On 6th of January 2019, Antifa, an anti-Fascist street protest movement, announced the development of a Chrome (and Mozilla Firefox) plug-in to report content on youtube. The plug-in, 'No Platform for Fascism', can be found on the Chrome web store. Users who download the plug-in (so far, the plug-in has 249 users and 15 five star ratings) will receive white-supremacist or neo-Nazi videos from Antifa researchers which they can report to Youtube in 1-click through no videos have been shared through the plug-in yet.

The plug-in's goal is to scale-up the reporting of Fascist content and pressure Youtube to remove more Fascist content from its platform. However, the way social media companies have handled such reports in the past suggests that it is a weapon that could easily be used against Antifa.

Lessons from Syria

Many Syrian activists found their Facebook pages were shut down when pro-regime activists reported their accounts. Sometimes, the pages did host pictures of dead people which breached Facebook's Term of Service. However, some activists have claimed that their pages were shut down simply because of the sheer volume of complaints which pro-regime activists generated.

You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence - Facebook Terms of Service (3.7)'.

Social media companies may indeed actually prefer to remove content they deem as 'controversial' to avoid unnecessary polarisation and media attention. YouTube recently developed a new artificial intelligence system to identify content that may be terrorist propaganda or disturbing to Youtube users. Subsequently, the 900 channels that were shut down included Bellingcat, an open-source investigations website and AirWars, a website which monitors the toll of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. This shows that social media companies are unreliable regulators.

My plug-in VS your plug-ins

Antifa's willingness to use violence against Fascists at protests could surely attract the unwanted attentions of social media company censoring teams. Since the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally in August 2017, Antifa's media profile has risen considerably. This increased attention has brought with it heavy criticism. The Washington post even suggested that Antifa is the 'moral equivalent of Nazis'. Undoubtedly, there will be some sections of the American political establishment and private sector that would be glad to pressure social media companies to remove their media from the internet.

It would not be surprising therefore if white-supremacists groups develop their own plug-ins to report Antifa's content on social media platforms. A tit-for-tat escalation seems inevitable. Tech-savvy white supremacist supporters would love to engage Antifa in a plug-in war.

There may also be more discreet ways of subverting the plug-in. Tellingly, the only written review of the plug-in reads:

I am an autistic queer atheist who just happens to be a white male, and it's way past time everyone started cleaning up garbage where it sits. I don't think I have to give my life story, but after learning so much of my own history that was erased, this was mandatory. Fascists of all sorts do not deserve to have ANY rights, and I don't care who that offends.'

To the neutral observer, the review does not present Antifa's outlook positively. My guess is that the review was not written by an Antifa supporter and seeks to deliberately distort Antifa's image in the eyes of the public. It may just be a sign of things to come.