Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday joined fellow tech tycoon Elon Musk in slamming Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez over his “dangerous” plan to ban social media for under-16s.
The Socialist leader announced a series of measures in Dubai on Tuesday to protect Spanish minors from harmful social media content such as violence and pornography.
As well as the ban, Sanchez pledged to change Spanish law to make the chief executives of tech platforms “face criminal liability for failing to remove illegal or hateful content”.
Durov spoke of “dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms” in a Wednesday post on his Telegram messaging app, which has an estimated billion users and is known for its privacy features.
“These measures could turn Spain into a surveillance state under the guise of ‘protection’,” he wrote, saying mass data collection and censorship would result from their enforcement.
Sanchez responded on X with his own spin on a quote attributed to Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century classic novel “Don Quixote” that embraces criticism as a sign of doing the right thing.
“Let the techno-oligarchs bark, Sancho, it’s a sign that we are riding,” Sanchez wrote.
Spanish government sources said Durov had used his “unrestricted control” of Telegram to send a message full of “lies and illegitimate attacks” to all Spanish users of the app.
This demonstrated “the urgent need to regulate social media and mobile messaging apps”, the sources said.
Musk reacted to Sanchez’s announcement with a string of posts on his social media platform X on Tuesday, calling him “dirty”, a “tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain” and “the true fascist totalitarian”.
The SpaceX and Tesla boss had already been embroiled in a public spat with Sanchez over his government’s regularisation of hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants.
Spain’s move to ban social media for under-16s came after Australia became the first country to introduce such a measure in December.
France, Greece and Denmark have been leading a push for similar steps in the European Union.
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