Comment by inglor_cz
2 days ago
Yesss.
It seems that public pressure pays off.
During the first iterations of Chat Control, I was pretty much the first source (a poor blogger with about ten thousand irregular readers!!) that wrote about it in Czech. It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ... Almost bizarre, I felt as if I was watching news from a parallel universe where that thing just does not exist.
The latest round was already much better covered by the media, including the publicly paid TV and radio. It took them three years, but they noticed. It was also more discussed on the Internet. Slovakia flipped its position precisely due to grassroots pressure.
German public broadcaster published a commentary last year after Chat Control was blocked saying that "child safety needs to wait" and lamenting that it didn't get through. Absolutely horrifying how much distance the media has from the people.
Thank you for doing that nad being a voice for liberty.
> It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ...
Unfortunately it's the pyramid of Maslow. It's hard to make people care about something that seems academic when there are much more pressing political problems crushing people and making sure they don't have space to think about anything else.
It's hard to make people care about privacy principles when they can't afford a house anymore.
That too, but my experience was that a huge part of the problem was sheer ignorance.
When informed about those plans, most people actually react with some disgust. But the European Commission was really trying to be low-key around this, and the media usually jump on loud scandals first. Too few journalists are willing to poke around in the huge undercurrent of not-very-public issues and fish for some deadly denizens there.
More publicity definitely helped the freedom's cause here.