My blog

GAFAM, or Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, have been getting a bad rap lately. They’ve been criticized for tax evasion, monopolistic practices, trading in people’s private data, manipulating consciences, influencing election results, and limiting freedom of speech.

The "Big Five" or as some prefer to call them "Gang of Five" have carried out a digital revolution since the beginning of the 21st century, giving people, often for free, access to innovative technology, thanks to which their lives have become simpler and more interesting, and the world closer and more understandable. On the other hand, it is impossible not to notice that as a side effect we have also become victims of this revolution. We have become addicted to technology, we have physically distanced ourselves from each other, we have confusion in our heads, we are lost in distinguishing good from evil, we have become susceptible to manipulation, we are overwhelmed by the vast amount of information and data from which we are unable to pick out important things.

One of the most serious accusations against GAFAM is the threat to our democracy resulting from restrictions on freedom of speech and censorship. There is an interesting correlation: those who shout the loudest about the threat to our civilization from GAFAM are most often the same ones who are willing to give in to conspiracy theories, more often vote for populists, or support authoritarian governments of various Trumps, Kaczyńskis, and Orbans.

Without a doubt, censorship has negative connotations for us Poles. In the times of the only true truth, thanks to it, only good things were said about the government and the sense of its actions could not be questioned. However, censorship, understood as control over the public transmission of information, limiting the freedom of public expression of thoughts and beliefs, can be bad and good. For me, censorship that limits racism, sexism, xenophobia, hatred or conspiracy theories is absolutely fine and I fully support it. Many times I have heard the outrage of people whose accounts were closed by Facebook. They say that this is a gagging and an attack on freedom of speech. I have a simple piece of advice for them - do not write nonsense, and your FB accounts will be safe.

Freedom of speech is undoubtedly the highest value. But like any freedom, it should be limited by the freedom of others, and in my opinion, limiting the freedom of others is not only spreading hatred, but also disinformation or misleading, as in the case of spreading conspiracy theories.

Those concerned about threats to freedom of speech often ask the question: who gives Facebook the right to decide whether what we write violates the rules. I think the answer is simple. FB is a private company that has the right to apply its own rules and clearly articulates what is allowed and what is not. It is worth reading the extensive FB regulations, which describe these rules in great detail, and if someone does not like them, they can always set up their own Facebook, where they will introduce full, unfettered freedom of speech.

Such Facebooks already exist, such as the three-year-old American Parler, which is dominated by right-wing extremists, Trump supporters and full of anti-Semitic content and conspiracy theories, or the Polish Albicla, founded by Tomasz Sakiewicz, the head of Gazeta Polska, which describes itself as a "social networking site enabling the censorship-free exchange of thoughts, ideas and opinions" and closes the accounts of users with whom it disagrees.