4.1 Biomatrix case exercises - student module  (Page 17/21)

1. The content of the speech to be censored is true. In this case, censorship is wrong because it denies society of the benefit of the truth. This is the most obvious case of the wrongness of censorship.
2. The content of the speech turns out to be (only) partially true . In this case, censorship is still wrong because it suppresses part of the truth and, thus, deprives society of its benefits.
3. The content of the speech is entirely false . This is the test case. If censorship is wrong even when the view suppressed is entirely false, then this is telling. For Mill, censorship is wrong even if the suppressed speech turns out to be entirely false, because suppressing the false deprives the truth of clarity, which is achieved by contrast with the false, and vigor, which is purchased by defending the true against the challenges brought to it by the false.

There is another argument for censorship based, this time, on the speaker. Corporations are considered legal persons and have been endowed with legal rights including free speech. Until 1978 this included commercial free speech rights but not political free speech rights; corporations could advertise their products (within regulated parameters of truth) but they could not advocate a political candidate. But First National Bank of Boston v Belotti changed all that. To deny corporations, as legal persons, the right to political speech is to target the speaker, not the speech. This opens the way for the suppression of speech based on gender, race, political persuasion, or religion because with each of these we have turned from the speech itself to the characteristics of the speaker. So the Supreme Court of the United States, using this argument, extended corporate free speech rights to include political speech.

The minority opinion issued by the Supreme Court in this case also found a dangerous precedent. Corporate speech backed by the huge financial resources of these commercial entities can easily silence the speech of human individuals by drowning it out. Corporations have the money to buy access to the mass media to disseminate their speech. Human individuals cannot do this so easily.

But consider speech in cyberspace. Outside cyberspace, audiences are best reached through the expensive mass media giving the advantage to the corporation with its huge financial resources. In cyberspace, the networking capacities of the Internet put the speaker in direct contact with the audience and, thus, circumscribes the need for purchasing access to audiences through the expensive mass media. The importance of the speaker diminishes and the spotlight focuses, again, on the content of the speech. Notice how in Biomatrix, three individuals were able to blanket the Internet with defamatory speech against Biomatrix. With this new found equality in cyberspace, how can corporate organizations like Biomatrix protect themselves against cyberslanders? One possibility: hold online service provides or OSPs responsible for the defamatory content published within their portals. This issue is addressed in the next ethics perspective piece.