The European Parliament’s socialist and liberal groups have called for a debate on fake news and hate speech in the next Strasbourg plenary on 20-23 January.
On Wednesday morning the liberal Renew Europe group announced they will request an urgent debate about recent posts by Elon Musk on X and whether they breach the EU’s content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Valerie Hayer, the group’s president, said that Europe cannot be blind about Musk’s determination to interfere in the EU’s democratic affairs. The Socialist and Democrats’ (S&D) leader, Iratxe García Pérez, made a similar call later the same day in a post on X.
“New dangers threaten our democracies. Dangers as powerful or more than weapons: fake news, hate speech and the abuse of social networks,” she wrote.
A request for debate by the S&D, the Parliament’s second-largest group, significantly increases the likelihood that the debate will be added to the agenda.
The calls come after Elon Musk published multiple posts attacking several European leaders and endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party.
On Wednesday, he shared a misleading picture depicting Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre meeting with Bill Gates, which could be part of the Commission’s DSA investigation against X on disinformation grounds, a Commission spokesperson told the press on the same day.
Ahead of February’s German parliamentary elections, Musk will livestream an interview on X with leader of the AfD Alice Weidel, similar to the one he held with Donald Trump before the US elections, to be broadcasted on Thursday.
Earlier this week, MEP Axel Voss (EPP, Germany) said that his group has sent several requests to the Commission to assess whether Musk’s behaviour was against the rules set in the DSA.
His compatriot and colleague Andreas Schwab posted on Linkedin that he will continue to push the Commission to “bring [X’s DSA enforcement] procedure to an end.”
Greens MEP Damian Boeselager previously sent an open letter to the Commission executive vice-president responsible for the DSA, Henna Virkkunen, expressing similar concerns.
The exact name of the urgent plenary debate will be negotiated next week by the Parliament’s political groups.
[Edited by Chris Powers/Owen Morgan]
