Reviewing the Impact of Telecommunications Sector on the Right of Freedom of Expression

Abstract

Telecommunications is changing the information sector forever. Pointedly, it has an incredible power to make people ingest information and disseminate same more effectively and speedily. The mobile phone itself, and the telecommunications applications in the forms of Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Telegram, Instagram etc. enable phone-users to receive, or listen to, or watch, or send news and factual information. Today, users can, at will, access and share, or edit their own or other's information, text comments, listen to music, makes some recordings, download some document, watch footballgame, create personal playlists, send some pictures, or intermingle with commercial, using their smartphones. This ability that makes a user to be more in control of the news around him, and the fact that telecommunications services are more convergent, more convenient and fast had made telecommunications a better platform of freedom expression than the traditional offline media. Off course, the print media, the radio and the television had remained centrally important in the world of information, but nowadays, the right to freedom of expression has always rested more upon the platform of telecommunications than anything. Newspapers, radio and television might have been the champions of free speech from the eighteenth century up to the end of the twentieth century, but by the twenty-first century, communication on a mass scale and wider coverage was monopolized by telecommunication services. This article reconnoiters how telecommunications sector have been critical in achieving the constitutional right of freedom of expression.