What kind of collective action are you thinking of?

I'm not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.

I don't care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.

If you have good ideas for collective action I'd love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.

Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don't think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs

Take note that there are lobbies pushing for these. Security state, police and religious fanatics wanting morality policing, also politicians who re afraid of popular upheaval.

Fucking hell. When does it stop? It's gotten shot down multiple times, so why do they keep trying? Do they see more of a chance now that we're getting more conservative views in the EP?
It's good to see my country opposes it, but man.

Citizen's Initiatives are great, but I'm not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.

They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen's Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.

And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen's Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.

Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.

Well, the EU has a consultation period on new regulations, but I don't know if that's open for this specifically.

Generally, I would say organizations on each country are often the ones with the infrastructure in place to issue a recommendation on these things. Consumer support orgs, unions, privacy groups and so on. Political parties if your country has one with a definite stance on the issue. If you can get those involved and they can get the press involved now you have an avenue for mainstream awareness, which frankly is more likely to do something than a purely online-driven signature or email campaign.

The rest may differ per country and even per party. It depends on what participation mechanisms you can deploy for each.

To be clear, I'm not against also reaching out to MEPs, but given how in many places they act as a collective blob representing national partisan interests and how electorally they don't have a particular incentive to engage with individual voters I don't know that it'd work best in isolation. I'm not particularly against that, either. "Contact your representative" is a staple of small district, majoritarian, first-past-the-post nonsense and I have no particular desire to move in that direction. I'm way more comfortable with a party-heavy system than with that weirdness.

EU is a regulation superpower.

And how much energy will be spent on this... power for the sake of even more power, right?

They need control for the sake of control, there is nothing higher than absolute power.

Dear Jack, where and why were you going to send photos of a child's genitals? Are you a pedophile? And you can't prove that this organ is yours and not a child's without shame...

Thoughtcrime is near...

It's only assumed the Netherlands opposes it because of the now fallen governments stance on it before. We all know that their campaign promises and 'regeerakkoord' are completly meaningless. So I'm still trying to call and emailing the dutch MEP's

Yeah, I'm not confident either. There are definitely parties in our government that don't actually oppose this (like the VVD)

I'm currently reading 1984 and already seeing references to it a bit everywhere. Same happened when I read hitchiker's guide to the galaxy.

Maybe if politicians did what the people wanted, they wouldn't have to be afraid of an uprising against them... and if religious cunts would just stay in their churches and mind their own business...

Exactly. And that is why i always feel like these "contact your representative" calls are useless. I will still do it, but it will happen. Maybe not now. Maybe not next time they try. But they will get it through.

It might be worth making a bid for legislation that requires that the public give up privacy to the government, those in government must make the same information public.

If they can read my messages, I should be able to read theirs.

Educate friends and family on government surveillance, use privacy tools like Signal, VPN, Tor, etc. Help them set it up. You can do everyday actions to push back far more useful than signing a petition.

The last time I contacted a representative they started relentlessly blowing up my phone begging for donations, so I don't even do that anymore.

I was relieved when I learned NL is opposing, but to be fair I was also a bit surprised. Don't think there is a good reason to be in favour of chat control, but kind of expect it from VVD, PVV and BBB anyway. They might even already want to expand it beyond child abuse to also include money launderers, immigrants and climate change protesters.