Could Europe switch off big tech's algorithms?

IrelandEuropean UnionThe NetherlandsSlovakia

12 Jun

The EU supposedly has some of the world's toughest laws regulating big tech. So why does it still feel like Europeans are being sucked into increasingly polarised online communities, and manipulated during our elections? Can we do anything about it? This week's guest, the Irish internet campaigner Johnny Ryan, argues that a pretty radical solution is within the EU's reach. We're also talking about the Dutch government's collapse, and why bear meat may soon be on the menu in Slovakia.

Johnny is the Director of Enforce. You can follow him on Bluesky here and read his article calling on the EU to switch off social media's algorithms here in The Guardian. A longer version of our interview with Johnny is available on our YouTube channel.

Inspiration Station recommendations:

Last One Laughing UK, LOL: Qui rit, sort
'The Mars House' by Natasha Pulley
Bonus: our interview in February with Jean Chalaby about the international TV format trade

Other resources for this episode:

'Bears stray into political territory in Romania and Slovakia' - BalkanInsight, April 21, 2025

Producers

Morgan Childs and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering

Wojciech Oleksiak

Music

Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Hello and welcome to the Europeans, your weekly passport to the people, politics and peculiarities of Europe. I'm one of those peculiarities. I'm Dominic Kraemer. I'm in Amsterdam. And I'm speaking to...

KATY LEE:
Am I another one of your peculiarities?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I'm speaking to one of the people in Paris, Katy Lee.

KATY LEE:
I think we're both peculiar people. And that's why our friendship has survived this long. Hi, how are you?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
That's something we can agree on. I'm fine. I'm just emerging from a totally windowless week of living in dark theatres and I'm struggling to process the daylight. But yeah, I'm fine. Happy to be here, speaking to you again after a week off.

KATY LEE:
Yeah. For me, we had a special episode about Serbia listeners last week, which I co-hosted with Wojciech. And if you haven't heard it already, go back and listen because we are super proud of how it turned out.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, it's really good. Well done, all of you.

KATY LEE:
Oh, thank you. But it's lovely to have you back, Dominic. What are we going to be talking about this week?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, in our interview slot this week, we're going to be looking at big tech in Europe. We're going to be asking: is our regulation to limit the powers of these huge organisations and protect us European citizens working? It is regulation that's been hailed as, like, some of the strongest tech regulation in the world, if not the strongest. But what are the risks to the safety of European citizens and to our democracies if this regulation is not working effectively enough, or not being enforced as it should be? Later on in the show, we'll be putting those questions to Johnny Ryan, Director of Enforce, which is a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. It's a fascinating conversation, so keep listening.

But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
Who has had a good week, Dominic?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, I thought it was a good week to talk about what's been going on politically in my home country of the Netherlands, because it's been rather a dramatic week. So yeah, 11 months after forming a so-called extra parliamentary cabinet, the Dutch government, a government that's supported by four right-wing parties, has collapsed. So yeah, I guess I should frame this as a good week for the left and centrist parties in the Netherlands. But whether or not the left or centre will actually be able to capitalise on the government's failure or not, we'll have to wait and see.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, I'm glad you're talking about this. I saw the news that the government had collapsed over there. But I've kind of been deliberately staying in the dark about why it's happened, because I'm very lazy and I knew you'd be able to explain it to me on this podcast.

So basically, the only thing I know is that Geert Wilders, who's the Netherlands’ kind of very own blond, far-right bogeyman—

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
We all have one.

KATY LEE:
We all have one. But it was him who walked away from the government and made it collapse, right?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yes, that's essentially what happened. So Geert Wilders, if you don't know who he is, Google him, he will look exactly what you—or don't even. He just looks exactly what you think he will look like. Another blond far-right politician.

He's a man who came to prominence by alienating Muslims. And he's a man who kind of behaves like a cartoon parody of a far-right populist politician. And he walked away because he'd had enough of trying to make this government work. So he pulled the plug. And yeah, I should say that this isn't really a surprising ending to the government. So in that sense, perhaps describing it as a dramatic week politically, which I think I did earlier, is slightly over-egging it. Everyone thought this government wasn't going to last. Actually, the fact that these parties managed to govern together for 11 months before imploding is a surprise for some. There were many, many arguments and many moments when it looked like the coalition might fall apart. And yeah, this time, it actually happened.

So the official reason for why Geert Wilders stepped away is because he was frustrated that not enough was being done about immigration in the Netherlands. The coalition agreement had promised the strictest asylum admissions regime and the most comprehensive package to gain control over migration ever. And Geert Wilders had the opportunities to make that happen. The Minister for Asylum and Migration was someone from his party, the PVV, after all. She’s a woman called Marjolein Faber. And yeah, she wasn't able to achieve what the party wanted her to. She was seen by many political commentators as an incompetent minister. I actually saw a headline in one of the newspapers, the NRC saying, “Is this the Netherlands’ most incompetent minister of all time?”

So that just gives you a taste of like, how much she is despised, at least in much of the media. But yeah, in many ways, it's being seen as a relief to a lot of people that she wasn't able to achieve what the party wanted her to achieve, because some of the ideas of her party on asylum are pretty extreme. So maybe that's a little thing to celebrate.

She had, in fact, submitted a draft law for immigration earlier this year, but it had been criticised by the Dutch Council of State for its legal viability, also criticised for the fact that they did not make plausible plans that would contribute to reducing the inflow of asylum seekers. And most damningly, it was criticised for being sloppily prepared, that draft bill. Anyway, this is all to say that Wilders and his PVV pals had all the opportunities to try and pass the strictest asylum laws ever that they seem so desperate to do, but they didn't manage to do it in the 11 months that they stayed in power.

And things came to a head last week, when Geert Wilders stood in front of the press and announced a 10-step radical plan for immigration, including ideas like stopping all asylum applications, closing asylum centres and using the army to guard the borders. Wilders was frustrated, essentially, that some other European countries had implemented some stricter policies to limit movement over the borders.

