Censorship Degrades Public Trust

I recently watched the two controversial Joe Rogan episodes. I would say the discussion was about 50% reasonable points (many of which haven’t been discussed very much elsewhere) and about 50% crackpottery.

I think censorship is counterproductive. When a large portion of the population is sympathetic to what your opponents say, you can’t censor your way to public consensus and maintain public trust.

Even if you could enforce the correct viewpoint on the public, censorship is fundamentally a Faustian bargain where society is creating extremely dangerous infrastructure of mass surveillance and social control. The type of centralized authority required to force censorship on the Internet is intrinsically dangerous.

Suppressing discussion affects moderate speakers more than the extremists. When you’re an extreme critic of policy you’re going to get the ire of people no matter what you do. But when you’re more moderate, people are going to tolerate you as long as you shut up on the parts where you disagree with the party line.

People hear cognizant points from these speakers and when the discussion has been suppressed, they often first hear those cognizant points from the controversial people. This gives credibility to the somewhat eccentric crackpots. Joe Rogan’s podcast is one of the rare places where you can hear actual discussion of some of these issues, instead of parroting of a party line.

Building public trust by censorship and telling people they’re not allowed to have opinions on policies affecting their lives is self-defeating. Policymakers taking this approach will necessarily offend a large portion of the population and degrade public trust even more. It creates an adversarial relationship between policymakers and the public.

US coronavirus policy was highly corrupted by treating China’s response as the objectively ideal response, instead of the policy responses of Asian democracies like Taiwan or South Korea.

See also: quadratic-voting, cryptocurrency-web3, urban-development-costs, mastodon-thoughts