this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Why don't Americans put pressure on legislation like Europeans did with the GDPR?
Because they work three jobs to get food on their table and have to remortgage their house to pay for an ambulance. Privacy is a first-world problem and the US is a third-world country.
Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that's designed to keep people watching -- stuff that's sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn't happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.
In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don't pay directly for healthcare, but they don't really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That's why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.
I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it's an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.
The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it's virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn't matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.
Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there's only 1 other option. It's so much easier to retain power when there's only one other option.
So, you can't get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don't know that things could be different, and because they know that it's hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn't benefit the wealthy donors.
That's sad :/
Americans in aggregate simply don’t care. They don’t understand this, won’t take the time to understand it, and don’t care enough to understand.
Americans care but they're bad at organizing. Significantly so. They fight amongst themselves and get caught up in drama. They spread misinformation and don't like facts that conflict with what they believe is right. So these kinds of movements stagnate unless someone with a specific type of charisma gives them a direction to follow.
The sheep needs a good daddy shepherd, the issue we haven't had a good daddy and the last we had, got killed by the ruling class.
So we haven't had a pedon friendly daddy since then. He won't ever happen again IMHO
Only viable option is decentralized direct action and hope others act in the same to create pressure on the money changers
We would if it would make a difference.
For the same reason the EU is doing anything at all: those companies are american.
You can bet your ass if those were europeans you would see the opposite happening. See: tiktok.
I don't think so. The reverse is even happening as there are way more restrictions inside Europe for Europeans companies. The result is that they are less competitive, but more respectful for EU citizens (but unfortunately, outside companies don't always have to respect this, for now).
That's the obvious political side effect of the european stance in this, I still think there's no magical difference between the US and Europe and the more blatant evident differentiator is that they are not tanking their own economies by regulating Meta's data gathering.
You can also spin the other way around: America doesn't do the obvious right thing because of the pressure the corporations can put on the legislators.
I agree 🙂 There's also a lot of lobbying inside EU, but there's more citizens resistance (for now...). As we say about capitalism: privatize profits, share losses.