That said, a lot of what Wilders was suggesting was extreme and went against international law, so maybe it wasn't ever going to be possible. What happened last week is that Wilders gave the party leaders from the other governing parties the chance to back all of these 10 policies he'd put together, to sign their name at the bottom of it. And if they wouldn't do that, he said he would leave the government.

They didn't do that, and therefore he walked away.

KATY LEE:
Okay, so a kind of ultimatum. A bit of showmanship there.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yes, exactly.

KATY LEE:
So a lot of this is about asylum policy, and definitely doesn't sound legal to me to just say people who are fleeing war and persecution just can't claim safety in this country. That's not how we do things, is it? But out of curiosity, what are the refugee arrival numbers in the Netherlands actually like right now? Are they super, super high? Is that why it makes sense to be banging on about this?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think he's mainly worried about refugees because it's the issue that gains him votes. The numbers of people coming into the Netherlands were very, very high a few years ago when Putin began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Netherlands welcomed huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees fleeing war.

But actually, the numbers have been falling really steadily since 2022. The early data for 2025 seems to suggest that numbers of arrivals are continuing to decrease in the Netherlands. In part thanks to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, fewer people from Syria are now heading to the Netherlands for safety. Although Frontex, the European Border Agency, say that the decrease is also due to stricter border controls. So that could also be playing a role.

And look, there are real problems in the Netherlands that need urgent action from whoever is in power, for example, a housing crisis. But asylum seekers arriving are by no means the dominant or primary cause of that. And I think it's very difficult to argue that asylum seeker arrivals is the number-one issue that needs fixing and the reason why a government should fall. As I said, I would argue that Wilders is just simply concerned about refugee numbers because he thinks it's politically convenient for him to make this the answer for all the problems in the country. Blame the foreigners. It's that old playbook. And I see it as a pretty manufactured crisis.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, oldest trick in the book, isn't it? What has this government, so they've been in power for 11 months now, apart from this, quote unquote, sloppily drafted immigration bill—have they actually managed to achieve anything?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, they haven't managed to achieve a huge amount, to be honest. It was a very turbulent and difficult coalition-forming process, and it continues to be difficult once they were in power. I've lost track of the number of public arguments these coalition partners had. Wilders just loves getting into a Twitter fight and dissing his colleagues online.

KATY LEE:
Oh, one of those far-right people.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, exactly. You know the type. They did pass a budget that contained some cuts to higher education and an increase in defense spending, among some other tax changes. And they passed some draft laws. But yeah, in 11 months, not much can get done, at least in the Netherlands. Things move pretty slowly here.

KATY LEE:
I've noticed. Presumably there need to be some snap elections now that you don't have a government over there.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, although they're not going to be that snappy. Thanks to the joys of Dutch bureaucracy, it seems like they won't take place until the end of October. So the cabinet and the prime minister stay in place now, but as a kind of caretaker government and actually without the ministers of Geert Wilders’ PVV party, because they were ordered by Wilders to step out immediately.

KATY LEE:
Okay, interesting that you mention the prime minister. I know he hasn't been there for very long, but I feel like internationally we have barely heard from the Dutch prime minister over the last year. Like, what is his name even? Dick something?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Dick Schoof.

KATY LEE:
Where's he been amongst all of this drama?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
“Dick something”! That should be the name of this episode. Yeah, well noticed. It really does say something that it takes this long into the good week for me to even mention Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof. He's a former civil servant, a former head of the spy agency, actually, and the coalition parties brought him in as a kind of non-political figurehead to lead this government because the other three coalition parties couldn't agree on appointing anyone from the largest party, the PVV, to lead the government because it was seen as too extreme and anti democratic of a party. So they decided to go for this so called extra parliamentary cabinet, which ended up being a bit of a damp squib, to be honest, and not so extra parliamentary, it's kind of just like a normal cabinet with a non-political figurehead. But yes, apparently Dick Schoof, our prime minister, read about the fact that his cabinet had fallen via a Twitter post from Geert Wilders.

KATY LEE:
Oh, that's not a good way to find out that news.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, so that shows like how he's being treated in all of this. And honestly, watching parliamentary debates over the last 11 months where Prime Minister Schoof had to represent the government in Parliament was really tenenkromend—that is the Dutch word for toe curling—because it was just really undignified. He'd give very hesitant speeches, and he would sometimes be undermined by his own coalition parties on Twitter whilst he was speaking.

It's been, I think, quite an awkward relationship. And anyway, now he's having to actually try to work hard to mediate another argument, an argument between the three remaining coalition party members in his caretaker government. They're arguing about who will get the ministries that the PVV have abandoned, including that vital asylum and migration portfolio.

KATY LEE:
Oh, just for the next few months until the election?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yes, well, you say just for the next few months, but it's about five months until the election. And then you know how long it takes for Dutch governments to usually actually get around to forming a coalition afterwards. So it could be a year.

KATY LEE:
Fair enough.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It's also important to note that the Netherlands is hosting the NATO Summit the week after next for the first time ever. So it's quite a busy time politically here. And I actually heard some political analysts saying that they think maybe Wilders chose this moment to pull the plug on the coalition because he didn't want to be in power during the NATO Summit when the government are probably going to have to agree to spending billions on defense.

He'd rather paint himself as a kind of anti-establishment opposition man, instead of being involved in giving a green light to that huge defense spending. And yeah, what is very clear is that Wilders just wants to make the next five-ish months before the election about immigration, just like he did at the last election. And therefore he has been encouraging over the last few days a group of citizens in high-vis jackets who have been conducting illegal vigilante border checks on cars passing from Germany into the Netherlands. It's kind of quite scary stuff and a sign of a tumultuous few months ahead probably in this country.

But I am making this good week for the opposition party. So I should make that case as well. I think there is a risk that Geert Wilders has taken by stepping out of this coalition. It's pretty doubtful whether he will be able to achieve the extraordinary almost 25% of the vote that he achieved at the last election for his party. Which, important sidebar, his party only has one party member officially: him. Very nice and democratic.

