A note on the abuse of free speech in the age of the internet

Every generation inherits a freedom it did not fully build and does not fully understand. Ours inherited the freedom to speak to everyone, everywhere, at once — and we are still discovering, often the hard way, that a right this powerful was never meant to be used without judgement.

The recent national episode made this plain. A woman appeared before the courts over false publications concerning the President and pleaded guilty. Within hours, the platforms had delivered several million verdicts of their own — one camp announcing the death of democracy, the other celebrating the return of discipline. As usual, the conclusion arrived long before the facts had finished speaking.

But the loud quarrel distracts from the real question, which is older and larger than one woman, one President, or one court case. It is this: what does freedom of expression actually mean once the whole world is holding a microphone?

Some believe it means saying anything about anyone without consequence. Others have begun to believe that criticism itself has become dangerous. Both are wrong, and a democracy cannot survive on either.

Let us be precise about what abuse of free speech actually is, because we throw the phrase around carelessly. It is not disagreement. It is not criticism, however sharp. It is not the uncomfortable question a leader would rather not answer. Abuse is something narrower and more corrosive: the deliberate manufacture of falsehood, the fabricated video, the doctored quote, the malicious rumour engineered to wound a named human being. Speech becomes abuse at the exact point where it stops seeking truth and starts manufacturing harm.

The internet did not invent that impulse. It merely industrialised it.

Consider the asymmetry we now live inside. A lie is cheap to produce and expensive to disprove. One person with a data bundle and a ring light can manufacture a falsehood in ninety seconds. Correcting it demands research, sourcing, patience — and an audience that has already scrolled away. The falsehood travels first class while the correction is still looking for its shoes. This is why online abuse is so much more dangerous than the gossip of old: the tools of amplification are free, instant, and available to everyone, while the tools of verification remain slow, effortful, and rare.

And the technology does not stay neutral in this contest. The systems that carry our speech are tuned to reward attention, not accuracy — outrage keeps people scrolling in a way that careful truth simply does not. So the most inflammatory version of any claim is the one most likely to be pushed in front of the most eyes. We did not just gain the ability to lie faster. We built machinery that quietly prefers the lie, because the lie performs better.

But here is the part we would rather not say aloud. The machinery provides the reach; the citizen provides the reflex. Every forward is a decision. Every "share" of an unverified claim is a small act of authorship — you are not merely passing the message along, you are lending it your name, your network, your credibility. A rumour now leaves Accra before breakfast and reaches Bolgatanga before the truth has finished brushing its teeth, and it does so because thousands of ordinary hands, most of them well-meaning, chose speed over verification.

So responsibility must be placed where it actually sits, and it sits in more than one place.

Some belongs to the platforms, which chose to reward engagement and made sharing frictionless while making doubt optional. Design is never neutral; every default is an argument about how you ought to behave, and most of these defaults argue for haste.

Some belongs to the State — but here we must be careful, because this is where the abuse of power hides behind the abuse of speech. A government allergic to criticism will always be tempted to relabel dissent as disinformation. But criticism is not abuse. The uncomfortable question is not a crime. When leaders treat every hard question as rebellion, they do not protect the truth; they simply teach citizens to stop reporting what is wrong. The problem does not disappear. You have only silenced the alarm.

And much of it belongs to us — the ordinary users — because ours is the only conduct we fully control. We cannot retune the algorithms before breakfast. We can decide, before breakfast, not to forward what we have not verified.

What, then, does responsible speech require? Not silence, and not fear. It requires a discipline of verification, and it is not complicated:

Before you believe a claim, ask where it came from — and whether that source survives being checked, or dissolves into "someone sent it." A message forwarded a thousand times is not more true; it is merely more travelled. Popularity is not proof.

Before you share, ask a harder question: what breaks if this is false? If the honest answer is a real person's name, safety, or reputation, then holding your hand is not cowardice — it is conscience. There is no undo button large enough to reach every screen your message has touched. Once a falsehood spreads, it cannot be fully recalled. It can only be regretted.

None of this excuses those who fabricate deliberately. "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour" did not expire the day the smartphone was invented, and freedom of expression was never meant to become freedom from consequence. A society that cannot distinguish speech from slander will eventually lose the protection of both.

Yet responsibility must never be smuggled in as a synonym for fear. A republic where everyone is too frightened to speak has not achieved order — it has achieved a very quiet kind of failure. The goal is not a silent people. The goal is an honest one.

The real corruption is not Facebook, or TikTok, or X. It is that somewhere along the way we mistook virality for credibility — we let the loudness of a claim stand in for its truth. The more outrageous the allegation, the faster our thumbs moved, until participation itself became indistinguishable from carelessness.

Our elders warned us that the tongue has no bone, yet it can break a neck. Wi-Fi did not improve that wisdom. It only increased its reach. And they say too that when the lizard nods, it is not agreeing with you; it is merely acknowledging that it has heard you. Perhaps that is all our freedom asks — that we speak, and are heard, without mistaking noise for truth or fear for order.

Let governments hear criticism without fearing it. Let citizens speak truth without abusing it. And let each of us remember that the freedom to say anything was never the same as the wisdom to say it — and that a right exercised without responsibility is not freedom at all. It is only power, waiting to be misused.