So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.

All votes have a certain margin or fluctuation, as individual representatives can be pressured, swayed, or coerced by any number of means. If a vote fails over and over again then eventually passes under dubious circumstances (start of vacation when attention is elsewhere), that seems to be against the spirit of democratic rule. At least to me, but what do I know? Maybe everyone loves this outcome and all the prior rejections were just a fluke.

The vast majority (72%) of European citizens are opposed to Chat control. Regardless, the proposal has been brought up and rejected relentlessly, mostly by action of politicians (commissioners) who are not directly elected to begin with. We have more than enough reasons to be furious.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...

Did you read the question of that survey? Talk about poisoning the well.

What you have to understand about issue polling is that it's very easy to get whatever results you want if you simply instruct the pollster to ask in absurd ways. This was the question posed to respondents:

> EUR02a. Some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content in the search for child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught. However, according to police reports, in the vast majority of cases innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position that your personal electronic mail and messages are searched for suspect content. What is your opinion?

Obviously this is not a good faith attempt to understand if people support message scanning.

Since you don’t consider that “good faith” I have rephrased it for you, in a format you may prefer:

> EUR02a. In the interest of protecting children, some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each EU subject in the search for dangerous, illegal child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught and children protected. According to activists who defend child pornographers, police reports indicate that a few innocent people may be mildly inconvenienced due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position of a law enforcement official trying to catch these evil people, who is currently obstructed due to false questions of “rights” and “privacy.” What is your opinion?

I jest, of course, I’m sure you would prefer something more straightforward and less manipulative like “EUR02a. Do you support child pornography?”

I understand that you're trying to dunk on me but I don't get what the point is supposed to be. It's certainly possible to come up with other bad ways to ask the question. If someone was interested in genuinely understanding the public's opinion, rather than including a demand to take some particular perspective, they would ask things like "Do you support online platforms scanning all personal messages for child pornography?" or "If you had to weigh the two, would you consider detection of child pornography or the right to privacy to be a higher priority?" And of course for the latter you’d randomize the order in case people are more or less likely to pick the first option.

I suppose the gold standard would be to present detailed arguments from each side with evidence (if any), for context. Barring that, the original question did seem to provide a rough summary of each side’s position. It may be weighted towards the anti Chat Control side, with the formulation “pro says this, but anti says this, and imagine that you are affected”. So perhaps they could have asked a reverse formulation 50% of the time to be more fair. But the poll was commissioned by Breyer, and of course he wanted to bolster his position.

Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!

Even your slightly longer formulation doesn’t really explain what scanning means and how that might affect people and society. Most people aren’t familiar enough with technical and legal details to dig into the implications without added context.

What scanning means, and how that might affect people and society, are precisely the issues in dispute. A poll which tries to provide arguments and evidence about contested issues cannot yield meaningful results. To pursue this line of reasoning, for example:

> Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!

you might ask questions like "How comfortable would you be with your personal mobile provider scanning your chats for child porn?" or "What would you consider to be an acceptable accuracy rate for such a scanner?". Then you could reasonably infer that respondents who say "not comfortable" or "90-100%" oppose Chat Control, because Chat Control will perform such scans and they're not 90% accurate. (Someone else who thinks the scans are 90% accurate might respond that your interpretation is wrong, but this dispute would not call the poll results themselves into question.)

Yes, and it would have been great if the EU had asked these sorts of questions publicly to develop its policy. Instead it was developed mostly behind closed doors, and it was up to politicians like Breyer to oppose this in Parliament. He presented the question as a political opponent would, although he gave an “out” for people who disagree—you can still answer his question by supporting Chat Control if you feel most strongly about catching criminals.

I don’t think the voting result would be different if he had been even more fair about this question, as the poll is not something that MEPs are going to care about. This was clearly designed to be passed by any means necessary, and this time they got it through. But at least now people have a poll to use when they campaign to repeal it in the future, or when they want to point to the unrepresentative nature of EU decisions like this one.

You could just write the simple effect of the law: "EUR02a. Facebook employees read your private messages. If they see child pornography, they will call the police."

It's important not to phrase it as "read your messages to detect child porn..." because that implies they won't do anything else with the messages, and Europe is a place where they still assume that if someone says they do X to do Y, they're only allowed to do Y and severely punished for doing anything else.

That's talking about a different Chat Control that has mandatory scanning. This is talking about an older Chat Control that allowed sites to scan on their own without getting in trouble due to privacy laws, which has been in effect but recently expired. The thing passing now is reauthorizing that older law.

We already had two votes to renew it before it expired, and both failed. The second one was forced by the EPP immediately after the first, and then they voted against it too because they failed to amend it even stronger before the vote.

They keep voting on surveillance state measures that the oligarchy wants that will limit the freedom of the people.

They keep voting and voting and voting until the energy of the people to protest diminishes or they find a way to get it in.

There needs to be a counter-balance where politicians can be removed or even punished by the people for proposing unpopular bills.

> How's that undemocratic?

Because they're not representing the needs of their constituents? Democracy is more than just voting—and if it wasn't, most states we think of as authoritarian would also be democratic.

Well, you can imagine a bunch of scenarios that match the "try repeatedly until it succeeds".

One good case: The original rule was good but had specifics that made it unpopular. Retrying repeatedly is a pathway to refining it into the minimal valuable version that is acceptable to all.

One bad case: The original rule is terrible and progress was stopped only because of public outrage. The assumption of the public is that a groundswell of opposition will cause a fundamental rethinking. However, because such outrage cannot last, repeated attempts will cause fatigue in the public opinion and resignation to pass anything.

If the situation is closer to the front it's "democratic". If it's closer to the back it's "not democratic". One represents a refinement to match the will of the people; the other relies on our human inability to focus tremendous energies continuously on a broad front. Both match a representative democracy repeatedly tabling (haha) a bill.

I didn't vote for the person that was elected. Where's my representation?

They only have to win once. You have to win every time.

To repeal it you only need to win once too.

Not quite, the EU parliament can't propose new laws nor repeal existing ones, only amend them and vote on proposals from the commission.

The Stop Killing Games campaign, for example, has noticed that the EU commission keeps repeating lobbyist lies and has no expectations of new laws actually passing, so they're focusing on amending existing law through parliament.

The repeal would have to be proposed by the same people who proposed the law in the first place. The European Parliament can't initiate the process on its own.

I want them to win. The internet is stupid right now. A culture eating its own tail.

Pray tell, how would stepping closer to a dystopian hellscape help the internet from eating itself? Somehow, having omnipotent watchers is going to make the internet... more fun and welcoming?

I think he means that maybe it‘s for the best if „the internet“ in its current state dies, i.e. people move on from the current platforms towards other ones or real life.

That’s exactly what I mean.

You could do us a favor and start by signing off yourself.

Accelerationism doesn't work.

That depends on what outcome you’re looking for. I want a fundamental change to internet right now, any change from the status quo is probably for the best.

If someone's asking too many times it's abuse.

Just as there a counter-suits perhaps we need more counter-laws. When something like this is defeated, a law is instead introduced to make chat control explicitly illegal.