My Political Meme

Creating my own political meme in class was so much fun. At first, I didn't know what I wanted to do, because there were so many options. I was thinking about doing an actual cartoon, but my creative juices were not flowing in that department today. 

I get nervous when displaying my political voice so overtly that it makes me shut down. However, I think that the trick is to purely look at political situations through a journalistic viewpoint. This ensures that the work is honest. 

As a class we started looking at memes and I got super inspired. I wanted mine to be straight and to the point. Instead of making a meme about a historical event of the past, I decided to make one about what we are facing right now as a country. 

I used a meme generator website to make my meme. It is an amazing website for anyone wanting to make memes, but don't know how to make them from scratch. This website has multiple base images to choose from and plenty of examples to consult. 

 In class the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about free speech and the implications of big companies censoring citizens. The biggest culprits in this censorship have been Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter so I decided to put them all in my meme. 

My meme is pretty self explanatory and the overall message is that these big companies only allow the facade of free speech as long as it is to their advantage. I think it is pretty funny and a hard truth that everyone has to realize going forwards. Just because you only see one viewpoint on social media, that doesn't mean others don't exist. These billionaires have the power to silence so many people and they can get away with it.           

Censorship in the Mainstream Media

These are scary times to live through as a journalist or even just as an American citizen. We pride ourselves on being the land of the free and the first amendment. However, is this nation going down a dark path where freedom of speech is no longer a valued right? 

Just recently, Twitter banned President Trump from using their app. They completely dismantled his account and he was silenced from talking to the people of the United States. When Trump moved on to Parler, Amazon and the App Store took the steps to shut the app down completely. One can make the argument that Twitter and Amazon are private companies so they can do what they want. However, silencing the most powerful person in the country is a dangerous precedent to set. Essentially these businessmen are telling the world that they single-handedly have the power to influence politics and public opinion on any issue. Nobody should have this much power and use it to influence politics in this nation. There is a reason checks and balances are a thing in the government. It seems like there was a checks and balances law conveniently left out for these oligarchic businesses. 

The sad fact is that a lot of people consume their daily news from Social Media sites. How can anyone trust what is being said when it is a known fact that they censor opinions and viewpoints that they don't like or disagree with? They may have the advantage of controlling the political dialogue but they might be doing the country a greater disservice. People are smart enough to be weary of the information being thrown at them. Twitter and other companies have blatantly silenced the voices of so many people, censoring half the country. Citizens living in a free country hate nothing more than being silenced and fill fight to have their voices heard. What will happen when eventually, nobody trusts the mainstream media at all?