Freedom of speech is a critical tenet that characterizes the success of modern civilization. Free speech promoted the exchange of ideas and information, allowing for culture, practices, and knowledge passage and exchange between cultures and people, elements that propagated the exponential rise of modern civilization. Free speech allows for autonomy and liberty; some governments, such as the US, have been formulated around the subject (Moore, 2020). Social media platforms and their inception owe their success to the understanding that free speech is universal and a critical right of every person. The different platforms amplified the rate at which information could be shared. Also, they allowed for more information and large quantities of data to be shared between people from different regions. While social media was immensely successful in promoting free speech, it also allowed for spreading misinformation. A lack of a regulatory framework allowed anyone without authority and background details to formulate information that was wrong or anti-true and make the information available to the public. Misinformation through social media has significantly increased in the past few years (Moore, 2020). The impacts of these disadvantages have included harassment of some people, damage to the image and credibility of others, and poor decisions that are based on social media information rather than scientific facts.
The numerous drawbacks have sparked interest from regulator bodies, which have tasked social media platforms to censor information deemed suspicious and sometimes to ban people entirely from their platforming in the long run, denying freedom of speech to some people their prerogative. However, this is a flawed and potentially catastrophic undertaking. Social media platforms should promote freedom of speech because it is central to liberty and autonomy, promotes the rate at which truth is realized, allows for creativity, and can be used to generate social change beneficial to society.
Liberty is a critical tenet defining and describing most Western societies. It is a principle in which Western society is structured, which also means that It can quickly become fragile if this critical tenet is affected (Demuyakor & Doe, 2022). Social media platforms function as key signals from which freedom of speech and expression trends can be monitored. It enhances liberty by allowing diverse individuals to find their voices and avail their opinions. Minorities, as well as majorities, are allowed to voice their concerns and make known their issues when they are being oppressed and unfairly treated. This has been relatively successful as more and more minorities and marginalized groups find their voices on social media platforms (Stasi, 2019). Secondly, social media platforms provide an easy avenue from which authorities can be countered and kept in check (Stasi, 2019). Individuals are allowed and most often portray their opinions on different social media platforms, advocating for and pointing out areas where the government or its leaders are flawed. This keeps the government in check, preventing its dissolution into a tyrannical state (Stasi, 2019). Social media enhances accessibility and reach of the various opinions of different people. It reduces the barriers that would otherwise curtail communication between individuals and the government or others of an opposing view.
Social media has enhanced the rate at which the truth is being sought and uncovered and also promoted the rate at which new ideas are developed and put into the limelight. The first mechanism through which social media ensures this is by allowing the thriving and potency of diverse perspectives to the community and society. Social media promotes both sides of a story, as individuals with diverse opinions can share and discuss a specific topic (Alodat et al., 2023). The exposure to differing perspectives influences critical thinking and stimulates the need for more answers and meaning (Alodat et al., 2023). Social media platforms provide avenues and systems of collaboration where a single idea can be pursued profoundly and further by many persons. For instance, an issue can be generated on Twitter, and comments can be provided while reading the subject. The more opinions there are on the subject, the easier it is to arrive at a fundamental and correct truth. Thirdly, social media promotes truth-seeking by providing a platform for minorities and the marginalized to voice their opinions and perspectives. The quest for the truth is often prevented by the silencing of critical voices or by preventing certain groups from expressing their opinions on a subject. However, with social media, different ideas are often discussed between resolutions.
The promotion of free speech by social media enhances creativity. Creativity is one of the rarest characteristics within the human population, often found in a few individuals. However, it is a critical tenet that tends to change the status quo and lead to revolutions. Its essence and role in American and Western development are unfathomable (Oldenbourg, 2022). Social media allows creative ideas to come to light quickly through trends, hashtags, and an available audience often ready to promote creative and revolutionary ideas. Social media is one of the central tenets of modern civilization that has promoted the success of creative individuals (Oldenbourg, 2022). Social media allows for ideas to be shared and, therefore, amplifies the voices of creative individuals. With a simple tweet or video on Facebook or YouTube, a great idea quickly gets a foothold in modern society (Oldenbourg, 2022). Freedom of speech by social media allows for access to a collaborating audience for creative people. These audiences are often in the form of groups or spaces that support creative ideas and propel their discovery and ultimate success.
Promoting freedom of speech through social media platforms serves as a foundation of social change and development by amplifying the status quo, ideal conditions, and gaps in power structures and leadership. Social media that promotes freedom of speech allows for the voices of marginalized communities to come to light. Sharing experiences from marginalized communities enhances awareness regarding certain ills that might have been overlooked. Numerous videos in the United States on police brutality have affected the nature of police work, leading to policy changes, all of which have been designed to enhance the quality of service offered by the police in the US. Secondly, freedom of speech in social media platforms allows communities and like-minded individuals to come together, collaborate, and cooperate against or for specific societal issues (Kocak & Kıbrıs, 2022). It allows for ease of mobilization, and with it comes excellent power that can quickly institute a change in society and how things are done. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram quickly amplify an issue and have it reach all individuals interested in the issue. As such, it allows for quick and massive mobilization on a faster and more massive scale but cheaper (Kocak & Kıbrıs, 2022). Social change becomes almost inevitable with the issues raised and the inception of the massive mobilizations.
Despite the numerous benefits of freedom of speech through social media, several drawbacks also become pertinent when social media platforms focus immensely on promoting free speech. The first is the increase in violence, mostly through extremist groups. Currently, several social media platforms have been used to voice the voices of extremist groups, including members from terrorist organizations such as the Taliban and al-Shabaab (Aguerri et al., 2023). They are often given a wider audience, which they most often use to influence their extremist ideas in the process, attracting others and growing their organization. Numerous conspiracy theories, for instance, have been traced to extremist organizations. Their understanding of tech and its use has amplified not just their voices but their audience as well. Extremist groups use the platforms to share graphic content. They use it to share their hate speech against specific groups and governments, which has been sown to lead to the inception of copycat criminals, as is the case with the US (Carey et al., 2021). With the inception and advent of propaganda on social media platforms, violence is often incited against a government, a group, or a particular community. Take, for instance, the war between Israel and Palestine, which has information and propaganda from both sides that make it even more difficult to judge between the two.
The promotion of freedom of speech by social media platforms allows for physical, emotional, psychological, and mental harm to some individuals in society. Its promotion of violence and extremist agendas leads to battles, copycat criminals, and terrorist undertakings, which tend to affect people and sometimes lead to their loss of life. Freedom of speech promotion through social media allows individuals to share graphic content freely (Abi-Jaoude et al., 2020). The presence and sarin of graphic content are then allowed to transmute and reach even children, affecting their mental and psychological well-being. Furthermore, criminals use the gaps in the freedom of speech but take advantage of its anonymity security to conduct cyberbullying exercises. The rate of online harassment and cyberbullying is currently on the rise (Schoenebeck et al., 2023). Sometimes, criminals generate false information regarding an individual and use the platforms to defame their victims and destroy their online reputations. Freedom of speech through social media can lead to moral decadence as there are no frameworks for filtering the information. Exposure to individuals of the same ideas can often work counterproductive, leading to immense confirmation bias, which ends up being deleterious to an individual and society.
Providing freedom of speech through unique media platforms generates and amplifies avenues for criminal exploitation and manipulation. Criminals are allowed to formulate their words and language. Therefore, they tend to utilize clickbait to mislead the audience regarding subjects that might not be true. Clickbait is on the rise and is depicted as a significant source of misinformation in modern societies (Jung et al., 2022). Clickbait promotes emotional manipulation by niacin what would be attractive to the eye and not necessarily the reality. Sometimes, it allows for the development and thriving of misinformation campaigns as everyone’s opinion is allowed to stand rather than how accurate their opinions are.
While the different assessments and perceptions regarding the other side of freedom of speech through social media platforms seem valid, there are flaws in several ways. To begin with, exploitation and manipulation, psychological harm, and physical violence have been depicted as having been caused by social media’s freedom of speech. However, this was far from the truth. There is often no direct link to a platform regarding social matters. This is because the challenges of physical violence and manipulation are potent and present in any society and every society (Ferrara et al., 2020). As such, any platform that promotes communication also allows for society to carry with it the manipulations and physical and psychological violence that already exist in society. Their correlation does in no way indicate causation. It is a model of shifting blame to social media when the issues are actual social cancers that must be addressed at a social level.
Secondly, the reasons against freedom of speech through social media consider context. Social media is mainly used for positive communication, not negative or harmful (Muhammed T & Mathew, 2022). While cases of harm and manipulations exist, they are often less numerous, taking into account their proportion to the actual number of social media users. The context in which a message is stated directly affects how the truth is perceived.
In wrapping up, freedom of speech promoted by social media platforms is an impeccable tenet that should be protected. The current increases in communication censorship by social media should be stopped and minimized. Minimizing censorship will promote freedom of speech, which is advantageous as it enhances liberty and autonomy, promotes truth-seeking behavior and the development of new ideas, enhances creativity, and forms a foundation for positive social change. On the downside, freedom of speech in social media has also been shown to enhance violence and extremist behavior, to enhance psychological harm, and to propagate manipulation and exploitation. However, these reasons fail to consider correlations, their limitations, and the context under which the deleterious impacts are realized.
The most challenging part of the research came with sourcing for a research topic. Coming up with a relatively updated research topic that would be interesting, informative, and useful was calling. This working thesis provided a clear direction and overview of the whole research. It denotes the topic, significant answers, and factors that will be addressed in the paper. As such, it helped provide direction to the paper. The outline was a critical tool that allowed for my ideas to be developed in chronological order. It also allowed me to focus on the main points and negate jargon. The research outline provides a structure and a form or plot, which makes the research essay more interesting. If I use the topic in the future, I would like to know whether it is still broad and should be narrowed. I will also have to assess more of the latest literature to keep up with the topic.
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