The linked tweet is a bit misleading. There were 2 votes, one for amending the existing proposal re: "unknown messages", and the other for the whole proposal itself. The screenshot in the tweet is about the amendment, which was less important than the fact than then the whole proposal was rejected.
I think this article [0] discussed here [1] is much more informative, and I suggest merging the current comment thread there [1].
I am not sure of the logic of the amendment, as parties voted differently between proposals (eg left parties voted for the amendment and against the whole, and EPP voted against both, S&D voted in favour of both). In any case, one vote difference for the amendment is not really the point, the actual vote for the whole is what mattered, and this gained a more clear majority against chat control [2].
Not sure if this is higher because it is more "clickbait" (chat control 1.0) or what, but it is a single tweet with a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this.
So they voted against the total because it did not include indiscriminate scanning? I am not saying this is not the case, but it does not make sense to me. If indiscriminate scanning does not pass, why not vote for the total even without it, and amend it after it passes and gets normalised at a later point?
It would have locked in the restrictions, which would be difficult to argue later that they should be removed and the package be opened up again. Without any scanning, it’s much easier to continue arguing that indiscriminate scanning is needed. They remain in a much stronger bargaining position towards those who want limited scanning (as opposed to no scanning) than if they had conceded.
Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something".
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
> This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
Germany and Poland are. Does the existence of a non-EU country in a data set about European countries detract from the fact that Hungary doesn't prosecute people for online speech to the same extent as other European (incl. EU) countries?
The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism.
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
That's happens often in parliamentary proceedings: when the other party succeeds in unrecognizably amending the law, the party proposing it will vote against.
Specifically for the European Parliament, this is also why, while it is true it doesn't have the power of legislative initiative, given the ability to amend at will any "law", in practice it doesn't make much of a difference.
> a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this
There's been an influx of low-quality bluesky links being posted lately, HN either needs to be better enforcing existing rules or we need a new one banning editorialized social posts that then link out to primary articles (just post the actual article without the editorialized social post as intermediary!).
Its time to start trying to push Chat Control 2.0. With enough money and infinite retries eventually all the bad regulations with a power group behind will end being approved.
Perfect name. Who in their right mind would ever vote against the Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse? Imagine if your voters heard that
What's perfect is the marketing campaign to call it by what it actually wanted to do, ie Chat Control. Whoever did this was so successful that we didn't even know the bill's official name, instead knowing it by what it actually wanted to achieve.
Good thing the EU didn't take a page out of the US' book, because things like the PATRIOT act are already pithy and hard to outmarket.
If RPCCSA were actually called PROTECT, the nickname "Chat Control" would have been fighting a losing battle.
Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about. Maybe they will today specifically, this vote is bound to get some press, but in general, mainstream media doesn't care much about this bill.
Even Europeans in tech who aren't in the "tech equivalent of gun nuts" culture that HN seems to exemplify are 50/50.
It’s not. People on Reddit, Mastodon, and other websites are also aware (of course not everyone, but not everyone on HN either).
> Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about.
People who haven’t heard about Chat Control haven’t heard the bill’s real name either. That’s true of the overwhelming majority of EU regulation, Chat Control isn’t special in that regard.
Yep, and it will make it more difficult to pass legislation designed to actually help combat child exploitation when a large(ish) portion of the population immediately equate "for the children" with a power grab.
Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab.
Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.
For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.
But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?
this is litterally what they do. point at opposition and try to imply they are pro child abuse. actually really sick to use such a method. I suppose that is what u get for decades long degradation of education and other things. A bunch of childish freaks in power who can only try to chuck eachother under the bus instead of doing something actually good.
they care less and less about it being obvious too.
our new prime minister (NL) was asked about some campaign promises recently (ones important to a lot of his voters actually) and he justs plainly said somethin like: yeah well sometimes u just gotta say shit to get votes.
i mean, its not news ofc... but now they dont even care to mask it. They know the public will just bend over and take it anyway.
Facebook and others have been scanning your private messages for many years already. Then someone discovered that this practice is illegal in Europe. So they passed the temporary chat control 1.0 emergency law to make it legal. The plan was to draft a chat control 2.0 law that would then be the long-term solution. But negotiations took too long and the temporary law will expire on the 4th of April (not the 6th) which means that it will be illegal again for Facebook and others to scan the private messages of European citizens without prior suspicion of any wrongdoing.
