concerned groups have attempted to combat these phenomena. Attempts to counter hate speech and disinformation, however, have often failed to reach their goals. In some cases, hate speech and disinformation have proved difficult to regulate or control, as those promoting hate speech and disinformation on social media have proven adept in avoiding regulations and controls through migration to other social media networks, use of coded language that avoids detection by social media platform algorithms to track hate speech, and developing a range of tactics to promote hate speech and disinformation without violating the standards established by social media platforms (Farkas, Schou and Neumayer, 2019; Alkiviadou, 2019). Likewise, government attempts to block social media at the state level have led to people accessing social media through virtual proxy networks (VPNs), as in the recent case of Sri Lanka, where government blocking of Whatsapp and Facebook merely led to their use through VPNs (Vignaraja, 2019), or in the case of Uganda, where a tax on social media intended to make it more difficult for opposition groups to use instead led to widespread use of VPNs (Daily Monitor, 2018). In other cases, government attempts to regulate hate speech and disinformation have led to restrictions on the freedom of speech. The Network Enforcement Law in Germany, for example, which requires social media services with over two million members to remove “evidently unlawful content” within 24 hours, has led to the social media companies removing content that was satire (Spencer-Smith, 2018). The Cameroonian government shut down the internet for much of 2018 in response to protests against discrimination by the Anglophone minority in the country (Freedom in the World, 2019). There is also evidence that government regulation of hate speech and disinformation continues to be extremely partisan in many cases, where government either deliberately engages in partisan attacks on social media, or where regulations are enforced in a way such as to give significant advantages to the incumbent (Privacy International, 2017; Goel and Rahman, 2019). On the positive side, a less heavy-handed approach seems to have led to modest progress in combating hate speech and disinformation in some instances, such as the European Commission’s Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, under which social media companies pledged to “review the majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal 4