On anything to do with this 'social media', I would regard as the more accurate headline:
One of the Clearest Signs That ADDICTIONS Have Consequences
As in, is anyone being forced to use it? Ever, at all, for anything?
The beauty and majesty of the right to freedom of speech is that its very existence as a societal ethos, as well as a codified formal code of rights to agency over one's own actions, implies what is often the more crucial right: the freedom NOT to speak.
My own view toward just how abysmal is the popular ignorance of the significance of this right, is in the usual presentations explaining the 'right to remain silent' in the 'Miranda warning' used by police on the occasion of an arrest, as a Fifth Amendment issue which allegedly goes to one's right against self-incrimination.
But a broader and more well-dimensioned grasp of civil liberties shows that any prerogative of remaining silent, whether in police presence or against any other form of attempted interrogation, is in effect an exercise of one's overall FIRST Amendment prerogative of speech, in a manner of one's own choosing. NOT to speak is such an exercise, and in the instance of 'social media', the most valuable application of this right available.
So why have hundreds of millions of Americans CHOSEN to exercise their sacred rights of free speech, instead, in such an openly abusive and intrusive setting, day in and day out, on the slightest whim, and even while imposing it on others as an implicit social obligation, as this 'social media'?
To what benefit, and in the furtherance of what aim, does what amounts to a cacophony of nonstop gossip on full public display, and with no recourse available realistically when such speech inevitably goes on to be abused as stored content, return value to its participants?
To discuss freedom of speech with 'social media' as its chosen context, is to express a thorough misunderstanding of what makes such a right so valuable to the cause of individual liberties on the whole: the freedom NOT TO SPEAK.
How about we as a society, at long last, begin to discuss in terms worthy of adults, how these companies and their products have come to represent the most cynical and abusive squandering of the sacred right of free speech, because they had intentionally been designed to be addictive, to an extent that even this post will become predictably an object of ridicule, by addicts?
On anything to do with this 'social media', I would regard as the more accurate headline:
One of the Clearest Signs That ADDICTIONS Have Consequences
As in, is anyone being forced to use it? Ever, at all, for anything?
The beauty and majesty of the right to freedom of speech is that its very existence as a societal ethos, as well as a codified formal code of rights to agency over one's own actions, implies what is often the more crucial right: the freedom NOT to speak.
My own view toward just how abysmal is the popular ignorance of the significance of this right, is in the usual presentations explaining the 'right to remain silent' in the 'Miranda warning' used by police on the occasion of an arrest, as a Fifth Amendment issue which allegedly goes to one's right against self-incrimination.
But a broader and more well-dimensioned grasp of civil liberties shows that any prerogative of remaining silent, whether in police presence or against any other form of attempted interrogation, is in effect an exercise of one's overall FIRST Amendment prerogative of speech, in a manner of one's own choosing. NOT to speak is such an exercise, and in the instance of 'social media', the most valuable application of this right available.
So why have hundreds of millions of Americans CHOSEN to exercise their sacred rights of free speech, instead, in such an openly abusive and intrusive setting, day in and day out, on the slightest whim, and even while imposing it on others as an implicit social obligation, as this 'social media'?
To what benefit, and in the furtherance of what aim, does what amounts to a cacophony of nonstop gossip on full public display, and with no recourse available realistically when such speech inevitably goes on to be abused as stored content, return value to its participants?
To discuss freedom of speech with 'social media' as its chosen context, is to express a thorough misunderstanding of what makes such a right so valuable to the cause of individual liberties on the whole: the freedom NOT TO SPEAK.
How about we as a society, at long last, begin to discuss in terms worthy of adults, how these companies and their products have come to represent the most cynical and abusive squandering of the sacred right of free speech, because they had intentionally been designed to be addictive, to an extent that even this post will become predictably an object of ridicule, by addicts?