Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Canada has a more important socialist component than the US, and it serves them well.
I wonder if you really did not understand my first post, or if it is just your take at flameware.
Have you watched the news lately? EU is a shitshow right now. France is going downhill really fast, Germany - I don’t even about them. And the rest is scrambling with their own issues.
Oh yes, Canadian free healthcare, right? Where a doctor might see you in 6-12 months. If you die in the meantime, tough luck.
No, socialism doesn’t work.
You know, everyone is a lefty until they start their own company, and then they quickly realize what a bunch of crap that ideology is.
So, here you are, people are pretty much happy with socialism, they are angry when you try to take it from them.
Also, I've read a lot a different version than yours: "ppl are righties up until they fell ill". Which happpens a lot more than creating a corporation. Ah and the result is quite life-and-death, which failing a startup is not (is common).
Ah and NO you won't have to wait in Canada if you have an emergency. And even an advanced cancer will be treated quickly, you won't have to wait months of course (or ppl would die of waiting, which the system avoids effectively).
Nice try, but no. They want the government to fix the deficit by not increasing their taxes or lowering their benefits. Which means the government needs to shrink.
Your take of it is, at best, delusioned.
French people, the ones shouting in the streets, don't care directly about that deficit. They care about being able to have decent lives with social welfare.
Fyi, the main hard points are currently: not wanting to push the retirement age, and not wanting to eliminate bank holidays.
One of the biggest components of the recent protests' organisers was LFI. If you do your homework, you'll understand easily that LFI does not push towards less social wellfare.
what the heck you place socialism as something towards <the overall happiness of the society, and not focusing on increasing material wealth>? first that socialism is a temporary state towards communism, that despite, it doesn't need to pursue communism. see China. second; WHY DO YOU WANT TO CENTRALIZE POWER TOWARDS A SELECTED GROUP OF PEOPLE? Karl Marx is fine, but it's a european guy who lived in 1800s. socialism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of the hope of donation of power coming from the public vs. the private... you need to be quite naive to believe the goverment will do the good without corruption. much more people with power allowing their goods to be taken. see our history before capitalism
Have you heard of SocDem, or "social democracy"?
It is everywhere. Even in ones of the most successful democracies on this planet.
They might have historically believed in gradual transition away from capitalism, but today they seem entirely happy with capitalism with a little corporatism in labor markets. Socialism is mostly branding.
This use of the word "socialist" (the use that is NOT meaning "communist dictatorship") is quite equivalent to "politically left".
For example, it correlates with free healthcare, free education.
This is not in opposition to "capitalism".
It is more, like, "maybe profit (financially) less, but care more"?
Seriously though, I realize that the American right calls welfare socialism, but that's just rhetorical slight of hand. There's also some actual American socialists who cynically label such things socialism to get more members, believing they'll be able to just slip in abolition of capitalism later in a bait and switch strategy - similar to the one attempted during the early American labor movement.
But welfare isn't socialism. If it was, that would mean that a fair chunk of the world has been socialist centuries before the term was coined - including American colonies where free public education was first instituted in the 17th century. It would render the entire socialist movement, for most of its existence, nonsensical.
And this is the other way around, "socialism" had the softer meaning of "welfare" way before the communist dictatorship even happened in History.
Here, in the "etymology" section of this WP page, you will read that all definitions (Émile Littré, Paul Janet, Émile Laveleye, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Adolf Held, Thomas Kirkup, Émile Durheim, August Bebel, and Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition of 1911), i.e. all definitions given before 1911 except one by Pierre Leroux, point to the general meaning of "improving society by better distributing wealth and caring more":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism
And that's why new terms were used for the subsequent authoritarian events: marxism, communism, etc. They exist because "socialist" was too ambiguous as it was already taken for the meaning of "with caring for society welfare".
Paul Janet stated socialism is generally used to refer to a doctrine which undermines the principle of individual property.
Émile de Laveleye stated socialism demanded a laborer reap the whole fruits of his labor and if other factors like land and capital contributed, then they must be unified with the labor. In other words, worker ownership of the means of production.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of course, believed property was theft and most certainly did not believe the continuation of property rights was an aspiration towards the amelioration of society, his definition of socialism.
