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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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No, the obvious answer is the true one here. Europe and the UK really really hate that the fundamental, society-altering technology that all of their citizens are using >5hrs a day is completely out of their control, as is the AI that they are hoping will become the new basis of their economy. And they are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that the answer might be less regulation rather than more.

This is in no way the obvious answer. The actual reason Europe and the UK hate the US tech companies, especially recently, is that the first amendment allows for freedom of speech which European governments absolutely cannot abide - exposure of the scandals of the elite and what they are doing is anathema to the corrupt and honestly evil governments that they have in place (see the recent disclosures about Peter Mandelson). Less regulation would in no way achieve their goals of censoring speech and keeping their population ignorant, which is why they are simply trying to use their existing powers to shut down foreign sources of uncensored communication services.

The closest American example is when America legislated the sale of TikTok (did that ever go through?).

Yes, it did, and users are now abandoning the platform in droves due to the removal of pro-Palestinian content, the mandatory amplification of Trump/Zionist content and censorship which means private messages containing the word "Epstein" cannot be sent.

Gosh, I'm so glad all the Americans are explaining to us poor benighted Europeans how it is that we hate Mom and apple pie.

Here was me thinking GDPR, massive pain in the backside though it is, was to prevent data scraping and turning customers into commodities by selling every single jot and tittle of information you hand over to these companies.

Nope, it's because bald eagle screech as it flies overhead, Marine Corps march by, Star Spangled Banner flies proudly in the wind as 'America the Beautiful' is sung by the Tabernacle Choir we hate all the good things!

all the Americans

I'm not an American.

Here was me thinking GDPR, massive pain in the backside though it is, was to prevent data scraping and turning customers into commodities by selling every single jot and tittle of information you hand over to these companies.

Nope, it's because bald eagle screech as it flies overhead, Marine Corps march by, Star Spangled Banner flies proudly in the wind as 'America the Beautiful' is sung by the Tabernacle Choir we hate all the good things!

Did you even read my post? Your comments here have nothing to do with what I actually wrote, which was about controlling communication and speech. European elites, especially in the UK, have a deep vested interest in the restriction of speech and the control of their society through it. Are you aware of the D-notice system that's in use by the UK government, where the government can simply order media organisations not to report on certain subjects? More pertinent to the thread at hand, are you aware of Ofcom and their attempts to censor American websites to try and censor information that the UK government doesn't like?

Here was me thinking GDPR, massive pain in the backside though it is, was to prevent data scraping and turning customers into commodities by selling every single jot and tittle of information you hand over to these companies.

No one has ever explained how this actually hurts me or why I should really and truly give a shit. Meanwhile Europe is now a tech backwater with no real way to affect the world it's awash in other than to issue fines.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.

[...]

The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.

The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.

To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.

Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)

Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)

Did he ever write anything more relevant to the subject than this near-meaningless "freedom and democracy" vaguepost?

That's not Stallman explaining, that's Stallman pontificating. There are certainly modern problems with surveillance, but I think few of them have anything to do with data collection by companies on the Internet. Constant tracking of my physical location directly by the government (e.g. EZ-Pass, street cameras, license plate cameras, tire RFID readers if they're real, etc) or proxies (cell phone, private CCTV, etc) seems a lot more dangerous.

You'd think that the whole Tea App debacle - Tea App not having been usable in its purpose in Europe due to being obviously wildly GDPR incompliant - would have shown that there are in fact reasons for GDPR other than just hobbling the US tech sector.

You'd think that the EU making more money from fining American companies, than from taxing it's own tech sector, would have shown that it is about hobbling the US tech sector, and the Tea App debacle ia just a happy coincidence.

(see the recent disclosures about Peter Mandelson).

While there is some validity to the general point, the idea that Mandelson/Epstein is an example of a specifically European need for censorship to conceal elite depravity is silly - the decision to do the Epstein cover-up was taken in the US, and the British have promptly thrown every Epstein associate under the bus as soon as the Americans allowed their involvement to become public. The deroyalling of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and banning from the financial industry of Jes Staley remain the only meaningful punishments of Epstein clients, and Mandelson is now the subject of a criminal investigation. The reason why the UK police investigation into Mandelson only just started is because the Americans kept details of his wrongdoing secret in order to protect US elites who participated in his crimes - in the case of Mandelson particularly, Jamie Dimon, and in the case of the Epstein files more broadly Donald Trump.

90+% of what European authorities want to censor is either accurate information about the harm caused by immigration, or malicious lies exaggerating the harm caused by immigration. And, of course, the reason why free speech is an issue in the first place is the difficulty in distinguishing between the two.

That is the same thing that I said, in much more polemical language, but it's only part of the story. Yes, various European and non-American (Aussie, UK, Canada) governments are very upset that, from their perspective, unfortunate dirty laundry is being aired in public. Some of them surely have things they would like to hide, others rightly or wrongly believe that the country would be better off and less febrile if matters weren't presented in a maximally inflammatory way and optimised for engagement.

But there are also lots of other things that people are concerned about. They really don't like the effect that addictive Instagram and TikTok etc. are having on the ability of young people to concentrate or socialise, they don't like Grok in general and the nudifying features in particular, etc.

Ultimately, both voters and governments generally prefer for regulation to be possible, even if they decide not to do it. Having a big part of life subject to the whims of Washington and Silicon Valley rubs people the wrong way.

I actually agree with you that a lot of people are concerned about the impacts of these apps and tech companies - I try to minimise their impact on my own life and my (as of yet hypothetical) children will never be given unsupervised access to this kind of tech. But the problem is that as someone who lives in one of those nations(Australia), I can see the actual impact and effects of the legislation - which is to do absolutely nothing to stop the pernicious effects of social media, while at the same time forcing anyone who wishes to comment or provide input to the online conversation to provide their face and/or government ID.

I do agree that there should be regulation targeting these apps and that ultimately it would be a good thing for that to happen - the problem is just that the implementation has consistently done nothing of the sort and only really makes sense if viewed from a conspiratorial lens. While it is possible that the government is just incompetent, I don't really trust that they would make mistakes that coincidentally give them the identity of anyone making comments that they don't like on social media, and especially after explicitly saying that they wanted to end anonymous online comments - which Anthony Albanese has actually done.

We Euros love regulation and censorship both. It's not just one or the other.

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