The Need to Update Laws for the First Amendment
The world is changing, and it has been changing for a long time, whether you realize it or not. We are getting more modern, and these changes have an effect on our culture and how we live; thus, if the world is evolving, don't you think we should change our laws as well?
The Impact of Fake News
For example, as the legality of our sex and the LGBTQ population as a whole become more inclusive, there is no reason that we cannot continue to change the laws governing our freedom to speak out. Fake news could come from a large news network, an untrustworthy website, a Facebook message from a friend, or even a tweet from our President. Fake news continually drills the society thus affecting people’s lives and when other people are affected by your decisions that is when action needs to take place. False stories are a real issue, and we need to change our laws if we plan ever to know what is indeed happening in our society. Many amendments need to be updated especially the first amendment and through President Donald Trump’s tweets, political elites depicting what is and isn’t fake news, and the overall societal decline in trust for the general media I will prove that our laws for the first amendment are outdated and need tweaking.
Proving the Need for Change
The First Amendment states that we are allowed “freedom of speech” and to “peacefully assemble” (United States of America). The Constitution does not state anywhere that one can use your freedom of speech to mislead people and gain power. Currently, with the Internet and technology, there is an abundance of information available, and it is hard for us to know what is factual and what is a fabricated. Which is one of the reasons why our first amendment should be modified?
Think about it Trump’s twitter is a huge source for media because of not only how ridiculous some of his tweets are but because the most powerful person in the country seems to personally connect to the whole nation you through a technological interface. For anyone to believe someone is credible there needs to be trust involved so that personable feeling that the user gets from reading Trumps twitter makes that presence of credibility automatically there. All President Trump needs to do now is push his agenda and feed the public the information he wants us to hear. This is a recipe for disaster and shows how media is a tool for power, which is why we need to update our laws.
So when President Trump tweets something like, “In addition to winning the electoral college by a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of individuals who voted illegally” (Beckett). This tweet had a purpose and whether it was his goal or not this tweet undermines the election by making it seem faulty and controls people’s thoughts by using his position of power to polarize them into separate opposing viewpoints. Some people would read that quote and honestly believe that Donald Trump could have won the popular vote if millions of illegals were not to have voted. That is okay to think but there is no factual basis for that statement, and this is where the problem lies. Our president made a public statement saying that illegal citizens not only voted in our election but also undermined the election and affected the results. How can someone in his position be allowed to make such a statement and not have any repercussions? Millions of people see that and are all given skewed information. That is extremely detrimental to a society and is the reason why I believe we need to make our first amendment more strict and updated with the current societal status.
The Plague of Fake News
To further prove the plague of fake news, a case in point is yet another tweet by President Donald Trump. Trump tweeted last year, that “Twitter, Facebook, and Google and are concealing the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton” (Newitz). Not only was there no evidence or proof of the statement, but the tweet was quite easy to disprove. Later after the tweet, the FBI email review was the topmost item of Google News. James Comey, the FBI director, was at the top name in Facebook’s “trending” box. The Twitter’s “moments” segment had a prominent expose about the FBI controversy (Rutenberg). The saddest part of the whole fiasco was that the “burying” claim was Trump’s most retweeted statement of that day. More than 25,000 twitter handles retweeted the claim, and almost 50,000 twitter users liked the tweet.
Social media has been most beneficial, and with many upsides, however, the primary downside is the proliferation of misinformation. Currently, fake news constantly plagued the internet, especially on social platforms, such as Tweeter and Facebook. Now, even more, unreliable sources of information about essential constitution processes like election have become far too many. New websites intended to mislead and trick the society seem to appear every day, and the purpose of the sites is to give the creators dollars as per ad-views. The fake news sites are classified into three categories. One type is the hoax sites that deal in entirely made-up news captions that cleverly try to trick readers. The second type is the hyperpartisan sites that in essence do not lie but mislead internet users by maybe sharing favorable news only about the famous political party and a lousy story that concerns the other opposing side. The final category is the hybrid sites that deliberately blend a tiny bit of fact and then a vast amount of fiction.
The Impact on Society
Another sad side of the fake information is that the stories hurt the individuals, who view and spread the news over and over again. During an election period, for example, most of the fakes reinforce the opinions of conservative or liberal electorates and insulate voters from the truth. In simpler terms, the stories prey on persons, who choose to believe the very worst about the opposition. Recent study by BuzzFeed on “hyper-partisan Facebook pages” found that the pages consistently provide the millions of users’ false or deceptive information (Silverman et al.). Consequently, it appears that the less truthful the information, the more regularly the content was shared. Such a turn of events does not favor the country’s news literacy during the periods of the election. An appropriate solution to sharing of information in social media could be legislation that forces users to apply a “triple check before you share rule.” The rule will help to ensure that before a social media user shares information, especially on sensitive areas like politics, the users are prompted to at least countercheck the validity of the information content through a three-step process.