And I think there is a risk for him in this campaign that he is presented as an unreasonable man and someone who doesn't actually want to govern or fix any of the problems of this country now that he's stepped out of the coalition without much of a reason to step out.

KATY LEE:
I mean, what is his endgame here? Like, did he walk away and make this whole thing collapse because he wants there to be new elections that end up with him being prime minister, even though you said there's a risk that actually does worse than before? Like, is that what he's playing at here?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, it could be that. And there were reports that he was very annoyed that he wasn't allowed to be prime minister this time around. But actually, if you look at his behavior whilst in this coalition, it kind of looks like he doesn't want to be governing at all.

He has burned so many bridges with all of his potential future coalition partners, and he's just proven that he is not someone you can negotiate with. For example, if you look at the conservative liberal party who've been working alongside him in this coalition, the VVD, their leader has already ruled out working with Wilders after the next election. And if they stick to that, it seems pretty difficult to imagine a path in which the PVV could be back in power, unless they win an extraordinary number of seats.

Dutch politics always requires compromise. There are almost always multiple parties involved in coalitions. And yeah, I honestly think Wilders is more suited to opposition, to simply position himself against things. He's really not a populist leader in the vein of like, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, who it seems actually really wants power in order to get things done. And honestly, that's why I think this week is potentially a good week for the centre and for the left. Because it's of course too soon to say what will happen in the election, and everything can change. But because of Wilders’ political tantrum, there is a chance that Wilders’ far-right party will be out of power after this next election at the end of October. And that is good news for not just for the centre-left people, but for people who believe in the rule of law, for people that believe that climate change is a real problem, for people that think what Israel is doing in Gaza is awful. For people that want anything to be done that will help with the housing crisis we have here. I think a lot of people should be thanking Wilders for his incompetence and for this political tantrum.

KATY LEE:
Thank you for being a giant baby man. I mean, so there's quite a few months to go until this election, but you have given this good week to the centrist and leftist parties. What are the polls saying right now? Like, who are the political leaders in the Netherlands who are hoping to come out of this election better off than they were in the government that just collapsed?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, well, before I talk about polls in the Netherlands, I should point out that in the Netherlands, the polls can change a lot during an election campaign. And that there are often, like, parties that just emerge and explode during a campaign and others that completely implode. So I really shouldn't get ahead of myself celebrating the end of Geert Wilders’ reign in Dutch politics. Also, because actually, at the moment, his party are still polling as the biggest party, and they still really could gain power after the election. But they're sitting at around 19-20%, according to polling averages, which is considerably below the almost 25% they reached at the last election. At the moment, there's something like a three-way tie for first place between the PVV, the conservative liberal VVD, who just ruled out working with them, and also the PvdA GreenLeft grouping.

Now, this is two center-left parties, the traditional Social Democrats and the traditional GreenLeft party. And they are currently in the middle of the process of merging and are going to run together. Now that progressive super-party is probably going to be led into the next election by former European Green Deal chief, Frans Timmermans. You might remember him if you're a big European Commission follower, which I'm sure some of our listeners are.

KATY LEE:
He was, like, one of the most charismatic people in sort of EU politics over the last 10 years, like, he was fun to listen to.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, he was. I think he's a really good talker, although he has this reputation here for being arrogant. I think maybe it's just because he's kind of clever. And people like populists. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, it's possible that if they became the biggest party that he could be a candidate for prime minister. Although he's going to have to fight really hard for that to happen. It's also possible that Dilan Yezilgöz could be the next prime minister. She's the leader of the conservative liberal VVD party, the one that's just ruled out working with Wilders. She was actually born in Turkey herself and migrated to the Netherlands as a child, but has, like so many center-right politicians, been doing that thing of becoming more and more of an imitation of a far-right politician on a wide range of policy areas, including around immigration, also around how her party responds to Israel's war on Gaza. Her party actually voted against a motion last month that called for emergency aid to be delivered to Gaza.

The Christian Democrats are also rising in the polls. That's the final party I'll mention. They have a really popular leader, one of the mos-liked political figures at the moment in the Netherlands, according to polls. He's a guy called Henri Bontenbal. And yeah, he might be the kind of wildcard in this campaign, because he's finding some centrist space that's been left a bit absent by some other parties. And I read actually in an interview last weekend that he hasn't flown since 2006, that’s how seriously he takes the climate crisis. So yeah, maybe he's going to be the wildcard. I don't know. We have to see what happens. But I think all in all, it's a good week for opposition parties in the Netherlands, who, thanks to this political crisis that Geert Wilders manufactured, now there's at least a glimmer of hope that the far-right may have messed up their chance of power in the Netherlands and may be locked out after the next election. Maybe?

KATY LEE:
Maybe. Interesting. Ooh, I'm really looking forward to following the twists and turns over the next few months until those elections in October. Dutch politics is more interesting than you think, you know?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, it is actually. I'm also looking forward to following the twists and turns and also bracing myself because five months is a long time.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, good luck.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Thanks. Who's had a bad week?

KATY LEE:
Yeah, so this is a story from last week, so it is kind of last week's news, but I want to talk about it, so I'm going with it. This week's bad week goes to Slovakia, where as of last week, restaurants can legally put bear meat on the menu if it meets health and safety standards. Have you ever eaten bear meat?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I haven't. That sounds like it's something we shouldn't be eating.

KATY LEE:
Well, I don't know. I don't want to be one of these, like, people. I don't want us to get complaints from, like, game eaters and roadkill eaters and people like that who argue that it's judgmental or Western-centric to say, like, “Oh, you eat bear? Gross.” Like, I'm not going to give Slovakia bad week because I think bears are cute and we shouldn't eat cute animals. Why not? I don't like being judgy about this kind of thing. I'm not one of these people who's like, oh, eating that kind of meat is weird in my culture, so you're a bad person if you eat it. It's more about where this bear meat is coming from and why the bears are going to be ending up on people's plates in the first place, and that is because the meat that the Slovakian government has just authorized for sale is the meat that's going to come from a major cull of Slovakia's bear population, up to a quarter of the country's bears, which currently number about 1,300.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Oh, is the government allowed to do that? Aren't bears a protected species?

