The Media Research Center’s Alexander Hall is bizarrely excited in a March 10 post:
Russia has decided to fight back against Silicon Valley, suing five companies to force removal of posts supporting anti-Putin protests. This is part of a tidal wave of opposition to Big Tech around the world.
Big Tech has allowed civil discord to run rampant if it targets entities liberals want destroyed. “Russian authorities are suing five social media platforms for allegedly failing to delete posts urging children to take part in illegal protests, the Interfax news agency cited a Moscow court as saying on Tuesday,” Reuters reported March 9. “Twitter, Google, Facebook each have three cases against them, with each violation punishable by a fine of up to 4 million roubles (around $54,000), and cases have also been filed against Tiktok and Telegram, the report said.”
The cases were reportedly launched “after protests nationwide over last month’s jailing of Alexei Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin.” Navalny and his sympathizers claim that his 30-month sentence, “for alleged parole violations related to an embezzlement case, was trumped up for political reasons, something the authorities deny,” Reuters summarized.
President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of many countries growing wary of Big Tech’s unchecked power to control the flow of information based on the biases of its CEOs.
That’s right — Hall is cheering Russia taking on “Big Tech” in order to squelch dissent. Hall’s problem here is not with Putin trying to censor political opposition, it’s with “Big Tech” for not letting him censor it.
Hall cheered further:
In the weeks following Trump’s censorship on Twitter, Hungary joined Poland as one of the premier European powers taking on Big Tech. Hungarian Minister of Justice Varga Judit announced in a January 26 Facebook post: “After consulting with the heads of the involved state institutions, the Ministry of Justice will propose a law to the Parliament this spring about the regulation of the great tech companies’ Hungarian [operation].”
Judit warned would-be censors that Hungarians will not tolerate technological tyranny from Big Tech: “The deliberate, ideological or business-motivated digital damaging can no longer happen without consequences in Hungary!”
Hungary is ruled by Viktor Orban, a right-wing authoritarian currently bent on exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to make a power grab that would let him rule by decree (as we’ve noted). Like Putin, Orban is trying to suppress political dissent, and his attacks on social media can be seen as part of that. Poland is also led by right-wingers who, like Hungary, are spouting the MRC’s bogus narrative that social media is exclusively “censoring” conservative points of view.
Cheering authoritarian censorship to own the libs — er, “Big Tech”? That’s quite the stance, Mr. Hall.