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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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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.