The right to think and express your thoughts is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment. The rise of social media has drastically changed the ways in which people communicate across the board, but the lengths to which we preserve our right to free speech has not kept pace. Continuing to allow the tech industry to play thought police is a threat to the most important freedom we have: The freedom to think independently. While proponents of censorship are quick to assure the masses that their actions are intended for good, the truth of the matter is that AI can easily be corrupted and used for flat-out thought suppression.
Censorship and the AI takeover
As All News Pipeline reports, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are in the process of creating a tool that will use artificial intelligence to identify “hate speech” on social media. The scientists are hopeful that their development will be more "successful" than the human censors used to identify so-called hateful content online.
What constitutes hateful content, however, is where controversy starts to arise. There is no doubt that there are clear cases of people being abusive or hateful towards other users online, and in those instances, action is likely justified. But, the liberals of Silicon Valley aren't just stopping their censorship at actual instances of hatred and abuse, and instead are expanding "hate speech" to include any and all speech they simply dislike.
Under the Left's reign, simply campaigning for better border security or supporting pro-life causes is all it takes to be considered "hateful," and it should be obvious why that is an explicit overreach. These are not hateful comments, they are differences of opinion. It's become clear in recent months that being a conservative of any kind in a left-wing space is a hanging offense.
Sharing a different political persuasion should not be tantamount to hate speech, yet conservatives are being stamped out of social media platforms in droves for merely existing. What is going to happen when Big Tech takes their censorship to the next level?
Big Tech's role in the end of free speech simply cannot be ignored. As private companies, social media platforms are purposely skirting around any obligation to uphold the First Amendment -- and this is not by accident, it is by design. As Politico contends, the government has shirked their responsibility by outsourcing the protection of free speech to a private industry.
And not just any private industry, but an industry with a strongly suspected political bias.
Writer Mark Scott posits further, "In this new era of global online censorship, tough calls will have to be made between free speech and online safety, and elected officials, not opaque tech companies, must be the ones to judge what content crosses the line. If you're going to censor the web, you better make sure those doing so are accountable to voters."
See more coverage of Big Tech's thought suppression at Censorship.news.
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