by rdm_blackhole | 2025-04-05 18:04:10+00:00
This article is just a propaganda piece.

I am getting tired of the the tropes such as this one: Europe is pro-privacy and the US is anti-privacy. This is simply not true.

It may have been true a while ago but this time has come and gone.

> While the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrines privacy as a fundamental right, US platforms remain bound by laws like the CLOUD Act, which grants American authorities access to data stored anywhere in the world. In 2022, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta for transferring EU user data to US servers, citing risks of NSA surveillance. Despite the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, experts warn that European data remains vulnerable to US intelligence overreach.

The EU is currently looking at breaking EtoE so that it can unleash an AI system to detect suspicious messages and images in your chat message, emails, private conversations with loved ones and so on. That's for our own good of course. Nothing nefarious here.

> US platforms siphon billions from Europe’s digital economy. In 2022, Meta reported €4.3 billion in EU revenue but paid an effective tax rate of 8.5% through Irish loopholes—€2.5 billion less than standard EU corporate rates. Google and Apple similarly route profits through tax havens, depriving European governments of funds needed for tech innovation.

I won't deny that Meta at al are using loopholes to reduce their tax bills but saying that this money would be used to fuel tech innovation is just not credible. Most likely, this cash would be used to plug the government's deficits and build weapons.

Also whoever wrote this probably forgets that there are costs associated with that revenue. If there was such a social media platform in Europe with the same scale at Facebook, it would required 10s of thousand of people to maintain and develop.

Considering the overall cost of an employee in Europe, I am not certain that there would be much left to tax after all these costs had been paid.

> US platforms homogenize culture by privileging English-language content aligning with the worldview of the current US presidential administration and US billionaires.

That is also false, if you are on Facebook for example you can join local groups that are in your own language. Same for your News feed. On X (although I go there rarely), my feed is composed of posts in 3 different languages.

If people see mostly content in English ,it is probably because those things are more interesting than other pieces of content in their own language.

As for the worldview, would this person have a problem with the worldview that people support if this worldview was the official worldview of the EU? I think not!

> Moreover, the EU is a regulatory superpower which can use legislation to support homegrown social media platforms. For example, the EU can mandate US “gatekeeper” platforms (per the Digital Markets Act) to interconnect with European alternatives, allowing cross-platform interactions.

And here we are back to the same old thing once again. More regulations and more coercion. If the EU can't compete, no problem, we will just force every foreign company to do our bidding because we can't win without forcing them to give us a leg up. Is that the European destiny that this person is talking about?

And here is another thing that reeks of self-contraction: we should not use the US platforms but we should force the US platforms so that they may help jump-start our own platforms despite the fact that the US platforms are bad except when we need them.

This is a really disjointed post that makes very little sense in my opinion.