i am really worried about what's going on in eu

The EU is using genocide censorship as an excuse to abort all "freedom" laws. A hillarious twist.

US big tech is influencing europe to do the same as the us, and opening them up for absolute power.

the only way out is to stop being US vassals.

No. This is a very naive & dated way of thinking about the world of today. We don’t really have distinct borders distinguishing politicians at that level.
It’s more accurate to say the Davos group is ruling all western nations. What looks like separate world leaders and parties is actually one world-spanning organization of those with power. And what’s worse, they’re all Nazis and technocrats.
The Nazis learned from WW2. If you invade a country, the people fight back. If you groom and install/bribe your own people into leadership positions, the people just let it happen.
- big US capitalists are the ones ruling western nations (and the third world, through neocolonialism). other western oligarchs might play a role.
  in this case, europe doesn't have its own big tech that compares to the US's, and i don't think they are allowed to.
  i don't think they are relying on a formal, yearly summit to do so either. the real politics are made behind close doors, and i doubt there's a public list anywhere of the people coming to agreements on how to direct their power.
  i will agree they are fascists who learned their lesson from nazi mistakes.
I'm not going to defend the US and it's tech oligarchs, they are all shit, but the way things are going, the EU and the UK are currently in way worse shape than the US in terms of all this 1984 bullshit.
No country is safe from this anymore, and we may very well be looking at the worse time to be alive when it comes to privacy, regardless of where you live.
- I highly doubt it's the worse time. There used to be no concept of privacy you lived in a small town everyone knew everything and you lived in a one room house and familys had on bed for everything. There would have been no privacy at all.
As a US citizen, pray for us 🙏
The olygarch's have ruined everything again?
- The tree of freedom must periodically be watered with the blood of tyrants.
- zoinks

The UK ain't part of the EU mate

It's worse in Germany.
France is doing the exact same shit as the UK with age verification...
Not officially, but the same powerful monied interests control both.
the EU is eyeing similar rules
Not any more 😭

Almost the entire western world is going authoritarian. Very worrying trend. It has to be stopped.

the only thing that can really stop it IMO is mainstreaming decentralized social media and messaging services.
You'd need to effectively replace Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp etc.. The only thing that totally keeps us from 1984 is that all these platforms for now have decided to be relatively free and impartial (compared to how bad it could be). But that could change at any time if the powers that be decide to on a whim. They could completely ban all privacy, pacificsm or any kind of political opposition tomorrow.
- No it won't stop it. Blood and violence is needed but we are sheep.

Old enough to remember how Europeans smugly thought that they lived in some sort of an enlightened and free society.

Now do Russia and and china
- Whataboutism
- No one in those countries believes that they live in a free, enlightened society...
  But the west always portrayed otself in such a light... Now everyone knows their politics are just as ugly as Chinas, Irans or Russias politics.
- Having supposed freedumbs is literally what y'all have been braying made the West different from Russia and China.

From the fact Britain produced Orwell, Huxley's Brave New World, and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, I figure the UK has always been some shade of "Orwellian".

Historically, the UK has always been very self assured in their goals and never looked for outside input while disregarding the people that they were upending. Anyone who wasn't helping them was viewed as an enemy to be controlled, oppressed , or destroyed. If that isn't a non-political explanation of rightwing authoritarianism, I'm not sure what is.

We are living in Orwellian society, it's just the news catching up with reality.

The news has been trying to obfuscate this awareness for as long as possible.
- It has been effective but every day more people take notice.

I am not aware of any western country that isn't a police state.

The reason the police state gets worse and worse is simply that our glouriouss western countries shift closer and closer to fascism every day.

Unfortunately that doesn't only impact privacy but also stuff like state repression or presence of state thugs.

To quote very smart people:

OOONEEE SOLLUTION
REEEVOLUTION

I hope for a revolution, but as for my country (Italy), too many people have been brainwashed by mainstream media's pro-European and Atlanticist propaganda. We call them "euroinomani" ("euro "drug" addicts")

For the age verification is it possible to sign a petition? I think is not too late to join forces… or anything but not letting them go further.. as of the chat control probably only contacting the representatives. I really hope lawyers and businessmen try to fight it…

I’m quite curious to see how it will end in the UK with the porn filters because the people don’t seem to be inclined to use their IDs online, the system is brittle, and non-porn websites are being blocked too.

As a Brit who has seen the UK government's ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I'm going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can't publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren't based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they'll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.
- then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function
  A little credit here. They'd rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.
  On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don't are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn't present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.
  I really don't think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don't like is starting with things like this.
Sign ups for Swiss VPN providers from the UK are up massively, nobody will use their ID for porn.
- Must be a great time to be in þe VPN market.

Have you already written to your members of parliament about chat control, and possibly other matters? Seriously, do it. There is very little you can do, but this might actually help. Slightly. Maybe.

The UK would be one if anyone could be bothered to run it properly.