Well, chat control 1.0 is about making an existing practice legal, it didn't create the practice of scanning messages for know child sexual abuse material, though I don't know how long that has been going on before the legislation in 2021 passed (but probably for several years at that point, since getting a new law trough takes a while).
The data that isn’t flagged from scanning is prohibited from being stored in the first place. Flagging is required to have maximum accuracy and reliability according to the state of the art. Data that was flagged is stored as long as needed to confirm (by human review) and report it. Data that isn’t confirmed must be deleted without delay.
"Protecting children is not optional," said Lena Düpont MEP, EPP Group spokeswoman on Legal and Home Affairs. "We call on the S&D Group to stop hiding behind excuses and finally take responsibility. We cannot afford a safe haven for child abusers online. Every delay leaves children exposed and offenders unchallenged."
Personally, I feel there must be other privacy-preserving ways to address child abusers than mass surveillance.
Also, for the record, here is the list of parties that lobbied for this for Mrs Düpont, alongside very few privacy-focused organisations. Not sure why Canada or Australia are lobbying for EU laws.
ANNEX: LIST OF ENTITIES OR PERSONS FROM WHOM THE RAPPORTEUR HAS RECEIVED INPUT
- Access Now
- Australian eSafety Commissioner
- Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer (BRAK)
- Canadian Centre for Child Protection
- cdt - Center for Democracy & Technology
- eco - Association of the Internet Industry
- EDPS
- EDRI
- Facebook
- Fundamental Rights Agency
- Improving the digital environment for children (regrouping several child protection NGOs across the EU and beyond, including Missing Children Europe, Child Focus)
- INHOPE – the International Association of Internet Hotlines
- International Justice Mission Deutschland e.V./ We Protect
We need to add Palantir in bold letters to that list, they are behind this in every way except for 'officially'.
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [1]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [1]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor of Gotham for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [2]
> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.
> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.
Did it work? One political party (EPP) didn't like the result of the previous vote and so they forced a re-vote.
> After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterday to force a repeat vote to extend the law anyway.
The measure voted on is "Extension [of Chat Control 1.0]", it was voted 36% "for" and 49% "against" (so result is "against"), and looking at "Political groups", majority of EPP MEPs voted "against" (137 out of 164 votes).
EPP is appalling and I'm revolted that many large so-called "moderate, centre-right, liberal-conservative" parties are happily part of it and indeed actively pushing extremely anti-citizen, anti-human agendas with the help of the far right.
European parliament parties are really not particularly cohesive, and the EPP in particular is a bit of a random mess; it is _broadly_ liberal-conservative and pro-European, but its membership is a bit all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party#Full...
Note that in some countries it has _both ruling coalition and opposition_ member parties.
Eh, I wouldn't say that's true. It has a lot of "Christian democratic" parties (the likes of CDU/CSU), and also a bunch of 'liberal-conservative' parties (there's a fair bit of crossover). However, it's pro-Europe, and certainly not particularly nationalist. Nationalists (at least ethnoreligious nationalists; leftist nationalists like Sinn Fein go elsewhere) would largely be in ECR, the absurdly-named 'Patriots.eu', ESN.
So what happened previously is that the parliament accepted a modified text for an extension of "chat control 1.0", the conservatives didn't like that draft so they managed to get a redo of the vote on the amendments.
It seems this second time around amendment votes produced a final draft that the parliament as a whole found unacceptable, which apparently includes the majority of the EPP.
It is however quite tedious to go trough this to figure out what the final draft text was that then lead to the outright rejection.
From the tweet, it seems tuta is implying it was the vote in favour of amendment 34 that killed the extension; I guess that's possible but certainly not obvious from the amendment text:
> Reports on the 1325% increase in generative AI produced child sexual material requires voluntary detection to be calibrated to distinguish artificial material and avoid diverting resources from victims in immediate danger. Such measures should prevent the revictimization of children through AI models, while ensuring that this technological development does not justify general monitoring, a relaxation of privacy standards, or the weakening of end-to-end encryption.
