Yes, but the process needs to be transparent and democratic
Deplatforming not only works, I believe it needs to be built into the system. Social media should have mechanisms by which racist, fascist, misogynist or transphobic speakers are removed, where misinformation is removed, and where there is no way to pay to have your messages amplified. And the decision to deplatform someone should be decided as close to democratically as is possible, rather than in some closed boardroom or opaque content moderation committee like Facebook’s “Supreme Court.”
In other words, the answer is alternative social media like Mastodon. As a federated system, Mastodon is specifically designed to give users and administrators the ability to mute, block or even remove not just misbehaving users but entire parts of the network.
For example, despite fears that the alt-right network Gab would somehow take over the Mastodon federation, Mastodon administrators quickly marginalized Gab. The same thing is happening as I write with new racist and misogynistic networks forming to fill the
potential void left by Parler. And Mastodon nodes have also prevented spam and advertising from spreading across the network.
Moreover, the decision to block parts of the network aren’t made in secret. They’re done by local administrators, who announce their decisions publicly and are answerable to the members of their node in the network. I’m on scholar.social, an academic-oriented Mastodon node, and if I don’t like a decision the local administrator makes, I can contact the administrator directly and discuss it. There are other distributed social media system, as well, including Diaspora and Twister.
The danger of mainstream, corporate social media is that it was built to do exactly the opposite of what alternatives like Mastodon do: grow at all costs, including the cost of harming democratic deliberation. It’s not just cute cats that draw attention but conspiracy theories, misinformation and the stoking of bigotry. Corporate social media tolerates these things as long as they’re profitable — and, it turns out, that tolerance has lasted far too long.