Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wants to make the fight against disinformation a priority with a plan for “democratic renewal”, though the country’s conservative opposition has blasted it as an attempt to censor critical media.
Sánchez is to join Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to discuss the issue Tuesday (24 September) on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Brazil’s Supreme Court recently ordered a block on Elon Musk’s X social network after it failed to respect judicial orders regarding “fake news”.
Sánchez’s leftist government unveiled last week a plan for fighting fake news over the remaining three years of his term.
It includes the creation of a public registry listing newspapers, their owners and their advertising revenues, as well as measures to increase the right to privacy and the correction of inaccurate information.
Sánchez announced earlier this year that he would take steps to fight a “filth factory” spreading “disinformation and defamation”.
The move came after a court opened an inquiry into his wife, Begona Gomez, over allegations of corruption and influence-peddling filed by a group with links to the far right.
The group has said its claims against Gomez were based on media reports.
Franco comparison
Raúl Magallón, a communications professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University, said the government’s measures were “a step in the right direction” but “won’t solve all the problems”.
“Insofar as they can help increase public confidence in the media, I think that is positive,” he told AFP.
But the head of the main conservative opposition Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, called the plan “an offensive against judges, journalists and the media, a plan for censorship”.
“We haven’t seen anything like this since Franco,” he said in parliament, referring to Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain until his death in 1975.
Magallón said the legacy of the Franco dictatorship, which tightly controlled the media, made any sort of press regulations a sensitive issue in Spain.
Most of the measures proposed by Sánchez’s government would bring Spain in line with the European Media Freedom Act, approved by the European Parliament in March with the backing of the PP’s four European lawmakers.
“This is yet another contradiction by the Popular Party,” Paloma Roman, a political scientist at Madrid’s Complutense University, told AFP.
“I think the PP will continue because its objective is to continue its frontal opposition” to the government, she said.
‘International leadership role’
While many of the government’s proposals would transpose binding EU regulations, some will require the approval of new laws.
That poses a challenge for Sánchez’s government, which lacks a majority in Spain’s deeply fragmented parliament.
“It will take time to materialise, if that is even possible,” Roman said.
Cristina Monge, a political scientist, said the government’s proposals were more complicated than had been expected.
“We all thought at the time that this plan would be something simple, but we have seen that this is not the case, so I don’t know exactly how all this is going to come about,” she told AFP.
But Monge said that even if Sánchez fails to win majority support for his plan, the Socialist premier could see this as an opportunity to enhance his international stature.
“I think that Pedro Sánchez will want to play an international leadership role on the issue of disinformation, and this meeting with Lula is an example of this,” she said.
