The freedoms of speech, religion and expression are all protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. People are able to express themselves as they see fit; that’s a human right you’re born with, guaranteed by America. But with this protection comes the endangerment of others when hate speech is used to manipulate and spread negative, false information. - Jadyn Polk, 11th Grade
One of the bright shining lights that has made America seem special to so many people is the level of access to things people are promised to have. The freedoms of speech, religion and expression are all protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. People are able to express themselves as they see fit; that’s a human right you’re born with, guaranteed by America. But with this protection comes the endangerment of others when hate speech is used to manipulate and spread negative, false information. And as the grip social media has on our world continues to tighten, almost anyone can easily spread their thoughts to large audiences. As the internet has also been used recently to hold those who are politically insensitive accountable, people are more careful with the language they use to justify their actions, hiding violent behavior and manipulations behind the Constitutional protections to continue to uplift and harbor white supremacist ideology.
Celebrities and politicians have proven to be idolized to an unhealthy extent. The bonds people make with those influencing the media are so unhealthy that they blindly take their word for truth. One of the most blatant examples of this was on January 6th, 2021, when Trump riled up his base before the electoral vote count, telling them: “We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved,” falsely informing his audience that the election is rigged and that the media is lying to them. Trump also spewed to the crowd that America was going to be destroyed and lose its democracy if he wasn’t able to guide it, raising the stakes to the point where America as they knew it would be destroyed if he left the office. Then in response, thousands of supporters violently stormed the Capital.
The same day, videos of Trump supporters invading, vandalizing, and showing aggressive violent behavior inside the Capital flooded the internet. As reported by the New York Times the day following the event, “A mob overran the nation’s Capitol, as lawmakers hid in fear. Wholesale vandalism. Tear gas. Gunfire. A woman dead; an officer dead; many injured. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” (Dan Berry, Mike Mclintire, and Mathew Rosenberg). That night resulted in five deaths and spread fear throughout neighborhoods nationwide. Fear at how they were able to breach the capital and how it was handled with such little consequence. It scared people that Trump was able to move that many people to help him in a coup attempt after his reign on the country left so many marginalized groups under his power wounded.
Previously, during the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin caused a rise in protests for the Black Lives Matter movement. Resulting in the whole following summer to be filled with protest for proper consequences against Derick Chauvin, activists used this particular murder to send a message that those communities wouldn’t continue to fight against the murders of Black men, women, queer, and non-binary peoples. Trump in response famously called the protesters “thugs” and “terrorists.”
Trump also told his fan base “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Why is it when he sends his base to protest? This contrast in his language is only because he had two different agendas: when addressing the protesters his goal was to demonize it and to distort the true weight of the situation. His agenda when encouraging his base, however, was to sustain power as president and as a force by any means necessary, consequently weaponizing his base in one fleeting attempt at victory.
When we think of “freedom of speech” or just freedom in general, it’s empowering. When you are free to do anything you like (with some basic guidelines like don't kill or steal), you are bound to have people who are going to abuse that right. A clear example of this was in 2020 when COVID-19 reached The United States. During the first critical months of the pandemic, we were dramatically underprepared and mishandled the situation. As a result of those factors, so much false and dangerous information was spread by scared misinformed people, which led to the spread of COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands of lives lost. People across the nation are refusing to wear masks and state-enforced regulation is disregarded as compromising their free will.
“In the midst of the pandemic, a small piece of cloth has incited a nationwide feud about public health, civil liberties and personal freedom. Some Americans refuse to wear a facial covering out of principle. Others in this country are enraged by the way that people flout the mask mandates.”(Tara McKelvey).
Why should people be allowed to refuse a mask when the consequence is the lives of people around them? Why does your freedom mean the health and happiness of their communities should be sacrificed—especially when the reasoning is based on unchecked, false information?
The way information has spread has been difficult for the health of our communities in more ways than one. Under the “justification” of COVID-19, which Trump famously called the “Chinese virus,” reports of hate crimes towards Asian American and Pacific Islanders heavily increased. According to the statistics recorded by SFPD in 2020, hate crimes against AAPI rose from nine reported incidents to sixty recorded crimes in 2021. There have always been clear links between people who commit hate crimes to spend time consuming hate speech on white supremacist websites, some examples being Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist who engaged with and posted in hateful online forums right before murdering six people at Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012; Dylan Roof, who regularly consumed white supremist media who murdered nine people in historically black Charleston, S.C., church in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who was accused of gunning down 11 elderly Jewish worshippers at the Tree Of Life synagogue in 2018 and was active on Gab, which is a website similar to Twitter used by white supremactists. When thinking logically, why would online hate stay online?
All of this information isn’t to say that freedom of speech is a bad thing: self-expression is a beautiful and powerful tool that can be used to speak up and fight for your beliefs and change. However, some people's beliefs harm and take away the rights of others—and that’s when the problem arises.
