Digital transformation minister Óscar López says ‘the profit of four tech companies cannot come at the expense of the rights of millions’ as Madrid’s regulatory package moves through parliament.
Spain’s digital transformation minister, Óscar López, said on Wednesday that Madrid would press ahead with a slate of rules targeting social media platforms and high-risk artificial intelligence systems, despite what he described as intensifying lobbying from American technology companies.
“The profit of four tech companies cannot come at the expense of the rights of millions,” López told reporters, citing pressure from “powerful voices” against proposals that would constrain high-risk AI and force platforms to disclose how their recommendation algorithms work.
The push has been gathering for months. In February, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced from the World Government Summit in Dubai that Spain would ban social media for users under 16, an amendment now winding through parliament as part of an existing digital child-protection bill.
Sánchez also pledged to criminalise the manipulation of algorithms to amplify illegal content and to hold executives personally liable for failures to remove it.
