Poland plans to make censoring of social media accounts illegal

Not only ironic, also hypocritical: they are proposing to make it illegal to censor views that don't break Polish laws, while replacing a halo with a rainbow in a photo of an icon does break Polish laws, because it "offends religious sentiment", so it could (and probably also should, if you ask them) be censored.

That's how these people operate.

You claim to value something but you are not maximalist, therefore there are exceptions you tolerate.

A demagogue that doesn't value it at all but he/she confronts you about your imperfection and demands to you to be a maximalist or you are a corrupt lier and claims that he/she would totally be maximalist about it.

You accept that you are a "fraud" so you oblige to the demand of this person and the value you claim to hold is now a value of someone who doesn't value it at all.

When you transfer the power accept that the demagogue has higher moral ground, the demagogue can drop the claim and do it's own thing.

A good example is Turkey's Erdogan. He was banned from politics but he suddenly decided that will of the people is the highest priority, he was a flaming democrat and he was right that it's not right to ban him from politics. With the pressure from EU and USA his right were restored and Democracy began to flourish in Turkey up until he had enough power to not to have to deal with this.

Fast forward today, He actually tried to steal elections(made the elections canceled, then he lost again with higher margin then proceeded to remove power from the office he lost) and whoever seeks support from EU or USA is labeled as traitor.

It's simply sad that the trick works so well everywhere.

Interesting. In India a comedian was arrested (still is) for making a joke which he didn't crack. Some people wanted to make a joke of the system by a false complaint and guess what, the police is supporting a false claim instead of letting the accused go. So much for free speech. Literally the guy didnt say something and he is being arrested for that

As I've said time and time again, people say "free speech" but what they mean is "consequence free speech".

Free speech is an idea. It's also a law. Stop being pedantic over absolutely nothing.

You're only seeing a straw man version of the view opposing yours.

Claiming to have a right to use a telephone isn't a demand to be heard, it is a demand to let a person talk to people that want to hear them. People blocking a number because they don't want to hear from it is another story. While some people are demanding the right to speak, most defenders aren't demanding the right to be heard, those people are demanding the right to hear something.

Yes, the company may be facilitating communication is doesn't approve of, but it isn't amplifying it. The amplification with social media occurs because people that want to hear the message tell other people that want to hear the message about it and it is so easy to go out and hear the message. Telephone companies helped facilitate organization of all kinds of odious things, but rarely is it suggested that the phone companies should deny access.

Censorship is equivalent to the censor telling people, "Because we don't like the message, we won't let you hear this message."

The debate is on how necessary social media is to our communications and how reasonable it is to deny access. That is, how similar is it to a telephone or mail.

Yes exactly. Typical far right / extremists tactic, disguise their discourses as well accepted democratic ones. They say they want to protect free speech, etc, but in fact are only pushing for their own definition of free speech and will be very quick at banning any other speech that are not according to their views/laws.

Ad hominem much? And yes, why shouldn't someone have the right to say that? Under natural law theory, same sex attraction is gravely disordered, and indulging that attraction by engaging in an active gay lifestyle is perverse and self-destructive. That some people want to silence traditional views is revealing. Instead of counterargument, you see totalitarian attempts to silence people, in this case Catholics, though one not need be a Catholic to hold this view. The presumption that such criticism must come from a place of contempt shows a profound misunderstanding of the nature of love (the willing of the true good of the other), conflating it with the scandalous encouragement of self-destructive behavior. Regardless, let us suppose such remarks show contempt. Then by that definition, the rabidly anti-clerical and Church-hating Jacobins on the left are the pot calling the kettle black.

of course, you can always create your own social platform, and then if some hosting company decides to ban you, you can always create your own, and have own internet as well right?

Twitter can cease offering service in Poland if they don’t like it.

Poland has (wisely) decided social media is like telephones and you can’t stop providing service because of what customers say, as long as it is legal. Good for them.

Poland is a sovereign country — Twitter doesn’t get to tell them how to act. That’s “tail wags dog”.

Social media companies blatantly exerted themselves as political entities — and now they’re facing “common carrier” regulation from existing political entities who don’t like that.

Again, if Twitter is uncomfortable being a common carrier for Polish social media — they’re free to exit the market and offer their services elsewhere.

