Test yourself on Chat Control - the law that nearly passed without a majority

I just published a quiz about the EU's "Chat Control" legislation - and I think it is one of the most important things you can test yourself on this year.

Why? Because on 9 July 2026, 314 MEPs voted to reject this scanning regime while only 276 voted to keep it - and it passed anyway. A procedural rule requiring an absolute majority of 361 meant the majority of those present simply wasn't enough. The law was not voted in. It slipped through by default.

That should worry everyone, regardless of your politics.

Chat Control authorises platforms to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material - a goal nobody opposes. But it does so through generalised, suspicionless scanning of everyone's communications, with detection methods whose false-positive rates reach as high as 20 percent for AI-classified "unknown" material. Germany's federal police report that more than half of the alerts it receives are not criminally relevant, and around 40 percent of investigations triggered by these flags target minors themselves - not offenders.

Even the EU Council's own Legal Service reportedly concluded the scheme sits uneasily with Article 7 of the EU Charter, which protects private communications. A challenge before the Court of Justice is expected.

And this is only the temporary "1.0" regime. The permanent regulation - Chat Control 2.0 - would go further, potentially forcing end-to-end encrypted services like Signal to scan on the device itself. Signal's president has said the company would rather leave the EU than break its encryption.

Why test yourself? Because laws like this depend on most people not knowing the details. The more of us who understand the difference between voluntary and mandatory scanning, between targeted court-authorised investigation and mass surveillance, between hash-matching and client-side scanning - the harder it becomes to push this through procedural loopholes a second time.

My quiz covers the 2026 timeline, the voting arithmetic, which services are actually affected, and what applies for sure right now. If you can't answer those ten questions without guessing, that's exactly the point: this is too important to be learned after it's too late.

Test yourself. Then tell your MEP what you think.