until they fell out this week,<\/a> actively campaigned for Germany\u2019s far-right AfD, saying the country should not be burdened by \u201cpast guilt\u201d about the Nazi era.<\/p>\nNathalie Loiseau, a member of the European Parliament who is a close ally of Emmanuel Macron, said that responding to the Trump administration\u2019s comments would be part of a taskforce she is leading on defending democracy in the EU.<\/p>\n
Speaking during a visit to London, she said: \u201cThat is absolutely in the scope of what we are looking at, unfortunately.\u201d <\/p>\n
Loiseau claimed that the US government had interfered in recent elections in Germany, Poland and Romania, adding: \u201cWe just saw that in the Netherlands where the Government fell because of the far right, there was sort of a tacit endorsement of the far right by the US administration. And this is outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also pointed to Vance\u2019s Munich speech \u2013 Loiseau said: \u201cLecturing the room, telling them what they should think, how they should vote, was just appalling.\u201d<\/p>\n
The French MEP added: \u201cWe know that there is strong pressure from the Trump administration\u2026 to tell us that our regulations should be weakened. I think we have to resist this pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018We don\u2019t have a problem with free speech in Europe\u2019<\/p>\n
Tomas Tob\u00e9, a Swedish MEP who is vice-chair of the largest party in the European Parliament, said: \u201cWe don\u2019t have a problem with free speech in Europe. What we have a problem with is Russian disinformation, we have problems with manipulation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you take Mr Musk for example, of course he can choose to have an interview with the AfD leader, he can even say publicly that he is in favour of that political party, but it is not OK to change the algorithms of the platform X to favour one political party.\u201d<\/p>\n
He pointed to existing EU laws such as the Digital Services Act which could be wielded against X to stop it from deliberately promoting one viewpoint over another. Punishments could include multi-million-euro fines.<\/p>\n
US-based tech firms have historically sought to avoid being embroiled in other countries\u2019 legal systems but have sometimes fallen foul of court judgments. Last year X was entirely banned in Brazil for several weeks until the firm agreed to pay fines totalling nearly \u00a34m over breaches of local law.<\/p>\n
EU politicians have confronted their US counterparts in person to warn them they will take action against American companies regardless of whether the administration agrees. <\/p>\n
Sandro Gozi, another French MEP on Loiseau\u2019s taskforce, said: \u201cWe were very clear that for us, it is unacceptable and unthinkable that they tell us what we can do with our legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senior members of the European Parliament have threatened action against tech firms if they interfere with elections in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[32,295,2000,299,5187,1699,601,3027],"class_list":{"0":"post-168457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-elon-musk","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-jd-vance","15":"tag-politics-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114649612358471048","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}