Report from AP News
In Brief – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has announced plans for a package of measures to regulate online companies, including banning teens under 16 from social media platforms that he called “a space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence.” Other proposals include making platform executives criminally liable for failing to remove illegal or hateful content, creating a new criminal offense for algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal material, and introducing a “hate and polarization footprint” system to measure how platforms fuel division. Sanchez called out Elon Musk’s platform X by name, claiming it “amplified disinformation” over his administration’s recent decision last week to grant legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants. Musk responded saying, “Dirty Sanchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.”
Context – Spain may join the growing list of countries following Australia with an age limit for social media, but the harsh back and forth between Sanchez and Musk is about the billionaire’s proclivity to attack progressive politicians and back populist conservatives. He’s repeatedly been accused of election interference by European leaders including by French President Emanuel Macron, and French government prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of X last year targeting how the platform’s recommendation algorithms deal with political issues. Those prosecutors recently expanded their probe and raided X’s Paris office. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the EU law that regulates how digital platforms police illegal and objectionable content online, and the European Commission is the lead regulator for the largest platforms, which includes X. The Commission is engaged in several investigations of X, including how its algorithms handle politically sensitive content. The DSA’s backers say that the law protects free expression, but they also argue that law’s regulation of “recommender systems” is different from regulating the content itself. Critics disagree. Regulating how social media, especially X, handles political content, is the most sensitive US-EU bilateral digital policy issue.