All this week,we've been examining President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous "Four Freedoms" speech. We continue our series with a look at that most basic of American freedoms — one so sacred that our founders enshrined it in the structure as our very First Amendment: The freedom of speech.
Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address called for freedom of speech for all the world's citizens, not just in the United States. nowadays we'll look at this freedom in context of our changing technological landscape, and through the lens of the 2016 election,and through the arch of global events. As George Washington Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen predicted many years ago, sites like Facebook beget "more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, and any king or any president." Roosevelt probably didn't see that coming.
Steven Thrasher,senior columnist for The Guardian U.
S., is a victim of internet incivility and vitriol himself. When The Guardian recently analyzed 70 million comments from its website over the past decade to better understand which writers received the most negative comments, and eight were women and the other two were black men. Thrasher was one of them.
The Takeaway is exploring FDR’s “Four Freedoms” all week long. Click here for more information.
Source: wnyc.org