The planet were "critiques of western political leaders" are increasingly stiffled, and governments and "independent" third parties and "fact checkers" (funded and working with said governments) dictate what's allowed to say and what's "disinformation".
Yet here you are, criticising them with absolutely 0 fear of any kind of repercussion, and you could be 100 times harsher and still expect nothing wrong happening
>Yet here you are, criticising them with absolutely 0 fear of any kind of repercussion, and you could be 100 times harsher and still expect nothing wrong happening
How benevolent! Zero fear as a person with insignificant reach and following, commenting on a tech forum (and under a nickname). What a feat!
Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.
Even mere regular people expressing counter to the party line views in major issues on social media are fired, censored, harassed by the police, "fact checked" into social media bans, increasingly the target of new related laws (recent examples from UK, France), and so on.
Heck, just a couple of weeks ago students supporting Palestine in US universities were doxxed, threatened, and had a coordinated effort to render them "unhireable".
> Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.
Journalists, whistleblowers, and content creators in the west are living in fear of governments targeting them for saying things the government doesn't like?
Yes, they do and Thierry Breton is on the frontline in this fight. He proposed legislation that would have endangered free journalism and protection of their sources aside from the fight for editorial control of social media. And he did that multiple times, every time to protect particular interests that fool people that have diffuse fears about social media.
I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship. Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government
Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
>I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship.
A lot of these is outsourced governmental censorship.
And all of these support a single narrative, in lock-step about all kinds of issues.
>Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government
Yeah, just happens to coincide with domestic and foreign policy agendas and narratives the government pushes, and government affiliated/sponsored overt or covert "fact checkers" and "independent bodies", all the way to direct orders from the government. Read on "The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex".
The private sector companie don't have to be told what to do: they just see where the wind goes and act accordingly. Nobody was fired for being pro-narrative or for firing anti-narrative people. But increasingly they are also told what to do, threatened with related ("disinformation") or unrelated (taxes and such) violations, and such.
>Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
No, but I can say that I give very few fucks in what China does, but as a person in the EU I give many fucks what the EU does, and how the public discourse is getting increasingly less open than in past decades.
(I wouldn't give much fucks about what the US does internally either, but unfortunately, unlike China, they also export it)
You're free to think whatever you want, just don't expect people to swallow the "EU = literal China" without commenting, especially if you admit of not knowing much about half of your statement. I have yet to see an argument being strengthened by the "it's literally china", "it's literally hitler", &c. techniques
Oh, so we are back to litterally tens of thousands of people at non-approved demonstrations sayong they cannot voice opposition anymore as we had during Covid...
I would not expect that level of self awareness from Tankies. Such people always existed, and always will. They claim living here is intolerable, and yet they never seem to go and live elsewhere.
Did I say "no different from China or Russia"? (1)
Or are you notorious for making it ad-hominem, and of putting statements in other people's mouths they didn't make?
Yes, I frequently hold opinions "in contradiction to other people’s statements" and state them. I wouldn't do it if I knew that such blatant individuality isn't approved!
Though surely "putting out public statements in contradiction to other people’s statements" is true for any non trivial statement one can make about a subject that has at least two sides: it would be in contradiction with some people's statements, and in agreement with other people's statements.
So, isn't your accusation basically boiling down to: "putting out public statements in contradiction to [your preferred people’s] statements"?
(1) And isn't that a pretty low bar to be happy about?
In general I’d like stronger speech protections but I find your approach to be hysterical and counterproductive. For example, I don’t think it’s right to say the government cannot possibly request content moderation action, nor do I think it’s right to say that a private company can’t voluntarily cooperate with such a request.
So your whole hysterical “private companies can’t stand up to this!” is actually adding to the problem by giving the impression they cannot. In reality, they can, they should, and they very often do.
I'm not sure if you just didn't notice, but public and private gatherings were unilaterally outlawed just 2~3 years ago in the name of national emergencies.
The freedoms we enjoy here in the west are closer to erasure than you realize.
“Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.
It’s worth being paranoid about our freedoms, which is why I take issue with the characterization that we are just the same as China and Russia. We are neither as helpless nor as victimized as those people.
> “Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.
Well... It took one signature on an administrative act and almost everyone in Italy, not in China, was under house arrest for 70 days with armed soldiers on the streets. No oversight, no checks and balances, no constitution, nothing. This warrants being very careful of any government activity.
And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.
But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year. They are very afraid.
It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
> It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated. At least in the US, authority was exercised and at times found overreaching and at times found well-within Constitutional bounds. That's exactly those checks and balances functioning correctly.
> The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
What volumes does it speak?
> Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
Nope, not always. And even if that were true, it's also true that threats or emergencies have sometimes required extraordinary government action that didn't result in dictatorships.
> An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
Of course not. But obviously the debate is what is "a fundamental freedom" and what counts as "taking away." Sure, scrutinize away. Just don't assume that lockdown == illegal == immoral == people don't agree with it == you can just assert that it was illegitimate. People elected the governments they elected, a crisis emerged, and those governments did what they felt they were elected to do, and if you disagree you just vote for different leaders next time around. That's how it works. We're obviously not going to do snap elections every time a new crisis emerges.