The French president has repeatedly called for restrictions on social media access for younger users.
NEW DELHI — Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday blasted social media platforms and the tech executives who run them in a fiery dismissal of their claims to be defending free speech.
The French president used a discussion on university partnerships between India and France to flay nontransparent platforms and artificial intelligence systems.
“Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech. We are in favor of free algorithms, totally transparent,” Macron said during his remarks in India. “Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this.”
“All the algorithms have biases, we know that. There is no doubt,” he said. “And they are so impactful, when you speak about social media, that having no clue about how the algorithm is made, how it is tested and where it will guide you — the democratic biases of this could be huge.”
Since returning to office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has cast Europe’s tech rules as a threat to America’s free speech tradition.
While Brussels has spent the past decade designing legislation to rein in Big Tech through landmark laws like the GDPR, Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, Washington frames many of those efforts as incompatible with U.S. principles on free expression.
That dispute has triggered a broader political clash, with U.S. officials and tech companies warning that Europe’s content moderation rules amount to censorship, while EU leaders insist the measures are necessary to curb illegal content and platform abuses.
Macron has repeatedly called for restrictions on access to social media access for younger users, as a groundswell of European political sentiment builds in support of his position.