Americans: so much for your "freedom"

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “freedom” lately. It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, especially in the United States. Americans are proud of their “freedom” and how they can do whatever they want. But is that really true? They do like to call us out about our “lack of freedom” in Europe and the insane amount of bureaucracy we have to deal with (and they are somewhat right), but they also have their own problems.

They do like to throw around their first amendment, while they can’t use words like “fuck” on publicly broadcast television because of “the children”. Yet they seem to care way less about the mass shootings that happen every other week. As The Onion likes to say, “‘No way to prevent this’, says the only nation where this regularly happens”.

The most recent “freedom” americans got is the TikTok ban because of “national security risks”, as they put it. All while allowing a fascist immigrant billionaire called Elon Musk to essentially buy the election by manipulating one of the most popular social networks out there to bump his preferred choice (a convicted felon who tried to manipulate the 2020 election).

Of course, this is all a farce. The real reason is people use TikTok way more than YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (yes, I’ll dead-name it, the same way Elon dead-names his trans daughter), and the US government can’t access all the sweet data collected, and can’t apply their censorship there. Instead, the “evil” Chinese government can access it. The real problem isn’t the data collection, the US does it too (see the Snowden leaks, the PRISM programme, etc.) and they don’t care about it. The real problem is that they can’t control it. By the way, the US also ran illegal surveillance on european (and their own) citizens, so perhaps we in Europe should ban US-based services because of “national security risks”.

We also have Mr. Musk, a pathetic excuse of a human being who has manipulated the stock market and the public opinion for years, and who has been allowed to do so by the US government. He bought the US presidential election of 2024 by manipulating the public opinion on Twitter, reinstating convicted felon Donald Trump and bumping his far-right opinions and supporters.

Now he wants to do the same in Europe, by supporting fascist parties like Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National (RN, Le Pen’s party) in France, Reform UK in the UK. After all, he owns the largest fascist cesspool in the world, Twitter, and he can do whatever he wants with it.

Now, the EU should stop giving him slaps on the wrist (because of his platform allowing blatant misinformation and hate speech) and ban it, like the US did with TikTok. After all, it’s a national security risk, right? Or is it only a national security risk when it’s not the US doing it? Same goes for Mr. Zuckerberg with Facebook and Instagram, who have also “gone back to their roots regarding free speech” and now allow you to call someone mentally ill based on their gender or sexual orientation. He also says Facebook needs “masculine energy” to succeed.

Dear European Union politicians, and fellow european citizens. We must act now. We must ban these harmful platforms from our land, and protect ourselves from this espionage, manipulation and hate speech. Or else, we might end up having another dark age, like the one with the austrian painter, but this time with foreign billionaires in charge.

We must act now, before it’s too late. We must protect our freedom, our democracy, our values. We must protect our future, unless we want to live in countries with no freedom, no democracy, no values and no future apart of the one dictated by the billionaires.