6th Learning Journal

I think that a couple of the darker drivers of human motivations are money and power. There isn’t anything wrong with these two tools intrinsically but I believe that there will always be a group of people who will abuse things and use them with bad intentions. I thought this module reinforced a lot of what I believe social media will lead to. If you take a look at the history of media you can see a lot of pivotal moments and I think we might be living in a time more pivotal than the invention of the printing press. We now have more information available to us than ever before and we can be updated on what's happening in the world in real time, but on the other side of the coin we are being bombarded with information that is opinionated, false, or divisive. The information we are fed is delivered to us via algorithms which are built ro reinforce our own beliefs by feeding us things we agree with and things that infuriate us. The algorithms aren’t built with bad intentions but to keep users engaged. All these factors are the perfect ingredients for history making events which we can see with recent political events. President Trump is a beast created by the media, his supporters and haters are always wrapped up in what he has to say and he is intelligent in how he advertises himself. Slogans like make America great again and fake news are so loaded and get people charged up on both sides of the isles. The reason I bring up Trump is because he has been at the focal point of conversation on how we should moderate our speech. Usually people have put on an agreeable and potentially fake perception of who they are on social media but this has changed. Now being “authentically you” or who you think people want you to be in the most boisterous way can lead to popularity and attention from fans and supporters with zeal. This has led to radical ideas growing leading to more bias and uninformed ideas being shared. These ideas create more division which lead to calls for censorship. The thing that scares me about this direction is where it could potentially lead, freedom of speech is the first amendment for a reason. It is the most important tool a citizen has in a democracy and you may be able to justify censorship of some bad ideas is good but that is a slippery slope because what is considered a good idea depends on who’s in power i.e “Nazis' '. We can see a less extreme version of this case with the recent covid-19 pandemic. Trump initially stated the virus was the ‘China Virus” and because he took the stance that it might have leaked from a lab there was an immediate opposition to him not based on facts but based on Trump. Now that narrative is quietly being accepted by those who denied it and attacked and censored others for sharing their beliefs. Censorship and regulation on free speech is a dangerous game and when all is said and done it probably is better to let people say whatever they want and let the good ideas fight for themselves.