Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party and current favorite to be Spain’s next prime minister, met on Tuesday with Maldita’s team. “It’s shocking, and we can’t look the other way,” he wrote on X. “We have a duty to protect children, and this is one of my top priorities for families.”
Borja Sémper, a key PP lawmaker who attended the meeting between Feijóo and the investigative team, said: “What’s happening on TikTok is unacceptable. We’re not going to let this go.”
The Socialist Party has positioned itself as Spain’s toughest voice against the platforms, and Sánchez has made clashes with “techno-oligarchs” a key campaign calling card.
A spokesperson for Spain’s digital ministry pointed to the PP and the far-right Vox as partly responsible for the inaction over TikTok, given that they voted against the government’s designation of the National Markets and Competition Commission as the regulator of digital services. By rejecting the motion, the spokesperson said, they deprived the state of “the tools to protect our children.”
Earlier this week, Youth Minister Sira Rego asked the country’s data protection watchdog to suspend TikTok. “If it were up to us, TikTok would have been shut down from the very moment we learned of the investigation,” said a ministry official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue. “But we don’t have the authority to do so.”
The same official said the Ministry of Youth and Children had met with Spain’s TikTok team but hadn’t received a satisfactory response. “We asked them to voluntarily suspend their services in Spain,” the official said, adding the platform had only agreed to “look into it” without providing a timeline.