Feijóo criticises the government's plan to protect minors from pornography: "The problem is more complex"

Vicente Coll Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday,16January2024 - 12:43

• Politics The anti-bill for minors obliges all users to verify their age with their ID card
• 23-J Feijóo's key to protect minors: blackout on social networks during school hours and in the early hours of the morning

The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, lashed out on Tuesday against the strategy designed by the Government to protect minors from pornography on the Internet, a plan that has already reached the Council of Ministers but that starts with the firm opposition of the Popular Party, who criticize that the project barely delves into the problem and will not be able to solve it.

The PP believes that the government is making a mistake by focusing only on pornographic content on the Internet and not on the total protection of minors from all the dangers they face when accessing the Internet, beyond those websites considered unsuitable for minors. As published this Tuesday by ELMUNDO, the Executive's plan involves the design of a verification system that will force all users, including adults, to justify by means of an identification document that they are of legal age when they intend to enter platforms that are inappropriate for minors. All this without being able to access the user's identity.

But this verification system does not convince the main opposition party: "The problem is much more complex," Feijóo said on Tuesday during a meeting with his parliamentary groups held in the Senate, and therefore requires a solution that covers far beyond pornographic content platforms on the internet.

In fact, the PP has taken advantage of the relevance of this issue to recall how its electoral program addressed this issue in a more comprehensive way and sought the protection of minors against all the threats they can find on the Internet, beyond pornography. "Let them copy us well," said the popular leader to refer to how the PSOE is now taking to the Council of Ministers a partial measure of what was proposed some time ago by the PP. In any case, it has not been revealed for the moment what the position of the main opposition party will be if this measure, which is expected to see the light of day before the summer, it ends up being approved.

Last June, this newspaper published the plan designed by Feijóo's team to protect minors on the Internet. The strategy developed by Genova revolved around a "blackout" of social networks both during school hours and at night. A measure that, added to a "self-regulation" of the technology sector, would put a stop to the threats that children and adolescents face when they browse the internet. "I wish the PSOE would listen more to a state party," Feijóo reflected on Tuesday to recall how the PP already tried to make the banner of the protection of minors in digital environments its own just a few months ago.

Three plenary sessions per month

All this with the firm opposition, likewise, to the roadmap maintained by the Government with the independence movement in recent times, aggravated, they believe in the PP, in recent days. Feijóo announced on Tuesday a "political, institutional and social offensive" against the government in the face of "the acceleration of the pace of concessions" by Pedro Sánchez in the face of the independence movement.

To this end, the PP will turn the Senate into its great parliamentary weapon and, as Feijóo specified, will hold up to three monthly plenary sessions to counterbalance Congress, where the independence movement controls the balances so that the government can sustain itself.

Feijóo was responding in this way to the latest agreement reached between the PSOE and Junts for the validation of various decrees in exchange for the cession of migratory powers to Catalonia, a pact of which the details are barely known. "Our responsibility is greater today than it was a week ago, because the threat is greater," Feijóo explained to his deputies and senators on the matter.

In fact, the president of the PP asked the PSOE and Junts to hold a joint press conference in the Lower House this Wednesday, after holding the meeting scheduled by Santos Cerdán and Jordi Turull in Congress, to report on the agreements reached between the two political formations. "We want to know what the colorín colorado of the pro-independence supporters and the checkmate to the government consist of."