The European Parliament has failed to ban platforms from scanning private messages for child abuse material until 2028 after a motion to reject the rules fell short of the required 361 votes.
The EU’s chat control message scanning system will continue despite the fact that most lawmakers who cast their votes want to scrap the rules.
There are no private messages in the European Union
Patrick Breyer, former activist in the European Parliament and the Pirate Party, open During the last European Parliament vote, 314 members voted against the EU’s chat control rules while 276 members voted in favor.
There were 17 abstentions, and because rejection of such a measure requires an absolute majority of the full Council rather than a simple majority of those present, the 314 dissenting votes were not sufficient.
A separate amendment to limit the examination of letters to suspects reported by the courts received greater support from the opposition, by 322 votes to 255, and likewise lost a majority.
because of Voting result“Chat Control 1.0”, which was paused after the EU institutions were unable to agree to its extension, will now be revived. It is a temporary exception that allows US technology companies to delete direct messages on services such as Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Gmail and iCloud without a warrant or prior suspicion.
The proposal was returned to a vote by the center-right European People’s Party. Parliament Speaker Roberta Mitsola, a member of the European People’s Party, asked EU leaders to resume discussions at the latest European Council meeting. Four European Commissioners also wrote to members of the European Parliament, urging them to pass the proposal.
Mitsola’s office said it followed a decision made by the group’s leaders, but several lawmakers who worked on the issue said they were not told about it in advance.
Simon de Bruyère from the digital rights group EDRi Euractive said And that Parliament “was stabbed in the back by its president.” Using the power of the largest political group to force a new vote on a measure that has already failed “should concern anyone who cares about institutional integrity,” said Rand Hammoud of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Europe.
Privacy advocates Like the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, he also campaigned against the measure.
“Fight chat control. You can’t make a community safe by making people unsafe,” Buterin wrote on X in September 2025. He argued that the back doors In private communications it is “inevitably hackable”. NFT collector and freedom of expression advocate 6529 Amplify the function of buterin Opposition to the renewed push on July 8.
Notably, the 2024 draft leaked to French outlet Contex and reported by Briar showed EU interior ministers seeking to exempt the professional accounts of police, military and intelligence staff from the same scrutiny they wanted to impose on the public.
Buterin says this is evidence that officials know the tools are unreliable.
Why do platforms scan messages?
The regulation, officially known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was proposed by then Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson in May 2022. Supporters, including the Commission’s Home Affairs Directorate, say voluntary disclosure through the platforms leaves gaps and that the EU relies too heavily on the United States to report abuses occurring within the bloc.
Opponents counter that checking everyone’s messages amounts to mass surveillance. The European Union Legal Service Council has warned that this approach contravenes the right to privacy, and a study by the European Parliament concluded that there is no way to detect abuse material on a large scale without a high rate of false positives.
Breyer cited German Federal Police figures showing that 48% of alerts were not primarily criminally related, and pointed to EU Commission data indicating that a survey of private chats produced only 36% of abuse reports in 2024.
Breyer called the result a “travesty” that is “harmful to democracy,” but said the battle over the permanent version is “just beginning.” A token truncation was added for encrypted chats, although, as Breyer pointed out, services like WhatsApp were never checked to begin with.
Talks on the permanent framework called Chat Control 2.0 resume in September.