KATY LEE:
Yeah, the short answer is yes. Brown bears are a protected species, and that is the case across the EU. We have this law called the EU Habitats Directive, and under that, all across the European Union, bears are only allowed to be killed in really strictly regulated circumstances and when there's no alternative to killing them.

And these animals are protected because they bring really important benefits to Europe's ecosystem, like it is good to have big predators around. For example, they eat other animals like deer that might otherwise be overpopulated. They help keep the soil of the forest floor in balance. They also—I didn't know this, but they can be really helpful in controlling the population of ticks. You know, those little bugs that carry some quite serious diseases.?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I do know.

KATY LEE:
So we need to have bears and other big predators around. And so the fact that their population has bounced back in Europe from being nearly extinct about 30 years ago due to hunting and the destruction of their habitats, to a situation where there's something like 20,000 bears across the EU these days, this is generally celebrated by environmentalists as a really good thing, even if it means that we have to figure out ways of living with them. And even if it means that that burden, of course, falls almost entirely on rural communities. But yeah, since Slovakia is part of the EU, the Slovak government isn't allowed to just order a mass killing of up to 350 of them, unless they can show that they have exhausted all other options for dealing with the bears.

But that is nonetheless what they have pledged to do, kill up to 350 of them. Now, the European Commission has so far declined to confirm that this plan is illegal. They said that they're still looking at Slovakia's plans. But some Slovak conservationists at least have come out and said that they think the government is going to be in breach of this EU law if they go ahead with this plan. But anyway, yeah, since they are planning to go ahead and kill hundreds of bears, the government has said, well, you know what? Waste not, want not. Let's authorize this meat for sale. Bear meat is safe to eat.

A bear can weigh like 600 kilograms. So there's potentially going to be, like, tons of this meat available. Let's not just throw it away. And like, arguably, this bit of the policy is actually good policy. Because it's true, like it would be super wasteful otherwise.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. But is there like even a culture of eating bear meat in Slovakia?

KATY LEE:
Not really at all, as far as I can tell. In fact, it's difficult to find anywhere in Europe that really does have a culture of eating bear. There are a couple of pockets of Croatia where there's limited legal hunting of bears, where you can find, like, bear paté on the menu in some mountain villages. Similarly, in like Finland and Sweden, there is a quota of bears that can be hunted every year. And you will find some hunters and their families eating the meat. But it's not something that the average person would have tried. It's pretty tough meat. Apparently, it's difficult to cook well. There's also a risk of bear meat being infected with trichinella, these worms that can make you pretty sick, actually. So if you are going to cook bear meat anytime soon, Dominic, make sure that your meat thermometer gets to at least 70 degrees for the internal meat temperature. Okay?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Okay, good to know. But can we go back to the fact that Slovakia has decided to kill all of these bears in the first place? Why is it doing that?

KATY LEE:
Well, there have unfortunately been a couple of fatal incidents over the past couple of years involving bears in Slovakia. And scary interactions between humans and bears have been rising in general in the country. So it's understandably become a political issue.

The government announced the cull in April, not long after a man really sadly got mauled to death while walking in the forest near Detva in the middle of the country. There was also a young woman last year who fell into a ravine while she was being chased by a bear. She also died. A really, really horrible case. So, you know, these incidents are very scary. And the government understandably wants to look like it is doing something about it.

However, this is kind of a classic culture-war issue, right? So you have a populist government saying, “We're going to listen to the people. The people in these communities are telling us that they don't want there to be so many bears. So let's just shoot them. Never mind all of this hand wringing about biodiversity, blah, blah, blah. This is a common sense policy.”

However, you know, this does feel like a quite typical example of populist policy making based on gut feelings about what instinctively feels right. Because if you read what Slovak conservationists are saying, they will tell you that the reason that these incidents are more and more is because of things that humans are doing. And there are much better ways of dealing with the problem than just killing the bears, with all of that negative impact on Slovakia's biodiversity and ecosystem that just getting rid of them would bring.

So there's a Slovak nonprofit called Ursia, which tries to educate people about bears. And they have pointed out that these really scary interactions between humans and bears, they tend to happen in areas where hunters lay bait, not necessarily laying bait, you know, to attract bears, but just to attract animals to hunt in general. And these bait sites are often near residential areas. And you know, bears are pretty clever, they will seek out places that have food and keep going there. So they're being drawn towards areas of human habitation by stuff that humans are doing.

Environmental activists have also pointed out that Slovakia has already loosened the rules to make it easier to kill bears in areas near where humans live. Last year, 144 bears were killed, 94 of them as part of a culling intended specifically to bring the size of the population down. That is a record in Slovakia.

And yet despite that record culling, these interactions between bears and humans, they keep happening, some of them fatal. And that does suggest that there is something to this argument by the conservationists that the evidence that we have, it doesn't really suggest that culling is going to help. And that what we actually need is better education about how to live with bears and other policy solutions that don't involve killing them. But yeah, you know, it's very easy for right-wingers to paint this as an example of, you know, like, woke environmentalists banging on about biodiversity, people that live in cities who don't have to deal themselves with the consequences of having these scary predators on their doorsteps complaining that, oh, we must protect the bears. And yeah, like, I do understand that instinct to eye roll, specifically at urban people like me who live really far away from where this is actually happening. But the people who study bears really do argue quite consistently that culling isn't the best way to deal with this. It is a knee-jerk response.

And I don't know, call me old-fashioned, but I think sometimes it's best to listen to the experts who spend all day thinking about this.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
People probably think they're arrogant because they know lots of facts. Stupid experts. So did you say that hunters put bait down in areas where humans live in Slovakia, and that's one of the things that's drawing bears to those places where humans live?

