Pedro Sanchez

Feb. 17 (UPI) — Spanish authorities plan to investigate social media giants X, Meta and TikTok over the distribution of child sex abuse materials on their respective social media platforms, the government announced Tuesday.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said there is a pending investigation by state prosecutors into the alleged spread of artificial intelligence-generated material.

“These platforms are jeopardizing the mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters,” Sanchez said in a translated post on X.

“The state cannot allow this,” he said. “The impunity of the giants must end.”

The Spanish government said it is looking at options for holding tech firms accountable for “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,” as reported by The Guardian.

A recently produced report suggested that social media platforms enable the creation and rapid distribution of offensive content that enables their makers to elude detection and potential criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, the respective social media sites profit from such activities, officials said.

Sanchez said Spain’s Council of Ministers will invoke Article 8 of the Organic Statute of the Public Ministry to ask it to investigate the alleged crimes that the three tech firms might be committing via the creation and distribution of AI-generated child sexual abuse materials using their respective AI tools.

The Spanish probe into the social media giants arose after French authorities raided X’s offices in Paris over similar accusations, but X officials there have denied any wrongdoing.

X recently added Grok AI, which is the creation of Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company. Musk also owns X.

TikTok offers AI tools, while Meta AI is integrated into Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp platforms.

The issue raises the matter of free speech laws in the European Union and the United States.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission is among European regulatory bodies leading the European Commission’s inquiry into X over the use of the Grok AI tool to generate deepfake and sexualized images of real people, including children.

The investigation is to determine if X is complying with European laws regarding personal data and how algorithms might protect lawbreakers.

Feb. 3 (UPI) — Spain announced it will ban social media for children younger than 16 and introduce measures that hold platforms and people accountable.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and denounced social media companies’ misconduct. He said access for young teens will end next week as part of five new government measures against the platforms.

“Social media has become a failed state, a place where laws are ignored, and crime is endured, where disinformation is worth more than truth, and half of users suffer hate speech,” Sanchez said. “A failed state in which algorithms distort the public conversation and our data and image are defied and sold.”

He said, “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 alone: a space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence. We will no longer accept that. We will protect them from the digital wild west,” Sanchez said.

The first country to ban young teens from social media was Australia, which implemented its new law in December. There is also a measure in the French National Assembly to do the same. Greece, Denmark, Ireland and Great Britain are considering similar laws.

Spain hasn’t said which platforms will be subject to the new law. But during his speech, Sanchez criticized TikTok, X and Instagram.

Spain’s other measures include developing a “hate and polarization footprint,” which would track and quantify how platforms create division and magnify hate. Sanchez said the government will also hold social media executives criminally liable for failure to remove illegal or hateful content.

“We will turn algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal content into a new criminal offense,” he said in Dubai. “Spreading hate must come at a cost.”