Facebook bans Polish far-right party for Covid disinformation and hate speech

A Polish far-right political party has been banned from Facebook due to “repeated violations” of the platform’s community standards regarding COVID-19 disinformation and hate speech. Figures from Poland’s national-conservative government have criticised the decision.

This afternoon, Janusz Cieszyński – a secretary of state in the prime minister’s office and his plenipotentiary for cyber security – revealed that he had been informed by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, that the page of Confederation (Konfederacja) would today be removed. Its page later disappeared.

The nationalist party has only 11 members of parliament but an extremely large online presence. The 670,000 followers it had on Facebook was more than any other Polish political party, and around twice as many as the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party can boast.

The decision by Meta to remove the page was criticised by Cieszyński, who wrote that “we can hold different views, but there can be no consent for [a division between] the equal and more equal on the internet”.

Adam Andruszkiewicz, a former far-right leader who is now the prime minister’s secretary of state for digitisation, declared that his office is “strongly opposed” to Facebook’s actions. “Freedom of speech in Poland is the foundation of democracy,” he declared.

Subsequently, Meta’s press office confirmed that it had removed Confederation’s page due to “repeated violations” of Facebook’s community standards regarding COVID-19 disinformation and hate speech.

This had included “false claims that masks do not contain the spread of the disease, that the death rate of COVID-19 is the same as or lower than that of influenza, and that COVID-19 vaccines do not provide any immunity and are ineffective”, said Meta’s statement, quoted by news service wGospodarce.

The party had also shared content “directly attacking other people on the basis of so-called protected characteristics, such as nationality and sexual orientation”. Meta said it had “warned the page’s administrators several times” about their violations.

Confederation has been at the forefront of protests against coronavirus restrictions and proposed vaccine mandates. Its own MPs have often flouted requirements to wear masks in parliament, resulting in one of them, Grzegorz Braun, being fined 20,000 zloty (€4,300).

Braun, a prominent antisemitic conspiracy theorist, has likened the compulsory wearing of masks to how the Nazis forced Jews to wear armbands as a first step on the way to ghettoisation and then death. Speaking in parliament, he warned the health minister that he “will hang” for his Covid policies, resulting in a 63,000 złoty fine.

Last month, Braun and four other Confereration MPs attended an anti-vaccine protest outside parliament at which they were pictured standing beneath a banner saying “Vaccination sets you free” modelled on the sign at Auschwitz and other Nazi German camps saying “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”).

Confederation have also regularly spread anti-LGBT rhetoric. In 2019, Braun called for homosexuality to be criminalised and “sodomites sent to prison”. He claimed that “Jew-Masons” are using “sodomites” as part of their attempts to bring about “world revolution”.

The same year, one of the party’s leading figures declared that its five main policies were: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the European Union.”

In response to today’s ban, one of Confederation’s leaders, Krzysztof Bosak, condemned the fact that an “American corporation wants to suppress freedom of debate and interfere with democracy and the electoral process in Poland”.

He thanked Cieszyński for his quick response and said that Confederation was “counting on a tough reaction from the Polish state”. Bosak called on the government to finally pass a law, first proposed over a year ago by the justice ministry, to stop “totalitarian censorship” by social media giants.

That bill was added to the government’s legislative agenda in October, but has subsequently not moved forward. Though the ruling coalition has no formal links with Confederation, it has often criticised the alleged bias of internet giants against Polish nationalists.

In 2020, Facebook removed the page of one of Confederation’s leaders, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who had almost 800,000 followers. It has also removed the accounts of other far-right groups, including National Radical Camp (ONR).

Main image credit: Jakub Wlodek / Agencja Gazeta

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.