Greg Lukianoff

So every time you're actually saying –

you can't say that.

You're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think.

You're causing what Timur Karan, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification.

You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be.

And actually, these kind of restrictions, there was a book called Racial Paranoia

Um, that came out in about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist, um, are these codes.

So it must be really, really bad.

It can actually make all these things worse.

And one, which we talk about in the book, one very real practical way it makes things worse is.

is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion.

It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble.

So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off.

So we have some interesting data in the book about how driving people off of Twitter, for example, in 2017, and then again, I think in 2020,

Driving people to gab led to greater radicalization among those people.

It's a very predictable force.

Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds and it pushes them in directions that actually by very solid research will actually make them more radicalized.

So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from it, but it gives the government such a vast opportunity.

What people think, and I think it's important that we actually do.

So I think that, you know, let's take, for example, QAnon.