Social media companies that censor posts of legal content can be fined up to €1.8 million (Euros) under a new Polish bill. That’s over $2 million in US dollars. Users are very happy with the new law as a corrective measure to the growing censorship fromother countries.
Any Big Tech tyrant social media companies that remove content or block people’s accounts that do not violate the laws of Poland can be fined under this new legislation which was announced in a press conference by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro last month. The law also creates a special court for the Protection of Freedom of Speech inside one of the district courts. At least the Polish government believes in Free Speech, unlike the American Democratic Party.
It’s strange because the Polish people already went through that whole communism thing thanks to the Soviet Union and they came out of it with a higher respect for human rights and freedom of speech. So then why are members of our Democratic Party heading down that ugly road?
Users whose posts have been censored will have the right to file a complaint to the platform that censored them, and the social media company has 24 hours to respond. The user then has 48 hours to petition the newly-created court to have their content reinstated, and the court then has seven days to consider the petition.
This is the level government who care about human rights and Free Speech have to go to when tyrants run social media companies.
Censorship is dangerous. A good example would be what just happened last week at our Capitol building. The president of the United States held a rally where he argued that he won the 2020 election and the Democrats stole it from him. This was the day that the Congress was to certify the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden. Thousands of Trump supporters showed up and at the end of the rally the president said that they will now go march to the Capitol “peacefully” and “let your voices be heard.” The president never incited violence.
But mainstream media censored his words by wiping the video from their platforms, and they didn’t let the American people know that the president said that they were going to March peacefully after a riot broke out. They did this after the riots happened. During the riots, the president posted two videos where he called for peace and asked the people to go home. Social media scrubbed those videos and the mainstream media never covered them. The president also made multiple posts on Twitter and Facebook asking for peace and asking for his supporters to respect law and order and to respect the men and women in blue. The social media tyrants censored his posts and therefore none of the people involved heard his call to stand down.
One could argue that the censorship of social media companies contributed to more violence by removing the president’s calls for peace. I don’t see them getting into trouble but we have Democrats in a few goofy Republicans who want to remove the president from office when he did everything correctly. That’s what censorship brings you. It’s dangerous but the left is hungry for power so they don’t care who gets hurt in the interim.
If the Polish court rules in favor of the censored user and the social media platform doesn’t restore the content or unblock the account, the court will fine the company up to €1.8 million by the Office of Electronic Communications. The whole process will be run online.
The victims of “ideological censorship” are unfairly suppressed by social media platforms “just because they express views and refer to values that are unacceptable from the point of view of communities…with an ever-stronger influence on the functioning of social media,” the justice minister said.
There will also be a system of “blocking requests” by social media companies for content posted that does violate Polish law that will be handled by the same court.
Maybe we should all go post on Polish social media sites because you’d have a better chance of Free Speech there than in the United States of America these days.
