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Full title: EU’s new social media child protection rules to require all social media accounts to produce state ID - Leaked documents suggest that some existing accounts will also be subject to identification checks
The democracy is in the process. Stuff like this gets introduced all the time by some politicians and pushed by some lobby groups, with counter-arguments from other lobby groups, and then gets rejected by other politicians and/or by the courts.
It’s how a functioning democracy is supposed to work.
If you’re an EU citizen and worried about this there are many ways to contact EU representatives and also to track what your EU MEPs are up to.
This kind of empty sentences do not make EU a democracy. “The democracy is in the process” – no, the process shows that there’s no democracy. “It’s how a functioning democracy is supposed to work” – no it isn’t. A democracy establishes a referendum for such invasive measures.
We aren’t speaking about empty technical definitions here. Also China is a “republic of the people” then – it’s even in its name.
This kind of empty legalese, this Newspeak, does not help anyone. Call slavery ‘freedom’ and then tell the slaves “you’re free! you see? This is how functioning freedom is supposed to work. It’s in the process”.
But there’s no absolute truth so the best you can do is try to come to compromises and offer processes to arrive at them fairly. All democracies out there have differences in a lot of factors. You can place some safeguards so the idiots or the evil people can’t take over easily but eventually if enough people want something (even if misguided) it’s gonna happen.
Be fair now. I’m not talking about outright twisting of words. I’m talking about concrete processes for considering competing points of view before making something into a law.
And you need to strike a balance because if you make such processes very rigid and inaccessible then you may not be subject to new bad ideas but you also won’t be able to shift to new good ideas. Speaking of slavery, it was once upon a time habitual in many societies, but it was the ability to shift our points of view that changed that. Same goes for a lot of other antiquated ideas.