Or at least, according to the president, your right to say terrible, hateful things online anyway.Yesterday, a feature was published by Wired magazine penned by U.S. President Barack Obama. The piece is titled "Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive". The overall tone of the article is great, applauding the scientific and cultural advances that we have made as a country, and I agree with him in many places. But a particular sentence caught my attention, nestled within a paragraph talking about distribution and networking services. He's talking about algorithms used by sites like Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB), and he says:"Not just making our social networks more fun for sharing memes but also harnessing their power to counter terrorist ideologies and online hate speech."So are we about to have our first amendment rights trampled on?Well.. um, that's sort of hard to answer right now, for several reasons: The foremost being that the technology is not in use at this time, at least as far as I can tell. Then again, I'm not really into putting hate speech out there so it's not something that I can say I have firsthand experience testing. Because I have a reputation to protect, I'm not really motivated to try. For those of you who are somewhat bolder than I am, if you'd care to test posting some hateful things online, perhaps we can verify the methods used. I have actually said on previous occasions that I think freedom of speech is a somewhat overrated concept, but I was speaking in terms of things like those parody websites that constantly produce untrue news articles, particularly about the Monsanto (MON) corporation. It took years to undo even a small portion of the damage caused by false information spread by websites like naturalnews.com, or "Moms against Monsanto", stuff like that. It's really gotten out of hand.I'm not sure how I actually feel about the possibility of this happening for real.Freedom of speech is a valuable right, and while it can certainly be wielded as a weapon to harm, it also gives us the ability to express our dissatisfaction with society. I think it might actually be really horrible to block thoughts of any kind. But that's a slippery slope, and I also think that the president feels that way too, as he has a background in constitutional law. I'm certain that he's taking any ideas brought to him in a serious way. So what do you think, readers? Does government have the legal authority to block your words, or for that matter, even have the right to just go looking through anything you've said in the past, even if the conversation was private? As a matter of fact, if you want to post those comments on this very page, I will have no personal problem with that, and I ask that moderators allow "anything goes" with respect to this posting. Follow me for updates. Thanks for reading.