Dangers of an open world

Would it not be nice if you could vent and say whatever you like and have every thought and feeling you have ever had publicly opened? Right about now you are thinking definitely not, and don’t get me wrong I feel the same way. But in a bid to understand why this shouldn’t be, we must understand what threats this poses and why we surely should not consider this.

Let’s be clear here, this is total and complete freedom of speech and feelings. This is clearly something we may feel we need to have, but in total honesty is not a mutually exclusive event. That is, you cannot be free to say what you want if someone else is not free to feel hurt by what you say.

A negative reaction in system A can lead to a negative reaction in system B in thoughts, speech, or feelings.

This somewhat proves that you cannot have complete freedom of speech or feeling as we will always have them dependent on that speech and feeling of others. Hence we’ve created methodologies and techniques to navigate around these such as persuasion and manipulation. It, therefore, means that in order to have a complete utilitarian state where everyone contributes evenly and gets along, then freedom of speech becomes nothing more than just a phrase in existence.

Alright granted, maybe all of this is irrelevant and we can actually advocate for freedom of speech and expression, but what does it mean to have personal thoughts and emotions shared out in the open, and how can it affect society?

One major point of call is in the policing of a society. Crimes happen based on negative emotions and detectives and the police have to figure out who committed the crimes and for what reason. This leads to the major problem of bias in case investigations. It becomes easy to stop halfway into an investigation because of the possible intent and availability of data to back up convicting a particular culprit. This could lead to investigators nabbing the wrong culprit or increasing the number of possible suspects by an unimaginable amount.

Let’s break this down a little further say a suspect A was killed and we decided to use readily available free speech and expressions data made public but people connected with the crime. If the probability that a lot more people would have at one point or another talked about killing the victim, even with a motive it should take a lot of damning evidence to convict someone for the crime.

The openness of data can lead to unnecessary noise which doesn’t necessarily help in its analysis and breakdown and can stifle the investigation.

Free and available data with little or no filter does give room to a lot of noise, hence providing two major solutions either reducing the amount of free and available data or improving the ways in which data is analyzed across multiple platforms.

The latter seems more interesting and provides a major opportunity for expanding and pushing the inner dimensions of programming.

In summary, free speech in its true form poses more problems than can be reasoned on the surface. Techniques needed for analyzing such data are growing enormously and would eventually become a force to be reckoned with in areas of crime and forensic analysis.