Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. From the US Constitution to other developed nations, freedom of speech utilized for news, advertisements, music, and such. It prevents the government from detaining civilians for any unwanted messages and enables the people to speak out. With the help of the internet, people now have greater access to the public and can get a wider audience on a global scale. It plays a main role in gathering people such as for the Hong Kong protest. Governments should not have the right to force censorships on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as they can misuse this for their own agenda. However, this does not mean these companies should just allow people to post whatever they want. This would hurt their platform anyways as people would start to assume that the social media is not an accurate method of getting news and information. Governments should encourage and push for these companies to start enforcing better flagging/reporting system. Most sites implement this feature already; unfortunately, it is on a basic level. It only enforces disturbing images or adult content. If anything, some content still manages to bypass these filters. It does not do much for fake news or hate crime. Because the sites should not censor any user’s posts or content, they should allow everything to be posted (except for legal concerns such as copyrighted material or photo/video taken without consent), but have an alert system that notifies any viewers that the information is wrong. For example, if someone wants to post on Facebook, “Notre Dame is an all male school,” it would still be posted. But it would have a badge in the corner or somewhere to mark it as invalid information. Of course, things would get harder to filter out especially with meticulous details. However, it would be nice to see the US government implement it for the presidential election which brought an immense amount of fake news. With growing research in AI, it could, one day, be a useful tool. For posts such as “Hillary Clinton killed 100 people,” it would mark it as not true. Social medias should also warn users for any links to news medias that are notorious for false information or bot generated pages. Not only would it help the users and make the world a better place, but the companies themselves will get a better image from it too, and more people will trust them. I am all for freedom of speech, but there shouldn’t be a forceful push for regulation. Rather, the government should provide incentives or tax cuts for companies that bring benefits to society. If not, it would be seen as censorship which I am sure the media would make a bigger deal out of. Just like driving a car and owning guns, everything is better and safer with some sort of rules. The government is not going to get rid of the rights, but making sure the world is a better place.
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