The Danger of Unreliable Sources
Our society today can no longer just blindly trust what political elites including our President said. As sad as that is to admit this what our society has come to because of how simple it is to spread information through social media and technology today. So, unfortunately, we have to start doing the fact-checking ourselves, which can still be tricky. In the article Fake Democracy, Bad news, it states, “Media that all too often prey on the vulnerable and bows down before the powerful; a media whose noble crusade for truth and justice has been replaced by a carnival of gossip and spectacle” (Fenton and Freedman). The society has come to a bunch of individuals who cannot even trust its government to tell them the bare minimum truth.
On top of that the numbers speak for themselves, the amount of people who had faith in the media since 1997 has gone from 53% of Americans to 32% in 2016 (Fenton and Freedman). As we can see over the past few years, we have had a steady decline in our trust for the media. It is just purely sad that in a democratic government there are still secrets with people who believe they are more important and can control what is happening in our world. There has been a significant shift of trust in the public and whether it is for the better or worse will soon to see. The public has shown that they are sick of news networks that are biased toward the left or right and are moving toward social media recommended news sources. “Social media recommendations improve levels of media trust, and also make people want to follow more news from that particular media outlet in the future” (Turcotte 525). Now it is great that people are finding ways to seek out the news they find worthy but this can cause major issues in our society. The issue is everyone has no idea if what they are reading is credible when we use social media as our only platform for information.
For instance, when people get their news of Facebook or Twitter they are usually reading an unreliable source or reading an article because their friend said the such and such story was incredible. So you go and read the story and afterward since your friend told you about it and it was on the Internet it must be true. This fallacy is a huge issue, and every day more Americans are becoming more and more uneducated about our society, and it is what the power elites want. Our everyday news and current events have been so clouded by other news sources that currently some of the best source of news is actually some of the satirical late night shows like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.
Now I am not saying that this should be your primary news source nor am I saying to stop reading newspapers and just watch The Daily Show for your weekly dose of news. The fact of the matter is though they tell society how it is with no tricks or gambits. They do not care if they hurt someone’s feelings or expose someone their purpose is to discuss current events and put a satirical spin on it. Even more amazing, though, is that according to a 2007 Pew research study, “it revealed that those who got their knowledge from Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows were better informed than those who got their information from more traditional sources” (McBeth and Clemons 80). It is shocking to believe that some of our most reliable news sources are comedians, and our most untrustworthy citizens are the ones with the most power and say. We cannot allow Trump and other political elites to keep controlling the media for it is finally time we put a stop to their words and start changing laws so we can truly benefit from our god-given rights.
The Spread of Propaganda
The society is now more susceptible than ever before to propaganda. A shocking expose made this year by The Washington Post revealed that Russia influenced the 2016 election much using propaganda bots and weaponized memes (Newitz). The intelligence community having suspected the Russian conspiracy focused on the traditional digital issues like network penetration. Intelligence groups were not prepared for the tactic the Russians employed like political propaganda and fake news propagation through social media. Apparently Russia has been refining its social-media skills on spreading propaganda (Newitz).
Another report of 2016 by the Time talked of some interviews with senior intelligence officers (Rutenberg). The officials spoke of how Russians posing as American voters infiltrated social media groups. The Russians spread conspiracy tales through Facebook accounts for imaginary media channels. The Russians also bought ads to spread the false news on the same Facebook. Some examples are the Russian clickbait headlines. Other forms of fake communication are the Russian media hacks that are skillful at fashioning dank memes of renowned stickiness. Weirdly, the hacks are now applied together by state-sponsored hackers. It is now the dawn of cyber threats that come in the form of Facebook posts as shown by the evidence above. In 2015, a post by Adrian Chen of The New York Times exposed Russian “troll farms” filled with people paid to create pro-Putin commentaries on social media (Chen). During the election year, 2016, Adrian Chen discovered through research that most of the troll accounts had evolved into "fake conservatives" that generate fake posts about Trump. In the eve of the election, USC researchers released a report that showed 20 percent of tweets relating to election originated from an army of about 400,000 bots that looked like the bots originated from Georgia in the US. The memes, bots, and the posts depicted fake information with the intention of duping the people to harbor partisan views on the political choices.
