Comment by SpicyLemonZest
1 day ago
I understand that you're trying to dunk on me but I don't get what the point is supposed to be. It's certainly possible to come up with other bad ways to ask the question. If someone was interested in genuinely understanding the public's opinion, rather than including a demand to take some particular perspective, they would ask things like "Do you support online platforms scanning all personal messages for child pornography?" or "If you had to weigh the two, would you consider detection of child pornography or the right to privacy to be a higher priority?" And of course for the latter you’d randomize the order in case people are more or less likely to pick the first option.
I suppose the gold standard would be to present detailed arguments from each side with evidence (if any), for context. Barring that, the original question did seem to provide a rough summary of each side’s position. It may be weighted towards the anti Chat Control side, with the formulation “pro says this, but anti says this, and imagine that you are affected”. So perhaps they could have asked a reverse formulation 50% of the time to be more fair. But the poll was commissioned by Breyer, and of course he wanted to bolster his position.
Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
Even your slightly longer formulation doesn’t really explain what scanning means and how that might affect people and society. Most people aren’t familiar enough with technical and legal details to dig into the implications without added context.
You could just write the simple effect of the law: "EUR02a. Facebook employees read your private messages. If they see child pornography, they will call the police."
It's important not to phrase it as "read your messages to detect child porn..." because that implies they won't do anything else with the messages, and Europe is a place where they still assume that if someone says they do X to do Y, they're only allowed to do Y and severely punished for doing anything else.
What scanning means, and how that might affect people and society, are precisely the issues in dispute. A poll which tries to provide arguments and evidence about contested issues cannot yield meaningful results. To pursue this line of reasoning, for example:
> Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
you might ask questions like "How comfortable would you be with your personal mobile provider scanning your chats for child porn?" or "What would you consider to be an acceptable accuracy rate for such a scanner?". Then you could reasonably infer that respondents who say "not comfortable" or "90-100%" oppose Chat Control, because Chat Control will perform such scans and they're not 90% accurate. (Someone else who thinks the scans are 90% accurate might respond that your interpretation is wrong, but this dispute would not call the poll results themselves into question.)
Yes, and it would have been great if the EU had asked these sorts of questions publicly to develop its policy. Instead it was developed mostly behind closed doors, and it was up to politicians like Breyer to oppose this in Parliament. He presented the question as a political opponent would, although he gave an “out” for people who disagree—you can still answer his question by supporting Chat Control if you feel most strongly about catching criminals.
I don’t think the voting result would be different if he had been even more fair about this question, as the poll is not something that MEPs are going to care about. This was clearly designed to be passed by any means necessary, and this time they got it through. But at least now people have a poll to use when they campaign to repeal it in the future, or when they want to point to the unrepresentative nature of EU decisions like this one.