MEPs from the ranks of the Social Democrats and Liberals have called for a crackdown on fake news and hate speech on social media to be included on the agenda of the European Parliament session scheduled for January 20-23.
The liberal group “Renew Europe” (RE) said it would call for an “urgent parliamentary debate on the recent posts” by X’s own Elon Musk on this social network and whether they violate the content moderation provisions of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
According to RE President Valerie Ayer, Europe cannot be blind to Musk’s intention to interfere in democratic processes in the EU.
The leader of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (SD), Irace Garcia Perez, also called for a debate on this issue in a post on X. – Our democracies are threatened by new dangers.
Dangers that are more powerful than weapons: fake news, hate speech and abuse of social media, she wrote in the post.
Such requests for verification for “social media abuse” followed after Musk attacked several European leaders in several posts on X and supported the German far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of the country’s early parliamentary elections.
Yesterday, Musk posted a photo showing a meeting between Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Storr and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, after which the European Commission said that this “misleading image” could be part of its ongoing investigation into X for spreading disinformation, which is being conducted on the basis of the Digital Services Act.
Additionally, Musk is scheduled to broadcast a live interview with AfD leader Alice Weidel today, similar to the one he had with Donald Trump before the US presidential election.
Earlier this week, German European People’s Party (EPP) MEP Axel Voss announced that the group had submitted several requests to the European Commission to assess whether Musk’s behavior was “in conflict with the rules set out in the DPA.”
Green MEP Damian Boeselager expressed similar concerns in an open letter to the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkunen, who is responsible for monitoring compliance with the DPA.
