deplatforming Concepts

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson · 8 Mar 2022 · 574pp · 148,233 words

. After Mullenweg intervened, Lenny said, “WordPress took down blogs that were ten years old. I still work with them.” * * * — Hundreds of news stories about Infowars’ deplatforming tarred Jones with spreading the Sandy Hook hoax. He reacted as he had in our August 3 interview: complaining that he didn’t invent the

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Rush Limbaugh, tens of millions of views. He knows who Infowars is, playing this joke over here.” He touched Rubio’s arm, daring him. “The deplatforming didn’t work,” he told him. A man from Rubio’s security detail pushed Jones’s hand roughly away. “Don’t touch me again, man

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bothered with him. Rubio wrapped it up and headed back to the hearing room. “You guys can talk to this clown,” he said. In fact, deplatforming Alex Jones did work. By the time our profile of Alex Jones and his business, “Conspiracy Theories Made Alex Jones Very Rich. They May Bring

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conspiracists who hawk books and DVDs touting their loopy claims, including that vaccines fulfill Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’s plan to inject people with microchips. Deplatforming these repeat offenders is “the most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information,” the center said. Yet Facebook, Google’s YouTube

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end of 2021, that had belatedly begun to change.[11] It’s no accident that Alex Jones failed to make it into the Disinformation Dozen. Deplatformed in 2018 and 2019, his social media presence remains a faint shadow of what it was, despite constant efforts to sneak back on. By late

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percent of all traffic to Infowars’ website came from social media, according to an analysis for the Times by Similarweb,[12] an internet tracking company. Deplatforming blunts misinformation superspreaders’ influence and access to funding. White nationalist Richard Spencer, who rode Trump-era bigotry to stardom, had his social media accounts yanked

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’t afford a lawyer.[13] Spencer’s National Policy Institute has closed. He lives in Montana, shunned even by his neighbors.[14] To be sure, deplatforming is a pretty blunt weapon. Platforms take ages to do it, it creates “free speech” martyrs, and it can drive extremists onto anything-goes platforms

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isn’t pumped into the feeds of susceptible people. J. M. Berger, a writer and researcher on extremism, terrorism, and propaganda, told me he recommends deplatforming as a part of a “drug cocktail” of measures, including civil lawsuits and prosecutions, which “are good at stopping groups or movements with strong organizational

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5 Casey Newton, “How Alex Jones Lost His Info War,” The Verge, August 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17659026/alex-jones-deplatformed-misinformation-hate-speech-apple-facebook-youtube. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Brian Stelter, “Reliable Sources: Alex Jones Has Been

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‘Deplatformed.’ Now What?,” CNN, August 7, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/07/media/reliable-sources-08-06-18/index.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE

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copyright/takedown notices, 197–98, 199, 200, 277, 290, 297–99; on coronavirus pandemic, 415; and day of Sandy Hook massacre, 71–72, 74, 82; deplatforming of, 374–75, 377, 379, 380; and Facebook, 342, 343, 345; founding of, 75–76, 358; on gun policy, 90; and Halbig, 101, 147, 180

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, 378; on copyright/takedown notices, 297–99; on coronavirus pandemic, 415–16; Cruz’s support for, 384; custody battle of, 297, 299–300, 362–63; deplatforming of, 374–75, 379, 380, 420; depositions of, 412–15, 429; divorce, 299, 362, 372; erratic behavior of, 265–66, 299; and Facebook, 166, 342

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, 123–24; bots on, 423; and congressional hearings, 377–78; content algorithms of, 209; and coronavirus pandemic, 419–20; death threats made on, 169–71; deplatforming repeat offenders on, 374–75, 377, 420–21; difficulty of posting Sandy Hook lies on, 421; disinformation/misinformation of, 419–20, 423–24; failure to

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, 206–10; growth of, 85, 86, 195; harrassment of families on, 388; hoaxers’ profiting from conspiracy content on, 194; influence/impacts of, 165, 286; Infowars deplatformed from, 374–75, 377; lack of regulation/standards, 193–95, 209; as news source, 385; and Pizzagate, 243, 250, 253; and QAnon, 250–51, 252

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein · 11 Sep 2023

same people who make their toothpaste). “Losing Control of the Brand” (like, oh, I don’t know, having the words and actions of a serially deplatformed conspiracy monger attributed to you amid a deadly pandemic). At the time Hon offered his free advice, brand dilution was making headlines because Nike had

