Why Free Speech is Misunderstood Today

Let’s talk about freedom of speech. Recently, I saw a story online about an interview between a late night talk show host and an eccentric rich guy. I find this particular eccentric rich person annoyingly unaware of anything but the universe he has constructed for himself. If there had only been one story, I never would have read it. But there were so many articles about this one moment on television. If it was that interesting to so many people, perhaps there was something worth reading about had happened. I picked one of the articles and random. It was a line-for-line description of what (apparently) happened on the show as well as behind the scenes at the set of the interview. It bothered me that the person that published this chose to present it as a script for the evening rather than share an actual video of the moment. Clearly they would have needed to watch a video in order to create an accurate script for the event. I decided to look for a copy of this video that allegedly got cut short. To my surprise, there didn’t appear to be a copy of the video available for viewing anywhere on the internet. Just AI voiceovers offering the same account of the incident. That was beyond just weird. The internet loves sharing salacious videos. But I couldn’t find even one that day. 

The unnerving repetition of the soulless AI voice chastised the interviewer for asking questions about what they wanted to know and accused them of preventing free speech for calling the guest out about blatant lies. I just wanted the opportunity to form my own opinion from actually seeing video of the incident. Honestly, the imitation narrator was clearly in favor of the guest over the interviewer. But the actions that they described and seemed intent on presenting as commendable from the guest sounded to me like an adult having a temper tantrum about not getting their way. 

Lately, it seems like a lot of people believe that the meanings of words and phrases are malleable. It has become acceptable for many to say something and then retract the statement if it’s unpopular or (even worse) just insist that whoever disagrees with them is wrong or confused. Freedom of speech was never meant to be some empty regurgitation of everything that gets said about a topic. Even the most noble newspaper isn’t truly objective. Reporters and editors are people and people have opinions. People are supposed to have opinions. It isn’t normal to be indifferent or neutral about everything that is happening around you. 

Freedom of speech has never meant that you aren’t allowed to say that you don’t agree with someone else. It doesn’t require you to be neutral. If you want to control the dialog about something, you have to make your own platform. Going onto someone else’s platform and expecting to have complete control over the situation is ridiculous. And disagreeing with another person is not denying them freedom of speech. 

I have heard so many lies in the past decade. If that is a lie people are starting to believe in America, than we definitely aren’t free.