Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has addressed the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to attack online anonymity and make a number of radical comments concerning “misinformation” and the nature and in his view, the extremely negative impact of social media.
Sanchez wants to end anonymity on these platforms, replace it with, in his own words, “pseudonymity” – and force platforms to link all accounts to a European Digital Identity Wallet.
The result would be the ability of the authorities to know real life identities of every social media user, while those users would still be allowed to use nicknames “if they want” instead of their real names online, the Spanish prime minister said.
He considers this to be an example of “accountability” that in no way undermines freedom of speech – according to him, it is in fact, and somehow – “an essential compliment” to free expression.
Sanchez picked the examples that politicians pushing for similar policies always do, to make them appear more palatable – solving crimes and protecting minors.
Sanchez also sees anonymity as “paving the way for misinformation, hate speech and cyber harassment.” While unmasking all social media users to the government unavoidably deeply undermines their privacy, the prime minister decided to go for the fallacy that privacy is possible without anonymity.
Other than promoting this idea of what one might call “pseudoprivacy,” Sanchez also went after social media owners and CEOs (whom he referred to as “tycoons”), accusing the companies behind the platforms of concentrating “power and wealth in the hands of just a few.”
But he didn’t voice a similar complaint about the legacy media ecosystem that operates along the same lines, while also being considerably less diverse in terms of speech and opinion.
Sanchez treats social media as a “threat” that needs to be fought and “faced head-on” by world leaders and proposes holding CEOs “personally accountable for noncompliance with laws and norms in their platforms” as one (intimidation) tactic.
His speech is littered with alarmist language, likening social platforms to “invaders concealed in the belly of a Trojan horse” that fuel misinformation, cyberbullying, hate speech, sex offenses, privacy violations, anxiety, violence, loneliness – not to mention, “harming the liberal order and democracy.”
But at one point, Sanchez reveals the gist of his impassioned complaints against social media, when he tells his Davos audience, “Let’s take back control.”