I don't quite get what you mean? EPP is technically in power (whatever that means in the European Parliament). But also why would that matter? Or they wanted to force a vote just so they could vote against it (which is not necessarily a stupid strategy in cases like this)?
Ashamed of France Poland and Hungary. Hungary is a state regime dictatorship so I get it.. but France and Poland, after everything Poland went thru during WW2 then communism with USSR, who the heck are these people voting FOR ?
That pretty much _is_ what it is called. It's generally known as Chat Control, but "Chat Control 1" (the thing just rejected) is called "Extension of the temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive to combat online child sexual abuse", and "Chat Control 2" (which you'll probably have heard more about; it's the one that keeps reappearing and disappearing) is called "Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".
Judging by https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189270, the outliers who seem to want this, would be France, Hungary, Poland and Ireland, all other countries seems to had the majority MEPs voting against it.
The countries are free to repropose similar things through the council (basically the representatives of the ruling party in each country), but the MEPs are free to strike it down. The MEPs are elected through PR in each country so often have broader representation than the council.
It’s more complicated than that. MEPs do not represent countries, so you can say that most MEP from $country were for or against, but that would not necessarily be the position of the country’s government. For that you have to look at what happens in the council of the EU, which is composed of government ministers.
It is not exceptional for most MEP from a member state to be in the opposition at the national level, particularly in contexts where it is seen as a protest vote. Turnout is usually low for European elections, so they tend to swing a bit more than national elections.
It's way more complicated. For instance according to this vote Denmark is overwhelmingly against it. However Denmark most recently was the country that pushed heavily towards this, in fact, under Denmark's leadership the whole thing was revived last time around.
If you look at local politics and news they are all lobbying massively for it (or some people do). The reason is usually "for sake of the children". Parents in particular are heavily in favor of chat control.
While the EU council is composed of people from the respective country's government, the European Parliament is directly voted in by citizens and has a lot of people for whom politics is not their main career.
You could interpret the results as the Danish government being for Chat Control, but "normal" Danish people not following the same trend
Let’s make very clear that "France" here stands for MEP sent by France.
Only 51% of people able to vote in European elections actually vote (with 2,81% white ballot), so it’s not even a majority of electors sustaining them, despite abstention being at record low level in decades.
Elites being disconnected from people day-to-day reality and needs is a recurrent topic leaking even in the mainstream media which almost all owned by oligarchs by now.
European institutions are notoriously opaque and byzantine, which doesn’t really help with feeling represented, even before Qatar gates and the 1/4th of MEP revealed "implicated in judicial cases or scandals."
It does matter. Even if it eventually passes, the later and more gutted it is, the better.
Saying that it doesn’t matter is just defeatist (and unfortunately always parroted on HN) and plainly wrong. Defeatists have been proven wrong time and again.
Also making sure this is as painful and costly as possible to pass will discourage future attempts. If we just rolled over and let it happen that would signal that it's easy to pass legislation like this and we would get a lot more like it
In 2016 the UK demonstrated that there is a way for the public to vote down the corpus of bad EU legislation.
Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.
Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.
This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.
The UK has shown that they can vote down bad EU legislation, and pass a lot of pretty awful legislation that's worse than anything the EU ever produced
But I'm sure voting for Nigel Farage one more time will fix everything
This is a clear case of a terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism fully). Chat Controls would be illegal in Germany.
This is sad that this has gotten this far. If they wanted to pass a law to blow up citizens, do you think European Parliament would seriously consider it? It is exactly the same calibre of idiocy.
I would expect German authorities to issue arrest warrants and properly investigate this.
For context:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
“Congrats all we maybe fixed the problem we created in the first place! Let’s celebrate!”
Also - wasn’t this program voluntary? This seems like the height of backslapping. Would have been better if they just sat on their hands and did nothing in the first place.
This gave companies permission to do things which would ordinarily be illegal under the ePrivacy directive, but did not make it mandatory for them to do so. That permission is now revoked (or will be when the derogation they were trying to extend expires in two weeks).
I think this article [0] discussed here [1] is much more informative, and I suggest merging the current comment thread there [1].
I am not sure of the logic of the amendment, as parties voted differently between proposals (eg left parties voted for the amendment and against the whole, and EPP voted against both, S&D voted in favour of both). In any case, one vote difference for the amendment is not really the point, the actual vote for the whole is what mattered, and this gained a more clear majority against chat control [2].
