Lately, with right-wing populism getting closer and closer to me, I've developed some more strong opinions on dupery and selling simple answers to complex problems.

It's probably a mixed bag, to some degree. But I think the people behind it, the ones really pushing it and selling it know what they're doing. They must have read the statistics and counter-arguments to be able to take part in the political debate.

I found this article talking about the statistics of investigations in 2019 in Germany. We had 13670 cases of child abuse and the police did 21 wiretapping orders. This leads me to believe either the police/judicative is utterly useless (they're not) or, electronic surveillance isn't a tool that is useful at all in those investigations. Yet somehow ... it get's promoted in this context.

And the EU member states pledged to be transparent with the statistics regarding Chat Control. They're currently breaking that law and not giving us the statistics to judge for ourselves. (They could well be hiding it deliberately.) To me it smells like somebody wants to push something fishy.

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how we got there. It is an emotional topic, that's why it resonates with people and it's pretending to do something and selling a simple truth, one that sounds good. While you'd need a different solution if you wanted to tackle the issue you're talking about. If they're really exploiting the abused children to push their own agenda: Shame on them.

And maliciousness going along with incompetency is the worst mix I can imagine.

(Sorry for only giving german language references. I can't spend all of my day looking up articles for my Lemmy comments. Feel free to comment better ones and I'll bookmark them.)