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Essay: Exploring Justice Marshall’s Vision: Examining the Intersection of Mental Health, Free Speech, and the Internet

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  • Published: 1 April 2019*
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  • Words: 1,117 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 5 (approx)
  • Tags: Essays on mental health

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In 1987, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a lecture where he argued that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the moral, political, and cultural climate of the age of interpretation believed the U.S. Constitution must be a living document that transcends with the times. Adopting a “living document” approach, American constitutional laws must be consistent with the advances of her modern technological advances. Modern technology has changed not only American way of life but, her place in the global community by bringing the world closer together. The Internet encompasses people, places, and ideas that require laws and regulations just the way real time and space does. Since the birth of the Internet, legislatures, courts, and lawyers have been grabbling over how the law should be applied in cyberspace. Born out of the Internet, social media networking has become a space for all forms of speech and expression. Users are not stripped of their First Amendment rights granted to them in the U.S. Constitution as soon as they enter into cyberspace. Social media networks are “a market of place ideas” where protected speech resides. Unfortunately, social media users are so caught-up on their soapboxes that they are neglecting their mental health and how their sharing of certain content is affecting the virtual community, as well.

Although the Internet have become one of the most important achievements of modern society, the infinite and widespread use of the World Wide Web can often lead users to abuse it and misuse it for malicious reasons. Most shared online content is intended to invoke some of sort of emotional response to its viewers and if the emotional response is strong, then such content will go viral. Millions of people online witness viral content that they continue to share themselves without a regard to how these images and videos are affecting the mental health of viewers. Since the expansions of the Internet, many scholars have researched how excessive use and consumption of media impact human psychological and physiological responses to the world. More recently, have scholars looked into the detrimental effects that online violence and offensive content has on mental health, particular Black and other non-white Americans.

Ranked third among other countries, America is one of the most depressed countries in the world. The federal government’s role providing optimal mental health includes regulating systems and providers, protecting the rights of consumers, providing funding for services, and supporting research and innovation. As a major funding source for mental health services, the federal government sets minimum standards for states to adhere to when addressing mental health and states are free to expand upon those standards within their police power. In the United States, police power is the states’ capacity to regulate and enforce health, safety, morals, and general welfare within its border without the federal government’s interference. The freedom that individual states have to experiment with new or innovative services and models stimulates innovation and improvement among the states that can ultimately be translated across the country. During the time when the country was torn in half, the laws eventually caught up to amend the differences between states in passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Reconstruction Amendments were one of America’s greatest accomplishments. When the Amendments were passed, the states were forced to adhere to the federal government. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution establishes that the Constitution and federal laws are the “supreme law of the land” above the states. U.S. Const. art. IV, cl. 2. Although there was still resistance in the Deep South, this is the premise of how it is supposed to work in America. Recently societal norms are evolving faster than Congressional acts and the courts leaving private individuals and companies to promulgate policies that create safe online spaces for everyone.

Furthermore, Over 44 million American adults have a mental health condition and the rate of youth experiencing mental health conditions continue to rise. Many factors contribute to the declining mental health of Americans, but the obsessive use of social media and the exposure to its detrimental content is among the most significant. Unfortunately, the powerful freedom forces online greatly aggregate real-world factors that directly conflict with the mental wellbeing of American Internet users.

American freedoms are at the forefront of Western modern society and historically. The very first freedom afforded in the Bill of Rights is the freedom of expression. It was not happenstance that America decided that the freedom of expression would be the first afforded freedom granted to American citizens. The freedom of expression is one of the reasons America is “the land of the free” and the blueprint of other nations. The First Amendment states that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  However, the United States Constitution does not guarantee absolute freedom of speech, exceptions do apply.

Exceptions that has created ongoing debates surrounding finding a balance between creating a safe place for users to express and exchange ideas on one hand and, on the other hand, protecting all forms of speech. This research paper’s purpose is to examine the interests in users’ mental health and free speech rights. Part II of this paper discusses the internet’s impact on mental health and how the violent content online, specifically police killings and police brutality disproportionately affect Black and non-white people. I propose that some of the hate speech online, such as racist propaganda and Internet trolls that hide behind anonymity, may incite violence and that Black and non-white people are adversely affected. Part III of this paper discusses the government and private companies’ authority to regulate media content, specifically hate speech online, and how media was regulated historically. The First Amendment protects many of the speech that takes place online, especially hate speech. In fact, much of the speech online is hate speech, and it has real world consequences that often go unseen. Although, hate speech is protected, such a protection is not absolute if it incites imminent violence.

Part IV discuss Silicon Valley’s effort to censorship online speech and the First Amendment implications that protect such speech. Most case precedent favors the protection of speech over any regulation of it, however in this paper I push for a reinterpretation of the law that is consistent with modern technology. Part V concludes on possible solutions to censor online content without abridging the freedom of speech and expression and ways to minimize the detrimental effects of violent content.

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