PM Orbán’s Fidesz slams Facebook’s censorship in Brussels after EP rejection to discuss it in-depth – UPDATED
The European People’s Party (EPP) and the European Parliament’s liberal majority do not support in-depth dialogue on Facebook’s censorship because they benefit from it, Csaba Dömötör, an MEP of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, said in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
The EP’s Patriots for Europe (PfE) group initiated a separate debate on censorship by Facebook, but this was rejected by the EPP and the assembly’s liberal majority despite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg having admitted that Facebook had censored content on a political basis, Dömötör told a joint press conference with fellow PfE MEPs.
Dömötör said this censorship had been forced on the social media company by former US President Joe Biden and it had concerned content relating to immigration and corruption cases surrounding Biden’s family. Though this had been done in the name of combatting fake news, he said, it had turned out that the practice restricted the freedom of speech.
He noted that though Facebook has ended its fact-checking programme in the US, it was still in place in Europe, and the EU was planning to bolster the legal framework of censorship. He said the European Commission was financing groups of activists not elected by voters that functioned as fact-checkers which often came from foreign circles, including those linked to the US Democratic Party.
Dömötör said this meant that EU institutions wanted to uphold “the practice of restricting the freedom of speech” even if this policy has failed in the US. He said the Patriots group was calling on the EP to set up an investigative committee with a view to uncovering the types of content being censored in Europe. He said they also wanted to know who was behind the censorship and “on whose orders”, as well as whether it constituted an interference in the domestic politics of certain European countries.
UPDATE: ‘EPP’s leftist turn due to Tusk’, says Fidesz MEP
The leftist turn of the European People’s Party (EPP) took place during the five years when incumbent Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk served as the party family’s president, and, as a result, the party does not have a single Christian Democratic feature anymore, Tamas Deutsch, an MEP of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz told MTI at a press conference in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
“A party that used to be a pan-European Christian Democratic party has become a formation fully endorsing the agenda of the left-wing liberal mainstream,” he said, after a debate held in the European Parliament on Poland’s programme for the presidecy of the European Council, which it took over from Hungary in January. “Brussels has parachuted Donald Tusk, an important figure of the liberal, globalist, Soros-linked political circle, into the election campaign of Poland, a key battlefield state in central Europe,” Deutsch said.
He said it was yet to be seen “how the Soros-linked globalist Brussels elite will respond to the significant political change that has taken place in the western world”.
Commenting on the Polish EU presidency’s programme, Deutsch said “Brussels’s fight against the ongoing patriotic turn is increasingly desperate.”
He said that the issue of war and peace had been hardly mentioned in Tusk’s speech, “but he continued to emphasise the importance of fact-checking and European media regulations which in fact strengthen the institutionalised censorship in social media…”.
On another topic, Deutsch noted that the legal affairs committee of the EP is tabling the issue of the immunity of Peter Magyar, and MEP and leader of the Hungarian opposition Tisza Party on Thursday.
“Despite his earlier statements that the had not sought to be a politician and deemed immunity unnecessary, Magyar now insists on it….,” Deutsch said. “Peter Magyar and his supporters, including EPP leader Manfred Weber and his party and the left-wing parties, are working together on dragging this issue out for as long as possible,” he added.
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