Utilizing Data Visualization and Linear Regression to Identify Trends Behind Campus Deplatforming Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Anya Vani Prakash
07/09/2026
Campus deplatforming is the intentional censorship of speakers or events in college environments. Deplatforming speaks to the growing problem facing many U.S universities: blocking people's expression. This weakens the coexistence of different views and democracy itself. This study focuses on deplatforming events specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been at the forefront of polarization in U.S universities.
We used the Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression’s Campus Deplatforming database and its definitions of successful and unsuccessful deplatforming (i.e., attempted censorship) to identify contextual patterns.
Our data visualizations revealed that campus speech was the most targeted form of expression. Students initiated the most deplatforming events targeting campus speech, but administrators were responsible for most successful deplatforming events across all expression categories, including campus speech.
We applied a linear regression model to identify keywords in each event's description provided by the database. We assigned coefficients to represent the importance of these keywords for successful or unsuccessful outcomes. Our model had an 84.34% accuracy and identified ‘spoke’ as a positively weighted word, reinforcing that most successful deplatformings are associated with speech-related expressions.