Worldwide Free Speech

With freedom comes responsibility

   Social media have expanded the boundaries of free speech so much that political and government efforts to control what people post on internet web sites are often pointless.
   Nevertheless, they keep trying.
   Time was, it was easy enough for officials to shut down a newspaper critical of what government was doing. They could simply send police, the military or even a mob to invade a building, arrest the staff and destroy the presses. And in some parts of the world, that's still possible.
   In other regions, however, anyone with a computer can post anything at any time from anywhere.
   Individuals don't even need a landline to connect to the internet. Messages and opinions of any kind can be posted by anyone, ranging  from a young student to a religious leader or a political leader of a major nation.
   For many, the only limit on what they post is good taste. There is no bureaucracy to set standards. Given the quality of some of the material posted by a few, the question become this: Should there be limits, and who should impose them?
   This raises issues of editorial judgment and censorship, as well as who can or should appoint those censors.
   Major social media firms defend their roles as simply offering a platform for people to share their views and opinions, as well as a way to provide information and to make contact with others with similar views.
   Anything more than that, service providers say, is editing and censoring, and inappropriate for what they do.
   Meanwhile, the issue of what constitutes good behavior and acceptable speech depends largely on the norms of a particular society. A comment that is thoughtful and insightful to one person or group may well be obscene or sacrilegious to another.
   The best an individual internet user can do is to adhere to the norms of his own social group, bearing in mind that there are some norms of morality, politeness and courtesy that are universal.
   Inciting violence would seem to be one of these universal norms, but even that can depend partially on the goals and ideals of the sender as well as the listener.
   Currently, there is a debate over things that the president of the United States has been posting on his Twitter feed, and whether they violate the company's code of appropriate usage.
   At last report, the company has decided that editing, censoring or deleting postings made by the leader of a major nation are not within Twitter's purview. But does that mean that they will continue to delete the accounts of so-called "ordinary people" who say similar things?
   Where is it written that the president is not subject to the same standards of behavior as anyone else?