Eastern approaches | Smears and slurs in Poland

Wash your keyboard

Radek Sikorski starts legal action against online smears

By E.L.

THE POLEMICS and hysteria in Polish politics are bad enough: accusing your opponent of mental illness, treachery and lies is just a throat-clearing formality. But compared with the online debate about the debate, those exchanges look like a colloquium between Socrates and Cicero. When commenting in internet forums, many Poles seem to lose their manners, to put it mildly, freely making the grossest personal insinuations about anyone unwise enough to pop their head above the parapet. That has a corrosive effect on the quality of public life. To be fair, this is not just a Polish problem, but at least in Poland someone is making a stand about it.

That person is none other than the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski (disclosure: an old friend of mine). In an interview last week in Gazeta Wyborcza (link in Polish) he complained about the way in which Polish newspapers allow anti-semitic and other grotesquely insulting comments on their websites, of a kind that they would never publish in print. He argued:

As the head of Polish diplomacy, it is my duty to safeguard my country's image abroad. The racism, aggression and hate spouted in Polish internet chatrooms is beyond belief. People can read these comments anywhere in the world and form their opinion of Poland.

Mr Sikorski and his wife, the American Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum, have been the butt of particularly venomous comments. One recent one read:

Do fiuta bez napletka hasbarowca, jak ci nasz kościołek przeszkadza to won do OSRAELA, mały icku, czy wiesz, że twoja babcia to rzydówka ubecka z domu Rojer, dwulicowe ścierwo, które dąży do rozkładu polski ...do gazu fraglesa". ty ch... sik-orski pejsaty kondonie

Which is simply too unpleasant to translate (maybe a reader with a strong stomach can try to render it in an appropriately illiterate and ranting tone). Another rather milder one merely accuses Mr Sikorski of being the "husband of an orthodox Jew, an enemy of Poland controlled by his father-in-law, bent on the “the destruction and destabilisation of Poland” and a "hidden, ruthless traitor". In December the minister forwarded these (and another one saying that Poles should finish off the Jews, the way Hitler started) to Poland's attorney-general, as a criminal complaint.

On Friday he appeared in court (link in English from Mr Sikorski's website) to give a deposition, complaining that the administrators of the sites concerned had not taken down the comments, despite being notified of their offensive content. He has also brought civil cases against two of the papers, Fakt (a hard-hitting tabloid) and Puls Biznesu (a business-news media outlet). He says:

My aim is to induce the owners of the sites to comply with the law and their own regulations. On top of removing the offending entries, this can be achieved by changing registration procedures on internet forums, for example by requiring users to provide a verifiable telephone number or other data that prevent anonymity from the administrator. I'm convinced their sense of anonymity goes a long way to encouraging users' loutish behaviour on internet chatrooms.

The campaign has brought speedy results. The two papers concerned have taken down the offending comments and apologised unreservedly to Mr Sikorski.

It is easy to snigger about thin-skinned politicians who can't take criticism. But in this case my sympathies are with the fox, not the hounds. Anonymous online comments are probably a good thing on balance—but they do require some sort of moderation. That costs time and money, but news media need to take responsibility for that, and not simply try to muster as many clicks as possible by allowing discussion to rage (literally) unchecked. If they don't, then a lawsuit is a good response.

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