This is a naive argument: the "X is a private company and can do anything they want" is completely wrong when you can affect hundreds of millions of people with a few click through your platform.

Once a company can affect X million+ people they become a direct manipulator of societal/democratic opinion.

> they can ban those platforms from the country completely.

Can they do that without leaving the EU?

Poland is a country. They aren't responsible for upholding US law. They can do what they want to companies that decide to operate in Poland. Not only can they have their cake and eat it too, they will - unless said companies stop operating there.

No, this is absurd. So you would let all media companies censor someone "because they don't like him"?

The only reason you trust private media companies is because they are supposed to be as neutral as possible, not political. If not neutral, then perhaps society should start treating them for what they really are - private political machines.

Furthermore censorship is stupid. You might like it when it's Trump getting censored, but you wont be laughing once the censorship comes back and hits you. Free speech fuck yes.

This comment is beyond ridiculous. Private American corporations are not above law or democratically elected governments. This is not any different than GDPR or other regulations.

I think the difference is that unlike spoiled American "Bernie Sanders voter"-generation, Polish people still remember what it's like to live under a far-left censorship and simply do not want to experience that again.

A restaurant is a private company and if they don't want to serve blacks and jews they can completely do it.

You see now how absurd that argument is?

The Polish fought the Nazis and the Soviets for this cake, though.

The recent big tech actions call for regulation. The main question is, who is responsible for the content published in specific mediums - users or platforms?

If they put themselves in a position of publishers, then they should fall under specific laws accordingly.

EU would very likely be delighted to have an excuse to ban Twitter and start their own clone.

One of the reasons why laws actually even exist is to limit the freedom of private actors to do what they want.

You, I and many others actually cannot do whatever we want, even on our own property.

It is true that the software world isn't used to the same level of regulation as manufacturing or agriculture, so the idea of application of, say, antitrust laws to digital giants seems unusual to software people.

The fact that PiS is terrible is clear indication that they have a bad agenda behind this move.

In some countries, it is illegal to promote racist speech, or to call for violent actions, etc. These countries define a limit to free speech. Morawiecki would call these limits censorship of free speech, but these are not.

Moreover, anyone crossing these limits may be sued in court. No such things with FB / Twitter ban. This makes Mariewki's statement even more pointless.

Exactly. Let's have US companies be ruled by US laws. But then, should Poland ban Twitter? Who's censoring who?

The move here is only pushed by bad political agenda. If the move would come from EU, it would be much more neutral and more protective of civil rights and freedom, which is not what Poland wants here.

I think the confusion stems from the fact that it should be illegal for a private business to censor someone. But that does not preclude the democratically created law from censoring someone, as interpreted by the judiciary.

The issue in the US has been that the executive and judiciary part of the state did nothing for four years.

As per the first sentence of the article: "Polish government wants to protect posts that do not break nation’s laws"

>It feels like letting the lies continue to spread is tearing out democracy apart.

and the solution of course is "censorship will be increased until free speech and democracy improves".

My broader view is that the society at large is woefully under-educated for dealing with the new complexities of life. Most educational systems I know of don't really teach critical thinking, evaluation of sources, dealing with biased accounts etc.

Censorship of the worst lies is justified as something like "we know better that these are lies, so we'll hide the content from those who don't", and in some sense this does send shivers down your spine. The long-term solution must be that an average person can do the evaluation for themselves.

You're missing the part where "what's illegal" varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. No international platform can simultaneously comply with points 1 and 3 everywhere in the world.

Deleting one guy's account requires much less moderating resources than evaluating each post of an army of bots. So this particular case doesn't prove anything about their moderation capabilities. Yes, they COULD technically look at each and every account and each and every post, but I can't imagine any entity, private or not, having the resources to do so. Which leaves us to the manual banning (irregular, mostly high profile = low hanging fruit) or AI based solutions (and we know already how good they work)

And by doing that you allow a competitor to emerge. You are free to do that, however note that there are more than enough companies willing to jump at the opportunity...

Yes, people need to know the motivations - the current polish government basically won the election on spreading hoaxes on social media (Facebook) and heavily polarizing the population on LGBTI, migrant wave, abortion laws and other topics.