https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-european-leaders-question-twitter-donald-trump-ban/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-sees-closing-trump-s-social-media-accounts-problematicQuote
On Monday, a spokesman for Merkel said Twitter's Trump ban was “problematic.” “The fundamental right [of freedom of expression] can be interfered with, but along the lines of the law and within the framework defined by the lawmakers. Not according to the decision of the management of social media platforms,” government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said.
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French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, while condemning Trump’s “lies,” also expressed his disagreement with Twitter’s ability to unilaterally decide to remove the American president from the platform. “What shocks me is that Twitter is the one to close his account. The regulation of the digital world cannot be done by the digital oligarchy”. Le Maire oversees the ministry for digital affairs, whose junior minister Cédric O also raised questions over the weekend. “The regulation of public discourse by the main social media companies with regards only to their Terms and Conditions ... seems, to say the least, a little short from a democratic point of view.”
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Thierry Breton, one of key EU commissioners behind [digital platform] reforms, wrote [...] that “the fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing. It is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organized in the digital space.”
The head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, wrote [...] that Europe needs “to be able to better regulate the contents of social networks, while scrupulously respecting freedom of expression. It is not possible for this regulation to be carried out mainly according to rules and procedures set by private actors.”
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Manfred Weber, chairman of the EPP group at the European Parliament, concurred, telling Brussels Playbook: “The EU mustn’t let Facebook and Twitter decide what’s within the boundaries of the acceptable on their platforms.” “We cannot leave it to American Big Tech companies to decide how we do and do not discuss, what can and cannot be said in a democratic discourse. We need a stricter regulatory approach,” Weber added.
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All those leading European politicians are able to see the danger in private companies unilaterally setting the terms of public discourse, without democratic legitimization or oversight. It's really no secret that there is absolutely no love lost between Trump and Merkel, Macron or the EU. They all condemned his lies and his incitement of violence in the strongest of terms, yet were nonetheless able to see that Big Tech having the power to silence the American president - no matter how much he might have "deserved it" - is hugely problematic. If even Trump's political and ideological adversaries from across the pond are able to see this problem, why are our resident establishment-cheerleaders unable to see it?
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 12 2021 03:32am