The Spanish government will ask prosecutors to investigate whether social media companies X, Meta and TikTok committed criminal offenses for allegedly allowing AI to generate and disseminate child sexual abuse material.
Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his government had taken the decision to protect the “mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters” and end “impunity” on big social media platforms.
The government said it was taking action based on an expert report that analyzed the “potential criminal liability of increasingly prevalent practices in the digital environment, such as the generation and dissemination of sexual content by manipulating deepfakes and real images to create images of others containing sexually explicit content, thereby undermining the dignity of victims, and child sexual abuse.”
The report warns that social media companies can engage in these practices because they “facilitate the formation of networks that create, share, and monetize this content while enabling mass dissemination with speed and opacity that greatly impedes detection and prosecution.”
The measures, agreed by cabinet on Tuesday, come as Sanchez’s government prepares a series of measures, including a social media ban for under-16s and a bill to hold tech companies accountable for hateful and harmful content.
The announcement also comes less than a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the platform’s AI chatbot Grok, which produced sexually explicit images and disseminated material that could be child sexual abuse.
On Tuesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees the tech company with its European headquarters in Dublin, said its “extensive” investigation would focus on generative artificial intelligence capabilities related to the Grok large-scale language model.
The regulator’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, said it engaged with Company X over allegations that the @Grok account had the ability to encourage users to generate sexual images of real people, including children.
“The purpose of this investigation is to determine whether X has complied with its obligations under the GDPR.” [general data protection regulation] …with regard to the processed personal data of EU/EEA data subjects,” Mr Doyle said.
Spanish government spokeswoman Elma Sais said Madrid would not allow digital sexual violence against children to be “amplified or protected” by algorithms.
He added: “At issue here is the safety of our sons and daughters and the protection of their likeness, privacy and freedom.”
Saiz said the cabinet will formally request the attorney general to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute companies that have broken the law.
Mehta said he could not comment on the proposed investigation as he did not have detailed information on the matter.
However, the company said it takes a very strong stance against child sexual exploitation and non-consensual intimate images, whether real or AI-generated, and removes any such content it finds.
TikTok officials said child sexual abuse material is “abhorrent” and categorically prohibited on the platform, adding: “TikTok has robust systems in place to thwart attempts to exploit or harm young people, and we continue to prioritize and invest in advanced technology to stay one step ahead of malicious actors.”
We also asked Mr. X for comment.
Mr. Sanchez’s insistence on holding social media companies accountable and protecting children from what he called the “digital wild west” has drawn a furious response from executives at some of the world’s biggest tech companies.
Earlier this month, Sanchez said urgent action was needed because social media had become a “failed state where laws are ignored and crimes are tolerated.”
He also accused Musk of using X to “amplify disinformation” about the administration’s decision to regularize 500,000 undocumented workers and asylum seekers, noting that Musk himself is an immigrant.
The comments appeared to infuriate Mr. Musk, who called Mr. Sánchez a “tyrant and traitor to the Spanish people” and a “true fascist totalitarian.”
The Spanish government’s plan also infuriated Russian technology entrepreneur and Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov.
In a message to all Telegram users in Spain, he accused Sanchez’s government of “pushing forward with dangerous new regulations that threaten internet freedom,” adding that the measures could turn Spain into a “surveillance state disguised as ‘protection.'”
Spanish government officials have responded by saying Durov’s unprecedented messages to millions of users are aimed at undermining trust in institutions and demonstrate the need for regulation of social media and mobile messaging apps.
“Spaniards cannot live in a world where a foreign high-tech oligarchy can freely pump propaganda into our phones just because the government has announced measures to protect minors and enforce the law,” they said.
Growing concerns about the negative effects of social media have led many governments, including the UK, France, Greece and Spain, to enact or consider introducing stricter laws.
In December, Australia became the first country to ban children under 16 from accessing these platforms.
