Fight against billionaires Look inside Surveillance and censorship of everyone else
For Spain’s Sánchez, the fight against tech billionaires is personal
Submitted 2 days ago by lechekaflan@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-sanchez-fight-against-tech-billionaires-musk-durov-personal/
Comments
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 days ago
You do realize that the billionaires are already surveilling and censoring everyone? Google sharing info with ICE, Bezos killing Washington Post, Musk modifying algorithms to promote his messages and banning inconvenient accounts, Thiel promoting his crazy agenda through Palantir and so on and so on.
When you say “government should not surveil and censor” you’re really saying “only billionaires should surveil and censor”.
The proper way forward is to censor the shit out of Russian bot ridden, billionaire controlled propaganda machines that is social media and move discussion back to civilized places. People who think that places like Twitter are net benefit for society are delusional. They gave us nothing but bunch of right wing populists and disinformation while real media is still doing all the actual oversight. The sooner all those places are banned the better.
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
And the solution to that is to give the billionaires your government ID?
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You do realize that the billionaires are already surveilling and censoring everyone?
For more than a century. Beginning with hired private detectives and crooked cops.
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
Internet discourse is a public activity, journalists and demonstrators don’t hide their identities when publishing or protesting in Spain or the EU.
Why people want the internet to be any different is beyond me. The public square being anonymous is an asset only for malign foreign actors. I want to know whether people writing stuff are single individuals from my country/the EU or suspicious actors. In a free country, you can tell the government to go fuck itself without a mask, and that’s the only way to separate real criticism from manufactured criticism and foreign manipulation.
coherent_domain@infosec.pub 2 days ago
In a free country, you can tell the government to go fuck itself without a mask
Political infrastructure works well until it is not. U.S. used to have okay political infrastructure in protecting democracy, then patriot’s act happened and many of its loophole identified, now president can just kidnap a foreign president as “law enforcement”.
I would love a system where people don’t have any need to be anynomized, it would make many things much simpler, but that seems hard to imagine for me. And I am not from the U.S. and I have lived in both U.S., U.K., and outside of the west, so it is likely not caused by “U.S. brainwashing”.
I am not entirely sure what is the “EU secret sauce” to prevent Politician in utilizing these loopholes or strong centiment to gradually regulate speech. People in U.S. protested, they shot protester, and no one can protest forever, unfortunately. I am curious what would prevent EU to replay what US have now, except with much much more targeted data at the government’s disposal.
Ardyvee@europe.pub 2 days ago
I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (wikipedia).
solrize@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
The prime minister has endured years of abuse on the social media platforms he now seeks to regulate.
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
Nobody would go to a political rally by an anonymous dude in a balaclava with a yank or russian accent, but somehow everybody loves to get their opinions molded by random anonymous, possibly paid and farm based, actors on the internet…
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 days ago
Nobody would go to a political rally by an anonymous dude in a balaclava with a yank or russian accent
You would be surprised…
Foni@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I could start by leaving twitter
Tehdastehdas@piefed.social 1 day ago
Peehole@piefed.social 2 days ago
It’s kind of an interesting situation because it seems like he’s not in the Epstein file, and while I don’t believe he’s anything but a typical corrupt opportunistic politician his opportunism is left-leaning.
Sadly this is a rare thing in today’s world, but also a reason why the surveillance tech apparatus hates him so I understand the urge to regulate them, but as usual this is at the expense of our freedom and just self-serving.
Novocirab@feddit.org 2 days ago
Fuck every Axel Springer Publication, which includes Politico
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Hating on tech billionaires - Yes Government control of communications - No
Those things are not mutually exclusive
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
So does the government ban the news from criticizing them just because they’re not anonymous? That’s not the way it works in the EU. You’re very lost it would seem…
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Not yet. Because they don’t have the mechanism.
And it’s not about Sánchez and his government. I don’t think they would do it. But governments change, sooner or later someone else will win elections. Someone who might not agree with criticism.
And don’t try to convince me “it would never happen in the EU”. We have more than enough examples that eventually every country has a brush with authoritarianism. Even in the EU currently (eg Hungary). Prevention is always better than trying to fix it later.