Re: "Is unfettered free speech online a good thing?" Opinion, May 5
I, like many other people, have grown weary of social media's physical (and often identity) disconnect through which the ugliest of comments can be and too often are made without consequence for the aggressor. Of course, there’s also mental health to consider, especially with child, teen and young adult users. Nonetheless, it has enabled far greater information freedom than that allowed by what had been a rigidly gatekept news and information virtual monopoly held by the pre-2000 electronic and print mainstream news-media.
Besides the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, I seriously doubt that Greta Thunberg’s pre-pandemic formidable climate change movement, for example, would’ve been able to regularly form on such a congruently colossal scale if not in large part for the widely accessible posting and messaging systems of Facebook. (Still, I've found that, contrary to prominent conservative proclamations, it silences progressive voices as much as, if not more than, conservative opinions.)
While I don’t know his opinion of social media, in an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019) Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media does publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock
