President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the President of Mexico, plans to form a coalition with other national leaders to fight back against big tech censorship after the platform banned President Donald Trump and at least 70,000 of his supporters last week, comparing it to the Spanish Inquisition, a report from the Associated Press reveals.
“I can tell you that at the first G20 meeting we have, I am going to make a proposal on this issue,” López Obrador told the AP. “Yes, social media should not be used to incite violence and all that, but this cannot be used as a pretext to suspend freedom of expression.”
He added, “How can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?”
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, said the country has already started to speak to likely allies in this new quest to end big tech censorship at the international level.
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“Given that Mexico, through our president, has spoken out, we immediately made contact with others who think the same,” Ebrard said, according to the AP. Ebrard claims the country has already received responses from officials in France, Germany, the European Union, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
This comes only hours after Project Veritas released a video recorded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, sent to them by a whistleblower. In the video, Dorsey indicates that banning President Trump’s account is only the first step, and that further purges will see far more accounts banned. Dorsey also said the purges will not end after Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“I don’t think this is going away anytime soon, and the moves that we’re making today around uh Qanon for instance, one such example of a much broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper on,” said Dorsey. He adds, “our role is to protect the integrity of that conversation, and do what we can to make sure that no one is being harmed based off that.”