1st amendment freedom of speech essay
Freedom of speech stands at a crossroads. This much has become familiar learning. It is well understood that threats to free speech do not come solely from governments. We know that the media no longer acts as a reliable intermediary between information and those who would consume it.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech stands at a crossroads. This much has become familiar learning. It is well understood that threats to free speech do not come solely from governments. We know that the media no longer acts as a reliable intermediary between information and those who would consume it. We know that social media platforms find themselves having to constantly negotiate between their role constituting the online public square and their status as lucrative for-profit businesses.
And it is obvious that these issues are not simply matters of private rights but also reach deep into geopolitics, global economic markets, and human freedom on a broad scale. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of sophisticated thinking and writing about these matters. It may seem as if there is little left to say. The series that follows shows that impression to be mistaken. The prompt was an unusual one. Freedom of speech is of course structured not just by social media platforms and their users, or even by the web of statutes, regulations, and contracts that govern their behavior, but also by an ever-present constitutional regime.
The First Amendment to the U. Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc. Playboy Ent. Group, Inc. The breadth of its canopy has structured campus life, leading to confrontations between unpopular speakers and those who would protest them, each side arming itself in the language of free speech. This series puts First Amendment doctrine on the backburner. Or perhaps better stated, it denaturalizes First Amendment doctrine by returning, once more, to first principles.
We have asked authors, and we are asking their readers, to try to conceptualize the challenges we face within the current and future information ecosystem without obsessing over the First Amendment as it has come to be understood by courts. This may seem a quixotic exercise, but it has a model.
Conservative legal scholars in the s held a different vision of constitutional law writ large than was then dominant at the Supreme Court. They did not argue, in the main, that their vision was consistent with or supported by modern doctrine, in the way of a good common law lawyer extending the cases in his or her preferred direction.
Rather, they simply asserted that existing doctrine was not the law. Once conservative judges began populating the courts in greater numbers, they had an off-the-rack alternative to the common wisdom.
Thinking in these terms is not a concession to practicality or an admission of defeat in the courts. It is rather, an affirmative recognition that constitutional law has always been dynamic, adjusting over time to the demands of mobilized social movements, technological change, and political imperatives. The First Amendment is no different. The law around electioneering speech has yo-yoed considerably in recent decades. Lawyers and activists within the conservative legal movement have understood what their predecessors within the civil rights movement did as well: that constitutional law is not a random walk but rather is charted by human beings making intentional decisions about how to move the law.
And so imagine that you care deeply about freedom of speech. You might care for any number of non-mutually exclusive reasons. Perhaps you believe freedom of speech is vital to democratic citizenship or to the formation of a democratic culture. Perhaps you think personal expression is an element of personhood and therefore a precondition for human freedom. Commentary Perhaps you think freedom of speech is instrumental as much or more for listeners as for speakers, to aid in the search for truth or to promote a culture of tolerance.
Abrams v. Imagine, though, that in addition to caring deeply about freedom of speech you also find other values compelling. Perhaps they are the very same values to which you view free speech as relevant or instrumental, but you think unregulated speech may threaten as much as facilitate them.
Or maybe in addition to freedom of expression, you also believe strongly in substantive equality, or civility, or economic justice. Instead of fitting your web of value preferences into First Amendment doctrine, what if you engineered First Amendment doctrine to respond to those values: What would freedom of speech look like?
Whom, or what, would it protect, privilege, or target? What would platform regulation look like? And what, if anything, are current models overlooking? Some of the essays in the series take on the first, more conceptual set of questions.
Freedom of speech is not about speaking , Waldron emphasizes, but about engagement , and so a speaker who complains of being heckled by his audience generally must appeal to values outside of free speech itself. There is an important lesson here for, among other things, controversies over campus speech. Freedom of speech is not the right to hold the floor; a provocative speaker invited to share his or her views with students should not—in the name of free speech—expect an orderly reception. At the same time, to the extent freedom of speech as an ideal of political morality is undisciplined in the way Waldron celebrates, its capacity to contribute to goals of truth-seeking or political equality may be compromised.
The voices most worth hearing may lack the resources, the temperament, or the wherewithal to shout down their opponents. We are seeing rule by the boisterous all around us; if disfavoring it is wrong, we may not want to be right.
