There aren't really any groups that want full control that have any power really - it's more like systemic pressure.
A police investigator trying to do his job is 100% sure he can solve crimes this way, to him, there is zero doubt about the benefit of being able to get info from social media, it's a moral concern.
The anti-terrorist squad - same. They see all sorts of threats, daily they are truly concerned, they're all waiting for horrible things to happen and in each case they 'knew they could have prevented it'.
Then you get corporate interests, who just want to 'sell gear to make money'
Maybe it even works really well ... because of 'checks and balances'.
But then, the 'checks and balances' start to fail, either from corruption, bad legislation, legal rulings etc.
Those forces all collide into the 'slippery slope'
Not "every parent knows this"; lots of parents fiercely oppose their kids being banned from access to decentralized information and communication sources. Would you prefer your kids get all their information from textbooks written by Glisaine Maxwell's father, all their news from sources owned by zionist-aligned billionaries?
Do you think this is about kids? It's about online identity and government surveillance and control.
Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.
>Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it.
Common but bad argument. You've misunderstood what the age verification control is for. It's to hold online services accountable for illegally providing services to minors. A parent being negligent doesn't mean Facebook should not be held responsible for breaking the law.
I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
You shouldn't be all or nothing here. To ignore the effect on teens is to be blatantly ignorant of social science itself. To ignore the implications of surveillance is to be ignorant of government surveillance. There is no value at either extreme.
ok, then what do you suggest? we don't get involved and decisions at the government level are made for us? I might be naive, but let's not be restrained by the cynicism of any involment in politics and governance is corruption
What? This is how governance and public opinion happen, at least in Spain. Government does something bad? Everyone out on the streets to complain, and calling politicians to change their mind.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, but doing nothing is never an option if you disagree with what they're doing. To think that doing nothing is better than something, that's incredibly naive.
The only part of the world where _democracy_ is a thing is Switzerland. Rest of the western world is utterly ruled by politicians, governments with ever more control over _their_ population's private life and money, and some who shout out "democracy", deluded they have any control over anything through voting lol.
"The climate", not decades of political mismanagement, has led the UK to its current predicament... In the specific case of immigration the article touches, inexistent border controls and welfare programs and incentives for "refugees" who cross several safe countries to get to England have a lot more impact then the days getting hotter.
Why do Europeans need permission from their governors to buy solar panels? I bet you also need to pay taxes on the energy you generate even though you alleviate the infrastructure need.
Because those "governors" need to first ensure that their grids and home electrical systems are equipped to handle a solar system pumping into the house power system.
You speak as though that were a bad thing. I'd rather not have people accidentally burning their houses down.
Once it's approved for an area, you go to your local shop, buy an approved PV system, and plug it in. No fuss, no worries, and your insurer must cover it.
If you pay tax on generated energy they would have to let you deprecate the cost of the panel as a cost. Would be interesting as to where that lands and if it makes much tax revenue at all.
If I had written a website with an input form that took whatever the user wrote in question form, and replied back with "You're absolutely right!" and then repeated the input in answer form, which I could have done 30 years ago with no AI, would that be a "huge security concern", or is the concern here not security, but control by the regulators that impose the norms?
That's quite the false dichotomy. You wouldn't hook people in with such a simple script, the problem with LLMs is that they appear to be rather good at getting inside people's heads. I rather think it would be a security concern if your simple no-AI website somehow managed to dispatch each user submission to a dedicated expert psychotherapist case worker, with instructions only to keep them talking as long as possible...
Where are all those "as an EU citizen" commenters? You are but a subject of an ultra-national government whose sole objective is ever increased control over your life and euros.
As a EU citizen, it pisses me off that the US is (with others outside the EU) trying this hard to lobby to undermine our democracy and freedom of speech.
And I’d still take this clusterfuck over the alternative current state of the US. At least this situation we can (and have been) striking down, despite all the naysayers on HN. Here’s to hoping we’re able to do so again!
Lots of places are socialist or collectivist and have a different set of problems, so the argument that EU problems can be solely attributed to that don't make sense.
I'm also not sure "collectivist" is the correct label. We can't describe Japan (and the PRC, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, a couple other SEasian nations) and the EU as both collectivist, considering Japan is the far more extreme version of it (I would say, only Japan is collectivist, not the EU). One or the other needs a different word.
> We Europeans have a pathological habit of blaming Orange Man Bad for all our many problems
Might be a different social circle, but I have not met a single European in my entire life of living in Europe who would blame Donald Trump or the US in general for the problems that we are currently facing. It doesn't take a genius to summarize that trans-continental geopolitics is much more complex than that
I would be more worried about police and wannabe police shooting people on the streets, detaining citizens without due process, sending billions to war in Iran while regular people are struggling with day-to-day life. Your universities and primary schools are restricted what they can teach or say either by government or religious movements.
Sure, the chat control is a serious privacy issue but acting like US is some sort of bastion of free speech is not based on anything real. And yes, while hate speech is not allowed in europe like in the US, we at least understand that freedom comes with responsibility.
