Spain has launched an artificial intelligence system to monitor, rank and publicly expose social media companies based on the volume of hate speech they host and fail to remove, putting Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube and other platforms under a new form of state scrutiny that has already drawn a warning from the European Commission.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez presented the tool at the first International Forum Against Hate held at the Royal Collections Gallery in Madrid on Wednesday, describing it as a transparency instrument built on recognised academic criteria and operated by the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE).
The system, named HODIO, a Spanish acronym for Footprint of Hatred and Polarisation, will generate a public report every six months ranking each platform by the volume and spread of hateful content detected on it, allowing citizens and regulators to compare how different companies respond to abusive material. “We will make the results public so that everyone knows who stops hate, who looks away, and who makes a business out of hate,” Sánchez said.
HODIO will analyse how hate messages spread on social networks and assess the role of algorithms in amplifying polarising content, generating indicators to track the evolution of online hate speech and identify propagation patterns over time. The system combines large-scale quantitative data collection with expert review, and its criteria are described as based on established academic protocols rather than purely government-defined standards.
Sánchez said hate crimes in Spain had increased by 41 percent over the past decade, and drew a deliberate parallel with environmental policy. “Just as we talk about the carbon footprint to measure the environmental impact of an activity, this instrument seeks to measure the impact of digital violence. When something is measured, it ceases to be invisible,” he said.
The launch sits within a broader regulatory offensive that has already generated significant friction. In February, Sánchez announced a plan to ban social media access for children under 16, a move that triggered a public confrontation with X owner Elon Musk, who called the Spanish prime minister a tyrant and accused him of censorship. Sánchez responded by challenging what he called the normalisation of deception by technology platforms.
The European Commission has since warned Spain that national measures to regulate social networks must not exceed the framework established by the Digital Services Act (DSA), signalling that Brussels is watching whether Madrid’s approach remains compatible with European Union law.
Critics have raised a separate concern: HODIO is not limited to detecting content that constitutes a criminal offence but is designed to measure “polarisation” and the social impact of certain opinions a far broader and legally less defined category. The specific algorithmic criteria used to classify content as polarising or problematic have not been made public, prompting questions about accountability and oversight of the system itself.
