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What is the summary for the article below? Freedom of Speech In the United State

ID: 3871907 • Letter: W

Question

What is the summary for the article below?

Freedom of Speech

In the United States, we like to think of our Freedom of Speech as
inviolable and essential to the proper running of the democracy. The
events of the Arab Spring a few years ago underscore the need for the
public to be able to exercise its rights of free speech to dissent against
the government when it becomes oppressive. At the same time, they
make governments scared. If the people can organize themselves
efficiently and anonymously, then what is to stop them opposing
unpopular actions? In addition, the fallout from the Arab Spring
has not been all good. Several oppressive regimes were overthrown,
but ISIS has thrived in this power vacuum, and other oppressive
leaders have taken the place of the old.

Should the right to express oneself be absolute in all cases?
Historically, this has not been the norm in the U.S., and the Supreme
court has placed different media in different categories, giving
higher protections to some media, and lower protections to others.
Print media holds the highest protection. Thus,
cigarette ads are legal in magazines, but not on TV. Broadcast
media such as TV and radio are protected, but not as completely.
Finally, common carriers, such as telephone companies and the postal
system are not allowed to censor content that goes across them.

Now, most communications are over the Internet, and the percentage
will likely increase over time. How should we classify the Internet, then?
In theory, then, we could place the Internet into one of the three
categories. Which category is important. One side of this argument
is about censorship. On network TV, most nudity,
and much vulgar language is prohibited. Should all content on the
Internet be subjected to this kind of restriction? Another side of the
argument is about control of information transfer. As a common carrier,
a phone company cannot block you from connecting with another user
or company. Should the Internet be treated this way?

How should offensive speech be controlled?

Whoever you are, there are likely some things that you find offensive.
Should offensive materials be prohibited on the web? Here are some
examples of speech considered offensive, and who wanted to ban them:

The First Amendment does not protect "obscene material". Unfortunately,
the definition of obscene material is based on "community standards".
What is considered obscene in Florida may not be considered
obscene in California. If a web site in California makes material
available that is considered obscene in Florida, should it be
prohibited or blocked somehow? This has happened.

In the U.S., there has been a parade of laws attempting to restrict indecent or
pornographic materials on the net, even when such materials are protected
in print. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996
was an early example that was later declared unconstitutional. The Supreme
court established the doctrine that "the Internet deserves the highest
protection from government intrusion."

A later law, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) "made it a federal
crime to make available to minors material "harmful to minors"". COPA has
repeatedly been ruled unconstitutional, with judiciaries suggesting that
censorship should be replaced by voluntary internet filtering.

Later, congress passed the "Children's Internet Protection Act" (CIPA),
which instead of censoring the Internet, demands that federally funded
libraries install filtering software on all Internet terminals. This
law was upheld by the Supreme court, following the earlier advice.

Censorship on the Net

Network television in the United States is censored. There are certain
ads you cannot display (cigarette ads, for instance). There is some content
that you cannot show (for example, guidelines on nudity), and there are
words that people are not allowed to say. Of course, network viewership has
been eroding over the last few years.

One of the reasons that the content of network TV is regulated is that
it is broadcast into our homes. Cable TV, on the other hand, has
less censorship, whereas newspapers and books are highly protected
forms of speech.

Existing laws also struggle to keep up with new technologies and
behaviors. For example, a number of groups have attempted to
restrict the sale and rental of violent video games, and child
pornography laws are sometimes applied when minors send explicit
images to each-other . These laws were not intended for
this purpse.

Outside the US, a good number of countries censor the Internet. China
censors key words such as "freedom" and "democracy". Iran has shut down
Facebook, twitter. Russia blocks Linked-In. Many of us in
the United States would consider these actions to be oppressive.
Even so, American companies have frequently been complicit in this
censorship behavior. Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo have all helped
foreign governments with their censorship goals. Is this acceptable
ethical behavior from U.S. companies? Censorship requests are also not
limited to countries that Americans would often consider oppressive.
France fined Google for not blocking web search results, even though
they made an effort to block some of these results in France. If Google, a U.S.
based company is told by France that they must block certain content
world wide, should they be required to comply?

Money as Political speech

Political speech has seen a big change in the United States in
the last few years because of the Citizens United case. That
decision directly lead to the rise of "Superpacs", political
action committees often funded by just a few individuals. The
typical function of the superpacs is to run attack ads against
particular candidates.

