For several years, Big Tech censorship of non-mainstream, conservative, and libertarian views has been increasing. Recently, Facebook banned Australian News and health services–among others.
According to a leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence search results, Google intentionally skews search results for people around the world. In 2016, this meant skewing search results in favor of Hillary Clinton to the tune of up to 10.4 million votes. In 2020, it meant skewing a minimum of 6 million votes–almost certainly away from Trump. Despite this, Trump won. That is why so many more irregularities were necessary for a Biden win in the 2020 election. Due to our largely feckless GOP and our largely complicit Democrat party, this has not been remedied in any way at all. In fact, it has only gotten worse; with all conservative voices being censored routinely on Big Tech platforms while President* Biden labels them as white supremacists and domestic terrorists, many Americans are feeling a bit nihilistic about the whole thing.
Poland fights Big Tech with push to block social media censorship https://t.co/b8aMSgTRU5
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 18, 2021
Do not give up. People are still fighting. This includes a few American politicians, like republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. It also includes our Western allies across the pond in Poland, a proud, nationalist, and very conservative, moral, Trump-supporting country that still remembers the blight of Marxism from Russia and the fascism of Germany.
“Speaking to Fox News, the architect of the law, Deputy Polish Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta, said social media companies have for too long been targeting conservatives, Christianity, and traditional values by banning them and removing posts and the Polish government is saying “enough!”
“We see that when Big Tech decides to remove content for political purposes, it’s mostly content which praises traditional values or praises conservatism,” he said, “and it is deleted under their ‘hate speech policy’ when it has no legal right to do so.”
After identifying the problem, it is the financially costly solution that might end up making this so effective:
Under the new legislation, any platform that bans a user would face fines of $13.5 million unless the content is also illegal under Polish law. An arbitration committee would be set up to oversee disputes.
Tech companies had reached a point where they were deciding what was legal and what was not –, but that was not their role, Kaleta says.
“Freedom of speech is not something that anonymous moderators working for private companies should decide,” he said. “Instead, that is for the national body; duly elected officials and all industries, car, phones, finance — were unregulated till they grew too large — the same should happen with Big Tech.”
He added that the removal of former U.S. President Donald Trump from social media platforms was just another example of Big Tech overreach and set a dangerous precedent.
“It’s very disturbing because if Big Tech sees themselves as an organization empowered enough to ban a sitting president of the U.S., it sends a message to the world –that we can ban anyone, whenever we want,” he added.
Doesn’t this sound like what you’d expect an American politician to say and do? Yet, they have done nothing. President Trump had four years to address this issue and did nothing until very late. This is very likely because no one in the GOP was willing to address the issue. They are all afraid or in the pockets of big tech. People like Ted Cruz talk a big game, but nothing ever happens. If we do not do something quickly, we will end up in the same position Poland was in in the mid-century 1900s:
Poland spent 45 years under communism, and Kaleta says that experience has taught it the value of free speech and that when the country sees these disturbing new trends toward censorship, the red light goes on.
Such laws will work. Big Tech is like a psychopathic unhinged child that needs strict guidelines. Without them, it will end up like Charles Manson, turning every society it encounters into a cult that cleanses all of those who oppose them. They do not have a moral or constitutional compass; such things are tools to use against the empathy of the host. They just want to grow like a cancer until they eat their host alive. Nothing they do is for the people. We all know how Big Tech is beloved by totalitarian China and caters to their every whim.
But, in India, for example, Facebook caved to the pressure of the Prime Minister to remove 500 accounts that were critical of his leadership:
“Meanwhile, in India, social media is also being curbed by the government but in a very different way: Twitter has caved to the demands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and removed 500 accounts that were being critical of his leadership during recent protests. Twitter relented after its employees in India were threatened with arrest.”
Because Poland has a closer collective memory of the atrocities of socialism, it still recognizes the immediate threat posed by Big Tech and Big Government corporatism that is currently underway. America, it seems, has been in blissful peace too long and is asleep at the wheel.
Hopefully, Poland’s efforts will awaken this sleeping giant of constitutional principles into constitutional action.