So how is that fixed? With freedom of speech, comes power: the power to manipulate and influence the actions of others. So it becomes the reader’s responsibility to then make sure they are properly informing themselves on current events and checking to see if their sources are truly reliable or based in truth. If you take the time to learn about different races, nationalities, cultures, and history from every perspective, and not just the eurocentric perspective on everything that is learned, you will have the knowledge to make better choices. Racism and false information aren’t spread by people who know what’s really going on in the world, or people who know history from multiple perspectives. If we don’t teach ourselves the truth of our past, how will we move forward to build a genuinely equitable future? Continuing to take unchecked information from people without fact-checking has proven to lead to violent and dangerous situations. For the health and safety of those around you, be cautious of what you share and consume online.
Celebrities and politicians have proven to be idolized to an unhealthy extent. The bonds people make with those influencing the media are so unhealthy that they blindly take their word for truth. One of the most blatant examples of this was on January 6th, 2021, when Trump riled up his base before the electoral vote count, telling them: “We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved,” falsely informing his audience that the election is rigged and that the media is lying to them. Trump also spewed to the crowd that America was going to be destroyed and lose its democracy if he wasn’t able to guide it, raising the stakes to the point where America as they knew it would be destroyed if he left the office. Then in response, thousands of supporters violently stormed the Capital.
The same day, videos of Trump supporters invading, vandalizing, and showing aggressive violent behavior inside the Capital flooded the internet. As reported by the New York Times the day following the event, “A mob overran the nation’s Capitol, as lawmakers hid in fear. Wholesale vandalism. Tear gas. Gunfire. A woman dead; an officer dead; many injured. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” (Dan Berry, Mike Mclintire, and Mathew Rosenberg). That night resulted in five deaths and spread fear throughout neighborhoods nationwide. Fear at how they were able to breach the capital and how it was handled with such little consequence. It scared people that Trump was able to move that many people to help him in a coup attempt after his reign on the country left so many marginalized groups under his power wounded.
Previously, during the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin caused a rise in protests for the Black Lives Matter movement. Resulting in the whole following summer to be filled with protest for proper consequences against Derick Chauvin, activists used this particular murder to send a message that those communities wouldn’t continue to fight against the murders of Black men, women, queer, and non-binary peoples. Trump in response famously called the protesters “thugs” and “terrorists.”
Trump also told his fan base “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Why is it when he sends his base to protest? This contrast in his language is only because he had two different agendas: when addressing the protesters his goal was to demonize it and to distort the true weight of the situation. His agenda when encouraging his base, however, was to sustain power as president and as a force by any means necessary, consequently weaponizing his base in one fleeting attempt at victory.
When we think of “freedom of speech” or just freedom in general, it’s empowering. When you are free to do anything you like (with some basic guidelines like don't kill or steal), you are bound to have people who are going to abuse that right. A clear example of this was in 2020 when COVID-19 reached The United States. During the first critical months of the pandemic, we were dramatically underprepared and mishandled the situation. As a result of those factors, so much false and dangerous information was spread by scared misinformed people, which led to the spread of COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands of lives lost. People across the nation are refusing to wear masks and state-enforced regulation is disregarded as compromising their free will.
“In the midst of the pandemic, a small piece of cloth has incited a nationwide feud about public health, civil liberties and personal freedom. Some Americans refuse to wear a facial covering out of principle. Others in this country are enraged by the way that people flout the mask mandates.”(Tara McKelvey).
Why should people be allowed to refuse a mask when the consequence is the lives of people around them? Why does your freedom mean the health and happiness of their communities should be sacrificed—especially when the reasoning is based on unchecked, false information?
The way information has spread has been difficult for the health of our communities in more ways than one. Under the “justification” of COVID-19, which Trump famously called the “Chinese virus,” reports of hate crimes towards Asian American and Pacific Islanders heavily increased. According to the statistics recorded by SFPD in 2020, hate crimes against AAPI rose from nine reported incidents to sixty recorded crimes in 2021. There have always been clear links between people who commit hate crimes to spend time consuming hate speech on white supremacist websites, some examples being Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist who engaged with and posted in hateful online forums right before murdering six people at Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012; Dylan Roof, who regularly consumed white supremist media who murdered nine people in historically black Charleston, S.C., church in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who was accused of gunning down 11 elderly Jewish worshippers at the Tree Of Life synagogue in 2018 and was active on Gab, which is a website similar to Twitter used by white supremactists. When thinking logically, why would online hate stay online?
All of this information isn’t to say that freedom of speech is a bad thing: self-expression is a beautiful and powerful tool that can be used to speak up and fight for your beliefs and change. However, some people's beliefs harm and take away the rights of others—and that’s when the problem arises.
So how is that fixed? With freedom of speech, comes power: the power to manipulate and influence the actions of others. So it becomes the reader’s responsibility to then make sure they are properly informing themselves on current events and checking to see if their sources are truly reliable or based in truth. If you take the time to learn about different races, nationalities, cultures, and history from every perspective, and not just the eurocentric perspective on everything that is learned, you will have the knowledge to make better choices. Racism and false information aren’t spread by people who know what’s really going on in the world, or people who know history from multiple perspectives. If we don’t teach ourselves the truth of our past, how will we move forward to build a genuinely equitable future? Continuing to take unchecked information from people without fact-checking has proven to lead to violent and dangerous situations. For the health and safety of those around you, be cautious of what you share and consume online.