More Notes on Censorship

Are you okay with Trump's Twitter account being canceled? Are you okay with corporations censoring our messages on social media?

Well . . . it depends.

The first amendment guarantees the right to free speech, but that doesn't mean you can spread false rumors, or damage someone's reputation or incite violence. Preventing someone from doing harm with words is called censorship.

The word "censorship" implies nefarious government control, but on a deeper level, it is merely a mechanism to ensure that words are not used to unfairly cause damage. Censorship may take the form of removing a person's social media account. Or it may take the form of lawsuits for damage to reputations. Or it may simply be a reporter that challenges a politician in real time.

So who gets the right to censor messages? Judges? Corporations? We should work toward answering these questions, because currently, corporations exercise that judgment by default when they cancel a person's social media account.

If you speak the truth, you should not be censored in any way. This is critical, because you can’t have democracy without truth. And you can’t have truth when facts are buried beneath layers of manipulative lies and baseless conspiracy theories. Censorship can help clarify the truth. But censorship is a blunt instrument, and it may well do more harm than good unless it’s used judiciously, transparently and without prejudice.