Indeed. GDPR, cookie laws, draconian anti-free speech content policies. I'm not a fan at all of the US government but Europe has proven to be the last place on earth you want to host something.
The US has DCMA and strong free speech protections.
There is no free speech protection in any EU country.
DCMA is overlooked but it's hugely beneficial for US companies and means they're not liable for what their users publish/write on their site.
In Europe you have to staff moderation teams to remove defamatory content etc or become liable to be sued yourself.
I don't find USA to have meaningful speech protection. Retaliatory lawsuits are frequent and the process itself is and the process itself is the punishment.
Plus, current goverment don't care about laws and people on top of it have history of retaliating against speech.
It is still a lot better than the nothing that exists in EU as free speech. Also the current government does not care about laws and the previous did not want free speech, but in the end there is plenty of it.
Yet almost all US companies where users can publish stuff operate in EU just as well. Seems like the upside of the market size outweights the downside of risks.
There is free speech in Europe, just not free lies. I think it’s a good thing if voter manipulation through Russian lies is addressed, this is just a piece of online warfare from Russia.
This is the kind of thing you don't have to contend with if you host outside of Europe. I don't care about your beef with Russia, I do care about free speech though.
Online warfare is warfare, and russias lies can destabilize working democracies. We all know the stories of the horrors of the 2nd world war, and never again also means fighting online warfare. Freedom is more important than freedom of lies. I’m sure that if you ask people who experienced the 2nd world war to choose between freedom and freedom of lies, they’d choose freedom.
Also, a vote for the right is a vote to increase the gap between the poor and the wealthy, things will only get worse.
My own country lies to me far more than Russia could ever even dream it. The president of the US went on live tv and said he saw non-existent "beheaded babies" just to service Israel. Russia isn't even a blip of a problem for US citizens (other than the Ukraine stealing our tax dollars). In fact, a lot of people that want to take away our freedoms seem to be anti-Russia, so at worst they're the enemy of our enemy.
I don't vote "right" because the Democrats and the Republicans are both working against my interests.
As soon as citizens no longer trust their democratic government, democracy stops being effective. I the Netherlands I think the governments have done a pretty decent job (although far from perfect, but compared to other countries they’re top of class) and I trust that most people in government are trying to do the right thing. A lot of the online lies are aimed at creating this distrust so democracies stop working.
And that distrust starts with this dishonest framing like ‘ukrain are stealing our dollars’. No they’re not, it’s your politicians that decided it was in the interest of the US to have wars: fight hitler (thank you!), fight communism in Vietnam, fund and later fight saddam, fund and later fight taliban.
But now you have a government that no longer thinks fighting Putin is useful, because they think the Russian style of government is the way to go, and not a threat to the US way of life. I doubt they’re right, the average Russian in the country leads a very poor life, and freedom is not a priority in Russia, if you disagree with government you will get thrown out of a window.
But your government is now following the government style of Russia, not following the rules of law, not following democratic, constitutional rules. Do you really want to be next Russia?
As a citizen I support my government's decision to not fund the Ukraine. I never supported it, most people don't. It's common sense, why send our money halfway across the globe to fight a battle that has nothing to do with us? That's stealing my money in my book and I don't need "Russian trolls" to tell me that. For the record I, along with many others, didn't support the wars against Vietnam, "communism" or the Taliban. We should not be the world's police. A domestic, home grown opinion based on basic logic.
US president Roosevelt actually started the creation of the United Nations to avoid another world war. If we want to avoid another world war, more policing is needed, and Roosevelt thought the US was in a good position to do this. No amount of financial efficiency weighs up to not having freedom. What is the worth of your millions if your family is gassed in concentration camps? That’s why I also don’t mind the European Union not being super efficient, as long as it brings us peace it’s worth it.
We are under no threat of that in the US. The UN is 100% ineffective anyway, they can't even stop or slow down Israel. Since the UN was created it's been the US that has been the major belligerent party across the globe. Our "policing" is the crime, we killed over a million Vietnamese people, over a million people in Iraq... we're the bad guys.
