PM says action is looking at potential criminal liability in order to protect children and end ‘impunity’ of online platforms
The Spanish government will ask prosecutors to investigate the social media companies X, Meta and TikTok to determine whether they have committed criminal offences by allegedly allowing their AI to generate and disseminate child sexual abuse material.
Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said his government had taken the decision in order to protect “the mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters” and to end the “impunity” of huge social media platforms.
The government said it was taking action on the basis of an expert report that had analysed “the potential criminal liability of increasingly widespread practices in the digital environment, such as the generation and dissemination of sexual content and child sexual abuse through deepfakes and the manipulation of real images to create others with explicit sexual content, thereby undermining the dignity of the victims”.
The report warned of the potential involvement of social media firms in these acts because they allow “their massive dissemination with a speed and opacity that greatly hinders detection and prosecution, while also facilitating the formation of networks that produce, share, and monetise this content”.