Thomas Kirkup, who actually contributed the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on socialism in 1887, stated that "Socialism means: 1) That the working people aim at gaining, by combination or association, the control of land and capital which they lost in the individual struggle. (2) That order, economy, and prevision should remedy the confusion, waste, and demoralisation caused by competition. (3) That industry should be carried on not for private gain, but for the common good."
Émile Durheim was describing Saint-Simon who called for centralized state regulation of production and distribution.
And the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "Socialists believe that the present economic order, in which industry is carried on by private competitive capital, must and ought to pass away, and that the normal economic order of the future will be one with collective means of production and associated labour working for the general good. This principle of socialism is cardinal and fundamental."
Never mind that these are but a handful of definitions for socialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- to US guys: when speaking with people of European education or culture, the words socialist and communist have very different meanings. Mixing those will anger your interlocutor. You can avoid it easily by using common "synonyms" (in US) such as communist or marxist.
- advice to EU people: be aware that in US they only think of "socialist" as meaning "communist" and are very obtuse about it. Danger zone!
But the whole point, on my side, is to emphasize that in some cases "socialist" means "authoritarian communist" (that's been only when the word is used by some Americans) and in some cases (the most of the time e.g. if you are dialoguing with somebody from Europe) it means something else. See my other comments for more.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...
For others this is the last para of the first link:
> The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC.
So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing.
Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures youth crime across the country by collecting and aggregating police statistics from every state and territory.
Its data shows the number of youth offenders are lower for every state and territory compared with 2008-09.
The same thing can be seen when comparing the number of youth offenders per 100,000 people — the rate has gone down, although there has been a slight uptick in some states and territories since COVID pandemic.
But some states, like Victoria, have recorded a significant rise in youth crime, with its agencies also highlighting the number of incidents involving young offenders — not just the number of youth offenders.
How Australia's states and territories are grappling with youth crime
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-31/australian-state-and-...
Also: 'They've always been scapegoats': Behind Australia's crackdown on youth crime
Are states like Queensland and Victoria really facing a youth crime "crisis"? Here's what criminologists, political experts and Indigenous advocates say.
It's a dire state of affairs. Sweden is currently one of the most (if not the most?) violent country in Europe if you count gun shootings per capita [1]. The police is unprepared, has few legal means and resources. There are also few officers in general [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-...
No that is not ChatControl, that is just some Swedish thing. Chat Control would make it mandatory for servive providers to scan every single message in the EU for offending material and notify the authorities if anything is detected. It's blatant mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children.
They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished.
They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed.
Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare.
This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well.
I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing :
- increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts
- a youth unemployment problem
- housing price crunch
This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption.
Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it?
Why does this seem unlikely to you?
Surely that is obvious?
All it will take is someone to make a fediverse chat that can be simply stuck on a Pi from a premade image, and automatically runs a script to update the DNS with their IP and the kids will do it.
It kinda is but I didn't want to make that assumption. That is what I had assumed, for what it's worth. (Actually, I figured it was either knowledge or resources.) It also helps for the reason to be given explicitly so others can weigh in with relevant arguments rather than one that refutes something you didn't mean.
For reference of discussion in Sweden see https://chatcontrol.se/ (in Swedish). Social democrats and Christian democrats are the ones who seem to be more supportive of this law.
People there have had their freedom since the viking ages and probably earlier, it was never taken from them and therefore never scarred the culture. In other countries where peasants had to fight for their freedom their culture reflects that, but Swedes never had to do that.
So after millennia of governments letting its people be free why start distrusting the government today?
I think that trust in government comes from a mix of things, oppression was probably not a necessity, and centralised control was beneficial to most classes, but I see that there is also a very strong cultural element. Trust in authorities is taught in schools in very early ages, I see this with my children and I can compare to other systems (contrary to most Swedes). The folkhemmet ideology is still very strong in this country, it's almost a matter of national pride. To this add the tendency to conformism (jantelagen) and the avoidance of conflicts at all costs, which makes criticising others very badly seen.
