So as you recall, just last week, people on Reddit nearly bankrupted a very famous hedge fund. They did that by using a strategy that hedge funds have used for years. They shorted stock in companies like GameStock and drove them up for that purpose. Now, of course, only hedge funds were allowed to manipulate the stock market, so corporations turned to a familiar tool.

They censored the people on Reddit. The online service Discord, for example, accused the Reddit day traders of hate speech. And then there were the questions around Robinhood, which was a service they used to conduct those trades. All of this is filled with lessons for the rest of us. We're not financial experts.

We're talking to someone now who is. David Sachs is a technology entrepreneur, very well known in that world. He co-founded PayPal. He wrote a really smart piece about the implications of this story. You can find it on the online publishing platform Persuasion. We wanted to talk to him tonight.

David, thanks so much for coming on. So you have the grounding in this world sufficient, I think, to draw informed conclusions, about what happened and what it means for everybody else. What have you concluded? Sure. Well, Tucker, you've been warning about censorship and the slippery slope when people start to invoke censorship.

And I think we see it here with Discord. You have a case here where some Wall Street traders, their message board was taken down. They weren't engaging in political speech at all. They were engaging in a plan to give these Wall Street predators a taste of their own medicine.

Because of that, they were very threatening to the people in power, and they were accused of hate speech. And they were taken down. Now, if you were to actually go into these message boards, you wouldn't see hate speech. You would see a lot of very raunchy speech, but nothing that's too different than what you'd see on any trading floor or boiler room on Wall Street.

And all of a sudden, these sort of titans of Wall Street are just shocked by the language that's going on here. So, you know, look, this is a really good example, I think, of when you strip away sort of partisan issues, you see that the real purpose of censorship is, as a tool, for the people in power to keep the outsiders out.

I think that's really smart. So when they invoke the phrase hate speech, especially, of all the phrases they use, I think it's the scariest. Nobody wants to be thought of as a hater or, you know, using hate speech. That's an awful thing. That's certainly how I feel. But what you're saying is they don't employ that in order to protect the weak.

They use that phrase in order to protect the strong. Yeah, exactly. I mean, hate speech is a very... It's a very malleable term. And so the people who get to decide what it means, which is really always the issue with censorship, is who decides who has that power. It's the people in power get to decide what it means.

And so, you know, you had a case here where, look, these message boards weren't set up for the purpose of organizing hate or even any political topic. They were organized to talk about a trade. And they, you know, figured out actually a plan that worked perfectly to execute a short squeeze.

And these hedge funds lost $20 billion. And so they were... You know, in a lot of trouble, a lot of financial distress, and they were looking for a way out. And so the way they found a way out was to go through these message boards. They screenshot any posts that could plausibly be characterized as hate speech.

They report it. And then they get the site taken down. And so this is kind of where the slippery slope of censorship goes, is that whenever outsiders become too threatening to powerful insiders, the insiders use censorship as a weapon. They weaponize these speech rules to prevent the threat. So you're making a very traditional liberal argument.

I mean, you're saying what the ACLU said for about 100 years, what, you know, Nat Hentoff used to write about in The Village Voice. Why aren't more people saying that now, do you think? More people in power with authority? Well, it's a really good question, Tucker. And I think part of it is that a lot of the people in power are frankly threatened by these new social networks.

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