Public Fora and Freedom of Expression

This paper focuses on freedom of expression in the age of digitalization specifically on social media public fora. As the current political climate worldwide is polarising and both democracies and dictatorships are tightening their grip on ‘hate speech’ and other ‘unwanted’ discourse, we as people should focus on what is being done with our freedom of expression. As it is obvious that not all expression can be free, e.g. child pornography, we should focus on both what expression we should limit, but also how: who should have the power to limit the expression and how should they do it? The argument of the paper is that the current corporation-lead black-box censorship in social media creates a danger for the freedom of expression as the corporations, often foreign for most people, seem to use the platform to affect the functioning of the democracies’ legislation processes. Thus, if we value our democracies, the censorship should be conducted in a justified and as open as possible manner and never without a sound reason.