KATY LEE:
Yeah, exactly. Not necessarily like in the city centre, but like, areas on the edges of like villages and towns, I guess. Yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Presumably, the hunters that are doing that could stop doing that.

KATY LEE:
Yes. And to the Slovak government's credit, that is in fact part of their new anti-bear plan, apparently, getting rid of all of these bait sites near towns, and also issuing clear guidelines on how to deal with a bear if you encounter one. Those things, you know, they seem like good policy that everyone can get behind. Killing a quarter of the national bear population? Maybe less so.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Are there examples of countries or places within countries that are handling this better?

KATY LEE:
Yeah. So if you look a little further southeast in Slovakia, Romania is a really interesting place to compare it to because bears have become a really similar political issue, actually, and part of the culture wars in the same way, but on a much bigger scale. Romania has way more bears than any other country in the EU. The latest governments actually suggest there are significantly more than we previously thought in the country, maybe 10 to 12,000 bears. And there's been a similar increase in recent years in Romania in people having these violent interactions with bears. And the political response has been pretty similar to Slovakia's, to be honest. Romania's government has started allowing the hunting of many more bears. And very similarly to Slovakia, that policy has been met with dismay by conservationists who have argued that culling is a really blunt policy instrument. And a big part of the problem, again, is that our own behavior is drawing bears closer to human habitats.

So in Romania's case, there's a lot of tourism around bears, like it's become a decent business. And the tour operators want happy customers, you know, they want to make sure that the tourists definitely get to see a bear. So they will typically lay down food for the bears to attract them. You can also find a ton of videos online of tourists feeding bears from their cars in Romania. And that is definitely going to keep the bears coming back to certain areas and getting a taste for human food. So it's kind of the same thing as the bait being laid down by hunters in Slovakia, you know, like this is human behavior that actively encourages bears to seek out humans and their food.

So yeah, there's really similar issues between these two countries. There has been an increase in bear attacks in Romania over the last 20 years or so. Human activity is a major factor in that. And yet the political response has been to just focus on killing more bears, much to the frustration of wildlife activists. However, there is one really interesting example of good practice in Romania. It's a town called Băile Tușnad. It is in Transylvania. And this town has been internationally recognized as having like a really smart bear policy. They do several things. One of them is a focus on, like ,particularly problematic bears that keep venturing into town, which experts say is apparently really important. I do kind of think that if I was a bear, I would be one of these problem bears.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I think so, too.

KATY LEE:
Venturing to town, going through the bins and then attacking people if they try to stop me. I feel quite a strong recognition for this behavior. Anyway, the town has an intervention team that identifies quote unquote problem bears and relocates them far from town. They've also done some quite radical things like cutting down fruit trees if they're not protected by electric fences. Because if you don't do that, the bear is going to come to the garden to try to get fruit from the trees. So there is a lot of electric fencing in this town, which is annoying to live with. But hey, it works. They also use sound deterrence at the town's entrance points to scare the bears away. And this is crucial to stop bears from going through the trash, looking for food. They have these special bear proof bins, which are actually made in Slovakia. So, you know, maybe Robert Fico's government should just support a local business and buy a ton of trash cans from the Slovak company.

But yeah, generally, this policy seems to have been working super, super well in this town. It has reduced the problem of bears coming into the town and causing trouble to basically zero. So this can be done well, we can find ways of coexisting peacefully with predators. And as I said at the start of the segment, it is unclear right now whether the current Slovak government plan, which is focused on killing a quarter of its bear population will even be considered legal under EU law. When the Romanian government wanted to they did manage to work out a plan that the EU was okay with. And it's possible that something similar will be done in Slovakia. But in the meantime, for this plan that seems to be not very evidence-based, but which may allow you to eat bear meat at a restaurant in Bratislava sometime soon, bad week goes to the Slovak government.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Oh, I thought bad week was going to the bears.

KATY LEE:
Oh, them too.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Making this podcast is great, but it's also a lot of work and costs a lot more money than I think most people realise. We really couldn't keep doing it without the support of some of our lovely listeners. If you think you might be able to help us out, then please consider heading to patreon.com/europeanspodcast to check out how it works with our small monthly donation system. This week, we have a few new supporters to thank. Katy, would you like to do the honours?

KATY LEE:
Always. A big thanks this week go to Niels, David, Dave, Suzanne, Petr and to Robert for increasing his donations. Thanks so much, everyone.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Thank you all.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
So Dominic, I hear you're kind of worried about the internet.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
More generally?

KATY LEE:
Yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I guess that's kind of true.

KATY LEE:
Why are you so uptight? The internet's fun. It's got memes on it and cats and stuff.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Of course it is. And I enjoy all those things. But I also feel like as we're moving into this era of increasing populism and misinformation and disinformation, it's just going to be easier for authoritarian governments to control us through the internet and for us also all to live in, like, weird separate information environments where we have one specific view of the world that's completely different to the people living next door to us because they live in a different information environment.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, those do seem to be valid concerns. We talked a couple of weeks ago on the show about the recent elections in Romania and the shocking extent to which they showed how easily as voters we can be swayed by what our algorithms show us on those tiny little screens of ours. And how if you're determined enough to wage a campaign of bombarding people with scaremongering, angry content, you can really convince, like, very large numbers of people to vote for some dude who was basically unknown a week ago.

It's pretty scary. So political manipulation is one thing. I'm also very concerned personally about like, you know, what being born into the social media age is doing to our kids and their brains and their mental health. Greece actually put forward a proposal last week for the EU to step in and make it much, much harder for kids across Europe to access social media full stop. It's a plan that has already been backed by the governments of France and Spain, Denmark, Slovenia and Cyprus. So we'll see what happens with that.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Love it.

KATY LEE:
But yeah, you know, it's funny, despite living on the continent that many people view as having the world's toughest regulation of tech giants, and the best protection supposedly against all the harms that the internet can do, I still feel pretty unprotected. And it's really clear from the Romanian elections and the general experience of, like, modern 12-year-olds, that we are still very badly protected on the internet here in Europe. Is there anything that we can actually do about this?

