By KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
With social media today, there are many growing concerns about freedom of speech, censorship, misinformation, and how we’re supposed to tackle this issue going into the future. It’s not an easy topic to navigate and there’s probably no definite answer that everyone’s going to agree on due to all the nuances and complexities of conflicting values. So where should we draw our lines in the sand when it comes to freedom of speech or censorship?
First, there’s the problem of our market liberties. Freedom of speech is protected under the first amendment for our country in general, but this amendment doesn’t expand into our society and markets. What this means is that while the state has no right to punish you for your speech or that the state cannot de-platform your speech, private corporations who pay the expenses of their own platforms aren’t bound to this amendment. In a strange way, it could be considered an infringement of a social media corporation’s freedoms to force them to run their platforms in a way they don’t want to. You could make the point that these platforms are out for profit, and the reason they can be so restrictive of information is that they want their brand to be as clean and attractive as possible for the largest possible audience and advertisers. For example, if I were the owner of a social media platform and I wanted to bring in advertisers, I would be very uncomfortable being forced to have my platform associated with perceived harmful information. Not to say that state enforcement is the answer, but it’s important to take into account that when discussing whether these kinds of things should be legal or illegal, you’re talking about crossing some pretty big constitutional rights.
So to move away from legality, should social media platforms have to deal with these issues in a moral sense? Well, there’s an interesting phenomenon that is pretty unique to social media so we don’t really have any reference of what to do, and it’s that social media is a very new technology and has quickly dominated pretty much every other type of platforming available to the average person. For example, if you wanted to create a social image for publicity for anything like a new business, organization, event, fundraiser, or for anything, you’ll find that the outreach social media allows someone to have is a totally different ballpark than trying to without social media. Access to social media nowadays is a complete necessity if you want to spread your own information and to pretend otherwise would be ignoring this. The problem arises when you allow everyone to spread their information, you’re also opening the gate for harmful information to spread.
To broaden this idea to a more philosophical point which might be interesting to think about, striking a balance between allowing as many people as possible to practice their freedoms while minimizing the harmful side effects is what our country was initially built on. The ideas which influenced our revolution and early government were about the ‘social contract’ from John Locke. The social contract idea claims that there should be an agreement between a nation’s people and government that the government can restrict certain rights in exchange for basic safety and well-being, but that the people will accept this from the government if the government’s other function is to allow as many freedoms for the people within reason of the basic safety. Our earliest government, before the Constitution, was the Articles of Confederation, which failed widely because it made the government too weak and it couldn’t get control over the people who were given what could’ve been called too much freedom. The reason I bring any of this up is that for this new age of speech being monopolized almost entirely through social media, I think this can prove to be another case of positive American exceptionalism where because of our country’s government and philosophies, we can and should be the country to first step up and start drawing these lines in the sand as an example other countries can follow.
If I were to take any definite stances on the issue, I would want to clarify the importance of social media as really the sole place for Americans specifically to spread their message as effectively as possible, and that as uncomfortable as it may be, we probably shouldn’t let private corporations have a monopoly on the entire platforms for dialogue. We can already see some pretty politically motivated actions taken by social media platforms, and even if you agree with the types of actions being enacted recently, it should be concerning because as we can see with Twitter in the past month or so that these platform’s entire core missions can be flipped to the opposite pretty quickly.