These days it seems that anyone can post whatever they want online as people fight for their freedom of speech, but is has this sentiment gone too far? 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

These words uttered over and over again ring hollow in the times of social media and in the era of “fake news.” Although the term has been around for roughly 125 years according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it is still relatively new. Furthermore, while the term carries much political tension, it really means much more than what President Donald Trump’s tweets suggest. 

Fake news seems easy enough to understand, at the outset. They are stories that contain deliberately incorrect information are published. These kinds of narratives are “created to either influence people’s views, push a political agenda or cause confusion,” suggests Webwise

These days, fake news travels faster than we are able to combat it. In fact, according to a study published in Science, fake news is spreading faster and reaching more people than ever before, especially on Twitter. These stories are spread at an exponentially higher rate than accurate stories. 

This is detrimental to a society. Because there is so much information being put out at such a high rate, there is no way to be sure that the public is being correctly informed. A public with false knowledge is worse than a public with none.

The blessing of the internet is proving to also be its curse: anyone can post anything they want, on any topic they want to at any time that they wish to. We cannot continue to allow this to happen for two main reasons. 

First and foremost, some people do not know what they are talking about. 

According to a Make Change article, one real life example of harm caused by allowing fake news to be published was surrounding the measles outbreak in the U.S. While in 2000 the measles were declared eliminated by the CDC, anti-vaccination articles have caused people to believe in the harms of vaccinating their children and now, more than “700 cases of measles have been reported in 22 states in 2019, threatening to once again take the lives of children, the elderly, and the infirm.”

Because it was allowed for people of all ages, and thought process and religion to publish their thoughts on vaccination, the health and safety of Americans is being threatened. Many people these days are buying into concepts such as the earth being flat or that the moon landing never happened because of simple videos on the internet that lead to rabbit holes. 

The promotion of fake or unsupported ideas needs to stop, and the only way to get those ideas out of the public sphere is to allow for more censorship rights to our social media platforms. 

More and more, people are resorting to Twitter and Facebook for news and updates, if everything that is published is opinion with a “news” title, the public is being fed misinformation.

The second reason we must give platforms more control is that high profile people have more power than we think, and they should not be allowed to abuse it. 

Recently senator Kamala Harris took a stand by tweeting at Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, to do something about Trump’s account. She then took to a letter to request he “consider suspending President Donald Trump’s account because his behavior regularly breaks the company’s terms of service” by targeting, harassing, and attempting to out certain individuals, according to Forbes

Harris perfectly exemplifies why it is imperative we give our social media platforms more power to regulate speech. The rhetoric and verbiage of the most powerful individual of the nation should not be harmful nor false, as it is reaching millions of people. 

People with the “blue checkmark” on Twitter have more power than we will ever be able to understand. Some celebrities have such loyal followers that whatever they say may be taken as fact.

We must understand how dangerous this can be. 

While there is a free speech right in this nation that we should all stand to uphold, there should and must be accountability to assist that. With shows like 13 Reasons Why proving how powerful words can be to harming an individual and cases like the Measles outbreak proving how detrimental fake news is to society, we must not allow the media to reign uncontrolled. 

Though they were intended to be gatekeepers for our government, we must allow someone to be the gatekeeper of the media.