Blog#3: The Eight Values of Free Expression

 

Freedom of expression I feel like is very important in this country. So when people ask,"what's freedom of expression", it's basically the first amendment. It allows us to share our thoughts with out being physically harmed and gives us the right to express who we are as people. Even though it is a great thing that we have in this country, it is our job to make sure that a persons free expression is used correctly, because some people in this world will use their first amendment right to create hate. That's when the Eight Values of Free expression come into play. The first value which I think is the most important especially in todays world is "Discovery of Truth". In todays world you have a lot of plat forms that give false information out to the public which can steer people in the wrong direction. For example when the 45th president of the United States said that the 2020 election was "rigged". Not to get political but that statement was very false. Even though it is his first amendment right to share how he feels about the election, it is not okay to say it was rigged and put out false information to back up your false point of view about the election. A lie like that can bring danger to our society, as we saw on January 6th 2021 at the capital. That being said, it is very important that the truth is the TRUTH. A quote from Arthur Schopenhauer says that, " the discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice. The truth is what sets people free, the lie is what can make people die.

Truth is something that I feel we as a country need to improve on. We as people have our own biases which can make us lean on one side without giving any thought about the other side. We can have our biases because where human and we all have different opinions, but we need to learn that we can be on one side but also take a look at the other side to find out if what we believe in is true or not. This leads me to the word "truthiness". Stephen Colbert did a segment on his show called The Word and talked about the word that he made back in 2005 and in 2006 Merriam-Webster made it the "Word Of The Year" and put the word in their dictionary. Truthiness is something that may seem true or factual, but not necessarily true. An example would be Vitamin Water. We all think that vitamin water is good for you just because it has the word vitamin on it and the way they promote the drink, but study's show that it's not all that healthy for you. Even though Vitamin Water has added vitamins in the drink, it also has added sugar that makes the drink unhealthy when you drink it way too much. This example is a good example for the word truthiness because it shows that vitamin water told part of the true but not the full truth and they aren't the only company that does that. Other companies and people do the same thing all the time. We do that because it makes money and sometimes it's not that big of a deal, but other times it can cause dangerous issues. Like when JUUL came out in 2015. JUUL said that their product was safer than a traditional cigarette, but that's not necessarily true either. Even though they got rid of the tobacco out of their product, you still have the nicotine chemical in the JUUL the pod which makes the product not safe at all and still can cause some of the same promise if you where to smoke a cigaret, it might not be as severe as smoking an actual cigaret but the product is still life threatening. 

To conclude this blog post I want to say that we live in one of the best countries in the world, but the truth is something that we as Americans lack on. We don't tell the truth because we benefit when we don't. Like the media. The media will sometimes tell you part of the story that is true but then exaggerate it to the point where it's a lie. Our first amendment right allow us to have free speech, but if you are a true patriot, you would make sure that the information you put to the world is the truth and nothing but the truth.