Commentary
In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court examined how we use debate and argument to unravel major public issues.
In New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the court said, “Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasant sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The justices also said, “Right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.”
In 1951, Canada’s Supreme Court also canvassed this subject. In Boucher v. The King, the court said, “Disagreement in ideas and beliefs, on every conceivable subject, are the essence of our life.” The court went on to say that “the clash of critical discussion on political, social, and religious subjects” is the “stuff of daily experience.”
It isn’t just the courts that analyze such matters. Leo Tolstoy explained that knowledge is a “continual movement from darkness into light.” He said we all evolve “from a truth more alloyed with errors to a truth more purified from them.” Around the same time, British writer Charles Bradlaugh remarked, “Without free speech no search for Truth is possible.”
In today’s world, social media has largely replaced the town hall forum and the newspaper editorial. Social media now delivers news like a tidal wave. There are 360,000 posts per minute on X. That’s 500 million per day. Facebook is even bigger. It is a fountain of countless ideas and opinions, from dull to strange to brilliant. Tolstoy might have declared we are in a golden age for pursuing higher and deeper truths. But instead, recent years have been infected by opposite forces of cancel culture and censorship—things that make barren the land of debate.
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In early January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was ending its fact-checking censorship. To a large extent, Facebook followed what Elon Musk did at X in 2022. Zuckerberg said that fact-checkers “have become too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created.” He confessed, “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” Or as an old tale put it, “Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”
Many cheered about these changes at Facebook, but others said it was altogether wrong. Joe Biden remarked, “I think it’s really shameful.” And in his farewell address, Biden went on to say that “Americans are being buried in an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.” One Canadian newspaper ran an editorial headlined: “Meta’s choice to axe fact-checking a travesty.”
Our wise elders, though, had much more faith in the human spirit. “Reason has never failed men,” said newspaperman William Allen White. And he maintained that “if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.”
But many forces still want to put a muzzle on social media. Will there be a censorship revival or not? That might be one of the big stories in 2025.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
