Yeah.
You can't change minds with anything other than ideas.
If you try and make certain ideas verboten or stop people saying them, they gain an edgy "the TRUTH that THEY don't WANT you to hear!" aspect.
You have the entirety of human history to look at any number of repressive regimes that have tried to stifle an idea by force.
All of those ideas still exist, but those regimes are long gone. You end up with martyrs to causes.
No, dude. Deplatforming is real and has a real, palpable effect in the expansion and rooting on ideas. We have recent proof here in Spain
Few years ago, a left-wing political party called Podemos ("We can") was created over here after a series of protests and a douche politic saying
Protests won't take them anywhere, if they want to change something, why don't they create a political party?. Well, they did, and Podemos was born
But Podemos' ideas were... dangerous. You know, it's been a GOOD while since politics over here looked at something that wasn't their own asses and Podemos was looking to the people first. Both right and left wingers parties started to pile up on Podemos, and after a while, a deplatforming proccess started. Podemos, who was seen as the third political force along with PP and PSOE back then, is today irrelevant.
On the other side we have VOX, a true alt-right political party that was a complete nobody, with ideas that wouldn't fly over there since they are eerily similar to franquism, that started to get traction by associating themselves with Ciudadanos (another far-right party) and becoming a meme themselves. Their leader, a walking meme, started to get called to TV, and to get interviews, and he was freely allowed to spew his bullshit on TV. One year later, the autonomical elections came for Andalusia, and Vox has got 12 seats on the congress right out of the bat.
So yeah, both giving voice and deplatforming works, and Yannopoulos is one of those dangerous beings that need to be deplatformed because his
ideas are pure hate speech. And believe me, as someone living in a country that less than 50 years ago got out of a dictatorship based on hate speech, you guys don't want that.