"Connecting with people from different parts of the world and hearing about their fight for freedom of speach is a good reminder of the tremendous importance of these rights and that it is not something we can take for granted. It is something we have to always be aware of and make sure is not taken from us.
When things get tough, when people get desperate, it doesn't take long to lose the rights we take for granted. Hitler was democraticly chosen because he offered solutions to a grave economic situation. Within days after he took power, civil rights had been removed, protesters killed and the rest is history. We've seen how US citizens, as well as US visitors have lost much of their rights because of new regulations following 9/11. Driven by fear, people accepted what would have been an outrage only few months earlier.
In January last year a very moving editorial was published in a newspaper in Sri Lanka. A post mortem article from an editor who wrote about the chances of him being killed and why that was. He was killed before the article was published.
We are seeing how people are fighting against oppressing governments in China, Iran and elsewhere in the world, where journalists are jailed and sometimes dissapear, where all mainstream media is edited and censored, where access to the internet is restricted and where the government is using all methods they can think of to control access to information. China even tried to control who Barack Obama would meet with and freedom fighters in Iran are filling the streets today in their green revolution. Social media is an extremely powerful tool to fight this oppression of the freedom of the speech. We are seeing how demonstrators and independent minds are trying to get the word out through blogging, through twitter and through other channels of social media."
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