Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a Thursday post on X that the European Union (EU) is trying to impose “an Orwellian world” upon the continent.
“#Brussels is creating an Orwellian world in front of our eyes. They buy and supply weapons through the #EuropeanPeaceFacility. They want to control the media through the #MediaFreedomAct. We didn’t fight the communists to end up in 1984!”
The European Peace Facility exists for the UN to buy weapons of war – to use in Ukraine and any other designated war zone.
The Media Freedom Act has been criticized by European media outlets for making it legal to spy on journalists.
The oldest democratic nations in the world are acting in unison with legislation that will ban “misinformation,” “disinformation” and even “malinformation.”
Most of these bills have the innocuous sounding name of “Online Safety Act.” The UK, Canada and Australia have either passed versions of this same bill or plan to introduce the legislation in the near future.
In Britain the Online Safety Bill was approved by the House of Commons. It bans any internet news that is judged to be false or offensive by fact checkers. Bristol, England police recently arrested an independent journalist for broadcasting “malinformation” on his podcast. Police arrived at his door while Warren Thornton was in the midst of an interview.
Australia has also passed its own Online Safety Act which contains similar provisions.
Canada already introduced the Online Safety Bill in June 2021 but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dissolved Parliament to call an election and the legislation died on the order paper. The bill was revived during Trudeau’s current mandate and is part of his government’s three-fold internet censorship legislation that includes the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, or Bill C-11 and C-18. The Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) recently announced the creation of an online news registry as part of C-11.
Canada’s Online Safety Act aims to ban “disinformation” from the internet, but as government documents reveal, the word disinformation will not be defined in the final legislation because study groups noted that this kind of clarification would make enforcement of the act more difficult.
Australia passed its own – you guessed it – Online Safety Act in 2021. It is very similar to the UK and Canadian variants as it promises to ban “online harm … abusive behavior and toxic content.”
In the United States, the Restrict Act, introduced by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was supposedly aimed at controlling the spread of TikTok, a social media platform controlled by communist China. But critics say it will have the same effect as Britain’s Online Safety Act and will leave all online media to the mercy of government censors.
