Poland pledges to fight “totalitarian censorship” by social media and calls on EU to act

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has hit out at the growing “censorship” enforced by social media giants, saying that it is reminiscent of “authoritarian regimes” like the one Poland once lived under.

He promised that such practices would be more closely “regulated” under Polish law, and also called for similar measures to be taken by the European Union. Last month, the Polish justice ministry proposed a bill that would ban social media firms from deleting content that does not contravene Polish law.

“We lived in a censored country for nearly 50 years, a country where Big Brother told us…what we don’t have the right to think, to say, to write,” wrote the prime minister in a Facebook post, referring to Poland’s communist past. Morawiecki was himself an underground anti-communist activist in the 1980s.

“That is why we look with concern at any attempts to limit freedom,” continued Morawiecki. “A byword for freedom has always been the internet – the most democratic medium in history.”

“[But] gradually large, transnational corporations, richer and more powerful than many countries, have started to dominate [the internet],” he warned.

“Recently ever more often we are dealing with practices that had seemed to be a thing of the past,” wrote the prime minister. “Censorship of free speech – the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes – is returning today in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently.”

“Poland will always uphold democratic values, including freedom of speech,” he pledged. “Social media cannot act above the law. Therefore we will do all we can to set out a framework for the functioning of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other similar platforms.”

This will involve “regulation” through “relevant national rules”. But Morawiecki also said that “we will propose that similar provisions apply throughout the European Union”.

Meanwhile, the European Conservatives and Reformists – a political group in which Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is the leading member – tweeted yesterday to condemn the “banishing” by Big Tech firms of Parler, a social media platform favoured by supporters of Donald Trump.

The Polish government’s rhetoric echoes recent remarks by Trump, who has been an ally of PiS. Yesterday, Trump also hit out at Big Tech firms, saying they are “doing a horrible thing to our country” and promising to take “counter moves” against them.

Trump was last week permanently banned from Twitter, while Facebook has also blocked him from posting indefinitely and Snapchat has suspended his account. Parler’s app has been pulled by Google and Apple, and Amazon has removed it from its cloud service.

Some in the EU – even those not usually sympathetic to Trump – have expressed concern at the moves. German chancellor Angela Merkel described Twitter’s decision as “problematic”. “Freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,” said her spokesman.

“The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing…[and] displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organised in the digital space,” said Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the internal market.

Poland’s government has long been critical of social media giants, whom it accuses of bias against conservative voices. In 2016, a deputy justice minister accused Facebook of “censorship” for deleting content by the far-right nationalist groups that organise Warsaw’s annual Independence March.

“There is clearly something wrong with freedom and democracy” when Facebook allows “the most vulgar” of content yet “harasses patriotic Polish pages”, said Patryk Jaki, who is now a PiS MEP.

In 2019, the then digitisation minister, Marek Zagórski, met with members of Facebook’s board to ask that their “rules used for blocking content be better adapted to the prevailing customs in Poland”.

Last month – before Trump’s latest troubles with social media platforms – Poland’s justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced a proposed law to “protect freedom of speech on the internet”.

The justice ministry declared that some groups in Poland have become “victims of ideological censorship” and “abuses by large internet corporations”.

In response, they want to introduce legislation that would stop social media firms from deleting content that does not violate Polish law or from banning users for posting such content.

Polish users would have the right to have such cases adjudicated by a special new Court for the Protection of Freedom of Speech.

Poland’s government has itself faced accusations that it seeks to limit free speech. Under Ziobro – who also serves as prosecutor general – a number of cases have been brought by prosecutors against people for the crime of offending religious feelings, which carries a prison sentence of up to two years.

Ziobro himself recently requested that an opposition MP be stripped of parliamentary immunity to face such charges. Last year, a deputy prime minister, Jarosław Gowin, demanded that Netflix remove a “blasphemous” comedy film that depicts Jesus as gay.

A study by the OSCE found that, among nine types of defamation and insult laws, Poland has the joint most and, unlike many other countries, imposes custodial sentences for all of them. As well as offending religious feelings, it is also illegal to insult the president, monuments, and the Polish nation or state.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.