After 244 years of freedom, Americans are permitting censorious technocrats in Silicon Valley to trample their First Amendment rights in order to advance a far-left, progressive agenda. Conversely, liberty-loving freedom fighters in Poland are standing up to big tech to protect the rights of citizens, rights We the People have long possessed.
Poland’s deputy minister for justice, Sebastian Kaleta, is pioneering new legislation called the “Freedom Act,” vowing to put an end to fascistic censorship. It is now commonplace for social-media giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to employ acts of suppression of speech and thought, issuing “time-outs” and “shadowbans” to restrict users’ reach and reduce the number of followers of targeted — and predominantly conservative — accounts.
In conversation with Breitbart London News, Kaleta warned of the “worrying” rise of cancel culture and pressure from the far Left to peddle political correctness, noting that these actions are “more reminiscent of Bolshevik standards than democratic ones.” He pointed to Poland’s 50 years under Soviet communist rule and the “reeducation camps” reserved for dissenters to remind Americans of the inevitable consequences when the government exercises extreme overreach.
Breitbart reports that under the proposed Polish law, “citizens will be guaranteed the statutory right to appeal against bans and content removal if their speech was lawful under the Polish constitution.” Moreover, if “social media companies suspend users accounts, a parliament-appointed Free Speech Board could require the reinstatement of those accounts. Poland could levy fines of up to 50 million zloty ($14 million) per offence in cases where [networks] refused to comply.” Ultimately, “Freedom of speech needs to be defended from censorship,” said Kaleta.
Kaleta joins the ranks of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who also is working to implement laws to “prevent the shadowbanning of ‘Christian, conservative, [and] right-wing’ voices online.”
Most troubling is that in the land of the free and the home of the brave voices are being silenced at an unprecedented rate, on a massive scale, every day. As Kaleta states, “Any criticism of the ‘system’ the left has created will not be tolerated.”
A recent example of this intolerance is conservative radio talk-show host Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s enduring a week’s suspension of his show America First, which airs on YouTube. The show was abruptly taken off the air as Gorka was midsentence, after his guest, duly elected Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, dared to utter two words: election fraud. Upon returning to the broadcast on YouTube a week later, Gorka jokingly told listeners that YouTube will allow him to air “questionable” content if he uses a chyron (a label at the bottom of the screen) that reads “AP disagrees with these statements.” How long will America tolerate such abuse?
Before leaving office, President Trump tried to combat social-media bias with calls to repeal Section 230 — the U.S. law that broadly shields big-tech companies from any form of litigation. Yet Internet companies remain immune to consequences for violating Americans’ constitutional rights. If such wrongs are to be righted, and the United States desires to remain a free society, patriots and lawmakers must respond like Kaleta and Orbán, and pursue freedom and justice, and defense of the truth, and hold big tech accountable.
