The effort to eliminate hate speech and violent ideologies on social media platforms is sometimes likened to playing the carnival game, Wackamol.

If only it were that easy. In Wackamol, as soon as you force a

critter back down into its hole, it does emerge somewhere else on the board, but there are a finite

number of places where it can pop back up, and the moles themselves never change. For all their

dangerous effects on society, you have to give it to the purveyors of hate speech.

They are way more sophisticated than this.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

Take out hate speech on Facebook.

And sure, that same content can easily be posted to a site like Telegram, which has been

less aggressive about content moderation.

In that case, the mole goes to another board entirely.

And the people who want to spread these ideas might also find ways to lure in eyeballs on a highly

moderated site by changing how and what they communicate there.

So the mole on Facebook gets transformed into something like a bunny that nobody wants to whack.

And anybody who

finds that bunny appealing enough can get to the uncensored violent version of the same message with

just a couple of clicks. My guest has been working to understand how extremist groups adapt

their messaging to allow versions of their ideas to escape platform censorship, use bans on more mainstream sites

to stoke grievances, and migrate their most dangerous content to less restrictive sites.

Tamar Mitz is a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, where she's

a faculty member at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, the Institute of Global Politics, and the Data Science Institute. Her book is called Safe Havens for Hate, the

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