Well, yes. Our guest this week is someone who argues that there is something that we can do. Something pretty simple, but pretty big. Namely, Europe could turn off the kind of algorithms that push us, quote, recommended content. Content that as you'll hear is often the kind of content that pushes our emotional buttons, makes us liable to manipulation in one way or another. Wouldn't it be better if that just wasn't a feature of the European internet?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I think it would also make social media just much less fun to be on. So, which is not such a bad thing.

KATY LEE:
I guess so. Johnny Ryan is an Irish campaigner for a better internet. He is the director of Enforce, which is a part of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that pushes for more democracy in the tech industry.

He's also just a delight to talk to and someone who thinks really, really interestingly about the internet and how we can make it work better for us. And in fact, Johnny was such a delight that we talked for ages. This interview would basically take up the whole of this week's podcast if we played you the whole of it, which is why if you go to our YouTube channel, you'll be able to watch a much longer version where we notably talk a lot more about TikTok. You'll find the link on the screen there. But for now, here's Johnny in Dublin. This conversation was brought to you in collaboration with Euranet Plus.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Hi, Johnny, thanks so much for joining us today.

JOHNNY RYAN:
Hi Dominic, good to be with you.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
You wrote a really interesting piece recently when you talked about how ancient Athens and Sparta basically waged an information war against each other by sowing discord in the opposing camps. Can you explain what the 2025 version of that looks like and how the way that social media works at present makes it easier to do that?

JOHNNY RYAN:
Dominic, what I was trying to evoke in that Guardian piece, and you're referring to one sentence in a piece, was that Europe is at the beginning of a rearmament process. We're talking about spending somewhere between half a trillion and a trillion euro maybe in the next half-decade because we're worried about our eastern border, Russia, but also because Europe is now thinking that soft power alone is not enough when you don't have a superpower propping up the rules-based international order. The point I was making is it will be a waste of money to invest in military if we haven't protected Europe's soft underbelly, and our soft underbelly is our politics.

It is very, very easy today for Russian intervenors to manipulate a European election, and we have seen, for example, Elon Musk getting involved in many European countries' politics, and now we've seen, and it started with the speech of J.D. Vance, official US support for that intervention in European politics. So what I was saying in that piece is that Europe is today caught in a pincer between the East and the West. Both Russia and the United States, and maybe others too, are trying to boost authoritarians within our ranks into power in our countries.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
And can you give us some examples of specifically, like, how that is happening online?

JOHNNY RYAN:
Okay, well the first thing that everyone will be aware of is that over the last decade we have had this amplification of anything that makes you angry or fearful, and this is not a new story. It probably had its widest currency when Francis Haugen, the Meta whistleblower, reported publicly with official documents from inside Meta and said, our company has been amplifying the worst stuff and getting people aggravated because that keeps them hooked on their screens. And the longer you are hooked on your screen, the more space there is to sell advertising to you, so it makes commercial sense.

What that has done is it has broken the original promise, the sales pitch of social media. These media were supposed to bring us together, they were supposed to connect us, and instead they're splitting communities apart. So this polarization within society where everyone is in a little camp, a very, very pure camp, and they can't tolerate anyone else, and they really hate the people a few camps over, but they don't talk to the people in the next camp, that is in a large part a symptom of the algorithm on social media platforms that profiles us all and figures out what makes us tick and then puts the perfect little bit of poison in each person's ear to keep them glued on the screen. But here's what's new, we've had a decade of accidental aggravation of our worst instincts because that was what made money.

What has changed is that not only can that system now be rented by the Russians, like they can buy ads and so on, but that system is now at the service of the US administration. And what I mean by that is, I don't think any of the oligarchs who were photographed at the inauguration wanted to be there except for Elon Musk. Most of them, if not all of them actually, had defied and opposed Donald Trump at different times, some in pretty serious ways.

And what that photograph said is that he has brought them to heel. He is saying, you're now going to turn up, donate a million dollars each to my inauguration, and you're going to be pictured standing behind me smiling. So we would be very foolish to think that the president who threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg publicly in jail for the rest of his life if he didn't do the right thing, that that president cannot get those companies to do what he wants.

KATY LEE:
In the piece where you talked at such great length about Sparta and Athens, you talked about these recommender algorithms and how dangerous those algorithms are in terms of enabling us to be politically manipulated. You have advocated for simply switching off these algorithms in Europe. How would we legally do that? Can we legally do that?

JOHNNY RYAN:
Well, first, we absolutely can. There are several legal instruments that are relevant, but let me just give you one of them. It's one of my favorite, and everyone loves to hate it, the GDPR.

Every listener will think of this as that terrible thing that confronts me with pop-ups. But for you to operate a recommender system that will understand my preferences and then decide what to show me in my feed, you're going to build a very, very nuanced picture of my preferences. Now, I'm going to suggest to you that even data as simple as where I pause and then where I click play in a YouTube video, even something as simple as that, over the space of a week or a month, would be enough to reveal my sexual orientation.

And it's the same for your politics. It's the same for your fears, your hopes, your aspirations, your religion, your ethnicity, everything. That data enjoy particular protections under the GDPR.

There's an article, it's called Article 9, and it says, any interesting facts about you—it doesn't say that, but that's what it means—whether you're a trade union member, your philosophical outlook, all of these things, they enjoy particular protections as special category data. And one of those protections is that no one gets to use them by default. So the free-for-all of data that we have right now online, where the platforms are just hoovering up everything about you and then using it to manipulate you in a way that makes them money, whatever the outcome, that's already illegal.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, because we have these pieces of EU internet legislation, like the GDPR, as you mentioned, but also the DSA and the DMA, which are held up around the world as some of the toughest internet legislation there is. And we've seen splashy headlines about Meta and other companies being fined hundreds of millions of euros under these laws. But yeah, are these laws just not being enforced properly? Is that the problem here?