I was reading an essay by Kant called “what is Enlightenment?” It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
He bases it on the idea that we should not be subject to be “lifelong tuteledge.” At some point we must speak up and contribute.
We can be wrong. Very wrong. We can advise our rulers to do terrible things. The Holocaust hadn’t happened yet, but the Wars of Relgion had - he knew how bad people could be.
Europe doesn’t seem to reject lifelong tuteledge any more. There want opinion and thought to be guided and formed by an elite class, not a noisy crowd of peers.
This is new. It was foreign to Kant, foreign to Locke, Hobbes, Marx, etc.
It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this. And it does seem they are poking at speech specifically.
Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.” Not medical malpractice legislation - just a very specific type of medical malpractice that has a very specific political constituency.
Meanwhile people who are subject to quacky things like past life regression or Freudian analysis are left with the normal malpractice system.
Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
Maybe I’m connecting dots where there are none, but there seems to be a big international shift away from free speech, with Europe taking the lead.
In America this manifests itself as “it would be nice if we could restrict speech like normal countries do, but we have to worry about the Republicans, so let’s not do that - yet.”
But it’s pretty clear free speech is going the way of right to bear arms and trial by jury.
What Kant, Locke or Hobbes imagined has only little to do with current societal environment. Our politics and structures are global and the age of internet has mixed it even more. The religions and christianity especially tried to control everything was said under their hemisphere by controlling who could print books or distribute them.
The european (or EU in this context) is truly multinational representative political instance (not a government). While it provides lots of opportunities and lets voices from dozens of different cultures to be heard, it also makes decision making hard. The opposite way to rule is authoritan or totalitarian way where there is just one ruler who has not real opposing forces. In that light you could argue that while EU is large political and economical alliance, it also fails to satisfy every political need of it's elected members.
what US is showing that less there is political variety (powerful parties) less there is moving space for expression, freedoms and change.
As a person who has masters in politics, I appreciate the fact that you brought Kant but more Hobbes and Locke into this. They are excellent reference point for those thinking about origins of societies and liberties. John Locke would have hate everything what current representative democracies are (including US). He would have loved the ideal of ultimate personal freedom but at the same time he would have loathed every control that governments have today over their citizens. There is no separation of state and religion in most of the western nations for example.
We are closer to world what Focault said but he is more recent scholar.
> It argues that people should be permitted to say whatever they wanted, provided they obey the laws.
that's exactly how it works
> Most recently the EU is considering a “ban conversion therapy.”
this has nothing to do with the opinions that are expressed in conversion therapy but with the insane practices - which actually try to enforce people to think like they believe is the "right" way to think about the world, which is far more restrictive than just letting people be themselves
> Really Europe (and other places) are using it as a way to weaken freedom of speech.
this is unfortunately true, too many extreme right wing politicians have been successful recently
> It’s a bit scary the Europe is leading the way on this.
it isn't, the US (though not just the US of course) famously collects data and searches through all of it if they need, and recently ICE had a hand full of incidents where they clearly used databases to profile people (just look at their use of AI cameras at protests)
EU is not a government for all EU members. You should look into what EU is and how it works before attacking it. Claiming that it's "ultra national" would mean that all of EU is one nation which shares one ideological, cultural and political sphere. There are 27 EU members with 24 official languages, 20 of those countries are part of the Euro currency zone.
But if you are a US citizen, I would refrain talking about increased control of life outside of your own turf. Your education system is controlled either government or religious groups. Your streets are patrolled by uneducated police troops without control and they are detaining even US citizens without due process. Now your government says they will block all foreign made routers. And did you forget NSA Prism program? Your voting system is controlled via gerrymandered maps which are changing constantly depending who's in the control. Lots of your citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and one health issue can bankrupt them and only way to survive is to ask money from strangers via gofundme. All because of healthcare and insurance companies greed and politicians lack of interests of their constituents.
Yeah, the EU legislation about privacy and chat control is problematic but saying that US is doing so much better for it's citizens is a stretch.
As an EU citizen I have to remind you that as a (most likely) US citizen, you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
As an EU citizen I hate this but I know it‘s a „when?“ not an „if“ topic.
I realise the EU is our only hope to defend ourselves against big players like China and the US and smaller bullies like Russia.
But at the same time I realise the EU we have in this timeline is one of the worst possible: a criminal venture, a safe heaven for the corrupt elite + their lobbyists and an organisation that‘s hell bent on harming and controlling its citizens.
Majorities for sane parties are not possible. Democracy is too slow, too indirect. Hell, this is barely a democracy at all, just like on the national level. As EU citizens we as powerless as every other citizen in the world.
As an EU citizen, I'm happy that the parliament has once again rejected the proposal, which at least gives credence to the notion that it not just there to rubber-stamp what the commission decides.
But the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
I don't think dismissing anyone as an agitproppist or foreign agent who expresses a dim view of the EU's tendency toward overreach and habit of asking the same question over and over until it's answered "correctly" is fair. Not when McCarthy did it, and not today. And I can promise you that nobody's paying me to post online, anyway!
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