Not sure if this is higher because it is more "clickbait" (chat control 1.0) or what, but it is a single tweet with a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this.
[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parl...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529609
[2] https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189270
EPP wanted indiscriminate scanning instead, not targeted one (the goal of the amendments).
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
The UK is, eminently, not in the EU.
Specifically for the European Parliament, this is also why, while it is true it doesn't have the power of legislative initiative, given the ability to amend at will any "law", in practice it doesn't make much of a difference.
There's been an influx of low-quality bluesky links being posted lately, HN either needs to be better enforcing existing rules or we need a new one banning editorialized social posts that then link out to primary articles (just post the actual article without the editorialized social post as intermediary!).
Told you so.
> The European Commission wants a backdoor for end-to-end encryptions for law enforcement
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
Good thing the EU didn't take a page out of the US' book, because things like the PATRIOT act are already pithy and hard to outmarket.
If RPCCSA were actually called PROTECT, the nickname "Chat Control" would have been fighting a losing battle.
Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about. Maybe they will today specifically, this vote is bound to get some press, but in general, mainstream media doesn't care much about this bill.
Even Europeans in tech who aren't in the "tech equivalent of gun nuts" culture that HN seems to exemplify are 50/50.
It’s not. People on Reddit, Mastodon, and other websites are also aware (of course not everyone, but not everyone on HN either).
> Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about.
People who haven’t heard about Chat Control haven’t heard the bill’s real name either. That’s true of the overwhelming majority of EU regulation, Chat Control isn’t special in that regard.
Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.
For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.
But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?
Such discussions simply can't be had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
they care less and less about it being obvious too.
our new prime minister (NL) was asked about some campaign promises recently (ones important to a lot of his voters actually) and he justs plainly said somethin like: yeah well sometimes u just gotta say shit to get votes.
i mean, its not news ofc... but now they dont even care to mask it. They know the public will just bend over and take it anyway.
The only way to really stop this would be to pass legislation that permanently strengthens privacy rights.
> This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU
It had already passed and started?
Facebook and others have been scanning your private messages for many years already. Then someone discovered that this practice is illegal in Europe. So they passed the temporary chat control 1.0 emergency law to make it legal. The plan was to draft a chat control 2.0 law that would then be the long-term solution. But negotiations took too long and the temporary law will expire on the 4th of April (not the 6th) which means that it will be illegal again for Facebook and others to scan the private messages of European citizens without prior suspicion of any wrongdoing.
Chat Control 1 says, eh do it anyway if you want on a voluntary and temporary basis until the Courts get around to saying no.
Chat Control 2 says you have to. Until the courts finally get around to striking it down in 15 years.
They even used a teddy bear image.
https://www.eppgroup.eu/newsroom/epp-urges-support-for-last-...
"Protecting children is not optional," said Lena Düpont MEP, EPP Group spokeswoman on Legal and Home Affairs. "We call on the S&D Group to stop hiding behind excuses and finally take responsibility. We cannot afford a safe haven for child abusers online. Every delay leaves children exposed and offenders unchallenged."
Personally, I feel there must be other privacy-preserving ways to address child abusers than mass surveillance.
Also, for the record, here is the list of parties that lobbied for this for Mrs Düpont, alongside very few privacy-focused organisations. Not sure why Canada or Australia are lobbying for EU laws.
ANNEX: LIST OF ENTITIES OR PERSONS FROM WHOM THE RAPPORTEUR HAS RECEIVED INPUT
- Access Now
- Australian eSafety Commissioner
- Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer (BRAK)
- Canadian Centre for Child Protection
- cdt - Center for Democracy & Technology
- eco - Association of the Internet Industry
- EDPS
- EDRI
- Facebook
- Fundamental Rights Agency
- Improving the digital environment for children (regrouping several child protection NGOs across the EU and beyond, including Missing Children Europe, Child Focus)
- INHOPE – the International Association of Internet Hotlines
- International Justice Mission Deutschland e.V./ We Protect
- Internet Watch Foundation
- Internet Society
- Match Group
- Microsoft
- Thorn (Ashton Kutcher)
- UNICEF
- UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-9-2020-0258_...