Criticizing Government Officials

In his campaign, then candidate Trump tweeted that he wants to
change the libel laws in the US to make it easier for him to sue
media outlets when they publish negative stories about him:

"...I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write
purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can
sue them and win lots of money. We're going to open up those
libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which
is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there
for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and
win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're
totally protected."

Anonymity

There are many legitimate reasons that people may desire anonymity. Drug
users trying to quit may not want their identities published. A young man
or woman looking up information about contraception may not want their
family to know that they are sexually active. Whistleblowers
may need anonymity to keep from being fired and to prevent government
harassment. When we go online, can we have any expectation of privacy?
If we desire privacy, should we be expected to secure it ourselves by
using anonymizers? Or, should the use of anonymizing software be
illegal? After all, terrorists and criminals use it to cover
their tracks.

Net Neutrality

Net neutrality refers to the idea that ISPs should not be able to give
preferential treatment to different kinds of data that they transport.
All data should be treated equally. Note that this is NOT the same as
giving everyone the same connection speed. Instead, it means that you
get the speed that you paid for without regard to the contents or source
of the data.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of HTML, put it this way. Suppose that
I pay for Internet access at a particular level, and a second party
pays for the same or better access. I should be able to connect to
that second party at the access level we have both paid for. The ISP,
who delivers the data packets, should not be able to block or slow that
access.

Throttling is the practice of lowering the connection
speed between parties. This can lower quality or make some products
unusable. Early in 2014, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast to stop
throttling their service:

http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-reaches-streaming-traffic-agreement-with-comcast/

Yet, why should Netflix have to do this? They already pay a fee
for the bandwidth that they use, and so do their customers. If the
fee is actually too low to properly deliver the bandwidth, why did Comcast
not raise the price for everyone?

A typical new way that ISPs skirt net neutrality principles is to offer "zero rating"
content. That is, some content is offered without it counting against a customer's
bandwidth caps. This makes the offered services more attractive, given that
most people do not have unlimited data usage connections.

During the Obama administration, the FCC ruled that ISPs must treat internet traffic
according to net neutrality principles:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000003569336/the-new-net-neutrality-rules.html

Under the Trump administration, the FCC has begun to roll back these rules.

Explanation / Answer

    Freedom of speech is one of the rights of a Democratic country. But, it should be done through proper channel without creating the environment of riots and violence. One should speak for himself, one should ask for his rights but without harming and badly affecting others. ISIS is a terror organization, they are mercenaries, they should be suppressed as soon as possible, because the way they’ve acquired for speaking for themselves in far away from humanity.
    As the document says, the print media has provided with most protection, this is because, print media like newspaper is one most basic means to convey government messages, organizations schemes and current affairs etc. A minor or an adult both can get access to the print media quite easily and it is still the most used means of communication, hence most protected.
   While on the other hand, Internet has grown its roots quite rapidly in past few years and now it has reached to most of the crowd. It is increasing its access to more and more people rapidly and has become a medium for news, entertainment, education etc. It is one of the media which need the maximum protection these days. Some people spread negativity through abusive and offensive messages, videos, images and tweets. These type of activities must be properly monitored and should be banned. A strict action is must against such people and organizations. While, nudity is one of the prime concern these days. Government has banned websites showing nude contents and the government interference is must in some of the cases regarding foulness over the internet.
   Revelation of one’s identity is one’s rights, whether the person wants to reveal the identity or not. There can be any reason behind the hiding of identity. It can be a noble one or it can be an oppressive one. But some terrorist use it to spread terror by releasing videos and hiding their identities.
   Coming to net neutrality, it was one the most popular topic few months back. It means the ISP’s and government will treat all the data as same and will not charge different prices for different websites and different contents. The net neutrality is good steps, as internet should not be discriminated on the basis of money and content. Everyone should have equal access to it.

   At last, I would like to conclude that equality and freedom are the major concern these days, as people are getting smarter day by day and they know their rights. So, no organization or government can make fool out of them. Contrary to this, freedom of speech and access to the media contents is purely based on the community guidelines, because every regions has different community rules, one rule that is acceptable for one community may or may not be acceptable to the other community.

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