Involves

Moment

The post that got deleted

The LessWrong forum, July 2010; the post and the site owner's decision to remove it

In July 2010, the user Roko posted the basilisk argument to LessWrong, a forum devoted to rationality and AI. The site's founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, reacted sharply. He deleted the post and forbade further discussion, on the grounds that even entertaining such an argument could needlessly distress readers and that spreading a potential infohazard was irresponsible. Discussion of the topic was suppressed on the site for years.

Posted
July 2010
Action
Deleted and banned
Result
Spread widely

The caveat

Accounts of the original post's exact wording and the moderators' reasoning are secondhand and disputed, partly because the material was deleted. The episode is well documented in later coverage, but details rest on participants' varying recollections.

The suppression backfired spectacularly. The deletion turned an obscure forum post into an internet legend, drawing coverage far beyond the community that spawned it: a textbook demonstration of the Streisand effect, where trying to hide information amplifies it. The episode became a permanent case study in the practical dilemma of infohazards: attempts to contain an idea can be the very thing that spreads it.

The self-defeating attempt to bury the post is the Streisand effect, named for a 2003 case where an effort to suppress a photograph of a celebrity's home caused it to be seen far more widely.

How it connects

A community treated an argument as too dangerous to discuss. Deleting it made the argument famous, the reaction that names the Streisand effect.

This moment appeared in Ideas that punish knowing them, the Involves connection for July 24, 2026, which asked: Can a piece of true information hurt you simply by being known?

Check yourself

What happened after Roko posted the basilisk argument in 2010?

The forum's founder deleted it and banned discussion, which drew far more attention to it.. Right. The attempt to suppress it backfired: deletion made the obscure post notorious, a classic Streisand effect.

What the sources establish

  • The basilisk post was removed from LessWrong and discussion suppressed, an act of attempted containment that increased the idea's notoriety.

Sources