Censorship Policies as a Way to Stop Cyber Bullying

Social Media and Our First Amendment: Censorship

Today, the world has become a global village due to various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and search engines such as Google. Through these platforms, friendships and relationships have been formed and businesses have thrived. Social media was initially popular among young people but today, it has encompassed even the old as it has developed features to suit each age group as well as socio-economic status groups. Thus, many people spend a lot of time on these platforms either socializing or doing business and sometimes, even learning (Dencik& Leistert, 2015). Just like any society, social media groups have all kinds of people and as a result, there has been the need to introduce certain policies of governance and codes of conduct.

Censorship Policies

Given that there are people from all walks of life on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube and other social media platforms, there are some who do not have good intentions with what they share online. The fact that social media gives a level of anonymity, some of these individuals are keen on spewing hate, obscenities, and other forms of negativity on social media. As a result, the ones on the receiving end may feel violated, harassed, and attacked. Therefore, these censorship policies are partly vital.

First, social media platforms are ran by private corporations. Apart from making profits, these corporations have personal interests, which can cause a conflict with principles such as freedom of speech. On one hand, censorship is important in protecting honest social media users from exploiters and malicious individuals who are keen on spreading hate. On the other hand, there is a lot of bias especially in trending topics as these corporations are determined to move conversations in the direction that favors them in the long run. Current events reported on social media are in most cases driven to create certain reaction from its users. During the presidential campaign period in 2016, a video of some Google executives declaring their support for Trump surfaced on the internet and even though Google vehemently denied the political partiality of their executives, these corporations forms a huge monopoly. Recent reports indicate that the Google search engine among other popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube have been given the mandate to manipulate online conversations that are of interest such as political conversations (Byström & Soda, 2017). Therefore, this explains why these platforms have embraced the censorship policies.

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