Up For Discussion: Find the Line Between Freedom of Speech and False Speech

In the age of the internet that we all live in now, there seems to be a plethora of opinions that are shoved down our throats every single day. While the internet is a vast place with billions of users, it is still a highly trafficked thing that is working overtime to try and prevent misinformation and hate speech. Although freedom of speech is a protected right, there are some limits to what can be said online. So, how does freedom of speech play into what can be said online?

The freedom of speech is a right that Americans have had since the 1790s when the Bill of Rights was passed. This stayed fairly concrete until the internet came upon us. The internet, with millions of people interacting with each other at incredible speeds, is often overrun with countless conversations happening every second. To ensure that everything is running smoothly, many social media sites have policing measures in place. Political events over the last few years have caused there to be a sense of over-policing on the internet, which leads to the idea of our freedom of speech being taken away.

The pandemic was a cause of some of the most prominent examples of this. Across the internet, those who believed that the virus was not as serious as others began to get censored or have a warning be put on their content before people could view it. This was in an attempt to stop the spread of misinformation when it comes to the subject of something that could potentially harm millions of people. This censorship caused an outrage across the country with people believing that their constitutional right to say whatever they believe and want was being taken from them.

This confusion happens is the misunderstanding of what is protected under the freedom of speech. False speech, which is basically categorized as something that is inherently not true and can damage the reputation of another individual. However, false speech means different things to different people, and this divide can cause a multitude of other problems, which is what leads to the debate between the freedom of speech being stripped from those speaking their minds. Having so many different people firmly believing different things makes the process of deciding what is and is not false speech extremely difficult.

On the internet, there can be different versions of censoring or restricting a user. Some can get their entire account deleted and banned, others get their IP addresses banned so they cannot create more accounts, while others simply get a post taken down or a warning that it may be sharing misinformation. All of these forms of censorship seem to outrage people, no matter the severity of the claim they are making. Some people are simply uninformed about what they are talking about and so they make a minor mistake that could be construed in a bad way and get taken down. Others, however, may make claims threatening or harming a specific individual, religion, organization or race that causes more severe consequences to occur.

When it comes to the line between protecting freedom of speech in America and protecting people from harmful or untrue data, it can be easily crossed in both directions.

Deciding what to believe while on the internet is completely up to the user and everything should generally be taken with a grain of salt. Internet users know that their claims and content have the potential to reach billions of people and sometimes they make quite outlandish claims to simply get more interaction. This phenomena is what internet users need to be aware of when searching for something to learn from.

Should the internet be a free-for-all when it comes to information, or should the government and companies running these applications be responsible for protecting the public from what they feel is misinformation?

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