#8.3 - How the EU will police what can be said online

Going back to my last post, we are now closer than ever to actual "thought-policing" of the internet, and removing freedom of speech completely.

For certain people, the following is a given - but for a scary amount of people, it is not.
But whether you know it or not, the first thing you need to realize and know is this fact:

EVERYTHING you post online, along with all the information you provide, is being monitered, stored and can be traced back to you to a scary degree, no matter what your "privacy settings" are.

- That picture of when you got hammered at a lunch-in, and flashed everyone at the table
- That video of you saying something, you can't even believe came out your mouth at the time
- That stupid post you made about your boss, forgetting he was on your friends list, and can see it
- Everything you, your friends and your enemies uploaded about you
- Every picture, every facebook post, every video, every tweet, facetime and skype call you ever made
- Even that awful MySpace page you had, back in the day

And don't live in an illusion about it belonging to you - or that you have any right to undo that fact. That's just how it is.
You (or someone else) gave it to a platform, who owns that content, at least as much as you do, in 99% of all cases.

Whether or not you 'deleted' it, or left it up - it never disappears.

It might get removed from the "surface" of the internet, so you or your friends can look it up anymore. But it is still being stored out of sight, somewhere!

Just look at The WayBackMachine for instance - one of many examples of, how nothing ever "really" goes away.

But the revision of the EU Copyright Directive (article 11 and 13 specifically), has the potential for the internet is about to be taken away from us, and be turned into the polar opposite of everything it was meant to represents, and become the ultimate potential weapon against free speech - at best.

Article 13 - the devil in disguise

Boiled down to its core, the revised articles state; to protect copyrighted content from being uploaded to the internet, all "society service providers that store and provide to the public access to... ...subject-matter uploaded by their users ", shall be forced to screen content for copyrighted material, before it is 'allowed' online.

On the surface it might seem like a sensible idea, to help fight bootlegging of content creators works.

But when you break it down into how it would work - and consider the possible consequences - it quickly becomes obvious, that not only would it be impossible to enforce fairly in practice, and in the worst case scenario - which is not too far fetched - it can be weaponized to "thought police" and censor the internet as a whole; as well as target particular groups, minorities or individuals.