Real

Free Speech on Social Media Platforms

By: Nicole Kerr

Have you ever gone onto a Social Media platform and the first thing you see immediately makes you want to log back off due to a cringy post or an inappropriate picture? I have recently found that many people are taking advantage of free speech among social media. I would like to start off by stating a few alarming statistics based on social media. Did you know that as of 2019,  79% of the United States population has a platform for social media. This is a 790 percent increase from 2008 when only 10% of the U.S. population had a form of social media. With this much increase in population found on social media platforms, there is no doubt that many people can abuse and forget about their responsibilities and rights on the internet. As the Supreme Court has recognized, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have become important venues for users to exercise free speech rights protected under the First Amendment. Legislators, however, have questioned whether these social media platforms are living up to their reputation. Some have expressed concern that these sites are not doing enough to counter violent or false speech. At the same time, many argue that the platforms are unfairly banning and restricting access to potentially valuable speech.  Although free speech is something to be seen as a privilege, because many people are not granted that freedom, there becomes a point when it is taken to the extreme. Given the freedom to say and post whatever you’d like has encouraged people to post inappropriate photos of themselves, cyberbully each other, and create a false life that influences their viewers to feel a certain way about them, or their beliefs. 

Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms that our generation abuses. Kids and young adults have thousands of followers and follow thousands, therefore creating a large variety of content that is viewed everyday. Some of this content is used in a positive way, and some is not. Unlike instagram, the photos and tweets that are aloud on twitter can range from a funny meme to an underage girl completely naked showing off her body trying to collect a large amount of retweets and favorites. It only takes one girl, or guy, to post something like this to influence many others to do the same for a social validation. As the human body should never be a shameful thing, and something everyone should accept and love about themselves, exposing yourself to these platforms can only cause harm to you and others. Overtime, people comparing themselves to each other has become one of the largest issues within social media. For someone to always be seeing others post ‘better looking’ or more ‘attractive’ photos than them can cause anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. This can easily be avoided if twitter would not allow men and women to post themselves in such vulnerable ways.

Twitter is not the only bad guy in this case, instagram takes part in social validation and comparison as well. Instagram is known as a very glorified highlight reel of one's life. The more aesthetic your page looks, the better right? Free speech allows people to live whatever life they want to live. Let me illustrate a situation- A young girl highly looks up to an Instagram model that travels all around the world, has an amazing body, and what seems to be a perfect life. More than likely this isn’t the case for this model, things for her are probably not as perfect as they seem to her millions of followers. Just like any other human, she has bad days, ugly days, and sometimes sits in her bed and doesn’t move all day. You’d never guess this by just looking at her social media; she is free to post, write, and pretend to be whoever she wants to be. This young girl who looks up to her now is brought to the idea that she needs to live this life in order to look, and feel, as ‘perfect’ as she thinks this model is. This girl is now pressured to post and write false things about herself to appear more perfect to the people that follow her. This freedom has now made two people appear a different way, and only snowballs and influences more people to do the same thing, to the point that everyone pretends to be who they wish they were, not who they truly are.

One of the most mentally exhausting and draining issues with free speech in social media is Cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is a persistent problem for educators and lawmakers, particularly with the popularity of social media platforms. The problem has become so embedded in the culture that 23 states have cyberbullying laws. “Cyberbullying appears to be somewhat less frequent than face-to-face bullying, but the consequences may be even more severe,” says social psychologist Elizabeth Englander, who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University. Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. Unfortunately, cyberbullying is a very common issue with social media. According to a recent Pew survey, 59 percent of teens have been bullied online, and according to a 2017 survey conducted by Ditch the Label, a nonprofit anti-bullying group, more than one in five 12-to-20-year-olds experience bullying specifically on Instagram. I found another very informative article from The Atlantic (a site where people share important articles and information). The article has an alarming title of “Teens are Being Bullied Constantly on Instagram--harassment on the platform can be uniquely cruel, and for many it feels like there’s no escape.” This article was full of cyberbullying stories from high schoolers. It amazed me how relentless some people could be. Some of these stories ranged from hate comments and rude comments on Instagram posts, to creating fake hate accounts to make fun of people. Lorenz states, “Instagram makes it easy to set up new, anonymous profiles, which can be used specifically for trolling. Most importantly, many interactions on the app are hidden from the watchful eyes of parents and teachers, many of whom don’t understand the platform’s intricacies.” People who deal with cyberbullying can experience anxiety, fear, depression, and low self-esteem. They also may experience physical symptoms and struggle academically. It’s true that there is nothing in our constitution about bullying and the Internet. Possibly because our constitution was created 200 plus years before the internet or even social media was even formed.  the Internet was only invented in the early 1990s, and more in depth the two platforms that I have spoken the most about: Twitter in 2006, and Instagram in 2010. The question isn’t whether or not you have freedom of speech; it’s what you want to use that freedom of speech toward. Freedom of speech is a luxury we have in this country and we’re hurling it in messages, and attacking one another instead of using a platform to connect people for positive causes. Free speech makes creating connections easier and opens up hundreds of doors, but many have taken advantage of social media to cyberbully those around them and use a good platform to harm others. 

To conclude, I would like to reiterate that Free Speech on social media platforms can be a luxury that shouldn’t be taken for granted because many countries and people do not get to express themselves or their opinions, words, and images freely. But due to our generation taking advantage of these luxuries by posting inappropriate photos of themselves, cyberbullying each other, and create a false lifes that influences viewers, these platforms can overtime develop very negative attributes, that should be monitored more heavily. Overall, social media and free speech is what you make of it, for the positives and the negatives.

Cite:

Cbs. (2008, January 30). Cyberbullying Vs. Free Speech. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cyberbullying-vs-free-speech/

Jr, D. L. (n.d.). Is cyberbullying free speech? Retrieved from http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/is_cyberbullying_free_speech/

Why Your Freedom Of Speech Is Not An Excuse For Cyber Bullying. (2015, September 29). Retrieved from https://thoughtcatalog.com/julia-gari-weiss/2015/03/why-your-freedom-of-speech-is-not-an-excuse-for-cyber-bullying/

Free Expression on Social Media. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center/primers/free-expression-on-social-media/

Emerging Media. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.loyola.edu/academics/emerging-media/blog/2016/freedom-of-speech-on-social-media

As social media grows, so does First Amendment appreciation. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.searchlightsandsunglasses.org/as-social-media-grows-so-does-first-amendment-appreciation/