates just about on par with many European countries. This is largely because the system proved, despite chaotic leadership from the federal government, to be resilient. Doctors, social movements, state governors, and local officials mobilized, reacting, improvising, and adjusting.
“A lot of people think Brazil’s Covid-19 response was a disaster,” said João Nunes, a senior lecturer in international relations at York University. “But it wasn’t a disaster. It would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for this resilience, for this capacity of the public health system.”
Bolsonaro has always maintained his unshakable base of supporters, but, increasingly, that’s all who’s left. His government is more unpopular than ever, and Bolsonaro is trailing far behind his likely opponent in the 2022 election. The country is facing an economic crisis, and as Aguiar said, people who are struggling to survive can’t afford to be sick. Many see Bolsonaro’s anti-vaccine crusade as a way to distract from his own failures on Covid-19, and the economy, and turn it into a fight over ideology, in an attempt to galvanize his supporters. “Now we are almost all tired of his idiocy,” Terra Dias said.
All of this helped create a buffer against Bolsonaro, but experts said it is fragile and not guaranteed to be permanent. “When it comes to vaccines, we have this 50-year-old tradition of trust,” Pasternak added. “And trust is not the same as understanding. It’s not the same as scientific literacy.”
The health system’s resiliency could still falter. Indeed, the rollout of childhood vaccinations for kids under 11 has been pretty slow so far, and some officials have blamed Bolsonaro for this, including his comments that he would not vaccinate his 11-year-old daughter.
“It’s the first time in Brazil in history that we have an outright anti-vax spreading vaccine misinformation,” Pasternak said. “So this beautiful vaccine confidence that we have today — that makes us immune even to Bolsonaro’s claims that vaccines are going to give you AIDS, turn you into an alligator, or kill children — I don’t know where we’ll be in like five years’ time, if these attacks continue.”
Franco is supportive of vaccines, but thought the Covid-19 doses were misleadingly sold as the silver-bullet cure to Covid-19. He believes that even more strongly after his vaccinated father spent eight days in the ICU with Covid-19. He is still evaluating whether he’ll get a booster shot; he’ll talk to his doctor again, get a checkup. He’s unsure if he’s better off vaccinated — maybe, maybe not — but he does not regret it, either.
“I have to stand with my decision,” he said. “I didn’t get any bad side effects or anything like that. But, I mean, what’s done is done.”
Social media bans can make it harder to recruit new followers, but existing supporters can become more toxic.
It’s been over a year since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned an array of domestic extremist networks, including QAnon, boogaloo, and Oath Keepers, that had flourished on their platforms leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Around the same time, these companies also banned President Donald Trump, who was accused of amplifying these groups and their calls for violence.
So did the “Great Deplatforming” work? There is growing evidence that deplatforming these groups did limit their presence and influence online, though it’s still hard to determine exactly how it has impacted their offline activities and membership.
While extremist groups have dispersed to alternative platforms like Telegram, Parler, and Gab, they have had a harder time growing their online numbers at the same rate as when they were on the more mainstream social media apps, several researchers who study extremism told Recode. Although the overall effects of deplatforming are far-reaching and difficult to measure in full, several academic studies about the phenomenon over the past few years, as well as data compiled by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs for Recode, support some of these experts’ observations.
“The broad reach of these groups has really diminished,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. “Yes, they still operate on alternative platforms … but in the first layer of assessment that we might do, it’s the mainstream platforms that matter most.” That’s because extremists can reach more people on these popular platforms; in addition to recruiting new members, they can influence mainstream discussions and narratives in a way they can’t on more niche alternative platforms.
The scale at which Facebook and Twitter deplatformed domestic extremist groups — although criticized by some as being reactive and coming too late — was sweeping.
Twitter took down some 70,000 accounts associated with QAnon in January 2021, and since then the company says it has taken down an additional 100,000.
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Facebook says that since expanding its policy against dangerous organizations in 2020 to include militia groups and QAnon, it has banned some 54,900 Facebook profiles and 20,600 groups related to militarized groups, and 50,300 Facebook profiles and 11,300 groups related to QAnon.
Even since these bans and policy changes, some extremism on mainstream social media remains undetected, particularly in private Facebook Groups and on private Twitter accounts. As recently as early January, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm was still promoting to some users militia content by groups such as the Three Percenters — whose members have been charged with conspiracy in the Capitol riot — according to a report by DC watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project. The report is just one example of how major social media platforms still regularly fail to find and remove overtly extremist content. Facebook said it has since taken down nine out of 10 groups listed in that report.
Data from Zignal Labs shows that after major social media networks banned most QAnon groups, mentions of popular keywords associated with it decreased. The volume of QAnon and related mentions dropped by 30 percent year over year across Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit in 2021. Specifically, mentions of popular catchphrases like “the great awakening,” “Q Army,” and “WWG1WGA,” decreased respectively by 46 percent, 66 percent, and 88 percent.
This data suggests that deplatforming QAnon may have worked to reduce conversations by people who use such rallying catchphrases. However, even if the actual organizing and dialogue from these groups has gone down, people (and the media) are still talking about many extremist groups with more frequency — in QAnon’s case, around 279 percent more in 2021 than 2020.
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Several academic studies in the past few years have also quantitatively measured the impact of major social media networks like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube deplatforming accounts for posting violent, hateful, or abusive content. Some of these studies have found that deplatforming was effective as a short-term solution in reducing the reach and influence of offensive accounts, though some studies found increases in toxic behavior these users exhibited on alternative platforms.
Another reason why some US domestic extremist groups have lost much of their online reach may be because of Trump’s own deplatforming, as the former president was the focus of communities like QAnon and Proud Boys. Trump himself has struggled to regain the audience he once had; he shut down his blog not long after he announced it in 2021, and he has delayed launching the alternative social media network he said he was building.
At the same time, some of the studies also found that users who migrated to other platforms often became more radicalized in their new communities. Followers who exhibited more toxic behavior moved to alternative platforms like 4Chan and Gab, which have laxer rules against harmful speech than major social media networks do.
Deplatforming is one of the strongest and most controversial tools social media companies can wield in minimizing the threat of antidemocratic violence. Understanding the effects and limitations of deplatforming is critical as the 2022 elections approach, since they will inevitably prompt controversial and harmful political speech online, and will further test social media companies and their content policies.
Deplatforming doesn’t stop extremists from organizing in the shadows
The main reason deplatforming can be effective in diminishing the influence of extremist groups is simple: scale.
Nearly 3 billion people use Facebook, 2 billion people use YouTube, and 400 million people use Twitter.
But not nearly as many people use the alternative social media platforms that domestic extremists have turned to after the Great Deplatforming. Parler says it has 16 million registered users. Gettr says it has 4 million. Telegram, which has a large international base, had some 500 million monthly active users as of last year, but far fewer — less than 10 percent — of its users are from the US.
“When you start getting into these more obscure platforms, your reach is automatically limited as far as building a popular movement,” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab who recently published a report about how domestic extremists have adapted their online strategies after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Several academic papers in the past few years have aimed to quantify the loss in influence of popular accounts after they were banned. In some ways, it’s not surprising that these influencers declined after they were booted from the platforms that gave them incredible reach and promotion in the first place. But these studies show just how hard it is for extremist influencers to hold onto that power — at least on major social media networks — if they’re deplatformed.
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