The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obradoron, has condemned the decision by Facebook and Instagram to block the accounts of President Donald Trump of the US.
The President who called the action of the social media against his US counterpart as censorship at the same time declined to condemn the assault by Trump’s supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
“I don’t like anybody being censored or taking away from the the right to post a message on Twitter or Face(book). I don’t agree with that, I don’t accept that,” López Obrador said.
“Where is the law, where is the regulation, what are the norms? This is an issue of government, this is not an issue for private companies.”
Presidential spokesman Jesús Ramírez also said in his Twitter account that “Facebook’s decision to silence the current leader of the United States calls for a debate on freedom of expression, the free exchange of information on the web, democracy and the role of the companies that administer (social) networks.”
Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram has maintained that they will bar Trump from posting at least until the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Twitter imposed a 12-hour lockdown of Trump’s account.
López Obrador also said he was not planning to attend Biden’s inauguration even if invited. He said on Thursday he has not received an invitation to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, when asked if he would travel to Washington for the 20 January event. Earlier, he refrained from congratulating Biden on his election victory until after the Electoral College vote in mid-December.
I don’t have an invitation, and I have decided not to leave (the country) much, he told a regular government news conference. As a matter of fact and tradition, foreign leaders are not always invited to U.S. presidential inaugurations.
Lopez Obrador has only made one foreign trip in the two years he has been in office, when he visited outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump in July and praised his American counterpart for treating Mexico with kindness and respect.
Trump, on the other hand, had railed against Mexican migrants as rapists and drug runners. He even vowed to build a wall on the U.S. southern border and threatened to slap tariffs on all Mexican goods, which words jarred with critics of Lopez Obrador.
They accused the Mexican president of helping Trump’s re-election campaign. But Lopez Obrador said on Thursday he had gone because it was “very important” to attend the roll-out of a new trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Lopez Obrador was one of the last world leaders to congratulate Biden on his victory, saying he wanted to wait for legal challenges to the U.S. election to be resolved.
