Spain launches probe into social media giants as European regulation starts to boil

Spanish authorities will investigate the social media companies Meta Platforms Inc., X Corp. and TikTok to determine if they’ve spread child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence.

The investigation follows a broader push by European countries to regulate what has often been called the “Wild West” of social media platforms. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X today that the “platforms are undermining the mental health, dignity, and rights of our children.” He added, “The state cannot allow this. The impunity of these giants must end.”

The probe comes after a report that detailed potential criminal wrongdoing regarding the “generation and dissemination of sexual content and child sexual abuse through deepfakes and the manipulation of real images to create others with explicit sexual content.” It concluded that social media firms allow such content to flourish.

Like the U.K., following in the footsteps of Australia, Spain has already proposed banning social media for children under 16. Earlier this month Prime Minister Sánchez vowed to protect Spanish children from the “digital wild west” and hold the tech giants who own the technology to account. He likened social media to a “failed state where laws are ignored and crimes are tolerated.”

He particularly took aim X owner Elon Musk after Musk criticized Spain’s plan to regularize about 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, calling Sánchez a “tyrant” and “true fascist totalitarian.”

X is already being investigated by the European Commission over allegations that the Grok chatbot earlier this year produced sexually explicit images possibly containing child sexual abuse material. X’s offices in Paris were raided for similar reasons, with Musk calling the raid a “political attack.”

This week, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also opened a probe into Grok’s treatment of personal data and its potential to generate harmful sexualized images and video.

The clash is part of a wider fight between European regulators and the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron has called regulation a “geopolitical battle” against U.S. big tech. Spain’s Consumer Rights Minister Pablo Bustinduy recently said Spain had to “break free” of its digital dependence on the U.S., adding that social media platforms were trying to “destabilize European democracies from within.”

Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was similarly outspoken. Recently, he said he had read Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” a book that argues smartphones and social media have rewired children’s brains. Mitsotakis called it an “an eye‑opening experience,” stating that social media amounted to the “biggest unchecked experiment with our children’s brains ever.”

In what has become a war of words as well as regulations, the Trump administration has warned that the U.S. must join in “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.” His contention is that Europe could be facing “civilizational erasure,” including the loss of free speech.

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