Chat Control is the informal name for an EU law that lets platforms such as Gmail, Facebook Messenger and Skype scan your private messages and emails. This week, in a vote that has stunned even seasoned observers of Brussels, it was renewed even though more MEPs voted against it than for it.
On Thursday 9 July, in Strasbourg’s last sitting before the summer recess, MEPs delivered a result that only makes sense once you understand the mechanics behind it. 314 MEPs voted against the regulation, 276 voted in favour, and 17 abstained, yet the motion to reject it failed because it did not secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes.
The outcome hinges on a procedural quirk. Because the file was in its second reading, opponents needed an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs, not just a majority of those present, to block or amend it. If that threshold was not reached, the Council’s text was set to proceed without Parliament imposing further safeguards. Supporters, by contrast, only needed a simple majority of those in the chamber. With MEPs already drifting home ahead of the break, the arithmetic favoured the text staying in force.
The measure, formally Regulation (EU) 2021/1232 and often called Chat Control 1.0, is a temporary exemption to the EU’s ePrivacy Directive. It allows, but does not require, providers such as Gmail, Facebook Messenger and Skype to voluntarily scan private messages and emails, looking for known child abuse imagery, newly identified material flagged by AI classifiers, and text conversations showing signs of grooming or solicitation. Matches are reported to authorities. It is a separate legislative track from the far more contentious permanent law, Chat Control 2.0, which remains stuck after years of negotiation over whether scanning should be mandatory and indiscriminate or targeted at suspects with judicial oversight.
The scheme had already been allowed to lapse once this year. MEPs rejected an extension on 26 March by 311 votes to 228, with 92 abstentions, and the previous temporary rules lapsed on 3 April. That should have been the end of it. Instead, the European People’s Party, backed by the Council of the EU and the European Commission, brought the file straight back. On the Tuesday before the final vote, MEPs approved a narrow urgency motion, 331 to 304 with 11 abstentions, put on the agenda at short notice at the request of the member states and the EPP group, allowing Parliament to vote again on the Thursday.
Critics called it a stitch-up. Greens/EFA negotiator Markéta Gregorová told colleagues on the floor that the manoeuvre broke Parliament’s own rules. “The European People’s Party is abusing its position as the largest political group to bring back, through a procedural loophole, a proposal that Parliament had already rejected,” she said. “This is unprecedented. This is no longer just about protecting privacy, it is about protecting our democracy.” Patrick Breyer, the digital rights campaigner and former MEP who has tracked the file for years, was blunter still. “The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy,” he said.
Supporters frame it differently, less as an expansion of power and more as closing a gap that had already opened. The EPP’s public position, posted alongside the vote, was direct: “We cannot accept this legal vacuum. We cannot let child abuse material go unnoticed and unreported, day after day.” The group has pointed to EU figures showing that roughly eight in ten online child abuse investigations begin because a platform detected the material first, arguing that without a legal basis for scanning, that detection pipeline simply stops, not because abuse stops, but because nobody is looking for it.
Manfred Weber, the EPP’s group leader, had spent weeks working to get the original, unrestricted Commission text back onto the table, specifically because the version Parliament considered in March had been narrowed by amendments from the Socialist rapporteur, Birgit Sippel, limiting scope in ways the EPP argued would blunt detection rates. Many EPP members had voted against that narrower March version themselves, not because they opposed scanning in principle, but because they wanted the fuller version restored. The second-reading route achieved exactly that. Four European Commissioners wrote to MEPs directly ahead of the vote, arguing that disrupting detection “seriously weakens our collective ability to identify abuse, support victims, and stop offenders.” Parliament President Roberta Metsola had also urged EU leaders in June to simply move on with the file, treating the repeated delay as the anomaly rather than the fast-tracked vote that followed.
One concession did survive the vote. Of the amendments put forward, only a small number cleared the absolute majority hurdle, including one confirming that scanning should not extend to end-to-end encrypted communications, meaning services such as WhatsApp and Signal remain formally outside the regime, even though providers were not scanning encrypted traffic in any case. The regulation now runs until 2028, with negotiations on the permanent Chat Control 2.0 law due to resume in September.
Questions have also been raised about whether the scanning actually works. A European Commission evaluation of the existing scheme found that just 0.00000077 per cent of messages scanned across the EU actually contained illegal material. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has reported that 48 per cent of all incoming alerts it receives are not criminally relevant, and that 40 per cent of the resulting investigations target minors themselves rather than adult offenders. The Commission has conceded there is no clear evidence that the scanning has led to an increase in convictions or in children being rescued.
The case for it
Supporters argue that voluntary scanning remains one of the few practical tools for identifying abuse material at scale and passing it to law enforcement, and that a five-year track record credited with the large majority of abuse detections that reach police is not something to let lapse over questions of scope. Because the regime is voluntary and excludes encrypted services, it does not force platforms to weaken encryption or build new scanning infrastructure, which is the more contentious demand contained in the still-unresolved Chat Control 2.0.
The case for concern
Critics argue the accuracy record undermines the justification for the law. Close to half of alerts referred to German police were found not to be criminally relevant, and a significant share of the resulting investigations were directed at minors rather than adults, often without criminal intent. False positives mean private, entirely innocent images or conversations can be flagged and reviewed by a human moderator.
There is also a broader concern about scope. The law authorises scanning for child abuse imagery and grooming behaviour specifically, but critics argue that once scanning infrastructure exists inside a platform, there is no technical barrier stopping a provider, or a future government, from expanding what it looks for. That is an argument about precedent and future risk rather than about what the current regulation permits, but it is one that has shaped much of the opposition to both this measure and its permanent successor.
There is also the question of process itself. Two amendments failed to reach the absolute majority despite winning more votes than the text they were trying to change, and the vote itself was scheduled for the final sitting day before recess, when attendance was at its lowest. Whatever view you take of the underlying policy, the arithmetic used to pass it is worth understanding on its own terms.
Among those following the vote closely was Fidias Panayiotou, the 26-year-old independent MEP for Cyprus who has become one of Brussels’ most unlikely political figures. An internet personality with more than 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, Panayiotou was elected as Cyprus’s first ever independent MEP in June 2024, finishing third with 19.4 per cent of the vote after a campaign that grew out of his online following rather than any party machine. Originally from Meniko, a village in the Nicosia district, he is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, and had built his profile with viral stunt and challenge videos before turning to politics, where he has governed largely by putting decisions to his followers on social media.
Ahead of the vote, he warned his audience the numbers were being managed. “This came also in the past, and we rejected it here in the European Parliament, and they are bringing it again, and this is very scandalous guys, because we voted already,” he said. “I’m afraid that behind closed doors, they did some deals with members of the European Parliament, and they will pass it.”
After the result, he confirmed it. “Bad news, guys, chat control passed, even though the majority of the members of the European Parliament voted to reject it,” he said. “We needed to reach an absolute majority, and were not able to reach it. Some amendments did pass, though, about the end to end encryption messages, so they will not be able to scan those, which that’s a good thing, but this is a sad day for freedom.”
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