Governance by brand safety
This week began with some belated spasms of corporate responsibility in reaction to the January 6 putsch: Social media platforms purged accounts (most notably, Donald Trump's) in an effort to banish users who stoke violence and foment seditious and racist conspiracy theories (i.e. QAnon). Internet infrastructure providers withdrew services from platforms that have served as hubs for right-wing agitation and plotting. Companies paused campaign donations and sought to distance themselves from members of Congress who have voted to overturn the election and incited political violence.
Even if it seems obvious that such preventive actions might have been taken before, it's not clear what effects they will have now. The wave of deplatforming could also be described as replatforming, as fascists seek out other tools and bases for communicating and organizing. Pushing the responsibility for content moderation further down the stack to infrastructure providers or app stores (as Tarleton Gillespie details here) may help prompt the build-out of an "alt-tech ecosystem," as if the existing one weren't corrosive enough.
Trying to force fascist discourse to the margins is certainly an improvement over how many tech companies have heretofore exploited it to boost engagement metrics. Depriving fascists of algorithmic amplification, the possibility of expanding their reach through virality on massively scaled platforms, and the opportunity of antagonizing their "enemies" in what passes for the public sphere takes away some of their sense of legitimacy and curtails the affective rewards (i.e. the joys of bullying, of enforcing obedience, of desublimating violent impulses, etc.) that such movements depend on.
But relying on corporations to rein in fascism is essentially governance by brand safety. It means that social values are subordinated to business models and the changing, often circling winds of the attention economy. If we depend on corporations to set the guardrails for civil behavior, it would imply that white supremacy can be dismantled only when it is no longer profitable. And given how capitalism and systemic racism are historically entwined, that might be never.