Speaking at the 2026 World Government’s Summit in the Emirates Office Tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Pedro Sanchez announced a powerful attack on online social media manipulation and hatred starting “next week” (9th. of February 2026) in Spain.
The Spanish government is left of centre coalition with Pedro Sanchez at its head. Spain too has an extreme far right party called Vox whose leader –curiously a Basque called Santiago Abascal– is a far right Spanish nationalist. Vox is doing well in the polls and elections are coming in Spain next year.
Abascal is at the centre of eurofascism, he hosted the Europa Viva, ’25 conference in Madrid where Kevin Roberts the President of the Heritage Foundation spoke. Roberts is the primary author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which Trump is beyond implementing. His conference was hosted by 16 far right parties from various European nations including Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale from France and a partnership with the far right fascist Likud party in Israel. Vox is also in the far right European Parliament group known as Patriots.EU. It includes most of the far right in Europe except the German AfD Alternatif für Deutschland.
Many far right parties drive their campaigns using online hate to manipulate a section of society vulnerable to anger issues and who are also susceptible to believing conspiracy theories as has been proven with trump’s first election in 2016 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This strategic move may help the Spanish government prepare for free and fair elections without algorithmic manipulation online. The initiative is to be lauded from a democracy perspective but will be hated by those who have a more autocratic bias, Milei, and Trump in the Americas and Urban and Farage in Europe.
The following was the text of Pedro Sanchez’s speech. It elicited the following somewhat childish response from Elon Musk on one of the targeted plaforms. “Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain (followed by the shit emoticon💩)”…
- First we will change Spanish law to hold platform executives legally accountable for many infringements taking place on their sites… Chief Officers of such platforms will face criminal liability for failing to remove illegal or hateful content. For that we governments need to stop turning a blind eye to the toxic content shared under their watch.
- We will turn Algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal content into a new criminal offence. This information doesn’t appear by itself. It is created, promoted and spread by certain actors. We will go after them as well —as well as after the platforms whose algorithms amplify this information for profit. No more hiding behind code. No more pretending that technology is neutral.
- We will implement a “hate and polarisation footprint” a system to track, quantify and expose how digital silicon platforms fuel division and amplify hate. For too long hate has been treated as invisible and untraceable but we will change that developing a tool that will provided the basis underlying future penalties because spreading and amplifying hate will have a legal, financial and moral cost that platforms can no longer afford to ignore.
- Spain will ban access to social media for minors under 16. Platforms will be required to implement effective age verification systems — not just checkboxes but real barriers that work. Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate. A space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence. We will no longer accept that. We will protect Spanish minors from the digital Wild West.
- My government will work with our public prosecutor to investigate and pursue infringements by Grok, Tiktok and Instagram. We will have zero tolerance on this matter and we will defend our digital sovereignty against foreign coercion.
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