Posted on 02/20/2021 1:51:37 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
Poland is taking a stand against the Big Tech conglomerate, proposing whopping fines for platforms that censor or remove posts for ideological reasons, according to the country’s Deputy Minister of Justice Sebastian Kaleta.
In a Fox News interview, Kaleta said social media companies have been targeting Christianity, conservatives and traditional values through their blacklisting and removal of posts.
“We see that when Big Tech decides to remove content for political purposes, it’s mostly content which praises traditional values or praises conservatism,” Kaleta said. “It is deleted under their ‘hate speech policy’ when it has no legal right to do so.”
Under the new proposed legislation, any platform that censors a post or bans a user for ideological reasons would face a fine of $13.5 million unless the content is illegal under Polish law, the Epoch Times reports.
And, an arbitration committee will be set up to oversee inevitable disputes....
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
There is a class action law suit in the US trying to get started on this as well.
It would be interesting if several countries would block and censor big tech. At least as much as possible.
Poland knows communism when it sees it. They should go after all the tech companies censoring free speech.
I thought the headline said “Pelosi”. I had to check that it wasn’t Babylon Bee. Makes fat more sense now.
$13.5 million is less than a drop in a bucket to Big Tech.
A hundred times or a thousand times or more perhaps they will do what big corporations do under pressure. They shut down operations in that locale.
$13.5 million is nothing.
Banning them from the market is the only thing that will get their attention.
Russia is using VKontakte. China has WeChat. Rest of the world can tax their user for using Facebook and Twitter which would encourage social media alternatives in their markets.
Lunch money at Google/Fakebook
They wouldn’t notice $13.5 billion.
this website doesn’t see any attack on conservatives and is no friend of President Trump. more concerned about Fakebook’s position on Muslims:
19 Feb: Just Security: Oversight Board’s First Rulings Show Facebook’s Rules Are a Mess
by Faiza Patel and Laura Hecht-Felella
The Facebook Oversight Board, in deciding its first cases, overturned five out of six of the company’s decisions. While the board’s willingness to depart from its corporate creator’s views is noteworthy, the bigger message is that Facebook’s content-moderation rules and its enforcement of them are a mess and the company needs to clean up its act...
Facebook’s ongoing inability to enact a clear, consistent, and transparent content-moderation policy may well lead the board to overturn Facebook’s decision to bar former President Donald Trump, a case that the company has voluntarily brought to the board...
The board also overturned Facebook’s removal of a post criticizing the French government for refusing to authorize the use of hydroxychloroquine, which the user called a “cure” for Covid-19. Because the drug is not available in France without a prescription and the post does not encourage people to buy or take drugs without a prescription, the board determined that the post did not create a risk of imminent harm, as required by the violence and incitement policy under which it was removed. Here again, if the board had looked at the broader issue of misinformation around Covid-19, or even around hydroxychloroquine, it could well have reached the opposite conclusion...
Implications for the Trump case
Figuring out what these decisions mean for what is likely to be one of the board’s biggest cases – its review of Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump from the platform after removing two missives he posted during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol – is like reading tea leaves. Both posts instructed the rioters to “go home,” but also reiterated Trump’s false assertions that the election had been “stolen from us” and “unceremoniously viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly unfairly treated for so long.”...
In the Goebbels decision, the board found that Facebook’s rules on Dangerous Individuals and Organizations – the basis for removing Trump’s posts – failed the international standard of legality...
Context, which has played such an important role in the board’s decisions thus far, will undoubtedly be key. But in the case of Trump, it probably will not matter whether the board looks at the long arc of his attempts to undermine the election and rile up his followers or only the events of Jan. 6. Both show the danger he posed...
At the end of the day, though, as the Knight Institute pointed out in its excellent submission to the board, the bigger issue is not whether Trump was rightly kicked off Facebook, but about the company’s responsibility for its “decisions about design, which determine which speech proliferates on Facebook’s platform, how quickly it spreads, who sees it, and in what contexts they see it.” Although the company has sought to exclude this issue from its jurisdiction, the board must push Facebook to address it. Otherwise it will just be addressing the symptoms of the problem, not the cause.
https://www.justsecurity.org/74833/oversight-boards-first-rulings-show-facebooks-rules-are-a-mess/
True.
However, what’s needed is a law that not only fines these companies, but also remits a portion, say half, to the person or group who was censored. That will put the tech companies in the position of directly supporting and funding the people they wanted to stop. Instead of silencing someone, you just gave them a few million that they might just use to spread the word for whatever message you were censoring them for. Yes, it’s pocket change for Twitter or Facebook, but it undercuts their “moral” reasoning for censorship.
Misinformation is false information spread intentionally and knowingly to mislead and often with malintent. I get that this website just totes the party line, but they are using the word improperly. Information can turn out to be faulty or incomplete, but submitted entirely out of good faith and with evidence. That is not misinformation - it is just information that needs to be publicly and openly debated in the sunlight in the town square. I think it is very important that these censors be made aware of the distinction and write it into their rulebooks.
And that's entirely different than opinion, which is a different category. Both information given in good faith, and opinion whether reasoned or not should be fairly broadly protected. Which is why I am of the opinion that these platforms be treated as utilities. They don't shut off my gas and power because they don't approve of my dinner conversation. These sites, when they reach some level of critical mass, should be held to the same standards.
And further still, these companies need to be broken up under anti-trust laws. Strip google search from google ads. Strip apple store from apple hardware. Break Amazon into at least 12 different companies. Remember when they went after Microsoft under anti-trust laws? In that case, MSFT lost but technology was still young-ish and alternative browsers won out over MSFT's browser. Today, these companies act in concert to protect each other and gang up against alternative options under dubious pretext. We broke up Standard Oil. We broke up the distribution and showing of movies from the production of movies. We went after MSFT and it was ruled against them even if it was a victory in name only since by the time they lost they were already behind in the browser game. Time to move against the rest of Big Tech.
Others may try to launch new platforms and services but as in the case of Parler (and previously Gab, and others) they ultimately end up being kicked off by these giants (now that they've bought themselves their monopolies). It's clearly an oligopoly or sort of like the Japanese practice of Keiretsu where a loose affiliation of conglomerates work together to protect each other from competition. Gotta break them up if we want to have a free market for products... and a free market of ideas.
And to think that Poles used to be the brunt of ethnic jokes.
They’re proving to be a hell of a lot smarter than the vast majority of people here in the States.
I wonder if they tell American jokes in Poland.
I was just wondering what Polish immigration policies are..
Ditto.
I have been admiring Poland for sometime now.
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