The Role of Facebook
Facebook was initially designed Mark Zuckerberg for simple, friendly social updates, and photo sharing, but now it has evolved into a massive information outlet (Solon). Facebook users hit a whopping two billion number this year. According to the The Pew Research Center, 44% of Americans acquire their news from the Facebook platform (Rutenberg). So, within Facebook’s echo chamber, misinformation that supports our beliefs dissipate like wildfire. An exclusively Republican problem now is the validation assumed to the fake news by Donald Trump. Trump has consistently repeated fabricated news stories and created conspiracy theories: from the famous question of Obama’s heritage, calling global warming a hoax, or attacking Hillary Clinton’s health status at political rallies. Amid all the mentioned theories and propaganda, Trump ironically urged his followers never to trust the corrupted traditional media. Trump’s conspiracy theories got amplified by a highly partisan outlet with subpar editorial policies called the Denver Guardian (Solon). The media outlet peddled stories on a story about Clinton killing people, and many more. Such media freedoms that allow outrageous fabrication and distortion of news need urgent legislation to protect the citizens.
Ensuring Protection without Abusing Power
An essential factor to consider is that as much as we strive to control fake news it is crucial not to give them all the power of speech control to the government. In the bid to revise the first amendment, the revision should be such that the power the Constitution gives government control over speech control is subject to limits by the people or a particular body. The fact of the issue is that if the government gets the full authority to choose which speech is allowable; the government’s exercise of the power granted is nearly always determined by political considerations, and not principled distinctions. In the long run, the individuals who proposed the limitations often come to regret giving the government such power. Indeed, the likely scenario about granting the government the control over speech is that the authority will use the power unpredictably. The American Civil Liberties Union founder, Roger Baldwin, once said that “to protect the people you like, you must protect the people you hate” (Newitz). In essence, one cannot claim to protect the ones he/she loves if in the ones he/she dislikes are not taken into consideration. It would be deceitful to deny that authorizing grossly offensive speech can exact a high cost. “Free speech is not free,” says a Georgetown Law School professor, David Cole (Wizner). In censoring fake speeches, as free as outlined in the constitution, it is vital to carefully describe the limits of the censoring body so that the power imbued is not misused.
Conclusion
We are living during a scary period, a period in which our government continually lies to us and tries to keep us from the truth by feeding us fake news stories. We have become so overloaded with false news that we have coined a term for the epidemic. This idea of malicious communication needs to be monitored by legislation because this saturation of fake stories not only undermines the credibility of what used to be reliable sources but it also hurts the lives of everyday people because their government cannot tell them the truth. Political elites and President Trump know the power of social media and the power of control, and they plan to use both against its society, since when is that legal or just in any organization. We are on a slippery slope, and changes need to be made to our legislation before it is too late.
Works Cited
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Chen, Adrian. “The Agency.” New York Times, Jun. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
Fenton, Natalie and Des Freedman. “Fake Democracy, Bad News.” Research.Gold, n.d. http://research.gold.ac.uk/22330/1/Fenton-Fake_democracy.pdf. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
McBeth, Mark and Randy Clemons. “Is Fake News the Real News? The Significance of Stewart and Colbert for Democratic Discourse, Politics, and Policy.” In A. Amarasingam (ed.) The Stewart/Colbert Effect (pp.79-98). McFarland Company, 2011.
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Rutenberg, Jim. “Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News.” The New York Times, Nov. 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/business/media/medias-next-challenge-overcoming-the-threat-of-fake-news.html. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
Silverman, Craig, Lauren Strapagiel, Hamza Shaban, Ellie Hall, and Jeremy Singer-Vine. “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” BuzzFeed, Oct. 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.acmjDPr0o8#.rxyyb8PoqZ. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
Solon, Olivia. “Facebook’s failure: Did Fake News and Polarized Politics Get Trump Elected?” Theguardian, Nov. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
Turcotte, Jason, Chance York, Jacob Irving, Rosanne M. Scholl, and Raymond J. Pingree. “News Recommendations from Social Media Opinion Leaders: Effects on Media Trust and Information Seeking.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 20, iss. 5, 2015, pp. 520-535.
“United States of America 1789 (Rev. 1992)” Constitute, 1992. www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States_of_America_1992#3. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
Wizner, Ben. “Should There Be Limits on Freedom of Speech?” PBS.org, n.d., http://www.pbs.org/tpt/constitution-usa-peter-sagal/rights/limits-free-speech/#.VE22mBYXnFJ. Accesed 8 Dec. 2017.
