I'm French and every idiot supports it, even the so-called left. There is nothing I can do except donate money every month to GrapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org/donate). Democracy is dead for me.
Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the website.
For any representatives that have no position / position unknown, rather than the website showing them as "Unknown" as you'd expect, it just assumes their position is the position of their government's EU Council representative supports this.
Many national representatives are aligned with opposition parties within their own country, and as such it's highly likely their position will deviate from that of their government, so this is a pretty bad misrepresentation. Highly misleading.
If you value democracy, I suggest not to trust any random website you read. Of course the French left (at least EELV/LFI) is not going to support this. This should be obvious if you know a bit what ideas they are defending (them and the others too), which you should as well if democracy matters to you.
If you're just looking at the website, do note that most (if not all) people are unconfirmed but show "supports" due to the leaked country position (hover over the pill/flag).
They will eventually come for GrapheneOS too in some way shape or form. Be it regulating hardware attestation being required to use devices, so that only government approved operating systems can be used, or imposing jailtime for possessing devices with capabilities such as GrapheneOS.
The left and the right stopped being about liberal values (like traditionally liberal or whatever) at some point, which are the backbone of democratic societies. I don’t see how you can have democracy without the ability to freely communicate. And that means freedom of speech but also the right to anonymity and privacy.
That sounds like contacting your MEPs could at least be worth it. Usually when it comes to things like this, the parties that I'd consider voting for already vote the way I'd like them to do.
(In this case it's even better - my country opposes, even though the governing parties are not mine.)
What impression of PRC social media do you have that makes you think the situation is different there?
In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media. It leaks into Taiwan constantly, especially when there's elections here.
> In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media
I was frankly going off the kids of business contacts I’ve met. But I’m realising they’re all wealthy—the kids of America’s rich are able to make eye contact, too, because their screen time is tightly regulated.
Yes, this makes no sense. No way they got 100% of every MPs to agree on this. They never agree on anything. I think the website took the fact that the country supports it and applied that position to each of its MPs.
Nobody would call them "left", especially not during Macron's 2nd term, the Walkers (or whatever is their new moniker) have firmly solidified as liberals in the right-wing sense (rather than in the bottom-wing sense).
Is there some way we can get people to abandon this entire premise?
You have a law that requires age verification. Does the right oppose this because they oppose government regulation? You have a law that spends more tax dollars on law enforcement, lobbied for by the police unions. Does the left support this because they support government spending and unions?
There is no consistency in their positions, it's all just whatever happens to be in their coalition right now and it changes over time.
Both "The Left" and "Greens/EFA", the major left wing parties in the Europarl, OPPOSE Chat Control!
Unfortunately the website appeared to show the MEP's positions as being *equal to their country's government's position", which is obviously nonsense!
This has since been fixed but the damage is done....
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That being said, does it not raise your skepticism bells even a little bit to see every single French MEP painted in the same colour, including parties that hate each other mutually, including liberal, anti-european, and left-wing parties... Should be enough to at least make you raise your eyebrows and be suspicious that something is wrong.
I think it's more apathy than an actual desire for more mass surveillance. People don't care until they are directly, negatively affected. Same as it ever was.
These so called left are as left as original national socialists. They share pretty much same views of state, security, country, media, ... they just want total control.
And that applies to all parties that call themselves left, regardless of a country.
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
It's more a thing like "boomers who can't install stuff in their phones themselves (except for suspicious apps apparently) vs people who actually understand privacy with the normies on the side"
Why would you expect anything else from the so-called left?
Do you honestly believe only the right want power and control?
In my experience the left wants this just as much, if not more than the right.
Right-wing politics is starting to show up again in Europe, this is true, but the left / left-of-center has been in power for a long time and need (at least in their view) to remain in power.
These kinds of laws allow the powerful group to gain more control and remain in power, it took no time at all for the UK version of this law to block videos of heavy-handed policing [0].
The low power group usually doesn't support controls on speech, as they know it will make their rise to power harder. Once power shifts these views inevitably switch.
This has led to the belief, at least in the west, that the right censor and the left are the guardians of free speech - because it was true and people want to believe the world hasn't changed (nobody like to admit that they've become the bad guys).
This also leads people make this mistake of believing that politics is a line. It's not, it's a horseshoe.
In the middle is the vast majority of people that just want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. At both edges there are loud, politically active, sociopaths that want power and control to protect and deify their own in-group, while, criminalizing and demonizing the out-group.
It's why, when looking at history, the right-wing fascists and the left-wing communists, seem to want totally opposite things, but end up with very similar policies and outcomes (illegal political parties, proscribed groups, concentration camps and genocide).
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.
In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.
So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
France is just very regressive when it comes to the internet, any laws which can make the situation worse is usually voted by all parties (see neighbouring rights or any anti-piracy laws), I don't think there's any real reasoning.
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
While I agree with you, this situation is also created by an all-encompassing State that rules every aspect of the French life.
Along with taking more than half of the citizens' income (on average), which dramatically restrains any agency that an individual would usually get from being self-sufficient financially. The snake eats its tail.
There's some old influence from the religion for sure but it's nowhere as important as you think.
France is still one of the least religious countries in Europe (Czech Republic usually being the least religious and France in the second position) and people talk about sex openly like a normal subject even at work.
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