Franks worries that the constitutional ideals of content neutrality and viewpoint neutrality that have come to characterize modern freedom of speech doctrine migrate too casually to the very different domain of platform regulation of online content. To the contrary, it means that they have the leverage and the freedom to experiment with more mindful, more egalitarian modes of speech regulation. There is a tension here.
The state action doctrine is an artifact of the very free speech doctrine that Franks wishes to criticize as protective of white male hegemony.
Many historic victories for the cause of equality have come from courts that had the creativity and courage to pierce the veil of private action—from striking down enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v.
Kraemer to invalidating the transfer, in trust, of a segregated park to city officials in Evans v. Newton to disallowing trespass prosecutions against sit-in protestors in Bell v. Maryland and other cases. And so the equality argument for imploring Facebook, say, to act as a more responsible speech regulator should not, perhaps, rest on its status as a private company but rather on more subversive arguments against content-neutrality more generally.
How much censorship should a just First Amendment tolerate? Tim Wu also questions the assumption that the First Amendment should view all claimants equally. In his essay, Beyond First Amendment Lochnerism , Wu takes aim at the use of the First Amendment to take a second bite at the apple after a loss in the political process. IMS Health , in which the Supreme Court struck down a Vermont law that restricted the transfer of physician prescription information to data miners who wanted to transfer the information to pharmaceutical marketers.
Drug companies vigorously opposed the law during legislative debates but, Wu argues, they lost fair and square. As he recognizes, the devil is in the details. How should judges assess when a litigant was well-represented in the political process? What kinds of legal interventions threaten core political values as opposed to other kinds of speech?
Wu and Franks are both asking important questions about how the law of the First Amendment should respond to how power is actually structured and exercised in the twenty-first century. In Keeping the New Governors Accountable , Victoria Baranetsky explores similar questions as they relate to transparency. We tend to take for granted that there should be some degree of public access to the mechanics of government decisions.
The Freedom of Information Act is premised on that view, as are rights of public access to criminal trials. There is no similar right of access to the decisional algorithms and decisionmaking processes of media platforms and technology companies even though these companies wield enormous power over public life.
They not only regulate public discourse but also, for example, structure financial transactions, assist in surveillance, and create sentencing algorithms. It certainly seems problematic for someone, say, to be incarcerated based on an algorithm the particulars of which remain opaque even to the judge, much less the condemned.
Predictive justice algorithms can also reinforce racial or gender bias in disturbing ways. Trade secrets are important to innovation, just as deliberative secrecy may, in public settings, be important both to protecting sensitive information and to successfully negotiating among a complex set of interests.
Transparency can gum up good government and good technology as much as it can expose pathological actors or unlawful conduct. How should we strike the right balance? As Mike Ananny observes in Probably Speech, Maybe Free , the answer to this kind of question exposes the nature of probability as an underexplored logic of speech systems.
Our comfort in relying on algorithms, whether to identify customers or recidivists, whether to deliver news or search results, in recognizing child pornography or a human face, depends on assessments of how probability relates to financial success, to the use of public power, and to human welfare.
When are we comfortable relying on probability? What are the distributive effects of false positives and false negatives? Who gets to make the assessment, and who gets to challenge it? The problem of freedom of speech in the digital age is a problem of scale —speech is enormously consequential, but it is offered, targeted, and countered on a scale too vast for human processing. Probability is a logic for taming scale, but what comes next?
Ananny uncovers a rabbit hole and offers a sense of how far down it goes. But, like probability itself, his essay is diagnostic. As much as probability must be understood as a logic of speech systems, and must be interrogated to make them better, relying on probability is, in itself, neither good nor bad.
That said, one prominent and obvious use of probability by social media platforms is in their business models, which rely largely on targeted advertising supported by data collection from users. These practices of course compromise user privacy to an extent as part of the bargain we make with the platforms we use, but, as Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani emphasize in their essay, First Things First: Online Advertising Practices and Their Effects on Platform Speech , the business model affects substantive content as well.
The advertisements and other content platforms deliver to users are designed to generate engagement, and engagement is hardly content-neutral.
Direct content moderation faces the familiar challenges of trying to use artificial intelligence to make highly qualitative, contextual judgments at scale. Better, Gary and Soltani say, for Congress to enact privacy reforms or the FTC to enact regulations that restrict data collection or restrict the use of certain data to target content. One wonders if any effort to separate platforms from their business models by fiat is quixotic.
