One thing that makes the United States of America so great is the marketplace of ideas. The first amendment allows American citizens to speak freely and with that comes opinions that can be either true or false. A marketplace of ideas was first suggested by John Milton in his 1644 prose polemic known as Areopagitica. Milton was an English poet, scholar, and polemical author who argued in his speech that when both true and false claims are put out into the world, the truth will always prevail. Milton also suggested that the conversation that ensues when both false and true claims are out there makes the truth even stronger. Extending his argument, Milton adds that there should not be a license required to print or publish and that anyone should be able to publish their thoughts as well as their opinions.
In Milton's argument he says that needing a license to print or publish is "a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of Learning." By needing approval, the government has the power to censor opinions they do not agree with and even facts that they do not want the general public having at their disposal. The government has infamously done this throughout their history, especially in response to work that is anti-war. This also leads to authors having to conform their work to the government's standards in order for it to be approved, denying authors creative control, their own opinions, and for the most part, genuinely good intentions.
With the introduction of social media, message boards, and the internet, millions of people all around the world are able to freely share their thoughts and opinions which have been front and center in the action-packed and very eventful year that was 2020. In 2020 there was no shortage of ideas in the marketplace thanks to platforms like Twitter and Facebook and those ideas, claims, and opinions were heavily debated between events like the Presidential Election and the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Personally speaking, I do not like watching or listening to the news. I feel like each network has their own bias and I find it difficult to separate faction from fiction. The marketplace of ideas available to me on Twitter, however, helped me decide who to vote for in the 2020 Presidential Election. I saw and heard both positive and negative opinions, facts, and claims about both candidates and using that information as a starting point, I was able to determine what was true, what was false, and most importantly, I was able to form my own opinion with all the information in front of me.
Unfortunately, despite freedom of press and all the advancements we have made since Milton first delivered his speech, censorship is slowly but surely crawling back into the picture in a very noticeable and concerning way. Over the past few months we have witnessed the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, lose access to his Twitter account, Facebook deleting accounts without reason, and perhaps most alarmingly, the removal of the social media app Parler from both the App Store and the Google Play store.
According to a New York Times article from January 9, 2021, Parler claimed itself as a "free speech" alternative to other social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook who were removing accounts and posts that they deemed to have incited violence or spread misinformation. In a few short months, Parler was one of the fastest-growing apps in the entire United States. On the same day that they were the number one app in the App Store, they were dropped by Amazon and their web-hosting service, putting Parler in jeopardy in the blink of an eye. The CEO of Parler, John Matze, was understandably outraged by this saying that it was a "coordinated effort" by tech giants in their attempts to "completely remove free speech of the internet."
Failure to properly vet their users and to remove content that was deemed to be incitement were the main reasons citied by Amazon, the App Store, and the Google Play Store for dismantling the application. The problem with that is there were nearly three million users on the application with around 1.5 million daily users. Realistically and statistically speaking, there is no way that all three million users were making threats and violent statements so why should they be denied their platform to freely speak their mind?
It has been an interesting few months to say the least as censorship begins to impact our daily lives and our access to a marketplace of ideas that Milton so passionately defended and fought for.
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