First Amendment

    Found expressly in the Constitution, our First Amendment rights are some of the strongest fundamental personal rights we have and while First Amendment protection is not absolute nor does it serve as a shield against laws of general applicability, it is important to preserve the idea of free speech in every aspect of our lives. With the growing popularity of using social media platforms to voice political views, the topic of free speech or expression on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Tik Tok has frequented headlines of news media. 

    The struggle advocates of free expression on social media are facing is based on the State Action Doctrine establishing that without government involvement, no constitutional claim can be made of a violation of First Amendment Rights because only the government can violate constitutional rights, so the First Amendment does not apply to private actors. Therefore, if a social media company decides to censor or ban a user from their platform, it has authority to do so without violating an individual's foundational right to free speech. 

    Though there has not been a violation of Constitutional rights found in censorship, it is interesting to consider why platforms like Twitter have chosen to silence, at the time, the President of the United States, and not the Chinese Communist party. I find even more curiosity in forming an answer to why media outlets and journalists in particular, are pushing for more censorship causing a herd mentality on several  censored platforms. Is the purpose of journalism not to voice all opinions and express all sides of stories journalists release? With this question in mind, I cannot seem to understand why journalists would want some people in the industry to be silenced for their views and others to have free expression without consequence.   

    💥Research from the Pew Research Center provides an interesting study which 💥 shows the difference between the people's political views and whether or not they feel their views have been censored by social media outlets. You can find this data in the link below!

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-americans-think-social-media-sites-censor-political-viewpoints/

    For another look into the censorship of social media platforms, the Freedom Forum Institute has created a detailed scale, ranking several social media sites on their censorship from low to high depending on categories or types of censorship. When it came to "misinformation" commonly referred to as "fake news", Youtube and Twitter had the highest levels of censorship.