The rebelious streak in me has been seeking out and reading so-called “banned books”— books that were at one point banned by a community for some reason or another— since I was a teen. Many of these are classics that ran afoul of norms or the party line at some point, somewhere.

The problem isn’t that the voices of hate are being banned. The problem is that the mechanisms used to lower the volume on or silence hate speech can lower the volume or silence any other form or speech. This is why the US enshrined free speech as the first amendment of the constitution.

Technical means of defying censorship, like this one, help to preserve that right.