Free Speech

When I was young I was very frustrated by the extremely narrow boundaries around allowable points of view in the media. The extreme restrictions on what could be said on the air or in the newspapers and magazines was disheartening. At the time I was mad because my radical left-wing views were so completely unrepresented, but it was equally true of right-wing opinions.

Today we are barraged from every direction by every conceivable point of view. Although it is certainly true that conservative opinion is routinely suppressed by Google and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, anyone wishing to know what the right is thinking does not lack for sources. There is more conservative opinion available from more outlets than any human being could possibly absorb.

The fact that there is an organized attempt to censor the right and promote the left only serves to make the left look crazier and the right more rational, since the worst of right is less visible than the worst of the left. In any case the amount of free speech that is available now is orders of magnitude greater than it was forty or fifty years ago. The real problem is that it is being used primarily to magnify conflict and division in an effort to amass clicks and likes, the currency of the information age.

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