Singapore is a country where not a lot of freedom of speech is allowed by the government. During my English class, we have discussed freedom of speech. After splitting into smaller groups, my group talked with each other and discussed the following four questions:
Do societies need free speech? Why?
Do societies need censorship? Why?
In your groups create arguments to support both (i) the right to freedom of speech and (ii) the regulation of it.
What is problematic about both stances?
Some of the reasons why my group thought the societies need free speech are the following. We thought that it is a basic human right to freely express our thoughts, hence the society isn’t entitled to take away this human right. Also, people having the freedom of speech would allow them to feel respected. But at the same time, we also thought the societies need censorship to a certain extent. As soon as that freedom of speech is being used towards others in terms of hurting or discriminating them, we thought this was when the government should step in. In other words, we thought that although it is good for a society to have freedom of speech, the government should be censoring the hate speeches or discriminating/ offensive comments.
I think the problems of both stances are pretty simple: too much of the freedom of speech would lead to a situation where too many people are offending each other and nobody is being responsible for what they’re saying, while too much of censorship would lead to people feeling suppressed. We thought that it is important for governments to find the right amount of censorship so that the society can function well without offending each other, yet giving people enough freedom and their right to free speech.