Brussels (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – MEP Csaba Dömötör said Patriots for Europe MEPs will set up a vetting committee in the EU Parliament on “the issue of Facebook censorship.”
As reported by Daily News, Hungary MEP Csaba Dömötör said that Facebook and Meta executive Mark Zuckerberg had declared with surprising honesty that:
“Facebook fact-checkers had been censoring specific contents under political pressure.”
Dömötör noted that among those that Zuckerberg mentioned as exercising pressure was the outgoing Democrat administration.
“What many have suspected, and many have experienced, has been proven to be a fact, but the story will not end at this point, and it must not end,”
he stated.
It is essential to determine exactly what content has been censored, who called it, and whether it represented an intervention in European nations’s domestic affairs, he said.
“Many people in the European Parliament often mention the freedom of speech and basic values of constitutionality. It will now display how much they take them seriously,”
MEP stated.
How serious is the EU about protecting freedom of speech?
Censorship in the European Union has received much attention recently due to recent issues with social media sites and regulatory measures. The European Commission has clarified the claims made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that EU laws amount to censorship, clarifying that while they do not ask platforms to remove lawful content, they do require measures to mitigate potentially harmful content to protect minors and democracy. This position is in line with the wider regulatory framework of the DSA, which seeks to make large online platforms responsible for the spread of disinformation and harmful content.
Additional efforts to protect media freedom include the adoption of the Media Freedom Act by the European Parliament, which prohibits political and economic interference with journalism. In this regard, the legislation covers transparency in ownership of media outlets and bars large platforms from arbitrary deletion and restriction of the content of independent media.
