19 Jan 2021
The Hungarian government is following Poland in moving against Big Tech, vowing action against the “shadowbanning” of “Christian, conservative, [and] right-wing opinions”.
“‘Shadowban’ means the act of social media providers secretly, for political purposes, restricting the visibility and access of our user profile without our knowledge about it,” explained Judit Varga, the Minister of Justice in Viktor Orbán’s national conservative government, in a statement shared on social media, claiming that she has herself had “personal experience” of such treatment at the hands of “Big Tech”.
“Tech companies thus violate all those fundamental democratic legal norms that form the basis of Western-type culture,” she accused, adding that “we could… only learn about the system-wide practice of shadow banning from a now-leaked voice recording of the Twitter CEO [Jack Dorsey].”
15 Jan 2021
Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki has vowed to “defend freedom of speech on the internet” and insisted “the owners of social media networks cannot operate above the law” after U.S. President Donald Trump and Parler were purged.
“I was born and raised among people for whom freedom was the most precious of values… because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it,” said the 52-year-old conservative, who was born in the same year the Soviet communists and puppet regimes in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland itself invaded the wayward satellite state of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.
14 Jan 2021
Highlanders in Poland’s “winter capital” of Zakopane are rebelling against lockdown, with hundreds of businesses vowing to reopen in defiance of government restrictions.
Sebastian Pitoń, who has emerged as leader of the Górlaskie Veto Highlanders’ Veto movement, was previously best known as an architect whose Tolkienesque designs were the subject of a Snopes article, as some people had doubted that viral images of his beautiful if eccentric traditional buildings were real.
Now, he cuts an exotic figure in the international media, holding press conferences in the traditional dress of Poland’s southern highlanders as ad hoc spokesman of some 200 businesses which have promised to “end this madness”.