Mex prez: I’ll lead G-20 fight vs. social-media censorship Dating app unblocks ‘riotous’ political filter
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has vowed to lead an international fight against censorship by social-media giants that have blocked President Trump from using his accounts.
“I can tell you that at the first G-20 meeting we have, I am going to make a proposal on this issue,” López Obrador said on
Thursday. “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.”
Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said the administration had already made contact with other governments to form a coalition over the issue.
“Given that Mexico, through our president, has spoken out, we immediately made contact with others who think the same,” Ebrard said, noting they had heard from officials in France, Germany, the European Union, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
“The president’s orders are to make contact with all of them, share this concern and work on coming up with a joint proposal,” Ebrard said. “We will see what is proposed.”
López Obrador’s effort comes a week after platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, suspended Trump’s accounts following the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol that left five dead.
“How can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?” López Obrador said.
On Tuesday, the Mexican president posted a Facebook message urging his followers to switch to Telegram.
He has referred to online platforms as “the blessed social media.”
The amateur sleuths searching for Capitol rioters on Bumble can now get back to the hunt.
The dating app says it has restored a feature that lets users see potential matches with similar political leanings after taking it offline for two days to clamp down on insurrectionists.
The outage had rankled users who saw the “politics filter” as a tool to hunt down people who participated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack.
Bumble said it made the move after a “noticeable uptick” in users employing the filter in violation of its policies, including people who used the app to “spread insurrectionist content” or attempted to “organize and incite terrorism.”
“On Jan. 13, we took the action to temporarily remove our politics filter in an effort to prevent that kind of misuse and abuse while we took the steps necessary to ensure we had the proper moderation tools and protocols in place,” a Bumble representative said on Friday.
“Having completed that process, the politics filter has been turned back on in the United States.”
The reversal came a day after Bumble confirmed it had temporarily disabled the filter, leading some to wonder whether the Tinder rival was trying to prevent users from sniffing out the rioters.
Immigration attorney Allison Norris drew attention to the feature on Twitter last week, saying a “friend of a friend” encountered rioters after changing her political preference to “conservative.”
“She’s matching with MAGA bros and they’re bragging and sending her pics and videos of them in the Capitol,” Norris wrote. “She’s sending them to the FBI.”