WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Tuesday that social media corporations should not censor views that they don’t share and called for new regulations that would govern the use of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in the European Union.
“Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” he said. “There is no and can be no consent to censorship.”
Morawiecki made the comments on Facebook just days after Twitter and Facebook suspended the accounts of President Donald Trump citing a “risk of further incitement of violence” in the wake of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of the outgoing president.
Without mentioning Trump’s case, Morawiecki said, “Freedom of speech is the salt of democracy, for that reason we must defend it.”
“The owners of social platforms cannot act above the law,” he added, noting that in Poland the functioning of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are regulated by law. “We will suggest that similar regulations are also put in place in all of the European Union,” he said.
The prime minister spoke a day after the spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she considers Trump’s eviction from Twitter to be “problematic.”
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