16 Apr 2021
The Hungarian government has warned against Big Tech oligarchs’ moves to dominate the public square online through the arbitrary and opaque enforcement of community guidelines in their view, a kind of “pseudo legal system”.
“If we are unable to control the activities of the tech giants that are building a pseudo legal system, they will rule our life and force us into a bubble,” warned Judit Varga, the Minister of Justice in the national-conservative government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Minister Varga also questioned “whether these guidelines are in tune with the principles of the rule of law” and sounded a note of caution over the “move to reduce political content” on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, questioning whether the platform would apply double standards to its users rather than treating everyone equally in comments to the 21st Century Institute.
30 Jan 2021
Social media giant Twitter suspended the main account of Spanish populist party VOX this week after the party launched a new campaign to push back against Islamisation.
The party, the third-most popular in the country, according to polling, had its account temporarily restricted for allegedly violating Twitter’s rules. It had posted about crime in the Canary Islands and Catalonia, and the prevalence of migrants in criminal complaints.
“Most of them come from the Maghreb. It is in Catalonia that there is unanimous indolence and complicity with imported crime. There’s only Vox left!” the account stated, according to a report from Spanish newspaper