On Thursday in Strasbourg, 314 Members of the European Parliament voted to reject the return of "Chat Control," the legal regime allowing tech companies to scan the private messages of roughly half a billion Europeans.
Illustration via proton.meOnly 276 voted to keep it.
So naturally, the scanning regime won - thanks to a 'quirky' voting procedure in Brussels that allowed legislation to survive even though most MEPs who cast a vote opposed it. That should alarm anyone who still believes the word "parliament" is supposed to mean something.
Losing by Winning
The vote took place at second reading, under an urgent procedure pushed through just two days earlier by Parliament's largest bloc, the centre-right European People's Party.
At second reading, the arithmetic is rigged toward passage. Rejecting or amending the text does not require a majority of votes cast. It requires an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs: 361 votes.
That means every absent MEP and every abstention effectively counts in favor of the law.
This is how “DEMOCRACY” works in Europe:
⛔️ 314 vote AGAINST mass surveillance.
✅ 276 vote FOR it.
MASS SURVEILLANCE WINS.
Then the same bureaucratic hypocrites travel the world lecturin
