When a seasoned politician tells you to “think of the children!” – nine times out of ten these days, experience tells us it unfortunately has nothing to do with any children’s welfare whatsoever.
Rather, it has to do with some “bigger” (smaller, really) own issue that politicians in question truly care about right thats moment, like their own current careers, that they are somehow able to keep going (lucky that is, for them or their PR desperately still capable of maintaining.)
Here’s one: of all the ills Facebook has managed to inflict onto the humankind, children, adults, the elderly over the years – UK’s Priti Patel managed to single out Facebook’s damage to the “kids.”
And why, you might wonder – is it because the kids’ data is relentlessly mined to provide Facebook’s third-party ad partners with data to build up the resulting ad-tech industry, and serve those young folk with tailor-made, creepy ads in their Facebook feed.)
Not simply. Facebook in reality mines and sells ad data for ALL users, mostly adult with (disposable) or otherwise discernible income, much more eagerly. UK Home Secretary Patel, apparently, had no issue with how Facebook earns its trillions and its dominant place as a major social media platform around the world that will inevitably attract all kinds of people.
The issue Priti Patel suddenly developed was with Facebook’s drive as an attempt to introduce end-to-end encryption.
(It’s commonly documented how many want an end to end-end-encryption so that they can “fact-check” and control speech in private messages as well as on social media.)
That’s the problem the UK minister sees in this big picture, and tries to cloud and shroud with other concerns.
The idea being – who in their right mind will speak against children’s rights. The antidote to that being – who in their right mind would abuse and misrepresent children’s rights simply to serve their dirty political campaign politics?
Well – it might be Patel. As end-to-end encryption online is seen as something that ultimately only benefits every woman, man, and child online – as a way to give them freedom from central authorities – it is also being reviled here as basically a crime.
“Priti Patel blasted Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg today over his plans to block police around the world from begin able to access Facebook messages, saying they would allow child sex crimes and terrorism to go unchecked.”
There are two hypocrisies going on here: not least of a person(s) who never went to school long enough to understand what end-to-end-encryption means, in technical terms. And the one who does, but chooses to lie they don’t. For ideological purposes.
Like Bolsheviks may have done in October 1917. (TL,DR: They ultimately lost that war.)
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