Will County Gazette

Will County Board member and Homer Township Supervisor Steve Balich is sounding the alarm on the Truth In Politics Act.

Critics say the measure would limit free speech. Balich argues the bill is an effort to block conservative Republicans.

“They have no business saying that something's right or wrong, it's just an interpretation of what they want,” Balich told the Will County Gazette. “And so it shouldn't even be a law because ... you can't qualify it. It's impossible because everybody's going to have a different opinion. So this is just another way for them to stop free speech from conservative Republicans.” 

Balich also decried Gov. J.B. Pritzker's actions against various media. He said the governor “has a lot of nerve going after any newspaper because the newspaper is printing stuff that he doesn't like. Because if you read the Chicago Tribune or magazines or whatever you want to read, most of those are slanted pretty far to the left. So now you got a paper that comes out that is slanted to the factual part of the right and the Democrats and J.B. [don't] want to have it out there ... that he is a bad governor. He wants to run for president and how's he going to run for president when he isn't doing a good job as governor?” 

“It's like Communist Russia back in the day, right?" Balich pointed out. "They censor and throw you in jail if you're going to write something against them. And it's getting to the point now that you say something against the government. Now you're a bad person but it's OK if one of the government people say something bad about you that this would be true.”

Opponents say HB5850, also known as the Truth In Politics Act, would criminalize speech. Those found guilty of a violation can be charged with a class A criminal misdemeanor or be subject to civil litigation.

Edgar County Watchdogs indicated the terms under which violations would be pursued are ambiguous. The group noted the bill “would criminalize certain speech directed at political campaigns. The bill prescribes criminal and civil penalties for certain election speech and adds speech requirements for political campaigns. Let’s hope this bill goes nowhere.”

The move by Illinois Democrats comes as The New York Post is pushing Twitter to describe the events leading up to the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story. At the time of the story’s publication in October 2020, Twitter took extreme measures to stop the story from being shared on its platform, and removed The New York Post’s access to its account for two weeks.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta which owns Facebook, accused the FBI of manipulating the social media giants into deadening the impact of that and other stories. “The FBI basically came to us… [saying], ‘Hey, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on a notice that there is about to be some kind of a dump that is similar to that, so be just vigilant,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on a recent podcast regarding the Biden laptop story. 

Zuckerberg said while Facebook limited the story’s organic reach, Twitter censored it from the platform altogether. “This is a hyper-political issue, so depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor enough or censored it way too much, but we weren’t as black and white about it as Twitter,” he said.