Are Your Beliefs A Streisand Effect?

A Streisand Effect is what happens when attempts at censorship or erasure have the counter-productive result of drawing positive attention to the Bad Thing in question.

In the Soviet Union, state-sanctioned atheism led to a backlash in religious belief. In religious communities, the banning of secular knowledge enshrines it as dangerous and therefore true, leading adherents to leave the fold upon discovering it.

Conspiracy theories thrive in part because their adherents can correctly point to one true conspiracy—namely, the conspiracy to keep their ideas from public view—and extrapolate from there.

Presumably the fact that some of our beliefs are formed in reaction to what we are told are the limits of acceptable viewpoints does not make our beliefs more rigorous or defensible. The Streisand effect is an argument that thrives off negativity: #theynevertoldme

But is it enough? How should we weight the beliefs we arrive at through Streisand Effect. Is it neutral—or must we have a skepticism about our skepticism, reminding ourselves than just because ideas are banned, or banned for the wrong reasons, or by “the wrong people,” does not make them less plausible. Or does it? Perhaps belief is mostly based on testimony and our sense of who counts as a reliable witness.

Even so, knowing that censorship and negatively framed arguments can often have the opposite effect as intended, how should we intellectually and culturally engage (or not) with worldviews fundamentally at odds with our own?