• DandomRude@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    Yes, it is unfortunately becoming increasingly clear that even in the EU, billionaires and their companies are above the law. The legal situation should be clear here and there should be consequences - but there apparently aren’t any.

    Unfortunately, this applies not only to Twitter, but to most US tech giants in particular, to meta, for example. I have already stopped counting the massive violations of the GDPR that meta and others are constantly committing, because nothing happens anyway. If anything, the fines are so low that violating the law brings these companies far more revenue than it costs them.

    So unfortunately, the same major issue that brought the US to the brink of a straight up dictatorship also applies in Europe: even the most blatant violations of the law have no serious consequences for the richest of the rich – and that is why billionaires are becoming more and more powerful.

    The situation may be better in the EU for now than in the US, whose legal system obviously no longer even maintains the appearance of fairness, but even in the EU, the enforcement of the law is miles away from anything that could even remotely be called justice.

    The reason seems to me to be the same as in the US: concentration of power in a tiny billionaire class that asserts its influence through corruption.

    I think that if things continue like this, and I see no indicators that they will not, it will not be long before even the appearance of justice is abandoned in the EU as well.

    Edit: Here is an example of how this is possible - it’s just plain old corruption, but in the highest ranks of our institutions: From Meta to the EU Parliament: Former chief lobbyist negotiates data protection (German article)

    Aura Salla was Meta’s chief lobbyist in Brussels for many years. Her task: to convince politicians to weaken EU digital rules such as data protection in order to generate even higher profits with Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms.