Social Media And Censorship In The United States

We live in a digital world where we can consume information from multiple sources including the internet, television, and social media. People can post all their opinions in a country that allows freedom of speech such as the United States who allows freedom of speech and press because of an established constitution was written by the founders of the United States of America. There are exceptions to allowing people to post their opinions in countries with stricter governmental censorship. Today in the United States the only established institute in America for the United Constitution states, quotes from the original constitution, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” (Constitution). These written

One country that has very strict censorship ideas is China. On a bar graph from “Dreamgrow” which is a social media informed website shows that Facebook has about 1.8 billion users per month with no other social media network in the world close to that statistic. Facebook is a social media network that allows people to connect all over the world with a click of a button, and an article of Facebook’s mission statement states that “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Doesn’t China’s censorship go against this mission? In 2009 Facebook had to go against this mission in order to expand into China’s 1.4 billion population, and have a third party monitoring Facebook’s feed in China’s geography. China’s strict censorship on social media has hurt Facebook and China’s people, because it is making it harder for Facebook to achieve its mission to help connect everyone and make it difficult for people in China to communicate and connect with the rest of the world if China’s government censors and monitors everything that people in China post to Facebook. Governments that abuse their social media censorship harm not only

Mike Pence, the Indiana Governor and now vice-president elect posted on his Facebook about how he was disappointed in the United States Supreme Court of Marriage Act, and he received many comments under this post. Pence and his office censored some of these comments from being read because of their negativity towards his figure. Paul Taylor a well-respected and senior advisor to the Center for Digital Government wrote an article in the “Governing” and had problems finding the exact count of the number of comments because, “The exact number of comments is unclear because staff in the governor’s office deleted some comments, initially defending the action on the basis of the office’s policy prohibiting obscenity, vulgarity and personal attacks” There are nearly 2000 posts about politics and only around 200 get to their recipients, says a post on Facebook from an account called “People Over Politics”. There are many cases that Facebook censors’ political comments and posts. The most common notice that Facebook gives a user that their post was censored looks something like this screenshot of a post that was deleted. Facebook isn’t the only people that are censoring the public. Many countries are also censoring the Facebook from the public. An article written about The Vietnamese government censoring the use of Facebook this May