Freedom of opinion and expression is legally granted to every human being, as per the article 19 of the UDHR.Likewise in the international law, everyone has the freedom to express his ideas and opinions, as it is considered as the basic democratic societal norms.
But free speech must have certain limitations because unlimited freedom of opinion can give rise to hatred, biases and conflicts within the society as a whole. Moreover, it is not good for the peaceful existence of human beings on this globe.
Today social media is rife with material that incites discrimination, hostility and violence against particular racial, ethnic and religious groups. This shows how pervasive this menace is.
Moreover, with the success of Donald Trump in the presidential elections of United States of America, controversial statements and posts by public figures and politicians have ignited the debate whether social media is facilitating the spread of prejudices and discrimination?
Besides serving as a valuable platform to access information and express personal opinions, they have considerable potential for abuse.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) is credited with freeing these social media sites from legal action for the content their users post or share.
Although these social media companies have their own rules and regulations in place to prevent hate speech on their sites, these policies are either inconsistently followed or they are not understandable to the users of these platforms.
Thus, the current situation has empowered these companies to control what videos, text, images etc. their users upload on these platforms.
So, what can be a possible solution for this? There are some possible actions take can be taken to counter hate on Facebook and Twitter in particular and the Internet in general:
Legal enforcements of punishments, content moderation and make the users aware.
And most notably, there must be acknowledgement on the part of social media companies that with this extraordinary power, there comes a big responsibility too.
Thus, being one of the platforms that facilitate social interaction, it has to coordinate its efforts to limit the dissemination of any material that spreads discrimination and prejudices.
