The reason why free speech matters to me are because I and my people of Kashmir have been devoid of it completely by the authorities. The people who try to raise their voices and speak against the injustices and wrong acts by the government are either beaten up or taken into custody. Some of them even end up in detention centers under the famous public safety act and the people living outside Kashmir who advocates in favor of people of Kashmir are booked under sedition law.
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This situation doesn't only prevail in my homeland, many other countries have the same or even more strict administration. Countries like North Korea is a great example where freedom of speech is curbed. It is, however, necessary to put some restrictions on those people who promote hate speech against a region, community or religion.
When social media arrived and became popular in the second decade of this century, people thought that this is a chance for them to speak their minds. People thought that the power of social media is tremendous, little did they know that their content was going to be censored. There is a cost that you have to pay if you speak your mind on these centralized social media platforms, your account is either suspended or permanently blocked. I have experienced those restrictions myself when a few of my friends were blocked on Twitter and Facebook just because they spoke against the wrongful activities of the government.
SPEAK AND LET OTHERS SPEAK AS WELL
For me, free speech is the ability of a person or an organization to speak whatever they want to. However, if we want that freedom for ourselves, we should be more than willing to give that right to others as well especially those who work under us in offices. I have seen many people who don't let other people speak freely that are lower in status than them. We often fail to recognize the fact that as it is our right to speak freely, other people should enjoy it too irrespective of their status.
Free speech is important to bring changes in our society. If free speech wasn't there, we would still be living under ruthless dictators and slavery would still have been present in our society. Free speech has been used to fight for a change, there would be no rights right now if it wasn't for free speech. The condition of women would still have been miserable if ideas had not ignited their minds to break free.
Yes, free speech often leads to some sort of offense to a community, religion or an area like it did in the case of Darwin and Galileo. But had they chosen to remain silent, we would still have no clue about the evolution and astronomy. Free speech is, however, not only about speaking your minds, it's about listening to other people as well. We may find some people's ideas and thoughts offensive but if we want free speech for ourselves, we should be ready to face such issues.
Free speech on the internet is most likely to be censored until there is complete decentralization of social media. Slowly but steadily, the world is going to move towards decentralization and we, at hive welcome all of those people who want to speak freely and at the same time raise their voices against censorship by the famous social media giants like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
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