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Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Julian Sanchez. Julian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., where he writes about technology, privacy, and civil liberties.

He's also written for a wide range of publications, including Reason Magazine, The Atlantic, the Nation, National Review,

and I've been reading Julian's blog ever since I was in college back in the dawn of time in 2002.

I reached out to Julian to help me think about the issue of tech companies deciding to ban users

for a speech that is hateful or false or inciting violence.

Most prominently, of course, there's Trump getting banned from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms.

But other examples in this category include the app parlor getting banned by Amazon Web Services.

And earlier this year, companies including YouTube, deciding to ban people for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

And, you know, many of the particular decisions made by these companies,

I don't particularly mind those people getting banned. But nevertheless, I've been kind of

consistently uneasy about the situation we seem to be in, where a few tech companies have a huge

...