English Language Broadcast - Social media bans: The struggle to regulate the internet - 16/04/24

English Language Broadcast

A few weeks ago a Spanish judge ordered the closing of Telegram in Spain, an instant messagging platform with more than 8 million users in the country. This decision came after a complaint from media organizations Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus, accusing the platforms of allowing users to share copyrighted content. The order sparked a wave of criticism and raised a lot of questions about censorship and free speech. Eventually, the ban was suspended by the same judge who, after a police report, considered it was "disproportionate".

The ban of social media platforms is not exclusively a Spanish problem, recently the US passed a bill to ban Tik-Tok for security reasons, they argue its ties to China threaten national security because the Chinese government could use this platform to spy on Americans. To tell us about the difficulties that fast-developing technologies pose when it comes to their regulations, on this broadcast, we spoke with Enrique Puertas, doctor in applied information technologies and director of the Big Data master in the Universidad Europea of Madrid.

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