They're looking to install Nigel Farage as their prime minister. The island is derelict.
- Not quite.
  Farage keeps running around saying "Pick me! Pick me!" and the press keep asking "Is farage a viable candidate?" while not offering the same credence to anyone else.
  The British public are "We're fucking sick of this bollocks from the establishment" and a lot of them are falling for the privately educated ex city trader Farages nonsense that he's a "man of the people" because all the centrist parties are saying "aren't immigrants awful?" in an attempt to distract from their own incompetence and quite frankly, the left is 10 years behind in offering a coherent alternative to all the bullshit.

Orwell never could have imagined society as it exists currently.

Is this thread about the rising fascist movements? Oh...

Is it about the refugees from their colonies they drown in the Mediterranean? Oh...

Well is it about the pivot from renewables and nuclear to oil and gas? Wh... well what is...

Oh. This is a thread about your online treats.

#1 on lemmy 'top in last 12 hours'

you are saying that as if all (or any) of those would have started to be a problem just in the last 12 hours...
and this is not about "online treats", but online threats. It's not just netflix, amazon and other silly unnecessary things, it's everything, including every forum where people can organize and discuss things, fucking youtube with their tons of knowledge based content, ...
but sure! we have 4 other problems, count climate change too, that's 5, we really should just ignore this one because it's literally meaningless!
- You're right! I forgot about the genocide your governments are enabling!

As an American it's nice to see were not the only ones in a complete downward spiral.

EDIT: wild that there are users pretending to be butthurt by this obviously joke comment so they can farm upvotes from the tens of users on Lemmy

It's nice to see that the rest of the world is just as bad as U.S.
As an American, no it's not nice. Why would I want more of this shit elsewhere?
- Also, Americans are subject to supporting this bullshit. If any company in the us (or in the world really) owns or maintains data that the EU qualifies as adult-oriented, they have to either maintain a means of actively prevent EU users or support the filtering and tracking that the EU mandates. If not, they can be fined by the EU, and as long as there is a financial relationship between the us and EU, the fines will be enforced.
  This has global impact.
  I'm curious if more companies will move their hosting to countries that are non compliant with EU regulations and move to accepting payment from cryptocurrency only. I would not be surprised if x-rated content providers were to move to such places.
Nice? I wish it was just the US so getting to another country would make it safe for us. This is awful.
Wishing ill on people, eh?

how will this "client side scanning" be implemented?

it's, not only worrying, but very confusing.

Not even close to the horrors of an Orwellian society and saying it is is an insult to the characters in those books. It isn't great though, and it's heading in a troubling direction

Oh no! Wouldn't want to insult those fictional characters
I think the characters in the book will forgive as that's a work of fiction and they are not real. That's like saying I insulted Bugs Bunny for having big teeth. We'll get through this calamity. ✌🏻
- I'm the guy that gets offended on behalf of what ever I want.
and it’s heading in a troubling direction
I'd say it's heading in an orwellian direction...

The UK is owned by a different country. That country is Italy, where the Roman Catholic Church resides. Any Catholic-owned platform will shut down anything that goes against the RCC, or at best, they'll just minimize the reach for those who have some things to say against the Jesuits and Catholic leadership.

That's from what my producer, Neigsendoig, researched.

I feel like at least in Germany privacy matters are alive and kicking thanks to GDPR / DSGVO

You literally have to provide identification when buying a SIM card for a mobile phone in Germany and it all gets registered.
Most of Europe doesn't have any such thing and even the UK with all it's authoritarian overreach doesn't have this.
This is literally no other use for this other than for the state to be to know who calls who.
Germany is a lot more "papers please" than most of Europe in my personal experience.
- Yeah I think it's very subjective and this one anedcote is just that.
  In Germany cash is preferred in most places, and that makes tracking payments difficult. This is not the case in most other european countries. That's an another anecdote for you.
German EU politicians are also pushing the chat control BS, it seems like it is only a matter of time until these psychos slip these invasive laws through.
- I'm noticing a pattern on Lemmy for every time someone makes a general criticism of the EU, the West (tm), Europe etc there's someone in the comments specifically mentioning how Germany is good, actually, regardless of whether Germany was explicitly mentioned or whether it's actually true that Germany is better than other places in the topic at hand. In all likelihood it's just that there's more Germans on Lemmy than people from smaller countries, but it's starting to feel like some weird out of place patriotism is on the rise or something.
- Merz's government should be overthrown just for the fact that that semi-human turd used to be a manager at BlackRock
- There are also German EU politicians pushing against it. It's not like there is a German consensus to it.
- What do you mean with chat control BS? Care to share a link?
  That being said, there are a lot of worrying politicians out there.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/14/germany-orders-deportation-of-pro-palestine-activists-what-you-should-know
Germany always had a different flavor of distopia, I think the people there similarly to America drink the state sanctioned cool aid so they can never have a Orwellian distopia.
- I don't understand what your article has to do with privacy. I understood that is the framework of this conversation. Yes, there's a lot of scary rightwing policing in Germany, but can we stay on topic?