BasilElton

Recently Spain's president has announced that following the footsteps of other countries, and no doubt inspired by the Chat Control proposal (Spain’s government has actually been in favor of it from the beginning), that they’re looking into banning social media for people under 16. Take a wild guess about how they’re planning to enforce that, yes, ID verification or photos so AI can determine your age. Just to be exact, the plan is not to force it themselves, but rather require that companies put it in place. Basically what the UK is doing with the Online Safety Act, for example. I will say it again in case it’s not completely clear by now: this is not for children’s safety, this is not out of kindness or worry for the people, this is a blatant abuse of power they’re trying to pull off so they can further monitor people’s activity online. Internet anonymity is scary for governments because it’s a major obstacle in taking control of discussion spaces between people. They're terrified

Current state of Chat Control: Original post Heya, I've been away from this topic for a while, mainly because I had enough negativity going on and couldn't stand having to deal with more bad news if they did come. Well, more bad news have come indeed. Basically, since the last unsuccessful voting the Danish Presidency has been trying to push a far more insidious, underhanded version of their proposal to try to get the other members to agree. The current proposal has been presented as a lesser version of the original, “more lenient", but in truth it’s still the same authoritarian crap it has always been. I’ve put a great article below that explains the actual implications of this version of the proposal. Again, this is the greatest threat to freedom of speech, privacy and online safety in the history of the EU. Please, do not fall for this. They’ve put April 2026 as the deadline to approve the proposal. If you will, please take a look at the website, there’s instructions there: