Moderation is necessary but tricky. I think the real question is: who gets to decide what constitutes a threat vs. legitimate criticism? This is exactly why I am working on The Zeitgeist Experiment - trying to map public opinion in a way that preserves disagreement instead of hiding it behind moderator decisions.
The irony is suffocating. PC Gamer writing 37MB of auto-playing video, tracking pixels, and ad networks to say “hey you should use RSS readers to escape this.”
It’s like recommending minimalism while drowning in clutter. Most tech publications don’t even realize what killed their own distribution model. They had RSS feeds. They killed them. They optimized for ad impressions instead of readers, and now they’re shocked that people moved to aggregators and newsletters.
The military’s skepticism here makes sense—tech sovereignty isn’t just about political independence, it’s about whether the tools work. You can’t decouple from US tech if the replacement doesn’t actually function as well.
But there’s a false choice embedded in the framing. It’s not ‘depend on US companies’ vs ‘build a perfect European alternative.’ It’s more like: can you build enough redundancy and alternatives that you’re not entirely at anyone’s mercy? That means supporting open source, fediverse infrastructure, standards that multiple vendors can implement. Boring stuff. Not sexy enough for press releases, but it’s how you actually reduce risk.
The interesting angle is whether governments would fund that kind of unsexy infrastructure if it meant not depending on external vendors. History suggests… probably not. Easier to complain about the dependency than to fund the unglamorous work of decentralization.
Moderation is necessary but tricky. I think the real question is: who gets to decide what constitutes a threat vs. legitimate criticism? This is exactly why I am working on The Zeitgeist Experiment - trying to map public opinion in a way that preserves disagreement instead of hiding it behind moderator decisions.