JOHNNY RYAN:
Well, that's exactly the problem. That is precisely it. Europe convinced the world that it was going to do one thing well, legislate and enforce. And the rest of the world believed it.

I remember being in industry, working for a Silicon Valley firm, and my colleagues asking me, are the Europeans serious about the GDPR? Do we need to adjust? I said, yes, yes, they're serious.

I was wrong. No one needed to adjust anything. Turns out you had a pass. The bigger you were, and the worse things you were doing, the safer you were. Whereas if you're a small, or if you're a, you know, a local football team, okay, you need to be worried about the GDPR, apparently. But if you're Google and Meta, you don't.

Now, fines, what do they do? If I make a thousand euro a day as a petty drug dealer by parking on a prohibited parking space outside a school, and I get a parking ticket for a hundred euro, of course, I'll park there tomorrow. So these fines, they sound big, they're completely immaterial. And that's been known for a very, very long time. But the law gives the enforcer the power to reach inside these companies and change how they use data. But the enforcers haven't used it.

KATY LEE:
But do you think that's because we just accidentally designed these rules badly? Or do you think there was a sense of, like, wanting to look tough, but at the same time, oh, we quite like these tech companies, and we want them to feel welcome here. And we're not really that serious about making laws that really bring them to heel.

JOHNNY RYAN:
I think it's some combination of those things. But this isn't just about digital. Europe has a huge enforcement issue in other areas too.

Antitrust, which has been largely dead in the United States for a long time, decades, has had a rejuvenation actually in the later days of Trump, and then a huge renaissance under Biden, which appears to be continuing to some extent under Trump. Europe used to credit itself that it was the one applying these antitrust and competition rules alone, without the US fighting alone. But actually, you can take a look at some of these markets and they are very clearly broken. The digital market, worst among them.

I'll give you in the digital market one of our original sins as Europeans. We allowed a company called Google to buy a company called DoubleClick. DoubleClick is the company that was running ad auctions on a very, very large chunk of the internet. Google was allowed to buy it. Then it said, well, we won't combine the data. And then it did combine the data. Nothing happened. We have a terrible problem of simply not applying the law.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
You're speaking to us from Ireland. Why is it that Ireland is key to forcing companies to give us an internet that is less dangerous and generally one that works better for Europeans?

JOHNNY RYAN:
I'm looking, it's mainly the weather and the attractiveness of its citizenry. Of course.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah.

JOHNNY RYAN:
So what happened was when the GDPR was being negotiated, there was a question. Will there be centralized enforcement in Brussels? Or will there be national authorities who enforce? Or will a company deal with whatever authority is in the country where you have your European headquarters? What we ended up with was that third option, which means nearly all of the top digital companies by market cap have their European headquarters in Ireland, in this small country that I am in today. The only exception is Amazon, which is based in an even smaller country, in Luxembourg.

Now, because they say that they have their European headquarters here, it is the Irish Data Protection Commission that is the so-called lead authority for how they use data. So if you've any issue with how Meta has used your data and you complain to your local enforcer, that will eventually go to the Irish. And there it will remain for quite some time.

KATY LEE:
Apart from the weather and the handsomeness of its citizens, what was it about Ireland that was so attractive when these giant tech companies were looking for headquarter locations in Europe? What was it that made them think, oh, Ireland, let's go there?

JOHNNY RYAN:
A primary reason is that the country never had an industrial revolution, which meant that there was a policy of grabbing other countries' companies, a very, very well-developed policy with the entire state apparatus committed to it, where you would incentivize foreign corporations to come here and employ people here. Part of that, then, is the tax system, the corporate tax system, which has been an ongoing battle. One other reason, however, is probably the language. Geographically, it's as close as you can get to the U.S. while being in Europe. And the people are probably as close as you can get to being Americans. They speak English, often with an American twang. It's reasonably easy for other language speakers to get to if you need to hire them to. And culturally, it is easy for Americans to deal with Irish people. All the easier if they have to pay very, very little corporate tax.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
Ever since we spoke to JoHnny, I'm ashamed to tell you that I have still been mindlessly scrolling TikTok and other social media from time to time. But I am trying to do it less and I'm trying to do it a bit more consciously and think about like why the algorithm might be pushing me certain types of content. How well do you think your algorithm knows you?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Oh, very well.

KATY LEE:
Yeah?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I actually did that thing on Instagram you can do where you can ask it to stop recommending things based on the algorithm.

KATY LEE:
Oh, yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Was that just with adverts? Yeah. So I turned off the personalized adverts thing and I started getting such irrelevant and ugly adverts and even just that I found difficult to tolerate.

So yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good idea. I think something needs to happen. And in a way, I'm pleased to hear an expert confirm my fears that we're all screwed if this regulation doesn't start working a bit better And if it doesn't get enforced properly.

KATY LEE:
We do have quite a troubled relationship with recommendation because some of the time, most of the time, I'm quite grateful for it. But I am also very amused when like on the rare occasion where the algorithm just doesn't know me at all. So yesterday I got this ad that was like, “Still partying hard even though you're not 20 anymore? Try this amazing hangover cure for old people.” It's like, first of all, algorithm, you should know that I'm heavily pregnant right now. But even if I wasn't, my days of hard partying are long behind me. Like, this is not who I am. But thank you for thinking I might be. It's kind of flattering.

Anyway, that conversation really did give us a lot of food for thought about the way that we use the internet. So yeah, I hope it was food for thought for you, too. Don't forget to check out the longer version of that conversation on our YouTube channel and also follow Johnny on BlueSky. He is a great person to follow if you, too, are interested in building a better internet. You can find a link in the show notes.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Time to enter into the Inspiration Station and share some European cultural goodies with each other. What have you been enjoying this week, Katy?

KATY LEE:
Well, I've been very thorough this week and I've actually watched the same TV show in two languages. It's the show Last One Laughing. I think you're familiar with this TV show. Isn't there a friend of yours in the Dutch version? Am I imagining that?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
A friend of mine was in one of the seasons of the Dutch version, Rick Paul van Melleche, and he failed. He laughed twice very quickly.

