[budududuroiu]

> In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy.

The disinformation campaigns have always been there, the reason they're growing roots in the mind of the average European is because the EU is spending it's razor thon political capital on things Chat Control, Digital Omnibus which are wildly unpopular.

Isn't it a bit ironic that in order to protect "liberal democracy" you need to reach out for authoritarian suppression?

[dependsontheq]

Yes we need to restrict the freedom of non citizens to influence our debates. And we need to have rules how digital platforms can influence our internal debates, we had this rules for TV and newspapers. That's not suppression thats's defense.

[budududuroiu]

How do you restrict the freedom of non-citizens without restricting the freedom of citizens too?

My parents and grandparents didn't fight against the Romanian authoritarian regime for reading of confidential communications to come back under a EU banner instead.

The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is, the only reason the "Russian propaganda" has teeth is because the current bureaucrat class in the EU Council have outlived their Mandate of Heaven

[whilenot-dev]

For me, it's a matter of authenticity at scale...

Let's assume I want every citizen to navigate the web freely while fighting propaganda machines as much as possible, so that means I want an automated system that creates the set difference between these two in real-time, as reliable as possible. To create such a system, and since there shouldn't be any overlap in these two sets, I can effectively put my efforts in half if I put my work in the detection of one such set.

The scaling problem, as I see it here, arises from the following: While the set of individual citizens (kind of) has an upper limit, represented by the number of internet users worldwide, the botnet nodes in propaganda machines do not. I can limit the set further, for example if I want to focus on the citizens that are part of my government only, whereas propaganda machines can come from anywhere on the globe. Internet users already need to provide a proof on authentication for quite a lot of services, while botnets generally want to avoid being identified as such.

While I'm far from in favor of Chat Control, I can somewhat understand why these initiatives are in motion at all.

> The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is

To put it mildly, this conclusion is non-sequitur at best.

[tankenmate]

"The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is"; it can be easily argued that this is only the case if democracy has little value because in Russia democracy does indeed have little value (let alone life, etc).

"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

So the EU and the EC are big lumbering organisation that make poor decisions; but then people make poor decisions day in day out. But just because you *feel* disaffected doesn't mean the system is inherently wrong (unless of course you believe that politics' primary, if not only, purpose is to make you "feel good(tm)").

It's probably far more accurate to say that wealth inequality is the EU's biggest threat and that "the elites" (which is more than just senior politicians and bureaucrats) don't feel the pain of inequality and so aren't internally motivated to do much about it (culture eats strategy for breakfast, etc etc).

[StrauXX]

The average person in Europe does neither care about chat control, nor have they heared more about tgan one or two surface-level news articles. Russian propaganda being more and more effective and these actions are not related.

[budududuroiu]

Russian propaganda is effective because the EU leadership has dropped the ball so hard that the Kremlin looks attractive. People aren't as stupid as you think