Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter All Helping to Take Away Your Right to Free Speech

Eugene Robinson -- Washington Post Op-Ed

This article is one of the few gems that the Washington Post puts out daily. Overall a crappy paper, but some of their writers are excellent. For those of you without the time or attention span to read this article I will sum it up for you after a little background. Wiki-leaks has been all over the news recently for exposing our government (and a few others) for what they really are. Corrupt systems of varying levels of oppression. Our governments' reaction proves this. The U.S. government supported Wiki-leaks when it was going to expose the Russian government but said it was inappropriate for them to expose the U.S. government. I find it very hard to believe that the government did not pressure Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter into fighting back against Wiki-leaks, but they had no legal ground to stand on. Those three companies should have told the government to shove off and stop intruding on the private sector, but instead they sided with the government and are helping to take away our right of free speech. In this article, Robinson says that while he doesn't support Wiki-leaks, he also doesn't support commercial enterprises making political decisions. He also pointed out that Facebook and Twitter allowed their sites to be used to organize protests against the Iranian government but won't allow them to be used for Wiki-leaks. He went on to say that it is dangerous to allow these near monopolies of the internet to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable to suppress on the internet regarding free speech. I agree with him 100%. It is only a matter of time before this gets out of control. My feelings on the situation are this; If our government doesn't want classified information to get out that could potentially affect national security, then maybe they should stop doing things that will affect our national security if the information gets out. It's all about accountability, something that we as Americans have forgotten about not only for our politicians, but also in our daily lives. It's time to step up and take our rights back.