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [1]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [1]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor of Gotham for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [2]
[0] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/176658
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-00016...
[2] https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-kept-no-records-on-...
> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.
> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.
Did it work? One political party (EPP) didn't like the result of the previous vote and so they forced a re-vote.
> After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterday to force a repeat vote to extend the law anyway.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parl...
20 out of 184
The measure voted on is "Extension [of Chat Control 1.0]", it was voted 36% "for" and 49% "against" (so result is "against"), and looking at "Political groups", majority of EPP MEPs voted "against" (137 out of 164 votes).
(Edit: word choice)
S&D voted even more for this than the conservatives themselves. ESN the least.
Less tight.
Note that in some countries it has _both ruling coalition and opposition_ member parties.
It seems this second time around amendment votes produced a final draft that the parliament as a whole found unacceptable, which apparently includes the majority of the EPP.
You can see the outcome of the individual amendment votes here, starting on page 15: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2026-03-...
and what the actual amendments were here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/LIBE-AM-784377...
It is however quite tedious to go trough this to figure out what the final draft text was that then lead to the outright rejection.
From the tweet, it seems tuta is implying it was the vote in favour of amendment 34 that killed the extension; I guess that's possible but certainly not obvious from the amendment text:
> Reports on the 1325% increase in generative AI produced child sexual material requires voluntary detection to be calibrated to distinguish artificial material and avoid diverting resources from victims in immediate danger. Such measures should prevent the revictimization of children through AI models, while ensuring that this technological development does not justify general monitoring, a relaxation of privacy standards, or the weakening of end-to-end encryption.
It means the people who get to vote on if you have a right to privacy or not.
It is not exceptional for most MEP from a member state to be in the opposition at the national level, particularly in contexts where it is seen as a protest vote. Turnout is usually low for European elections, so they tend to swing a bit more than national elections.
If you look at local politics and news they are all lobbying massively for it (or some people do). The reason is usually "for sake of the children". Parents in particular are heavily in favor of chat control.
You could interpret the results as the Danish government being for Chat Control, but "normal" Danish people not following the same trend
France has had really strange tendencies lately, e.g. when they arrested Telegram founder.
Only 51% of people able to vote in European elections actually vote (with 2,81% white ballot), so it’s not even a majority of electors sustaining them, despite abstention being at record low level in decades.
Elites being disconnected from people day-to-day reality and needs is a recurrent topic leaking even in the mainstream media which almost all owned by oligarchs by now.
European institutions are notoriously opaque and byzantine, which doesn’t really help with feeling represented, even before Qatar gates and the 1/4th of MEP revealed "implicated in judicial cases or scandals."
https://www.touteleurope.eu/institutions/elections-europeenn...
https://vote-blanc.org/europeennes-2024-la-repartition-par-d...
https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2024/06/10/euro...
https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/gouvernement/gerald-darmanin...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/02/02/o...
> In early October 2025, in the face of concerted public opposition, the German government stated that it would vote against the proposal
German MEPs also voted against this one.
(Note that the German government and German MEPs aren't the same thing here.)
Someone somewhere really really wants this and has the time and resources so it’s an inevitability.
Saying that it doesn’t matter is just defeatist (and unfortunately always parroted on HN) and plainly wrong. Defeatists have been proven wrong time and again.
Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.
Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.
This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.
But I'm sure voting for Nigel Farage one more time will fix everything
Until we meet again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529609
This is sad that this has gotten this far. If they wanted to pass a law to blow up citizens, do you think European Parliament would seriously consider it? It is exactly the same calibre of idiocy.
I would expect German authorities to issue arrest warrants and properly investigate this.
For context:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
Any time a scumbag politician tries this again:
"Mr. Jones, secretary of communications for the state, TTL (Time-to-live) left. 2 Hours? 1 Day? 1 Week?"
It would stop fast.
Anyone want to build this? There is a lot of money being left on the table.
Also - wasn’t this program voluntary? This seems like the height of backslapping. Would have been better if they just sat on their hands and did nothing in the first place.
You described 95% of EU's work.
This gave companies permission to do things which would ordinarily be illegal under the ePrivacy directive, but did not make it mandatory for them to do so. That permission is now revoked (or will be when the derogation they were trying to extend expires in two weeks).