Saturday, August 13, 2016

American Values 2

The Bill of Rights guarantees us Freedom of Speech.  This is not absolute since we still have laws against slander and libel, but everyone has the right to express their opinion.

Of course it should be pointed out that the Bill of Rights only limits the Government, not other people so if you express an unpopular opinion you may very well suffer social consequences.

In the not so distant past, getting your opinions heard outside of your soapbox range was sometimes difficult and required press coverage or possibly widespread word of mouth.  Now of course we have social media and there a chance that something will "go viral" and spread like, well a virus.

This is both good and bad.  In the past we had some filters on what we were exposed to.  Possibly the filters were bad but in general the media followed certain rules related to integrity.  There has always been some media that didn't follow those rules and regularly reported space alien abductions, but we knew what those publications were and while some were faithful and believing readers it was pretty clearly a fringe group.

However we now have so much bad information available that the only real filter is self imposed.  I'm not the first to say this but not everything posted on the internet is true.  Just finding some story that alleges some outrageous accusation doesn't mean the person actually did anything.

There are ways to check, fact checking and urban legend web sites help, but I see so much misinformation repeated without any "filter" that I don't think the sites are used as much as they should be.

Every freedom has a corresponding responsibility that requires us to use our freedom wisely.  In the rise of many dictators going back to ancient Rome and probably before, it was the strong leader who promised to restore public morals and greatness that ended up taking freedoms away from everybody.

Our freedoms are precious and we need to respect them, not abuse them.


No comments:

Post a Comment