Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

Status of the Chat Control proposal

• Commenters stress this is a tactical withdrawal, not a defeat: Denmark is reportedly shifting from mandatory scanning to codifying “voluntary” scanning by platforms and aiming for an EU compromise without explicit chat control.
• Many expect the idea to return soon, citing a persistent “Yes / Maybe later” pattern in governance where unpopular measures are reintroduced with small tweaks until they pass.

Citizen pressure, email campaigns, and petitions

• The coordinated mass-email campaign to MEPs is widely credited with influencing this outcome; people highlight the low friction (“one click to contact all relevant politicians”) as decisive.
• Others doubt email’s general effectiveness, arguing it’s easy to ignore or auto-delete and usually lacks leverage; proponents respond that volume and timing mattered here.
• Denmark’s formal citizen proposal (“Borgerforslag”) against EU mass surveillance is mentioned, but said to have had no practical impact so far; such proposals are generally viewed as weak tools.

Surveillance, power, and effectiveness

• Strong consensus that scanning all private communications is disproportionate and either technically infeasible at scale or easily bypassed by serious criminals.
• Several argue mass surveillance primarily enables political control and suppression of dissent, not child protection or crime reduction; CSAM and gangs are seen as pretexts.
• China and Russia are repeatedly cited as examples where digital panopticons “work” in the sense of stabilizing regimes, not solving abuse or crime.

Trust in government and motives

• Some Nordic commenters say high trust in relatively non-corrupt states makes such proposals politically viable, and attribute this case to tech ignorance rather than a desire to build a spy state.
• Others are deeply skeptical, noting Denmark’s intelligence cooperation with the US, prior data-retention attempts, and explicit political rhetoric against end‑to‑end encryption as evidence of intent to expand state power.

Child protection vs. penalties and hypocrisy

• A high-profile Danish child-pornography conviction with a short sentence is used to question whether authorities are serious about protecting children versus expanding surveillance.
• Anger is amplified by reports that politicians sought exemptions for themselves from Chat Control, reinforcing perceptions of a two-tier system.