Facebook: 53,000 signatures asking for the stop of Libra

More than 53,000 virtual signatures were collected on a European platform asking for the stop of Libra, defined as “the Facebook currency”. 

The petition is present in three languages, German, Spanish and Italian, whereas it does not seem to be present in other languages such as French or English. 

It was launched in collaboration with Finance Watch and Finanzwende and is aimed at the new President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the current Governor of the ECB, Mario Draghi, and the future Governor Christine Lagarde.

The petition calls for “the European Central Bank and EU institutions to stop the launch of Libra private currency before it is introduced on the market by Facebook and other private companies in 2020″. 

The goal would be to reach 75,000 signatures, and so far more than 52,000 have already been collected. 

According to those who initiated this petition, Facebook would like to profoundly transform our monetary system with the introduction of a new global digital currency, but very different from the open-source cryptocurrencies currently available. 

Concerns are particularly focused on the fact that Facebook has already infiltrated a lot of users’ private lives, and that with this move it may be able to monitor data related to money. 

From this point of view, they blame Libra for being used to concentrate power in the hands of a few and end up destabilising the financial system. 

Moreover, the warnings and commitments currently made by the supervisory authorities, including the ECB, do not seem to be sufficient and thus call for a “clear ban against Facebook”, in the hope that the entire European Union will oppose this project by stopping Libra. 

The 53,000 signatures were collected in a very short time, and the number is constantly increasing at a very fast rate. 

It should also be noted that other petitions hosted by the platform, concerning completely different topics such as food, the Amazon, or migrants, appear to have collected well over 75,000 signatures. It is worth remembering that in total the European Union has more than 500 million inhabitants, which is just under the size of the entire North American continent.