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. If the passports become a reality, she said in her own video, “there won’t be capitalism.” Already, she said, the tech companies (with their deplatforming of misinformation) and the government (with its various Covid mandates) were engaging in “CCP-type conditioning … conditioning us not to be members of the West

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getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of

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the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings—until the same dynamics came for them. The spread of lies and conspiracies online is now so rampant that it threatens public health and, quite

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most recent episode. It was a speech by Donald Trump, recorded live, in which he announced that he was suing the Big Tech companies for deplatforming him, followed by reaction from … What? Why her? I scrolled down and saw that I had missed several other recent appearances by my doppelganger while

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rules of her new culture. Where, in the past, she put out plaintive videos about the unfairness of having her accounts suspended, she now wears deplatforming as a badge of honor, exploiting it as a fundraising pitch. “We really need you,” she tells Bannon, “because since we’ve been reporting on

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this, we’ve been deplatformed again!… We got bumped off of YouTube so come please to DailyClout.io.” When her Twitter account was reactivated by Musk’s conspiracy-friendly regime

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, her first salvo back was: “Greetings. Signed, Deplatformed seven times and still right.” She knows that in the Mirror World, only “sheeple” get to speak unhindered, while prophets must battle to be heard

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I have listened to, I have never heard Wolf speak out against the escalating book bans around the country, even as she laments her own deplatforming as a member of the “shadow banned.” It’s as if by absorbing the language and postures of the oppressed, the diagonalists are attempting to

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Dr Naomi Wolf, Substack, May 29, 2022. nearly doubling her following: Before Covid, Wolf had around 70,000 followers; by May 2021, when she was deplatformed, she had 138,000. Naomi Wolf @naomirwolf, web capture of Twitter account, May 15, 2021. “local leaders are dying too”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch · 21 Jun 2021 · 446pp · 109,157 words

, toward their own dissidents and eventually toward outsiders, too. They brand dissidents as traitors, seek to exclude them from power or social participation, boycott and deplatform them, dehumanize and cancel them. Eventually, they use violence, sometimes to the point of seeking to wipe out a political faction or ethnic group altogether

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is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary. State actors have traditionally understood propaganda and disinformation as psychological or informational warfare against an adversarial regime. Modern trolls view

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A civil rights lawyer (who, one would think, might understand the difference between hearing conservative arguments and actually being shot) justified student activists’ blockading and deplatforming of a conservative speaker this way: “It doesn’t make sense for you to be pursuing a degree somewhere and for someone to put a

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regime.)22 Appeals to safety allow for no consideration of their real-world effects. When Reason magazine’s Robby Soave asked a graduate student whether deplatforming a speaker might backfire by creating a martyr and discrediting student protesters, the student granted the point but said it was not his concern. “I

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, when the public conversation about canceling reached a boiling point in 2020. “Threatened and actual violence in retaliation for speech are wrong, full stop. Firings, deplatformings, and social stigma for self-expression are not always wrong. They are wrong on a case-by-case basis.”55 Hannah Giorgis, another writer, put

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to the realm of propaganda warfare: like other forms of information warfare, it seeks to organize and manipulate a social or media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary. Like disinformation and trolling, its interest is not in discovering knowledge but in shaping the information battlefield. In practice, the

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being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities? The Constitution of Knowledge punishes the idea, not the person; cancel culture punishes the person, not the idea. Deplatforming: Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches, attending meetings? Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence

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and eliminating discrimination and other obstacles to conservative faculty and students. It entails welcoming conservative speakers, making them safe, and defending them from mobs and deplatformers; consistently disciplining bad actors who bully or harass people who have controversial views; repudiating the use of ideological litmus tests (like commitments to a progressive

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pressure from activists and interest groups within their own ranks to bend coverage toward social justice (as defined by the political left, usually) and to deplatform, or at least disfavor, contrary views. Some journalists, especially younger ones, ridicule the idea of objectivity as a “view from nowhere” and call for replacing

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information warfare. Cancelers and trolls share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets: confusing them, isolating them, drowning them out, deplatforming them, shaming them, or overwhelming them so that they give up on pushing back. Demoralization is demobilization. At bottom, individuals must decide whether to submit

