The “blackout” at the service of maintaining order. Faced with some 300 mayors invited to the Élysée on Tuesday, Emmanuel Macron raised the possibility of “cutting off social networks” when “things get carried away”, according to remarks reported by BFMTV and confirmed by Le Figaro. In question, the mobilizing power of these platforms in the nocturnal violence which followed the death of the young Nahel. The President of the Republic, who had in particular called TikTok and Snapchat to “a spirit of responsibility”, therefore took an additional step by blaming social networks for the acceleration of the “desire for revenge” of the rioters, driven by a “ uninhibited feeling”.
The statement by the Head of State immediately generated a unanimous reaction from opposition on all sides. “Cut off social media? Like China, Iran, North Korea?”, Hammered the boss of LR deputies Olivier Marleix on Twitter, judging this “provocation” in “very bad taste”. For once, her environmentalist counterpart Cyrielle Châtelain took the same position: “Are we going to manage social networks like in Russia or China?”, She asked. As for the Insoumise leader, Mathilde Panot, she contented herself with an ironic “Ok Kim Jung-Un”, in reference to the North Korean dictator. Finally, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, also allowed himself an ironic comparison of the “country of human and citizens’ rights” with “the great democracies of China, Russia and Iran”. As for the RN deputy from Gard Nicolas Meizonnet, he pointed to the “worrying drift” of the executive. Only the communist Fabien Roussel did not take part in this concert of criticism, and for good reason: he himself had considered a solution similar to that of Emmanuel Macron this weekend.
On the side of the executive and the majority, however, the tone seems less clear-cut than on the side of the Élysée. On LCI, the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu insisted on recalling that it was “not (of) the announcement of a censorship law, in any way”. Renaissance MP Éric Bothorel, a digital specialist, also tried to defuse the emerging controversy: “It is not a priori an option on the table. What is envisaged is the acceleration of the withdrawal of certain content or even the limitation of certain functionalities.
Without going to the most extreme option, the government remains determined to take up the subject of social networks. Jean-Noël Barrot, the Minister responsible for the Digital Transition, proposed Tuesday evening in the Senate the establishment of a working group on the role of amplifying the violence played by these platforms. Government spokesman Olivier Véran, supporting the initiative of a “transpartisan” group, spoke on Wednesday of the possibility of “functionality suspensions”. He notably cited the hypothesis of a temporary shutdown of geolocation, which, according to him, allows the rioters to find each other.
