BLOG POST #4 WEEK 3, Pt. 1: Eight Values of Free Expression

 From the 8 values of free expression, the one that aligns with me the most is “Promote Tolerance” the protection of ideas that we personally find hateful or upsetting that it teaches us to be exposed to differencing views. That will make us a more tolerance society if we force ideas to be censored, it feasters underground and becomes more radical. If you can't see it, how can a person learn why it's worthy, why it's hateful and should be condemned. This philosophy is called the “free market of ideas” that John Stuart Mill originated the concept Marketplace of Ideas. Therefore, if the idea is good the market will spread that idea while ideas that are not so good will not prevail just like it does in economics. To me that makes sense, if and idea is censored it can cause the Streisand effect the act to censor information can lead to the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information.

  I've met all kinds of people from all walks of life, so I have been exposed to ideas that I have interpreted differently than others, with me having autism some things are harder for me to process than for others. That's why I want to know as much about the world as I can why things are the way they are. However ever since 2016 I felt that society started to not like ideas that lean right which I align politically. I understand that the right is not perfect, but why the most “vile animosity” to people who lean right? Everyone has different viewpoints on how they see the world and how they think? That there is only one viewpoint, a “narrative” that is spread about a subject or idea, that if you don't agree with it, you are the problem. Likewise it's similar to how hiding away your emotions to bottle them up as it builds and builds and then just explodes all over.

This happened a lot during COVID-19 that at first we're told that the virus does not exist and then a week later everyone was talking about it saying to lock down. There was speculation that the virus leaked from a lab in the Chinese virology lab, but was not fully sure because of china blocking investigations into it. I always wonder why you weren't allowed to talk about COVID-19's origins on social media, you were banned for talking about it and called a “conspiracy theorist”. Now 3 years later the theory is most likely to be true with the Twitter files and Dr. Fauci's email leaks. That the USA was funding gain of function research on bat coronavirus's it was in-tolerance of different ideas that got censored. 

As Dr. Dean said during class Covid-19 was a disaster to free speech, I thought 2016-2020 censorship was bad but it gotten worse during COVID-19. People just didn't want to hear differing options in polices and only listen to what the TV says, it was the reason the “NPC” meme took off. During that time and echo chambers being more of a problem in discourse. So many ideas that were looked down upon and censored turned out to be true in the end, it doesn't always happen, but there seems to be a pattern.