Honestly, I did not make this up! The idea that a major news outlet, such as the New York Times (NYT) would publish the following editorial, is beyond belief. Many of us are aware that this problem, at issue, exists through reported stories, or from personal experience. Yes, the right to free of speech has been violated by many, so called Social platforms, as well as by many democratic Governments of the world, at all levels, the U.S. included. The NYT learned, apparently, from the opinions expressed by people that all is not well in the US.
The following is a partial quotation from the NYT editorial, published March 18, 2022. For more details follow the link shown below.
"By The Editorial Board
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are
informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
For
all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims,
Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free
country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in
public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
This
social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for
years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third
rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.
How has this happened? In large part,
it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a
destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel
culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture
exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering
cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their
braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme
version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing
society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage
open discussion in classrooms.
Many
Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and
where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints,
ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith
positions on issues that society is still working through — all without
fearing cancellation.
However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden. In a new national poll commissioned by Times Opinion and Siena College,
only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans
enjoyed freedom of speech completely. The poll found that 84 percent of
adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that
some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of
fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.
This poll and other recent surveys from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation
reveal a crisis of confidence around one of America’s most basic
values. Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’
search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values
freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and
their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish
without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts
that others might reject.
Most important, freedom of speech is the
bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express
their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to
and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing
views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by
tough scrutiny. When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out
of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve
conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.
There’s a crisis around the freedom of
speech now because many people don’t understand it, they weren’t taught
what it means and why it matters,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief
executive of PEN America, a free speech organization. “Safeguards for
free speech have been essential to almost all social progress in the
country, from the civil rights movement to women’s suffrage to the
current fights over racial justice and the police.”
Times
Opinion commissioned the poll to provide more data and insight that can
inform a debate mired in extremes. This editorial board plans to
identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming
months and to offer possible solutions. Freedom of speech requires not
just a commitment to openness and tolerance in the abstract. It demands
conscientiousness about both the power of speech and its potential
harms. We believe it isn’t enough for Americans to just believe in the
rights of others to speak freely; they should also find ways to actively
support and protect those rights.
We are under no illusion that this is
easy. Our era, especially, is not made for this; social media is awash
in speech of the point-scoring, picking-apart, piling-on, put-down
variety. A deluge of misinformation and disinformation online has
heightened this tension. Making the internet a more gracious place does
not seem high on anyone’s agenda, and certainly not for most of the tech
companies that control it.
But the
old lesson of “think before you speak” has given way to the new lesson
of “speak at your peril.” You can’t consider yourself a supporter of
free speech and be policing and punishing speech more than protecting
it. Free speech demands a greater willingness to engage with ideas we
dislike and greater self-restraint in the face of words that challenge
and even unsettle us.
It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from
government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of
free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on
which the law is silent). The world is witnessing, in Vladimir Putin’s
Russia, the strangling of free speech through government censorship and
imprisonment. That is not the kind of threat to freedom of expression
that Americans face. Yet something has been lost; the poll clearly shows
a dissatisfaction with free speech as it is experienced and understood
by Americans today."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html
