That's certainly easier than sitting down and questioning your own decisions over the last couple of decades and wondering why people are voting in ways you don't like
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.
EDIT: And may be that is why there is huge distrust against media. It is quite disturbing that tea-party has became the new hippie movement.
Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .
In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.
Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.
The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.
The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.
Yes, it does. It matters very much. The difference between a governmental body ordering you to do something and a single employee making one comment is tremendous. Maybe the latter can lead to the former, maybe, but they’re very far from being the same thing.
Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it. So we could assume that whatever she says does not carry much weight.
But the website reporting this news does not agree with you here, otherwise, why report it in the first place? To them, it matters and it is important because she is part of the Renew group. The Renew group is staunchly opposed to the far-right and pro NATO and pro Ukraine, that is to say the complete opposite to this Romanian candidate.
Furthermore, the MP in question is a close ally of the French president which means she could have the means to convince other MPs to join her and maybe get some support from Macron to jump start some kind of investigation into this matter.
Macron is/was the de facto leading figure in Europe (before becoming a lame duck in the last election) and his words still carry a lot of weight at the EU level.
If she was a random MP in a small fringe party on the sidelines of the EU parliament, I would have agreed with you but not in this case.
Maybe you are right and nothing will come out of it but to me this is not nothing and it should not be dismissed as easily as you think.
No, that was not my argument at all. I didn’t call anyone a bigwig. You’re not replying to the same person and are starting from an entirely false and incorrect premise, thus reaching a wrong conclusion.
I don’t think this should be dismissed, nor have I claimed it. My sole point is that the difference as it exists is meaningful. One is a certainty, the other is a possibility. Possibilities may be avoided, with different degrees of probability.
To me it looks like the EU wants to become an auditor of the elections of the EU members and is taking sides.
And here I thought that the EU wanted to promote democracy and the will of the people.
But people are waking up and vote because of what they see with their own eyes.
Which part of this guy's platform do you think people voted for? In a staunchly pro-EU and pro-NATO country that has centuries of bad blood with Russia, with a walking and talking unstable living proof of it (Moldova), a pro-Russian Eurosceptic sounds like a weird choice
That’s no longer an assumption, we’ve seen that happening for years now. For crying out loud, the CEO of a major platform regularly repeats every bullshit he reads on his own network, as long as it conforms to his world view.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/elon-musk-x-po...
What is the substance?
I know some Romanians, and they ain't no papa laptes.
The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.
They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.
They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.
This would never have happened if it would have been a left wing politician obeying to the EU elites.
I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):
> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-hous...