Does social media really empower “freedom of speech”?
Why did social media platforms exist? According to Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook, he once said in an open letter back in 2012 when announcing that his company filed to go public: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” (Zuckerberg, 2012)
Zuckerberg has always stressed on the fact that Facebook is a platform than enables its users to share, communicate and speak freely without restrictions. In other words, Facebook exits to empower the freedom of speech.
However, we cannot mention Facebook when it comes to freedom of speech without mentioning the related affairs of the US. More specifically, the US presidential elections and the scandals that came along caused somehow by the platform. Precisely, the two main scandals of the 2016 presidential race. The first scandal was a conspiracy theory known as the “Pizzagate”, which accused Hillary Clinton, the presidential candidate on behalf of the democrat party of running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. Similar conspiracy theory emerged in 2020 known as “QAnon”, which claims that Trump is waging a war against elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Facebook announced that it’s taking down all related accounts/pages that debunk this theory.
The second scandal took place in 2018 known as the “Cambridge Analytica scandal”, in which a British consulting firm was accused of breaching personal data from over 50 million Facebook users during the 2016 US presidential race. These data were obtained and deployed by the republican party and its representative Donald Trump, which eventually led him to wining the presidential elections in 2016.
Shall we blame Facebook for giving too much freedom of speech that caused a rise in the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news? Not only that but also did this freedom of speech breach the users’ trust more than their own data?
According to Facebook, the blame should be on the users for taking the bait that was given to them via the platform itself.
“People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”(Grewal, 2018)
So, to answer the title of this blog, my answer would be yes social media does empower the freedom of speech under certain limits, This comes with a price of course; your private data which you’ll wave goodbye to it willingly or not.
Zuckerberg, M. (2012). Facebook. Retrieved December 05, 2020, from https://pl-pl.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/founders-letter-2012/10154500412571634/
Grewal, P. (2018, March 17). Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group From Facebook. Retrieved December 06, 2020, from https://about.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/
