The First Amendment Right To Freedom Of Social Media

These days social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become an essential part of our daily lives in America. It is through media sources such as these that have enabled communication among people on a global scale along with uniting people with similar interests and ideas together in a positive manner. According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, around seven in ten Americans use some type of social media (Pew Research). The development of mobile devices has played a significant role in the widespread development of social media by facilitating the access to these sites. Today the use of social media is for purposes of

According to Brian Williams, news anchor for NBC Nightly News and author of “Enough About You,” Americans have become oblivious to events and news going on that they aren’t particularly interested in, and social media only adds fuel to the fire. Even though the news is still concurrently viewed by millions of people, it’s nothing like it used to be. Regardless of the decline in viewers, Williams states that “we work every bit as hard as our television-news forebears did at gathering, writing and presenting the days news to a smaller audience” (473). Social media is integral part of everyday life that will not vanish for quite some time. While social media has its upsides, I feel that the downfalls are far

With just the push of a thumb, the latest news headlines from around the globe can appear before a smartphone screen. Rather than tuning into the local 5 o’clock newscast or picking up the morning paper, people are receiving up to the minute information filtered through various mobile apps 24hours a day. This changing media landscape has led to a larger debate amongst many in the journalism world that dispute whether social media apps will lead to the advancement or destruction of meaningful journalism.

So much goes on in the world each and every day, and so much can be recorded with new technologies. People can capture a fleeting moment with just the press of a button and instantly share that with people dispersed all across the globe. That’s the beauty of modern technology in a digital age where people are almost as excited about their experience as they are with sharing it and hoping that it gets lots of likes and attention. Social media is one of the most powerful tools in the modern world as something as simple as a photograph can create a reaction on a large scale. People can celebrate victories and mourn tragedies together as news and images spread like wildfire. It’s almost a more pure form of news as people are able to post and

Social media is commonly used worldwide as a tool for learning and communication. However, the benefits are compromised by the inability to contain the contents shared and the misbehaviour of its users. Social media intervenes with the strict regulations of gun distribution, is used as a method of propaganda by terrorist organizations and is a platform that eases the execution of hate crimes in the form of cyberbullying. The aspect of efficiency and anonymity on social media makes it the largest contributor in violating laws across national borders, leading to more chaos and tragedy than convenience.

Since the invention of the Internet, people have become indulged with its copious functions, from making advanced programs to learning how to do new projects to social media. Social media has evolved over the years, from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook, since the late 1990s, and people have incorporated it into their lives. It is the modern way for people to connect and communicate with anyone and everyone across the globe. Plus, social media is everywhere; people utilize it when they are on the bus, at the checkout line, and even when they are using the restroom. In Peggy Orenstein’s “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” she propounds that social media has altered society. Social media has changed society’s priorities, characteristics, and mentality.

In particular, the Web enables users to share their ideas and thoughts about politics through social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. These users can post their opinions about general politics, share articles with their followers, and write their own opinion articles. Public social networking sites cannot fact check everything their users write and cannot restrict the content their user's post. This creates a chain reaction where users continue the cycle of “see it, like it, repost it.” As a result, this lack of regulations often leads to false or misreported information to be spread and read by other people.  A majority of these readers will repost anything they read that agree with their opinions. Thus, the cycle is continued. These readers are either too gullible and believe anything they read or are simply too lazy to acquire their information from credible sources and repost whatever they see.

The right to free expression rests upon public communication platforms, which is essential for the realization of the desired effects. Increasingly, the social media is playing its role as a platform through which individuals can express their wide range views to a considerable number of people. Through the social media, users can create and shape information. For this reason, the social media is becoming a viral actor by encouraging people to center their attention to particular issues. Additionally, the social media strikes a partisan position without regards for the traditional journalistic

This dissertation aims to identify and explore the use of the different social media platforms, focusing on the impact that the rise of social media has had on journalism practices. In addition, this paper will examine the public’s responses to the news that they receive through social media platforms. Examples of social media platforms that this dissertation will include are; ‘Twitter’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘YouTube’ as scholars claim that these are the most frequently used sites in the 21st century.

Social media changed the way we communicate, how we consume the news and most recently, how we tell the most crucial stories.

Freedom of speech or free speech is the right to articulate ideas and opinions without fear of censorship or retaliation. Others consider it the freedom of expression, and it has become more apparent that people are encouraged to voice opinions without societal sanctions. “The internet has become the main reason for this because it offers several channels and platforms to express ideas and opinions” (Gabriel, “Killing Free Speech”). Social media are the best example of the growth of the internet, where even companies heed points generated by the public through the social networking websites. However, this is a growing problem because free speech has become the tool for people enforce personal biases on others, or the liberating incentive for communities to abide or believe in some ideas and ignore others. as a result, freedom of speech is a problem because the lack of censorship has detrimental effects on the peace in the respective communities.

In less than two decades, social media has revolutionized modern communication and information sharing. What began as a simple form of social networking has turned into innumerable platforms for people around the globe to share ideas, create and share businesses, promote brands, read news from various sources, as well as share and find vast amounts of information, among many other uses. Thus, with a few clicks of a button, people are now able to interact with someone on the other side of the world. The capabilities created through social media’s many uses have forever changed global politics, business, and interpersonal communication.

Walk into a library, you have a computer, you are most likely carrying a phone, at home, you most likely have a computer, laptop, tablet, or even all three. This shows that we have social media access at the tip of our fingers, making it so easy to open up the site or app and just type out a phrase or paragraph, letting hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions, of people know what you think. Back then, it was harder to let the nation know what you were thinking, and it took even take months before everyone knew, versus today, where the nation might know by the end of the day, and it’s because of this that companies regulate what their users are posting, attempting at keeping the online world free from threats, hate, harmful words, and more. Rutenberg quotes Jeffrey Goldberg as he says, “At a certain point I’d rather take myself off the platform where speech has become so become so offensive than advocate for the suppression of that speech” (2). Twitter also said that “everyone on Twitter should feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, but behavior that harasses, intimidates or uses fear to silence another person’s voice should have no place on our platform” (Rutenberg 2).

There are two types of media, and each type has his way to broadcast the information. “These two types are traditional and-social” (Hayles K., 2004). Traditional media includes: radio, magazines, newspapers, television, different publications and so on. Social media is the process of the informational interchange. In recent years, social media became part of everybody’s life. People exchange the information, opinions, news everywhere: in blogs, social networks, forums, etc. People became sources to each other. The importance of social media is rising extremely.

Social media can be defined as websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or participate in social networking. As a phenomenon of only the past couple of decades, it has certainly changed the way we live our everyday lives. Whether socially or professionally, it opens the door to incredible amounts of information; most of which is freely shared.