Much of what we today think of as the internet is accessed through private platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that are controlled by a single entity. This has a streamlining effect and has enabled the platforms to collect large amounts of data that they can then monetize, but it makes content regulation a nightmare. Masnick argues that a shift to more open protocols would engender competition for the kinds of feeds that are free of unwanted content.
Dangerous or hateful content could be siloed into corners of the internet where it could do less harm, to the benefit of users.
The essays included in this collection give overviews of some of the most important areas of First Amendment and free speech law and scholarship. 13) The freedom of speech documented in the First Amendment is not only a constitutional protection, but also an inevitable part of democratic government and.
Jump to navigation Skip navigation. Your gift will fund our critical work to protect voting rights, demand that vulnerable people in prisons, jails and immigration detention centers be released, and fight to ensure reproductive health care remains open and accessible to all who need it. Now more than ever, we the people means all of us. The Supreme Court has written that this freedom is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom. But in spite of its "preferred position" in our constitutional hierarchy, the nation's commitment to freedom of expression has been tested over and over again.
Jump to navigation Skip navigation.
Freedom of speech can be limited during wartime. The First Amendment did not protect printing leaflets urging to resist the war effort, calling for a general strike, and advocating violent revolution. Read More.
Introducing Free Speech Futures
Skip to main navigation. Among other cherished values, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. The U. Supreme Court often has struggled to determine what exactly constitutes protected speech. The following are examples of speech, both direct words and symbolic actions , that the Court has decided are either entitled to First Amendment protections, or not. West Virginia Board of Education v.
First Amendment
Freedom of speech—the right to express opinions without government restraint—is a democratic ideal that dates back to ancient Greece. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees free speech, though the United States, like all modern democracies, places limits on this freedom. In a series of landmark cases, the U. The ancient Greeks pioneered free speech as a democratic principle. During the classical period, parrhesia became a fundamental part of the democracy of Athens. Leaders, philosophers, playwrights and everyday Athenians were free to openly discuss politics and religion and to criticize the government in some settings. In the United States, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. The Bill of Rights provides constitutional protection for certain individual liberties, including freedoms of speech, assembly and worship. In general, the First Amendment guarantees the right to express ideas and information. On a basic level, it means that people can express an opinion even an unpopular or unsavory one without fear of government censorship.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment to the U. Constitution protects the freedom of speech, religion and the press. It also protects the right to peaceful protest and to petition the government. The amendment was adopted in along with nine other amendments that make up the Bill of Rights — a written document protecting civil liberties under U.
Freedom of Expression - ACLU Position Paper
A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it protects several basic liberties — freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly. Interpretation of the amendment is far from easy, as court case after court case has tried to define the limits of these freedoms. The definitions have evolved throughout American history, and the process continues today. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion in two clauses — the "establishment" clause, which prohibits the government from establishing an official church, and the "free exercise" clause that allows people to worship as they please. Notice that the phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear in the First Amendment, nor is it found anywhere else in the Constitution. Most people do not realize that the phrase was actually coined later by Thomas Jefferson. In , when he was President, he wrote the opinion that the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause was designed to build "a wall of separation between Church and State. Court cases that address freedom of religion have dealt with the rejection of prayer in public schools, the denial of aid to parochial schools, the banning of polygamy the practice of having more than one wife , the restriction of poisonous snakes and drugs in religious rites, and limiting the right to decline medical care for religious purposes. Free speech is one of the most cherished liberties, but free speech often conflicts with other rights and liberties. The courts have had to consider the question, "What are the limits of free speech? The "clear and present danger" test is a basic principle for deciding the limits of free speech. It was set by the famous Schenck v. Antiwar activist Charles Schenck was arrested for sending leaflets to prospective army draftees encouraging them to ignore their draft notices. The United States claimed that Schenck threatened national security, and the justices agreed.
Freedom of Speech and the Press
Haven't found the right essay? Get an expert to write your essay! Get your paper now. Professional writers and researchers. Sources and citation are provided. Essays on First Amendment. The First Amendment to the Constitution is the one that prohibited the government from creating laws that somehow violate the freedom of the press and the speech, religion and the right for people to have a voice. Essays on First Amendment are so popular because they give students a possibility to acknowledge a history of the country and remember their rights. The papers with the introduction, conclusion and the outline of the topic are often given to the students by their college professors. The First Amendment, United States Constitution The First Amendment, Amendment I, to the United States Constitution prevents Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble or to