Regardless where it comes from, I find that the uncritic, often blind trust in authorities in Sweden problematic because it hinders plurality and a sane discussion in society, like in the case of the Chatcontrol law. But individualism is also on the rise, very much so in fact, and the society is changing fast, and with it also trust.
If I were to ask what my relatives think of Chat Control I'm certain that an overwhelming majority would not have even heard about it. Hard to oppose something if you don't know about it. But even if they did oppose it - does the average European even know how to figure out how their chosen politician voted on the issue? Probably not.
Maybe it's a lack of journalism, I'm unsure, but I don't see any other reason for it. I also think that this is the factor in euroskepticism.
I think this is a fundamental difference between the countries that have fought for freedom (like England, France, USA), and the countries where the powers that be saw what happened and made minimal concessions to try to avoid unrest.
Doesn’t mean the state should be trusted to a naive degree of course
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.
Following the money requires actually following money. Not imagined money.
Do we have evidence of these companies lobbying for CharControl?
The biggest issue is the lack of transparency about the people/groups involved in those meetings and why this ineffectual privacy-destroying idiocy gets pushed so hard.
Your comment makes 0 sense.
And law enforcement agencies.
For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.
We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.
It's very much NOT meme driven. We're generally very sensitive to child abuse in Denmark, and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
Originally, she launched the "branding" push when they were talking about schools and daycare, but like all branding it spills out into other avenues. I have no doubt she weighs her job around children particularly important.
It's not at all a stretch to me to say that she probably genuinely wanted her party colleague, and CSAM enjoyer, caught faster, and I don't doubt that she believes this is the best way to do that.
That's not a "meme". That's policy driven by observation and factual cases.
This is what the parent commenter meant by “meme-driven”: When singular cases can be turned into an idea that is shared and occupies a disproportionate amount of attention because it gets packaged into a simple idea that is easily shared and repeated.
Real life is not a meme.
If that's not a meme("bUt tHiNK oF THe cHilDRen!!11") I don't know what is.
I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.
EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).
The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
From document 11277/24 [1]. Unless it has changed more recently, the exemption is actually considerably broader, and presents the unusual argument that the system will be secure enough for any private personal communications, yet too insecure for any company's trade secrets (which, apparently, have the same weight as national security).
[1]: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11277-2024-...
I don't believe that's what people think of when they hear "law enforcement is excluded". Officials will still be subject to the law when interacting with anybody else. They will still be subject when interacting on public services. Crucially, everybody will be excluded from private messaging servers, also non law enforcement.
Do we have any reason to believe CSAM is being distributed on the internal EU communication networks?
That's...
Wow.
We had a number of cases in Denmark over the recent years which pushes this agenda:
In addition to the obvious child abuse, there have been a case where video of a high-school girls private sexual activities where spread wildly on asocial media, fake-porn of various public figures and several cases of organized crime using various end-to-end encrypted services.
None of the Danish politicians I have communicated with like the ChatControl proposal very much, but there is nothing else on the table, which isn't much worse in terms of privacy invasion, so their only choice is ChatControl or doing nothing.
My personal opinion:
No human right is absolute, not even the right to life itself.
The demands of upholding the civilized society limit all human rights, and this limitation has always included intrusions of privacy in order to solve crimes.
I far prefer Dan Geer's proposal (See his black-hat keynote):
Companies on the Internet get to choose one of these two business models:
A) Common-carrier. Handles all content as opaque data, makes no decisions about what users see. No responsibility for the legality of the content. (= how telephone companies and postal carriers are regulated)
B) Information provider: 100% responsible for all content, no matter where they got it from. (= how newspapers are regulated)
The current "the algorithm did it" excuse for making illegal material go viral, to maximize profits, is incompatible with a civilized society.
I've asked the politicians whey they do not do that and the answers is "We do not want to piss off USA", in recent months that concern seems to be fading.
ChatControl is about non-criminal activity.
> phkamp
Hey! A lot of my views are heavily informed by your writings. I tend to agree a lot with your view of these things.
I personally extend it further by positing that the current democratic crisis, most readily seen in America, is caused by the inability of democracy to solve certain important problems, which I then again posit is at least partially caused by cyberlibertarian obstructionism. That's all just conjecture though.
It's nice to see you around here :)