A Polish court held the first hearing this Wednesday on a case filed against Facebook by a historian for censoring people who posted about a nationalist rally in Warsaw. Lately, big tech has been severely criticized for censoring certain notable people and suspending their accounts.
Maciej Swirski, a Polish Historian has recently filed a case against Facebook on grounds of censorship. Last month on the 11th, there was a huge nationalist rally that took place in Warsaw. Several people have posted extensively about the rally on Facebook.
The rally was initiated by Poland’s far-right groups and is said to be one of the largest anti-Jewish rallies in the recent times. A huge number of people have rallied in front of the US Embassy asking the US government to stay out of Polish affairs.
As this rally was against the motives of the US and was also anti-Jewish, Facebook decided to completely censor this rally from its platform. In attempts to censor this rally, Facebook ended up suspending several accounts that posted about it – not even from those that necessarily supported it.
The historian said that he wasn’t a member of the nationalist movement, however, he was upset over the fact that Facebook was trying to control the news and information he could obtain about the incident.
“I’m not a member of the National Movement, but as a citizen, I wanted to inform myself on the event in question and I was blocked from doing so. This censorship doesn’t concern my own posts, but rather content that I had wanted to see.” said Swirski to the AFP news agency.
While Facebook wanted to have the court proceedings in Palo Alto behind closed doors, it was said by Swirski that Warsaw denied doing so. The tech giant’s lawyers said that accusations of censorship only apply to a state or a country, but not to a private entity such as Facebook.
It is reported that the next court hearing will be on October 30, 2019. We’ll keep you updated with how the case progresses.
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