Swedes and Danes are at the forefront.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Doesn’t mean the state should be trusted to a naive degree of course
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.
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.