Metro East Sun

GOP activist and former candidate Jennifer Korte is sounding the alarm on the Truth In Politics Act recently filed by Rep. Denyse Wang Stoneback (D-Skokie).

Korte warned about terms used in the bill, questioning that "by being bitter or unfriendly, you are attacking someone?" She pointed out that "attack" was defined as "a statement or action that refers to another person or the person's ideology through use of intentionally unfriendly, bitter, or threatening words or actions."  

“Legislation to keep an eye on: 'Truth In Politics Act' HB5850,” Korte, an Edwardsvillle resident, said on Facebook. “While I am all for honest elections, this legislation is vague to some degree. Who decides on what is considered ‘misinformation?” 

Korte said the measure is not only for the people running for office.

“This legislation also targets normal citizens," she said. "What I find really interesting about this is that every single Democrat who ran against my Republican friends would have violated this legislation. I wonder if they see the irony in this. I like the idea of election reform. I'd like to see honest elections. Financial reforms would make things more equitable for grassroots candidates. But this needs to go back to the drawing board.” 

Opponents say the Truth In Politics Act, HB5850, 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 point out the terms under which violations would be pursued are ambiguous. North Cook News reported that 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.