It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
