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Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

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Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#81
post #5

> Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. This is kind of insane. So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like because the person who wrote it- again, not a paying customer- wants it to be there. Not only…

But to determine if something is legal or illegal sometimes takes years, doesn't it?

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#82
post #3

Oh that’s stupid. Companies will end up with some creative solutions - if it can not be removed it can be made hard to access. Honestly it looks like stupid people in power are sad that their antiLGBT posts are removed.

I get your point, but there's a middle ground here that I feel countries should rightly be able to defend, instead of letting Silicon Valley American companies unilaterally decide their fate. LGBT advocates in America have become extreme, even floating ideas like giving all children puberty blockers (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/transgender-activist...) while other countries like the UK are recognizing, rather sanely, that there is no way a minor can give consent on puberty blockers (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/01/children-who-w...). These days, you'd be labeled a "transphobe" for suggesting something so obvious in the US, and your posts would be deleted from Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/whatever. So I can see reasonable reasons why other countries and their citizens would want to retain local control on allowed/disallowed speech.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#83

Trolling and many other forms of online abuse may not be against any law but it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content. This initiative may turn out to be the opposite of what it claims to stand for.

Yep. It would be illegal for dang to remove low-value or irrelevant posts.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#84
post #49
post #12

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with. The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kac…

This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Constitutional Court judges ahead of the end of their terms. For a summary of events: [1] Imagine if Barack Obama / George Bush decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahea…

> Imagine if Barack Obama decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahead of the end of their terms, because he was afraid he was going to lose his upcoming elections?

Imagine if Barack Obama had Supreme Court appointments blocked by Republicans on constitutionally flimsy grounds that were immediately ignored when the Trump administration was in identical situations.

Would any "nasty things" done by a future Democrat administration then be laid at the feet of this original malfeasance, forevermore, or would it be misrepresentation not to mention it?

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only really a liberal democracy if the ruling elite can coerce private actors to take the repressive actions instead of doing it officially. You must also allow your civil service to be an unaccountable branch of government controlled by the professional managerial class and unresponsive to the commands of elected leadership (unless they're from the correct side). Furthermore, you must allow lawyers to use the…

Gay marriage has a popular majority in the UK and Ireland in both polls and referenda. Is it that different in the US? Interpreting old documents is hard, and where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion.

> where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion

If “it seems right” is a good way to run a country, why do we even have laws?

I don’t think abusing silence and substantial ambiguity is a coherent approach to legislation. If something important in the law is ambiguous, the correct approach in my view is to make it unambiguous by the usual legislative process.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#86
post #34

As a country that has suffered the turmoil of both Nazism and Communism, it would be wise to heed their direction. They know the smell of tyranny all too well. The proverbial canary.

This is a valuable and reasonable opinion, and does not deserve the downvotes.

This government has learned from that time, but looking at the state of TVP and these "tematy zastępcze" they seem rather fond of Goebbels' methods. Paint "the west" as the enemy to your "great traditions" and use the wedges like this law to distract people from creeping towards authoritarianism.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you'd have easy time arguing in the court if you did something like that

I think geoblocking Poland would be easy enough.

I wouldn't cry if fb, twitter, insta and so on were unavaliable in Poland

I think that would be step to the right direction

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#90
post #49
post #12

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with. The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kac…

This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Constitutional Court judges ahead of the end of their terms. For a summary of events: [1] Imagine if Barack Obama / George Bush decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahea…

> This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments flagrant anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Supreme Court Judges ahead of the end of their terms.

It was the Constitutional Court, not Supreme Court. Also, no, not really - that didn't start the crisis in any reasonable meaning of that word. In a correctly functioning democracy that would simply be blocked by Constitutional Court, and that's in fact exactly what happened. The problem started when currently ruling party replaced not only the extraneous judges, but also those judges who were lawfully supposed to be appointed by previous government. Of course the Constitutional Court deemed that unconstitutional, but that didn't stop the ruling party at all, and the rest is history.

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