We live in an ever-changing social and political landscape. As we grow as a society, thoughts, opinions, and laws will change with us. Some citizens' free speech on online internet forums such as Facebook and Twitter are being suppressed or hidden from the general public, known as Censorship, and that is important to know because it is suppressing certain thoughts that a particular individual or political party might disagree on a person's different views. Censorship is defined as "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. "If an individual is not violating any of those rules, then there should not be a reason why their views are being suppressed, but conservative personalities such as Ben Shapiro, Candance Owens, and Michael Knowles are constantly finding themselves censored.
In 2020 Facebook released a report showing how they combated misinformation, saying, "Let's start with fake accounts. We take a hard line against this activity and block millions of fake accounts each day, most of them at the time of creation. Between October and December of 2020, we disabled more than 1.3 billion of them. We also investigate and takedown covert foreign and domestic influence operations that rely on fake accounts." In that same year, Candance Owens made an Instagram video saying that the website "Facebook fact-checkers" that censored her Facebook posts unjustifiably leans left politically, and she filed a lawsuit against the "Facebook fact-checkers" because of the censorship.
Big tech, or the four horsemen, are commonly known as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are the biggest giants of technology in their respective fields, and they dominate a majority of information and products spread around the world today, which makes it harder for new competition to get a foot in and provide a new source of entertainment or news such as the app called Parler. Parler was advertised as a safe haven for free speech and an alternate unbiased social media platform where users could freely express their views without the concern of getting banned. It was reported that Apple, Google removed the app Parler from their app stores, and Amazon took it offline in January of 2021 because it was discovered that Parler was storing user's social security numbers, driver's licenses. Now that the public is fully aware of what kind of information Parler was collecting, it would have been up to the person to continue using the site and not have it forcibly removed from their phones, which took the user's choice away.
The first amendment in the United States Constitution says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."That is people's problem with big tech. It has slowly reverted choice and put people in a socialistic society. "Twitter routinely restricts posts expressing conservative views even from a President of the United States while at the same time it allows Iran’s supreme leader to freely spew vile, anti-semitic hate and even death threats every year countless Americans are banned, blacklisted, and silenced through arbitrary or malicious enforcement of ever-shifting rules," said President Trump. (Factbase Videos, 2020, time stamp 1:28) As American citizens, we live in a free country but are not free to post our thoughts or opinions not because of the Government's limitation but because of individuals who run big tech monopolies.
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