Problema Europa Elon Musk: lui e altri oligarchi tecnologici stanno rendendo impossibile condurre elezioni gratuite ed eque ovunque.

>Quite soon, democracies around the world might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation.

So suspend them.

My only hope at this point is that the acceleration on display by the tech-oligarchy is going to make a mark. Musk and his cohort of billionaires have gone full mask off and I hope that European countries will be able to parse that prior to upcoming elections. I acknowledge that there are those like AFD for whom this won’t make any sort of difference, but for the rest of those who may have been fence sitters, the current state of the US march toward tech-oligarchy-fascism , in speed goose-step, will be a wake up call.

The EU needs to grow a pair and stand up to fascist America. Ban X and Facebook

Go back to ballot boxes.

It’s been that way for a while. It’s just dialled up to 11 now.

In the aftermath of the horrible year of 2016 I complained to my friends and family that I fear the democratic societies are no longer able to run proper elections without an entirely new approach to social networks and targeted political campaigning.

This started to be painfully obvious around the Brexit referendum (after the joke of a referendum in Netherlands on Ukraine which clearly served as a pilot project). Especially with the scandal about Cambridge Analytica, one of the new groups of psychopathic immoral cretins marrying modern means of user profiling with micro-targetted campaigns and advanced opinion moulding strategies.

*”You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time”*

Social media user targetting and echo chambers made it possible to lie to most people most of the time in a way we’ve never truly experienced. A hostile actor can now speak in 1000 tailored voices to 1000 people profiled to be susceptible to something at once and the full picture will stay hidden from the rest.

The media of the old also lied and misdirected, but it was all in the open, visible to all, and the contradictions were fewer and easier to call out.

Until we figure out a lasting solution for this, elections and referendums are fundamentally compromised.

During an American electionDuring an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, [limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate](https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/party-spending-and-pre-poll-donations-and-loans-uk-parliamentary-general-election/spending-limit). In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which [announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S.](https://apnews.com/article/meta-facts-trump-musk-community-notes-413b8495939a058ff2d25fd23f2e0f43), also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

This is exactly what happened in Serbia. When you once allow them to spread their news, it is so deficcult on a fair way to win elections. On top of it, they will not stop there, they will take all power so that corruption is allowed. When you come there, then you have to fight for the freedom on the street.

But also against minorities because they will be for sure pro-goverment, because they will not understand that all social networks and television are saying all is good and some people are complaining. Therefore, support Serbia! 🙂

Does any European country use electronic voting for their main elections? As someone who works in cyber security this has me more concerned than anything at least make sure it can’t be hacked.

Start regulating the internet and stop using American companies. It’s that simple.

20 years ago, I’d have fought to the death to keep the internet unregulated. But the companies, the governments, the billionaires, they have ruined it. It’s an absolute shell of what it was and it causes nothing but harm. 20-25 years ago, it was genuinely wonderful and an absolute wild west of communities and individuals. Now its homogonised, ad revenued to the eyeballs, full of SEO and like 8 websites that actually matter.

Then, begin removing America from our society, if it takes 30 years it takes 30 years, but they need to go. Start replacing them with European alternatives, start up new alternative companies for Europe if needed.

We are letting them have this power because we keep giving them the power to do it. If we shut down X tomorrow in the UK, no one would care within 6-12 months, and Musk gets that little bit more quiet. Tax fucking Amazon and alike properly, make it harder for them to be billionaires. It’s honestly this simple.

“Oh but the economy” yeah, because the economy propping up these wankers has been real fucking slick these last 25 years. If we’re fucked anyway, just rip the plaster off, start up our own manufacturing and industry, work together and stop giving them power we’re giving them.

Ban X and ban Facebook…stand up to these fascists.

We do *not* need these platforms.

Its a simple choice – allow democracy to be subverted via social media or disconnect the main players and develop EU based platforms with strong controls against manipulation, data theft and subversion with open and auditable algorythms.