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’t continuing them only force minorities to relive pain and suffer indignity? In 2017 the manifesto by Middlebury’s students made this point forcefully. Their deplatforming of a controversial speaker was “meant to challenge a college practice and policy which puts [an] undue burden on specific groups of students, asking them

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our commitments, they usurp attention which they could never earn on the merits. You need not be a professional propagandist to see that protesting or deplatforming someone is like putting up a neon sign attracting attention to her. After all, if an idea is dangerous, then it must be important; if

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a speaker is worth deplatforming, then she must have something interesting to say. Competitive condemnation is a game we can choose not to play. Next time you feel the urge

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to protest some piece of nonsense, to rebut it (and thus repeat it), to deplatform it, or to organize outrage against it, consider going out for a pizza instead. Don’t feed the trolls. That provocateur who comes to campus

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, 112; U.S. Constitution and, 81–82; virtuous public and, 112. See also liberalism demoralization and demobilization, 162, 166–69, 217–18, 243, 247, 249 deplatforming, 39, 200, 205, 217–20, 236, 240, 255–59 design of digital media, 17–18, 139, 146–49 digital media: cancel culture and, 210; content

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

by Ben Smith · 2 May 2023

, who had recently won an apology from Facebook, which had treated their political claims as dangerous misinformation. They walked among easels carrying enlarged words like “deplatforming” and “demonetization”—the tools that had begun to be used to chase extreme voices off social media—with their definitions. Another enlarged Trump tweet read

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a police report. By then, Gionet had been subject to the evils that had been denounced at Trump’s social media summit. He’d been deplatformed—thrown off Twitter and Twitch—and had his YouTube videos demonetized. So he was streaming to DLive, a blockchain-based service, when he entered the

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Torch March,” YouTube, April 17, 2018, video, 8:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPQScy9Z7M. Go to note reference in text He’d been deplatformed: Ignacio Martinez, “The Atonement of an Alt-right Troll,” Daily Dot, May 22, 2019, https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/baked-alaska-atonement-alt-right

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-deplatforming. Go to note reference in text It was easy to relate: Tasneem Nashrulla, “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds,” BuzzFeed

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, 85–86 and Thompson’s role at Huffington Post, 79–80 and traffic monitoring tools, 72 and 2008 financial crisis, 120 wedding, 213–14, 235 deplatforming, 278, 295 Diamond and Silk, 278 dick pics, 137, 139–42, 144, 215–17 Digg, 66, 70, 72, 74, 102–4, 107–8 digital labor

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent

by Ben Shapiro · 26 Jul 2021 · 309pp · 81,243 words

he was endangered by Trump’s overheated talk, became a household name thanks to his grandstanding. At no point did Acosta fear arrest or even deplatforming. The shock of January 6 was that the guardrails collapsed for a brief moment in time after holding for years on end. And then the

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. In the aftermath of January 6, America’s institutional powers swung into action on behalf of authoritarian measures. Establishment media broadly promoted the idea of deplatforming mainstream conservatives and conservative outlets. CNN reported that the Capitol riot had “reignited a debate over America’s long-held defense of extremist speech.” Naturally

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For now, presumably. This threat extends beyond the financial services industry. When Amazon Web Services, whose sole job is to provide cloud services, decides to deplatform Parler, that’s polarizing. When Mailchimp, an email delivery service, refuses to do business with the Northern Virginia Tea Party, that’s polarizing.42 When

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Project into multiple feature films, TV series, and documentaries.47 JOURNALISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH Authoritarian leftists often claim that “cancel culture” isn’t real—that deplatforming isn’t a problem, because conservatives and traditional liberals can simply present their ideas elsewhere. That argument is the height of gaslighting. It also happens

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and Jared Taylor. Roose lamented, “YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism.”56 The goal is obvious: get everybody right of center deplatformed. And threaten the platforms themselves in order to do so. It won’t stop there. Media members have now decided, in the post-Trump age

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activists,” NYPost.com, May 25, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purging-accounts-of-conservative-activists/. 42. Dana Loesch,” Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism,” Federalist.com, December 16, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp

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-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 43. Caleb Parke, “Conservatives call for PayPal boycott after CEO says Southern Poverty Law Center helps

