András Schiffer, a prominent Hungarian left-wing public figure, a lawyer by profession and co-founder and ex-co-chairman of the Politics Can Be Different (LMP) party, has penned an opinion piece for the major Hungarian news site Index on the European drugstore chain Rossmann’s recently announced boycott against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla.
The German retail giant revealed earlier this month that it will not be purchasing any more Tesla cars for their company fleets to show their objection to Tesla CEO Musk’s support for former US President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump. Rossmann argued Trump has called climate change fake news.
Schiffer, who happens to be an ardent eco-socialist, however, is highly critical of their choice to do so.
He does recognize that Rossmann has the right to purchase vehicles from whichever manufacturer they see fit, just like Elon Musk has every right to share his opinions on American domestic politics (although he also claims that reasonable arguments can be made to restrict Musk’s speech to some extent, given that he is the owner of an ‘oligopolistic’ social media company).
However,
Schiffer is concerned about multibillion-dollar companies joining the political discourse,
considering that their resources far outweigh those of a normal citizen.
Additionally, he argues that Rossmann’s public announcement of the boycott may violate some fair competition laws. The author, a lawyer by profession, specifically cites Article 5 of the Hungarian Competition Act, which bans ‘unfair invitations to terminate or prevent the establishment of an economic relationship with a third party’.
Schiffer recalls an even more egregious case of such conduct. In June 2020, at the height of the George Floyd riots in the United States, major corporations got together for the #StopHateForProfit campaign, per which they pulled their advertisements from major social media platforms to pressure them into censoring ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’. Such corporate giants as Microsoft, Henkel, HP, Starbucks, and Diageo joined the campaign. As Schiffer points out, the social media companies dutifully complied, and censored the story of the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop as ‘misinformation’—which happened to be true, as it later turned out…
The author goes on to write that in the 21st century social media platforms overtook in importance not only traditional print and television media, but online news outlets as well. Additionally, these social media sites rely on advertisement revenue even more than the old media does. Therefore, as Schiffer writes, giant corporations can have all the more leverage on them by threatening to pull advertisements. This way, corporations can have greatly adverse effects on democratic discourse.
‘So it was not an exaggeration when I said four years ago that the global takeover of giant corporations was taking place right before our eyes, nor was it an exaggeration when I said in Parliament eight years ago that the onslaught of giant corporations against democratic states must be stopped, because
the real conflict in the world today is not between individual states, but between giant corporations and the states that are guarding their independence,’
the former MP writes.
Schiffer proposes a number of solutions to the problem.
Firstly, he suggests tech giants should be broken up by courts, as Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican Senator and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance have also suggested. Secondly, he wants social media companies to be subject to regulation by national governments or the EU (the latter of which is currently trying to use the regulatory system to come after Elon Musk’s X for his political beliefs, which Schiffer does not cover in his piece).
And finally, he is calling on us all to ‘boycott the boycotters’, and refrain from shopping at Rossmann.
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