True, it’s a long time until the next UK general election. Maybe Reform’s vote will suffer before then. Alternatively the local elections and by-elections could be a boost for them, I dunno.

Anyway, maybe we should have proportional representation in the UK. Even if Reform had 25% of the vote and therefore 25% of the seats in parliament, that would mean that 75% of parliamentarians wouldn’t be Reform members.

Our current system allows a party with minority support (potentially Reform in the future) to win a majority of parliamentary seats. In 2019, the Conservatives won 44% of the vote, which gave them 56% of seats. Last year, Labour won 34% of the vote, which gave them 63% of seats.

It’s similar in the UK currently. The UK’s equivalent of AfD is Reform UK who are apparently the leading party in the polls (source):

Reform UK in front on 25%, Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 20%, with the Lib Dems on 16% and Greens on 10%

They do those things to some degree, but those things remain banned for under 18s, which I suppose reduces harm, even if it doesn’t fully eliminate harm.

Fair points. At least with real life politicians you can find out about their past behaviour though, if you do some reading.

On the internet people can just easily lie about who they are. There might be a propagandist on social media who has a strong foreign accent, so in real life you’d know they’re from a foreign country, but on the internet you can’t hear their accent, so they can easily lie about where they’re from.

Also even just for casual interactions on social media (e.g. Reddit), I think one of the reasons that people get so angry in discussions/arguments is because they don’t have to see the face of the other person. I guess it’s like a dehumanising interaction.

Jean-Marie Le Pen got 18% in 2002 apparently, but his daughter in 2022 got 41%.

Anyway. I think it makes sense that Europe shouldn’t just allow itself to be propagandised by the USA. Maybe Europe should bring in a law saying that, for example, Musk can’t boost the visibility of his own account on X (here is a news story saying that he did that).

I suppose a properly pro-democracy social media platform would be neutral and fair, rather than boosting certain types of content.

True. Another thing that I think is artificial about social media is anonymity. In real life you can see who somebody is when you’re talking to them - you know whether they’re lying about their age, or accent, or whatever. But online you could have an American pretending to be a European, or a Russian pretending to be an American, etc. And anonymity seems to encourage some people to be more abusive and insulting than they would be in real life, talking to real people.

Anonymity might have some genuine uses though (like trying to escape persecution from your country’s government).

By that logic we shouldn’t ban anything for teenagers. But we do: smoking, gambling, alcohol, etc.

People like Nigel Farage would probably say “they’re trying to rig democracy by making you vote again and again until you choose the ‘right’ answer”. And some Brexit voters would probably believe that narrative.

I think it’s definitely possible that there will be a push from the British public to rejoin the EU, at some point. Maybe in 5 to 10 years though.

I’m not saying I necessarily agree with the idea that getting too close to the EU would be a mistake. I think it makes a lot of sense for the UK to have strong ties with the EU.

Brexit was a massive headache for Britain so I think that’s why the UK government doesn’t want to open up that argument again immediately. I guess Starmer does want to build stronger ties with Europe, but he probably wants Brexit-voters (many of whom were from poorer parts of the UK) to feel like their vote is being honoured. If they feel they have been completely ignored then they might give their support to Reform UK, Britain’s equivalent of AfD.

You could say Germany isn’t unique though. The US is also split between those who want to be friendly with Russia (Republicans) and those who don’t (Democrats).

With Germany I guess Merkel believed that business ties with Russia would persuade Russia to not threaten Europe, but now that theory has been disproven, so Germans seem to be more supportive of the idea of cutting ties with Russia and boosting Germany’s defence spending.

It’s odd that the article title says “majority of Europeans” when the article itself makes clear that only some western European countries were surveyed. So I thought people should know that.

Who knows. And maybe this proposed project will go nowhere. But it would be cool if the European public sector does end up using Linux on the desktop.

As always, the year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner…

I wonder if there’s some validity to what OpenAI is saying though (but I certainly don’t completely agree with them).

If the US makes it too costly to train AI models, then maybe China will relax any copyright laws so that Chinese AI models can be trained quickly and cheaply. This might result in China developing better AI models than the US.

Maybe the US should require AI companies to pay a large chunk of their profits to copyright holders. So copyright holders would be compensated, but an AI company would only have to pay if they generate profits.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable in this field will tell me I’m totally wrong.

It would be cool if European countries joined together to make a European nuclear force (starting with French and British nukes I guess, and then they can pool money to fund further weapons development).

Maybe this will happen in the future, but it might be a while until then.

People thought the first Trump presidency was a politically divided time, but maybe we’re now entering an even more divided time, given that social media is now fragmenting along political lines, more prominently than it did before.