Blog 8: Eight Values of Free Expression & Social Media

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    The emergence of social media, a technology that has captured millions of users around the world in just a few years, has revolutionized society. Social media has contributed to shape politics, world culture, personal relationships, education, business, and many other matters that impact our everyday life, as social media has become a powerful communication tool with an extensive forum where individuals, diverse groups, media outlets, and public figures let their ideas and information flow in a casual and spontaneous environment without cultural barriers. Currently, about 72% of people in the Untied States use some type of social media, and this trend has grown even among older adults.
    Besides interacting and staying in touch with others and nurturing relationships, most social media users are there to freely express themselves, even if certain views are not popular, and this brings visibility and increased awareness of other issues in the marketplace of ideas. In order to create a personal opinion and make decisions on the kind of society they want, it is necessary to allow people from the whole spectrum of points of views to speak and listen.
    Dominant social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are American companies, have protected free speech aligned to the First Amendment values in terms of service agreements on their sites. However, as these platforms operate globally, they can be bound to the European Union regulations that offer less protection in freedom of expression which may possibly lead to further censorship in our protected speech by the First Amendment such as political criticism and certain news content, because the terms of service agreements are valid in every country where the platforms are used. To avoid the menace of European regulations, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies signed an agreement with the European Commission to prohibit incitement to violence and hateful conduct in their platforms and remove any reported hate speech that violates the terms of service within 24 hours.
    Although hate speech is disturbing and hurtful, it is protected by the First Amendment, and probably showing this type of speech may help to promote acceptable social norms and teach tolerance. Maybe, those people just let go their anger in their posts and may not turn that rage to actual violence. We need to picture social media as an open forum of the marketplace of ideas that also allow individual self-fulfillment, and, as such, all forms of expressions protected by the First Amendment should apply. If a powerful social media platform that holds control over an enormous amount of online communications involves in strict censorship on posts, inhibits people's self-expression. Given their influence on society and their size, can censorship from dominant social media platforms be comparable to a form of censorship from a government if that restricts individual self-fulfillment and the marketplace of ideas? I think yes...


Images:
  • https://www.symposium.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_article/public/2020-06/jon-tyson-IYtVtgXw72M-unsplash-16.jpg?itok=AK_zgPCo
  • https://miro.medium.com/max/1200/1*j10YofniF3w2y6NGcYWxyA.jpeg
Sources:
  • https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/what-do-about-emerging-threat-censorship-creep-internet?gclid=EAIaIQobChMItPzJmOKn6gIVSpyzCh0negCBEAAYASAAEgLE2PD_BwE
  • https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-ongoing-challenge-to-define-free-speech/in-the-age-of-socia-media-first-amendment/
  • https://www.simplilearn.com/real-impact-social-media-article
  • https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

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