KATY LEE:
Oh, he is a laugher. I've met him. So I can see him not being very good at that game. No offense. But yeah, depending on what country you're in, you may already be familiar with a local version of the show. It's on Amazon Prime, and they've made it in a bunch of different countries now, everywhere from Poland to Nigeria. The original show was Japanese, I think. But yeah, it's the same format in every country. You get a bunch of the nation's funniest people, professional comedians, actors, and they get locked in a room and it is a game show. All of the contestants have the same job, which is to try as hard as possible not to laugh no matter how funny the thing that's happening is. And if you do let out even a tiny little giggle, you are eliminated.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, and also even just a smile.

KATY LEE:
Oh, it depends on the country, I think.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Oh, really? Because in the Netherlands, smiling is not allowed.

KATY LEE:
Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've heard different things about the different national versions. I watched the UK version first because I heard it was really funny. And it really is very, very funny. They've got some of Britain's best comedians all in one room. And it is honestly such a joy watching the exquisite pain on their faces as they try not to laugh at the things that each other have just said.

It's just, it's really enjoyable television. And I think some really necessary light relief from the world right now. But yeah, I was really curious to know if I would also enjoy the French version of this show. Because I think humor is one of those things that is so nationally specific. And let's face it, much as I love my adopted country, I do think Britain is probably funnier as a nation.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Bold.

KATY LEE:
Britain is a very funny country. Come on. I mean, France, perhaps less known for its humor, shall we say?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I mean, I'm probably gonna get cancelled for saying this, but my instinct is that, like, French people don't have such a difficult time not laughing. I feel like their humor is quite like, po-faced or quite dry. Whereas English people are just like, big slapstick fools.

KATY LEE:
Yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
How did it work?

KATY LEE:
Well, it was interesting. There were more penis jokes in the French version, which I was maybe a little bit surprised by. There was also quite a lot more wordplay. I mean, generally, I was really pleased to find out that the French version is also really pretty funny. It is a similar mixture of like, puerile and absurd. And yeah, I've been enjoying it very much.

But if you've watched the other versions of this show, like the Italian one or the Swedish one or the Irish one, I'd be really interested to hear whether people enjoy them or not. Because as you probably know from an interview that we did earlier this year about the TV formats trade, I'm a little bit obsessed with this idea of translating TV shows into different languages and places and whether it works or not. So yeah, I can recommend the UK and French versions of this show, but I want to hear if you enjoyed the rest.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I need to restart my Prime subscription so I can watch all of these.

KATY LEE:
There's so many of them. It'll take you a while.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
There's my summer gone.

KATY LEE:
There it goes. What have you been enjoying this week?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, as I said, at the top of the show, I've been very busy performing and rehearsing all week. So I actually haven't had much time to consume culture because I've been making culture. And therefore, I'm going to lean on one of our listeners, Francesca, who used the community chat on our Patreon page to share a book recommendation that sounds great.

KATY LEE:
Oh, yeah, I saw this.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, she loved the book The Mars House by British author Natasha Pulley. She says, “It’s a sci-fi that draws from the present to depict a future on Mars with lovely characters, wise mammoths—yes, you heard that right—fish-obsessed dogs, and a quite intricate plot that is very rewarding in the end. And a lot of funny footnotes. I rejoiced every time there was a footnote.” I love that you love footnotes, Francesca.

KATY LEE:
I love that, too.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
So yeah, she said it's a heartwarming tale about humanity and she highly recommends it if you need something emotionally fluffy, which I think we all do.

KATY LEE:
I definitely do.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
So thank you, Francesca, for sharing that tip. If you have European cultural tips, be like Francesca and put them in our Patreon chat if you're a Patreon member or send us an email, hello@europeanspodcast.com.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Time for a happy ending, and for my happy ending, I wanted to tell you about a very old French condom.

KATY LEE:
Go on.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It’s a 200-year-old condom that's on display at my local museum in Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum. It's in mint condition, probably unused.

KATY LEE:
Good. Thank you for clarifying.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah. Although condoms back then, rather concerningly, were reusable. It might have simply been a souvenir condom, so not one that you're meant to use.

KATY LEE:
It was reusable. So is it like a kind of bin bag type material, like wipeable plastic? What is it?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It's made out of a sheep's appendix.

KATY LEE:
Oh, yeah, rubbery. I can see that.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
And it's got a drawstring, so adaptable to sizes.

KATY LEE:
One size fits all.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah. And it's also got some art on it.

KATY LEE:
Okay.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It's got a very naughty picture of a nun with her legs wide open and three clergymen in front of her in an aroused state, plus the words “this is my choice.” And I think it's indicating that it's the nun's choice to choose which of these three men she desires, which quite nice early, like, hint of 19th-century feminism to it.

KATY LEE:
Love it.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Anyway, there you go. A very safe-sex happy ending. I've not been to see the condom yet in real life, but I am, of course, going to go as soon as I have a spare moment.

KATY LEE:
I cannot wait to see the drawstring.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
That is it for this week. We will see you next week for another episode of the Europeans. We've got a great interview that I am particularly looking forward to playing you about abortion policy and reproductive rights across Europe. Also a quite exciting study that's been done here in Europe into a new contraceptive method. It's really moving things on from your drawstring condom, Dominic.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
My drawstring condom?

KATY LEE:
Don't miss it. It'll be in your feeds next Thursday. Yes, your condom.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
We're gonna have to put the explicit warning on this episode.

KATY LEE:
I think so.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
This week's episode was produced by Wojciech Oleksiak and Morgan Childs. Thank you both. Our theme tune and wonderful musical stings are by the fabulous Jim Barne, and our Patreon music is by Mariska Martina. Go check us out on YouTube, on Instagram, on BlueSky and on Mastodon if you've got some spare time and feel like being controlled by our tech overlords. Have a great week, everyone! Dag!

KATY LEE:
Majsa!