Belgian elections are today. Mailbox flyers for political candidates often show profiles in exclusive walled gardens (Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram). And they often have email addresses at hotmail, gmail, or outlook. They are betting on #digitalExclusion. I am cancelling all of them regardless of party.
nuances
All policians likely have a Facebook acct. That’s a sad state of affairs, but merely having an account does not get them cancelled. A cancellable offense is public displays that flaunt their digital exclusion. It’s despicable when their flyer pushes people into US walled gardens with no way to reach them in the free world.
I am also cancelling five whole parties for undermining democracy via digital exclusion by using Cloudflare for the party’s own website. Digital rights are important in 2024, particularly for democracy, as we are increasingly being disempowered by power abuses through forced use of oppressive technology. Direct Tor blocking? Also cancelled.
I am also cancelling all extreme right parties on general principle. And even slightly right if “immigratie stoppen” is something they are misfocused on.
Who’s left? I think I’ll be voting none of the above on a lot of positions because they don’t clear my basic bare minimum bar of digital decency.
(edit) maybe ecolo has a chance
No one represents me, apart possibibly from Ecolo. But superficially, it seems contradictory that a “green” party proposes making energy cheaper for a broader demographic of people. That obviously removes pressure to conserve energy.
Can you clarify your objections? Are you refusing candidates who use walled gardens prominently or only ones who use walled gardens exclusively, with no public webpage?
And I'm unfamiliar with your objections around email hosts entirely. Can you explain those?
They must be reachable from the open free-world, thus have a comms mechanism that is not exclusive. If their flyer has only FB, Twtr, gmail, etc, they are cancelled. I’m hard and fast about a flyer ending up in my box that tries to force me into a walled garden because it’s being shoved in my face.
If they have a public¹ webpage, that can be good enough. But then consider Olivier De Schutter. He has all the offending social networks, nothing open except a truly public website. But then the “contact” page just prints a gmail address. I’m ½ tempted to nix him, but OTOH the public website at least gives the public access to his proposals. Maybe good enough.
Google and Microsoft block RFC compliant email to a large extent. I cannot send an email to a gmail user because Google discriminates against my IP address, even though no spam has ever come from my network. It’s purely a manifestation of Google using a crude and reckless practice of IP reputation where earning a bad reputation is automatic if you are a residential subscriber. Microsoft is even worse than Google in this regard. Those two corps together with SpamHaus have broken email by making it exclusive.
(edit) I should mention it’s not just an exclusivity problem with Google and MS. I boycott those companies for as many reasons as you can fill a book with. Even if they accepted my email, the payload would financially support a surveillance advertising platform that I boycott. And what about security? Foolish for European politicians to share their email with the Americans. Belgian politicians should be using a European email service.
From there, I don’t have the time and energy to investigate the open free-world reachability of all ecolo candidates. Some will probably get a bit lucky with my vote for that reason. But at least I was able to freely reach the ecolo website and grab a big PDF of their platform positions. And that PDF expressed favorable positions on digital rights like inclusion and free software.
¹ by public, I mean truly open to the public, not a Cloudflare page or something that blocks Tor.
Thanks for explaining!