One truth to fool them all

I was shocked yesterday to run into this small group of people protesting Internet censorship three days before the European Parliament is due to once again vote on the infamous copyright directive. I was shocked because I had not heard anything about such protest taking place. Given the importance of the issue it should have been heavily shared on social media, if not announced on the mainstream media. But it wasn’t. Freedom of information, who gives a damn about that?

Even if I’m barely present on Facebook somehow I end up being informed of all sorts of protests and civic actions. Maybe I’ve missed it, so I decided to check the accounts of well-known local social influencers, those who spend most of their time talking about justice and freedom… and, nothing! Not a word about any protest taking part in Bucharest. Quite shameful considering the fact that Germany saw massive rallies on Saturday, as did Austria, Poland and Switzerland. (I wonder how they managed to get thousands of people to take to the streets in defense of Internet freedom.)
Clearly, not on the scale one would expect seeing that all Europeans will be affected. You would expect the whole continent to be in uproar. But most people don’t know and don’t care what might happen if the proposed law passes in its present form. Worse than that most would not even notice something has changed. Well, they might notice there’s less memes in their feed, but they’ll be easily distracted by pictures of their friends’ cut cats.
If the law were to pass on Tuesday and platforms like Google or Facebook would be forced to reach agreements on the proposed link tax, they would probably do so with the big mainstream media players. I’m sure they would find a away for people to share wholesome CNN news stories. The problem is with small content creators and independent news sites. Why would FB offer to pay some nobody for their content to be shared when they can easily censor it. The filters EU regulators have in their devious minds would prevent the regular user from uploading a snippet from @nobody at whothefuckcares.com. Would you feel inclined to share this very post on FB, chances are you wouldn’t be able to upload it because there’s no way Zuckerberg would agree to pay even one cent towards Steemit.com, much less to an obscure user of said platform.
The billions of users of FB, Google or YouTube will be left watching and consuming only pre-approved content from media giants, holders of the one and only truth. No one in their right minds would trust entities like Google or Facebook and having them pay some money to whomever would be actually fun, but this is less about them and their profits and all about the ability to share whatever you consider worth sharing.
With less and less independent opinions being shared online, the easier it would be to impose the one and only truth the powers-that-be want us to believe in. If it’s not on Facebook it doesn’t exist, like the protest I ran into yesterday because I happened to be in the area. The millions of other Romanian Facebook users have probably no idea there was a protest, like they have no idea there’s any reason to protest. In their sanitized version of reality, everything is and will be fine.
As for the Tuesday vote, much of our hopes are pinned on conservative forces in Hungary, Italy or Poland. One very interesting observation from Polish diplomats, the proposed filters and taxes would favor international media giants at the expense of local news platforms. In other words, the average European user would be able to read what, say, people in Washington would like them to read, but have no access to what others in their own country think.

“It is because Poland’s government does not accept any solutions that aim to restrict the freedom of speech on the Internet”, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN), which is in charge of copyright laws in Poland, had said in a statement.
Warsaw also opposes what it considers too excessive a restriction on sharing content. According to Polish diplomats, such a remedy benefits international publishing companies and may endanger the well-being of many small and medium publishers, including the Polish ones..

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