Last Friday, March 23, at eleven at night, with darkness and treachery, Judge Pedraz of the National Court decreed the precautionary measure of blocking the entire TELEGRAM messaging platform in Spain. He did so at the request of Atresmedia, Mediaset and EGEA through a lawsuit filed against several channels on the platform where content protected by copyright of said media entities was supposedly shared. This is, without a doubt, the greatest threat to freedom of communication and expression that has occurred in Spain in recent history since the Transition.
Evidently, this fact, which in any other country would be front-page news, has been touched on in Spain, as if nothing was happening. That is, with the excuse that “some channels” are infringing copyright, a judge decides to restrict and block a means of communication used by millions of users and hundreds of thousands of entities, self-employed workers and companies to structure their communities. and business. Spain thus joins the select group of countries that have blocked this application that allows the transmission of messages safely and without government control, along with excellent companions such as North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba and China.
Before getting into the subject, I find it interesting to share this summary by Marc Vidal, in which he explains in depth what is behind this movement.
Does the blocking of TELEGRAM bring us closer to the fiction of Yes, They will pass?
The quick and simple answer is a resounding yes. In the plot of my political and journalistic thriller that I began to shape in the summer of 2023 and published in November of the same year, I stated that an unprecedented event would take place at the end of that year and in its plot I described its effects a year later. Well, in these months events have not stopped happening that brought the fiction of my novel closer and closer to reality and even made the latter surpass the first. The blocking of TELEGRAM in Spain is another clear indication that reality is stranger than fiction.
Although the time frames that I predicted in my thriller are not being met, many of the antecedents that in ‘Yes, they will pass‘ are taking shape, giving way to what some will call a coup d’état, others a self-coup d’état. , but all of them, like the 24-hour Spanish civil war, as the main part of the synopsis states. And we have been seeing news and confirmations every day that full democracy in Spain is faltering. That a few months before several elections, it is decided to block, with an excuse that would be good enough to block the entire Internet, is something to worry and be afraid of. It is also a measure that shows the desperate situation of the government to try to stop all cases of corruption and rot in the partitocratic system that runs Spain.
In ‘Yes, they will pass‘ things do not happen in the end as some believed or expected, in the end society and different levels of the state manage to react. It is something that we are also seeing in our reality. There is a struggle between those who want to impose their regime using the excuse of wanting to guarantee progress, democracy and freedom, and those who see that they really want to do the opposite. I can’t help but wonder how this chapter of our story will end. Will Spain be an example of how to protect rights and freedoms or the opposite? For now, we are waiting to see if Internet operators accept Judge Pedraz’s imposition. Not only that, the claims and complaints that must rain against this totally absurd and disproportionate measure.
Imagine, just imagine, if we used this judge’s same argument to ban all political parties just because some politicians have committed crimes… Surely anyone who suggested something like that would be labeled as “putting in your favorite pejorative term”, Why then are journalists and the opposition not crying out loud about this blockade? I let each one answer this question, I’m sure it will be most revealing.