Blog #4: First Amendment language

 Censorship and the First Amendment

Recently in my Law Crime and National Security course I learned about the spread of disinformation. The protection of the first amendment protects the freedom of speech, religion, press assembly and petition. While the spread of disinformation throughout the media itself does not violate the First Amendment, the idea of the government wanting to censor computer platforms conflicts with the First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment is in the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution which is a fundamental personal right, meaning it is the strongest type of right. While the platform is able to monitor posts and if a post is flagged enough, it will be removed, the government is unable to interact with the posts on the platform. In 2017, a case where Q-ANON, a domestic extremist organization, began spreading disinformation about Hilary Clinton on Reddit which ultimately led to the removal of Q-ANON supporters on Reddit.

If the platforms themselves can review and decide what they want or don’t want on their platform, is this violating our freedom of speech? Should the government get involved with this censorship on social media? This can also take away our freedom of expression due to not being able to express or opinions. Any platform can take this information and decide to favor any information they like such as political views.

This argument has been surfacing across the United States for many years now, but how do we create a program that monitors and filters out disinformation without violating our first amendment right?  We could come up with a way to have the government intervene so that no one is able to favor a party, but this requires U.S. Citizens to give up their right to speech on online platforms. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is constantly checking these platforms to monitor for any extremist threats to prevent them before they occur, another issue with this censorship program is if you take this away the extremist organizations will not use social media to communicate and the government will be unable to prevent these attacks, as they will not know about them.

So, what should we do? I wish I had an answer. All I can say is that it is a battle of losing our First Amendment rights online, or protecting America from the spread of disinformation. I think it is more important to protect our country, but I think there must be an option created that doesn’t infringe upon our first amendment right. Until the government comes up with a way to do that, this issue will prevail.