Freedom of Speech
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
The reason I’m blogging today about the Freedom of Speech is, that an increasing number of companies want to shut up its customers. As you’ve probably heard, Google doesn’t care about protecting the human given right of freedom of speech, but gave in easily to tyranny and blocked out humans from reality. Sister YouTube suspends whole channels, when a few people are flagging a handful of videos – ignoring the fact that you have hundreds or thousands of happy subscribers. Facebook is another place where people are getting muzzled way to easily and all too often. While it’s important to be able to report inappropriate content, this feature is all so often being misused. But I wonder, if this post was really something that had to be reported? Was it that offensive? Did I deserve to be shut-up for speaking my mind? After all, Evernote was supposed to keep its customers’ data safe. It’s surely not my fault, that Evernote got hacked. What apparently appeared to the Evernote or Evernote butt-licker fans as being rude, offensive and very inappropriate, led to a limitation on my facebook profile. Facebook is not happy about me being such a bad person and complaining. It didn’t appear to me, that Facebook Pages (that all so often violate Facebook Terms of Services without any negative results) are only for praise, mass-liking and sharing stupidity. But before my rant goes out of control, I want to re-direct this energy and put it into something more beneficial.
Freedom of Speech
The right to freedom of expression is recognized as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized in international human rights law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
The origin of Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech and expression has a long history that predates modern international human rights instruments. According to wikipedia, it is thought that ancient Athens’ democratic ideology of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech were two of the most cherished values of the Roman Republic. It appears that this traditional right has less value nowadays.
The importance of Freedom of Speech
Summarizing the importance and meaning of freedom of speech is no small task and I’m definitely not trying to do that here in this small amount of time. I just wish that more people would use their head and think about the consequences they might cause.
The Freedom to lie and deceive?
I had to read over another article on the topic of Freedom of Speech to even think about that there’s also Freedom to lie and deceive, when talking about Freedom of Speech. When I hear Freedom of Speech, I automatically think about telling the truth aloud! Yet, when we’re talking about the fact that there’s Freedom to lie and deceive, I get my hopes up for having the Freedom to uncover truth. You won’t get called a conspiracist anymore, when you claim that the (US) Government is lying and deceiving all the time. That leads to the question: “Why can the Government lie and get away with it?”
We’ll cover that in one of the next blog posts.
I’m taking the freedom to chill with my wife now…
Related articles
- Kerry: Americans Have ‘Right to Be Stupid’
- Freedom of Speech Dies in the Workplace
- Canada Supreme Court upholds hate speech laws
- WAR with Google and YouTube
- Freedom of Speech by Arthur Topham
- Supreme Court muzzles free speech in Canada, rules against Catholic pro-family activist