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Social Media Freedom Of Speech Essay

Decent Essays

“As the use of social media increases and becomes an integral part of nearly every student’s life, problems arise when student expression on these sites turns into threats against the school or other students, implicating both student safety and the speaker’s right to free speech” (Hughes 208). There’s no denying that social media has become a part of most people’s daily life. We have sites like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. These websites, or apps, allow us to express ourselves in any way possible, whether it’s supporting families who lost a member in a mass shooting, trying to impeach the latest president, or donating to those who are victims of natural disasters. It’s not always that social …show more content…

Walk into a library, you have a computer, you are most likely carrying a phone, at home, you most likely have a computer, laptop, tablet, or even all three. This shows that we have social media access at the tip of our fingers, making it so easy to open up the site or app and just type out a phrase or paragraph, letting hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions, of people know what you think. Back then, it was harder to let the nation know what you were thinking, and it took even take months before everyone knew, versus today, where the nation might know by the end of the day, and it’s because of this that companies regulate what their users are posting, attempting at keeping the online world free from threats, hate, harmful words, and more. Rutenberg quotes Jeffrey Goldberg as he says, “At a certain point I’d rather take myself off the platform where speech has become so become so offensive than advocate for the suppression of that speech” (2). Twitter also said that “everyone on Twitter should feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, but behavior that harasses, intimidates or uses fear to silence another person’s voice should have no place on our platform” (Rutenberg 2). With that statement, it leads to the question, when do we know that it’s an actual, legit threat or just some child play online? So far, we haven’t amended the First Amendment

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