Any empire is the "bad guys" pretty much by definition, but there are still bad guys and worse guys. And Ukraine is very different from Afghanistan or Vietnam - it's a country that's genuinely asking for US military assistance against an external enemy that invaded it for openly imperialist reasons (annexing territory etc). Not just the Ukrainian government, but when you look at the polls, it really is a "people's war".
Now, that still doesn't obligate US to help. But it does mean that any military assistance that US does render to Ukraine can only improve its well-deserved "bad guy" image. If you truly believe that US did an evil thing by invading other countries, what better way to redeem yourself than to help someone who is being attacked by a bully just like you?
Agree, the us, and its allies have made some stupid decisions, but I would not be so sure there’s no threat from Russia. Putin may have already concurred the US by replacing its government by people that are owned by Putin, that vote and decide the way Putin wants them, and that are destroying the US and its economy so it can no longer be a leader in the world.
Israel did this long ago, not Russia. That's the threat. That's why our politicians vote the way Israel wants, that's also why they pass anti-free speech anti-BDS laws.
Polling disagrees with you here. Funding and helping Ukraine was massively popular in the US and transcended party lines until it became a wedge issue after the Republican primaries (what changed?).
Polling is easily manipulated and falsified. Just talk to any American and ask them if they're working hard so they can send their tax dollars to the Ukraine, you'll quickly find that there's no support.
It's indeed easy not to care about "our beef with Russia" when you're far away from them. The feeling is quite different when you live next to them, and know that your home might get bombed one day because of Putin's geopolitical fantasies you have absolutely no control over.
I like free speech, but I would rather not die because an army of Russian trolls managed to replace Western democratic governments with Russian puppets.
Just food for thought... I have a hard time viewing the people who want to restrict speech as my ally. Quite the opposite. I'll take so-called (likely fictional) "trolls" over restrictions of speech any day of the week.
I don't see why anybody would doubt the existence of those trolls. It's quite obvious that social media can be cheap and efficient tool for spreading propaganda, and information warfare / spreading propaganda among your enemies is nothing new. It's done by many nation states and other actors, Russia is just among the most successful.
Anyway, I tend to agree that "too much" freedom of speech is not the real issue here. Across Western world, neoliberal economic policy has failed to bring prosperity among large segments of population. Politicians have also ignored very real issues, such as failed humanitarian migration policies, DEI-policies which discriminate against particular "privileged" groups and so on. Trolls would have much lower success rate, and far right parties would be much smaller if these concerns had been taken seriously before by mainstream parties. People who are happy and optimistic about their lives and future rarely become extremists.
I find it ironic since your complaint about DEI almost certainly comes from the dreaded trolls you're referencing. I don't actually need a "troll" to tell me I don't want to spend billions of my tax dollars defending Europe when everywhere you look in the US things are falling apart. That's not Russia, it's just reality.
If your "tech innovation" isn't capable of restricting child pornography and calls for terrorism and genocide maybe it's not 100% a loss for everyone else?
Either one would agree that if the "MSM" were publishing bad things then there's a need to control it. At which point the question is why is a social media website different. Or you'd say that child porn and other bad things being published on websites are fine and there's no need to control things. At which point you'd be pretty wildly out of step with the majority of the population.
MSM are publishing bad things, freedom of speech is important and I don't think we need to "control" anything (child porn is illegal by any measure, it's an abuse issue, not a speech issue). I can't even imagine how you jumped to that conclusion. Just because I don't agree with something, it doesn't mean I'm ok with eliminating it through fascism.
You can't claim to support total free speech and also accept that there is content that is bad for society that needs to be controlled. The moment you accept the latter premise you then need to build enforcement mechanisms and have debates that boil down to political preferences on what constitutes bad. I think it's kind of a navel gazing gesture to just hand wave at "I support the good free speech' and wash your hands of any of the coercion/"fascism" that comes with how the sausage is made.
