By Vanessa Gera
WARSAW, Poland (AP) --Prosecutors in Poland are investigating after commentators joked on a right-wing television station that migrants should be sent to Auschwitz or be tattooed or microchipped like dogs, and some companies have pulled advertising from the broadcaster.
The remarks were made over the past week by guests on TV Republika, a private station whose role as a platform for conservative views grew after the national conservative party, Law and Justice, lost control of the Polish government and public media.
During its eight years in power, Law and Justice turned taxpayer-funded state television into a platform for programming that cast largescale migration into Europe as an existential danger. The state media broadcast conspiracy theories, such as a claim that liberal elites wanted to force people to eat bugs, as well as antisemitic and homophobic content and attacks on the party's opponents, including the new Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Spreading hate speech is a crime under Polish law. While public TV stations were shielded from market and legal pressures under the previous government, TV Republika now faces both.
IKEA said it was pulling its advertising from the station, prompting some conservative politicians to urge people to boycott the Swedish home goods giant. Other companies, including Carrefour and MasterCard subsequently said they were pulling their ads, too.
The controversial on-air statements were made as the European Union has been trying to overhaul its outdated asylum system, including with a plan to relocate migrants who arrived illegally in recent years.
Jan Pietrzak, a satirist and actor, said Sunday on TV Republika that he had "cruel joke" in response that idea.
"We have barracks for immigrants: in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Stutthof," Pietrzak said, referring to concentration and death camps that Nazi German forces operated in occupied Poland during World War II.
Three days later, Marek Król, a former editor of the Polish weekly news magazine Wprost, said migrants could be chipped like dogs, referring to microchips that can help reunite lost pets with their owners, but that it would be cheaper to tattoo numbers on their left arms.
Pietrzak has since appeared on air. TV Republika's programming director, Michał Rachoń, said the channel deeply disagreed with Król's statement but did not say he was being banned from its airwaves, Rachoń said the station "is the home of freedom of speech, but also a place of respect for every human being."
A right-wing lawmaker, Marek Jakubiak, then compared immigrants to "unnecessary waste." In that case, Rachoń, who was the host, asked him to avoid "ugly comparisons."
Prime Minister Tusk strongly condemned recent outbursts of xenophobia and said it resulted from such people and their ideas being rewarded for years by the former government and by current President Andrzej Duda.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum condemned the "immoral political statements regarding refugees."
"This has gone beyond the limits of what is acceptable in the civilized world," director Piotr Cywiński said.
Rafał Pankowski, head of the Never Again anti-racism association, said he was shocked by the comments but heartened by the disgust expressed on social media and the companies pulling advertising.
"It came to the point where society, or a big part of society, is just fed up with all this hate speech," Pankowski said. "The awareness and impatience have been growing for quite some time."
California governor signs law to protect children from social media addiction
California will make it illegal for social media platforms to knowingly provide addictive feeds to children without parental consent beginning in 2027 under a new law Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Friday.
California follows New York state, which passed a law earlier this year allowing parents to block their kids from getting social media posts suggested by a platform's algorithm. Utah has passed laws in recent years aimed at limiting children's access to social media, but they have faced challenges in court.
The California law will take effect in a state home to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Similar proposals have failed to pass in recent years, but Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law in 2022 barring online platforms from using users' personal information in ways that could harm children. It is part of a growing push in states across the country to try to address the impacts of social media on the well-being of children.
"Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children — isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night," Newsom said in a statement. "With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits."
The law bans platforms from sending notifications without permission from parents to minors between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, when children are typically in school. The legislation also makes platforms set children's accounts to private by default.
Opponents of the legislation say it could inadvertently prevent adults from accessing content if they cannot verify their... Read More