Eduardo González
Elon Musk, owner of the social network X, has once again attacked Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, calling him a “traitor to Spain” for the recent extraordinary regularization of around half a million migrants. The Prime Minister’s response was forceful: “Insecurity isn’t caused by a foreign minor under 14 in the United States or Spain; insecurity is caused by these tycoons who think the world belongs to them.”
“I haven’t had a chance to read the tweet; we’ve been quite busy all day,” Pedro Sánchez said this Wednesday, February 18, regarding Musk’s message, in which he again referred to the Prime Minister as “Dirty Sánchez,” the same expression he himself used earlier this month to criticize the government’s measures to control large digital platforms.
“On this issue, the Spanish government has been clear,” Sánchez continued during a press conference in New Delhi on the occasion of his official visit to India. “If violent content, pornographic content, hateful content is detected, and this content is propagated by algorithms designed for the purpose of spreading and expanding these hoaxes, this violence, this pornography, this vulgarity, someone will have to take responsibility for it, for removing it,” he warned.
“I believe this is something that certainly doesn’t stem from any ideology, neither left nor right. There are parents and young people who are absolutely concerned about the mental health of citizens, and particularly of the most vulnerable, our children and young people,” he stated.
“What the Spanish government, and of course Europe, must do in this case,” he continued, “is to put mechanisms in place to prevent the exploitation of citizens’ mental health, and particularly that of our young people and children.” “This is what we want: for responsibilities to be assumed, just as any business owner, whether self-employed, a medium-sized business, or a large corporation, assumes in any sector,” Pedro Sánchez warned.
In response to those who “say this is censorship,” Pedro Sánchez pointed out that, “in less than eleven days, up to three million images have been detected on social media containing deepfakes or AI-manipulated images of nudity with the real faces of children, especially girls, and women.”
“Does this have to do with censorship, or does it have to do with social media platforms where there is clearly no law, where there is clearly no accountability, and therefore, this type of vulgarity and violence can spread and expand?” he asked. “Freedom of expression is not about using a child’s face in nude images through artificial intelligence or any other type of technology on social media,” he asserted.
“I sincerely believe that the majority of citizens, regardless of their political affiliation, beliefs, or age, largely support the measures being proposed by the Spanish Government,” he affirmed.
“If, in the end, the reaction we get is crude and threatening responses like those this techno-oligarch might offer, then ultimately, the insecurity isn’t generated by a 14-year-old foreigner in the United States or Spain. The insecurity is precisely what these magnates, who believe the world belongs to them and that they can therefore do whatever they please, are causing,” he denounced.
In any case, when asked if the government plans to withdraw from these social networks, Sánchez’s response was emphatic: “No, we’re staying. We have to stand firm and defend reason, even in these sinister places that the techno-oligarchy has turned our social networks into,” because “what we want is for social networks to become great again and fulfill the promise they made us ten or fifteen years ago, not the quagmire they’ve become due to the greed of a few at the expense of the mental health of many,” he concluded.