Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, said on Thursday that governments have a duty to defend democratic systems “from the attacks they suffer” and to shield young people from what he described as the harmful and largely unregulated environment of social media.
Addressing the closing session of the 8th National Industry Congress in Bilbao, Sanchez backed his administration’s push to strengthen oversight of digital platforms, with a particular emphasis on safeguarding minors.
“The power of the state is there to protect democracies from the attacks they suffer and also children and adolescents from that toxic, unpunished world that social media has unfortunately become,” he said, according to La Voz de Asturias.
His comments come as the government faces mounting debate over proposed measures that would limit access to social media for children under the age of 16.
Sanchez’s remarks appeared to be a response to criticism from Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who on Wednesday cautioned that Spain’s proposed rules could undermine “internet freedoms” and turn the country into a “surveillance state.”
The prime minister has also been targeted by Elon Musk, the owner of X, who earlier this week described Sanchez as a “totalitarian fascist” and a “tyrant.”
Rejecting accusations that tighter regulation would lead to censorship or authoritarianism, Sanchez said the discussion should instead focus on the goals and consequences of technological progress.
“Some say that regulation is control, that doing politics is tyranny, that setting rules limits innovation.
But the key questions are almost never asked. What do we want this innovation for? To expand rights or to put those rights at risk? To strengthen democracy or to erode it? To improve people’s lives or for a few to line their pockets?” he said.
Sanchez also criticized what he portrayed as the growing and unchecked influence of powerful technology leaders, accusing them of spreading false information and profiting from the misuse of personal data.
“Do we want a technology that normalizes and amplifies deception, that turns privacy into a commodity, a society in which a tech oligarch can infiltrate, as they did this Wednesday, the mobile phones of millions of citizens to tell them lies?”
He said the response to that question “has to be a clear no.”
“They won’t break us, because the voice of reason, of the social majority and of democracy, will not be silenced by these techno-oligarchs of the algorithm,” he added.
