But why does Salvini want to give the Sakharov Prize to Elon Musk?
Social media platforms like X are only partly tools of freedom. So what does Elon Musk have with Nelson Mandela or Aleksei Navalny? The speech by Marco Mayer, professor at the Intelligence and National Security Course at Lumsa and at the Master in Cybersecurity at Luiss
The question to ask Salvini is very simple: why give the Sakharov Prize to the new owner of Twitter? I would ask the same question if Salvini had nominated Mark Zuckerberg, who has control of Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram).
What does Elon Musk have to do with Nelson Mandela, Alexander Dubcek or Aleksei Navalny, to name some of the personalities who have been awarded the prize for their fight for freedom in recent years?
However, social media platforms are only partly instruments of freedom. Of course, we are not talking about the Chinese WeChat (Tencent) which is the maximum expression of mass surveillance and digital totalitarianism of the Beijing regime. But even in our parts the discussion is at least ambivalent. In addition to allowing – unlike in China – freedom of expression without censorship, the digital giants (Musk's X included) use our data for sophisticated personalized marketing techniques , to launch subliminal and manipulative messages. Not to mention the addiction effect in millions of users (the famous digital addiction ).
Sometimes serious damage to political freedoms has also been involved, as in the famous “Cambridge Analytica” case by Steve Bannon in collaboration with Facebook.
Not if Matteo Salvini will find the time to answer the question I posed to Startmag readers. Of course, his choice appears even more strange if one considers that the majority of groups in the European Parliament decided to award the Sakharov Prize to the memory of Mahsa Amini, who died because a small tuft of hair came out of her veil. A year ago Mahsa Amini was yet another victim of the Iranian religious police who on some occasions managed to overcome the heinous acts that characterized the darkest periods of the Holy Inquisition.
I don't know what commitments he has made with Elon Musk, but in Salvini's shoes I would not fail to support the memory of Mahsa Amini as a concrete sign of solidarity with the Iranian women's movement and their slogans: woman, life, freedom .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/matteo-salvini-premio-sakharov-elon-musk/ on Thu, 21 Sep 2023 05:41:47 +0000.