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Opam, Kwame, 174 Operation Vote, 64 Overton Window, of acceptable discourse, 27, 40–42 Page, Ellen, 149–50 Palin, Sarah, 61 Parasite (film), 140 Parler, deplatforming of, 12–13, 136, 209–10 Pascal, Pedro, 214 PayPal, 135, 136 Pence, Mike, 2, 10 Philadelphia Inquirer, 177 Phillips, Hillary, 126 Pinker, Steven, 16

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–3 authoritarian responses to, 2, 11–14 democratic institutions and, 9–11, 14 media’s coverage of compared to BLM coverage, 166–68 Parler’s deplatforming and, 12–13, 136, 209–10 social media and banning of Trump, 205 U.S. Constitution checks and balances to restrain government and, 5–6

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

by Michael Shermer · 8 Apr 2020 · 677pp · 121,255 words

tyranny, a tyranny of the majority. 3. It is not just the right of the speaker to speak but for listeners to listen. When colleges deplatform speakers or students succeed in silencing a speaker through the heckler’s veto, the right of the audience to hear the speaker’s ideas is

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and gender differences in cognitive abilities or career preferences, and conservatives and centrists who challenge the far-left dogma on college campuses and find themselves deplatformed before speaking or vetoed by hecklers while speaking. These are the devils of Part I of this book, The Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought

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doubt this central tenet of liberty. I shouldn’t have been, given that signs had appeared the previous few years – starting around 2013 – with the deplatforming (disinvitation) of controversial speakers; the emphasis on protecting students’ feelings from ideas that might challenge their beliefs; the call for trigger warnings about sensitive subjects

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay · 14 Jul 2020 · 378pp · 107,957 words

. Also, the accounts of intolerant students are overhyped. It’s mostly a few activists at elite universities5 who demand trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the deplatforming of everyone who disagrees with them.6 The majority of students continue to support freedom of speech. Mostly, they just keep their heads down, and

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often fly under the radar. Certain views—academic views shared by professionals—are considered too dangerous or even “violent” to be allowed a platform. Unlike deplatforming drives—in which someone who has been invited to speak has that invitation rescinded—policies that disallow certain views in the first place attract little

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creation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and postcolonial feminism—the intersectional feminists, queer Theorists, and trans activists have gained dominance. This has led to the deplatforming of once-popular feminist figures like Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill for their views on trans identity and sex work. Radical feminists also face fierce

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon · 14 Sep 2022 · 371pp · 107,141 words

; Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, NBC reported; and Facebook banned all QAnon groups and pages.35 These are useful steps. Deplatforming works.36 It reduces the reach of extremist content and destroys the delicate network of connections between followers. Even if some migrate to surviving social

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, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/addressing-movements-and-organizations-tied-to-violence. 36. Will Bedingfield, “Deplatforming Works, But It’s Not Enough,” Wired, January 15, 2021, www.wired.co.uk/article/deplatforming-parler-bans-qanon. 37. “The Numbers,” Lostpedia, accessed November 28, 2021, https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

by Vivek Ramaswamy · 16 Aug 2021 · 344pp · 104,522 words

damage was already done. And even worse, these incidents reveal just how much everyday Americans trust these behemoths. Errors or not, this broad wave of deplatforming didn’t just happen to prominent politicians, who at least had other avenues for voicing their grievances. It happened to ordinary Americans too, in shocking

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. “Meet Your (Chinese) Facebook Censors.” New York Post, 21 Oct. 2020, nypost.com/2020/10/20/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors/. 5. Loesch, Dana. “Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism.” The Federalist, 16 Nov. 2020, thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp

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-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 6. Montgomery, Blake. “PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon Banned a Bunch of People Associated with the Alt-

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021

anti-Muslim violence in advance of an election. Just to underscore the enormity of this challenge: After the siege of the US Capitol and the deplatforming of President Trump, downloads of end-to-end encrypted applications exploded. As the plotters of the insurrection decamped for smaller but completely private messaging platforms

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, writing that “Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.” The decision to deplatform the sitting president of the United States brought swift reactions worldwide. Between declarations that it was a long-overdue action to stop a fountain of

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course, the inverse is also possible. Some users might choose platforms with looser content moderation, as we saw with the migration to Parler after the deplatforming of President Trump. However, the data so far suggest this will be an attractive option for a relatively small share of total users. Government should