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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.

Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”

I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.

We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.

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Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.

When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.

But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.

But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.

People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.

Unless they regulate how algorithms can work rather than filtering what they can show?

The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.

Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.

Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.

Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.

However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).

Your model has a major gap in it.

Markets don’t come into existence ex nihilo. They come into existence by regulation setting the rules to ensure that the system works for humans.

You have nothing without regulation and government power, setting up the rules and enforcing them.

Further, when we look at the merits of the case which is driving this entire conversation, Meta acted in a manner that most people would consider evil.

And the market is rewarding them for it.

More or less the definition of a state is that it upholds the monopoly of violence within its borders. In modern liberal states that monopoly comes with extensive regulations on how, when and by whom violence should be used. This is called the rule of law. The regulations are usually broadly enumerated in the constitution or similar basic law, and in more detail in ordinary legislation. In democratic states these are ideally determined by the population, usually via some representatives.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is the rationale why many people think that some powers may be granted to the institution with the sole legitimate power to force you to comply at gunpoint.

Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)

The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…

None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.

There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.

So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.

As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.

I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.

This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.

A functioning democratic leadership listens when told they've done good, and listens when told they messed up.

Arguing that they should receive no support or positive reactions because they also deserve blame is how the center and left break down their own power: Believing that disengagement from one another is a stronger moral obligation than working together and fixing shit with people who are willing to listen and work.

The EU is an institution that is democratically legitimized at every level (Either through direct elections in the parliament or through elections to the appropriate national government in the case of the Council / Commission). Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes the Conservatives do some messed up lawfare to introduce fucked up things like Chat Control, but at least they were voted in and can be voted out again.

Big Tech is some foreign rich dudes being dictators of their little fiefdom doing whatever they can to make themselves even richer. We have zero control over them and what they do to our society in this pursuit. No elections. No recalls. No public votes.

The only correct reaction is for the sovereign to assert its sovereignty and lay out some ground rules.

Maybe you missed it but the commission and parliament consists of a lot of people and groups that are all pushing for different things. While we have chat control being actively pushed by some groups actively funded by Facebook we have other groups like this working against Facebook.

If social media was just your family, friends and acquaintances sharing stuff like it used to be you may have a point. But with the algorithm feed its turned into a der sturmer like propaganda pipeline.

This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.

EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.

The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.

The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.

This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.

They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.

They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.

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