The United States of America is greatly known for being full of opportunity, hope, and freedom. But what happens when those freedoms are taken away from us? The United States Constitution clearly states in the first amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This is a sole right that we as Americans are granted and for some reason, people are not quite understanding that.
This past week, twitter has banned Milo Yiannopoulous, technology editor for Brietbart and openly gay conservative blogger, for posting a hateful review towards the upcoming Ghostbusters movie and “offensive” tweets towards Leslie Jones. For simply posting his opinion, a voice for many has been shut down by a website that is meant for everyone to be heard. When freedom of speech was written into the Constitution, I do not think the intention was “freedom of speech, except for when someone’s feelings get hurt.” People only seem to care when it is directed at them but turn a blind eye to other negative words being posted online. For example, ISIS has several twitters accounts and posts pictures of murder and propaganda; yet Milo was clearly pushing it too far with his opinionated tweets towards a movie and actress.
Apparently Leslie Jones has never dealt with hate in her life because she soon decided to leave Twitter--she couldn’t handle all the hate. I genuinely wish I could find the proper words to describe how pathetic I find that. Not everyone in the world will have something nice and loving to say to you and that is something we must learn to accept. If you do not like what someone else is saying online, ignore it or block them; but do not try to take away their rights. People came to this country for the freedom and fought for it to uphold our basic rights like freedom of speech. We are a society filled with people who only want to hear what pleases them. No opinion is necessarily the right one but that is the beauty of it; we are all allowed to have them.
The argument on the other side is that Twitter is a private company and therefore has the right to ban anyone they want or remove anything they do not want to see. That is understandable to an extent, but rather hypocritical and slightly ironic, if you ask me. This is a company that, like I mentioned earlier, is meant to and promoted to have everyone’s voices and opinions be heard. If you are going to make a website for people to share their thoughts, make sure to tell them that they are not all welcomed.
Twitter banning Milo should be a big wake up call to all Americans. Our freedom of speech is in danger by the overly sensitive and we need to do something about it now or be silenced later.
