Social media platforms needs to be impartial and never intrude in different nations’ political affairs, the Spanish authorities’s spokesperson stated on Tuesday, after X’s CEO Elon Musk commented on statistics about foreigners jailed for rape in Spain.
Pilar Alegria was answering a query in regards to the high-profile spat between the billionaire proprietor of X and European leaders reminiscent of Britain’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron.
“We imagine that these platforms should all the time act with absolute neutrality and above all, with out interfering,” she informed a information convention.
Musk, who is ready to serve Donald Trump’s new administration as an out of doors adviser, waded into Spanish affairs on Sunday by commenting “Wow” whereas reposting an X publish from the account Visegrad24 that includes a screenshot of an article on rape convictions in Spain’s northeastern area of Catalonia.
The article, initially printed by La Razon newspaper on September 27 of final yr, carried the headline “91% of these convicted for rape in Catalonia are foreigners” and the subheading “Immigrants make up 17% of the area’s complete inhabitants”.
A spokesperson for the Catalan area Justice Division confirmed to Reuters the information cited by the native media, including that it was printed firstly of final summer time.
Knowledge from Catalan authorities highlighted by La Razon confirmed that 22 out of the 24 individuals convicted or on remand on rape costs in Catalonia had been non-Spanish residents.
“We will’t enable democracy to fall into the palms of tech billionaires allied with the far proper,” Catalonia’s Socialist regional chief, Salvador Illa, informed an occasion in Barcelona afterward Tuesday.
“We gained’t enable anybody to make use of Catalonia’s title to unfold hate speech,” Illa added, with out explicitly naming Musk.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose liberal stance on immigration is harshly criticised by far-right get together Vox, has rejected any hyperlinks between charges of immigration and crime and has stated that “foreigners are neither higher nor worse than Spaniards” by way of criminality.
Spanish crime charges have both remained steady or diminished yearly since 2011. A Spanish Inside Ministry report printed in September concluded that “the immigration phenomenon will not be having a damaging or important affect on crime charges”.
