With the flourishing of social media, the distance between different countries has grown smaller, and the spreading of
information has never been easier. It seems that this very democratic culture of open information from the U.S. has
quickly spread across the globe, even to places that freedom of speech has never been guaranteed; such as the middle-
eastern countries that had started their revolution via Facebook.
However, on September 25th, 2012; one of the largest and most influential social media, Twitter made a controversial
move in Germany that triggered debate all over the world. This controversy started with the group "Besseres Hannover,"
a neo-Nazi group in Germany that had been posting far-right tweets and swastika symbols, which could be prosecuted
according to the laws in Germany. Though this incident caused little resistance due to its laws and Nazi past in Germany,
people from other countries have raised their concerns over freedom of speech. What if, the government of Russia
decided to suppress youtube videos that acted against the government? This is a serious problem since it makes the
social media companies potentially subject to manipulation by governments that are authoritarian.
On the other hand, JIllian C. York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation said that, "It's not a great thing, but it's a way of minimizing censorship. It's better for Twitter if they can keep
countries happy without having to take the whole thing down." As China did. Youtube also has a similar company policy
about removing videos that contain hate speech. However, if content being deemed inappropriate could be removed by
company policies or the legal system of the country, then, what is freedom of speech? Or moreover, what is
appropriateness?
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