There is such a rare consensus in French politics: regardless of left and right, unanimous condemnation of social networks to close the account of U.S. President Donald Trump. French Finance Minister Le Maire said on Monday that regulating digital space should not be done by the network giants. The radical “France Unbowed” MPs warned: Beware of the threat of freedom of expression being taken away by social giants for all!
On Friday, two days after President Trump’s supporters broke into Capitol Hill, Twitter decided to permanently shut down President Trump’s account after he announced he would not attend the presidential inauguration on January 20, citing the danger of new incitement to violence. Facebook and other social networks such as Snapchat and Twitch followed suit, also blocking Trump’s account.
French Finance Minister Le Maire was shocked by the banning of Trump’s account by Twitter and Facebook, revealing on French radio that “the cyber oligarchy threatens the state and democracy” and that “the only legitimate” people who can regulate digital space are “the sovereign people”, “the state” and “justice”.
Speaking on Europe 1, French government spokesman Attal expressed his “dismay” at Twitter’s decision, arguing that the disappearance of a person from a social network, which has become a public space, raises the question of the absence of special standards established by law.
The French government tried to push through legislation in 2020 to regulate hate speech on social networks, but the French Constitutional Council repealed the provision in June as “prejudicial to freedom of expression.
On Saturday, Cédric O, France’s secretary of state for the Internet, said the Twitter measures against Trump raised a fundamental question about the regulation of the public debate space.
All parties in France, without exception, have always considered measures taken by private companies in cyberspace as “censorship,” and Olivier Faure, the first secretary of France’s left-wing Socialist Party, argued that the owner of a company has a monopoly on deciding who can have freedom of expression.
From France’s radical left-wing leader “France Unbowed” Mélangchon to the far-right National Front president Marine Le Pen, all have expressed concern about social giants. The former said “they are using Trump’s words and actions as a pretext to control the space of public discussion”; the latter saw it as violence against democracy, showing that these private groups “think they have the power of the state, and it’s almost true! “
Ruffin, a Euro-MP for the France Unbowed party, said Monday that these private companies were able to cut off the network of a US president so powerful that they would feel they could do whatever they wanted from now on “to all those who are not loyal to the Internet masters. On Saturday, he told the French newspaper Libération: “Should we entrust freedom of expression to the Silicon Valley giants? Tomorrow, this digital and private censorship will target us all.”
Bertin, a former key member of the French Republican Party and current president of the Northern Region of France, who is said to be a possible candidate for the next presidency, said, “In the coming years, we will have to face a key issue, regulating or dismantling parts of GAFA (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), because they are floating above us a threat to democracy that has never been seen before.”
Only MEP Lalucq, who belongs to the Social Democrats, bucked the trend and thanked Twitter for its approach.
The abolition of Trump’s account has shaken French public opinion, and the main French media generally regard the social networking giant’s move as “censorship”. The French center-left Le Monde editorial, entitled “Trump expelled from Twitter and Facebook: social networks move between permissiveness and censorship,” wrote the newspaper, “It would be a mistake to think that addressing the symptoms is enough to cure the disease. Today, alternative truths have become a political weapon long underestimated by democracy, which faces a great challenge. It is tempting to cut off this voice of outrage that feeds on lies. But the real question is to ask why millions of people are willing to believe the unbelievable if only a little bit of it matches what they want to hear.”
The editorial of the right-wing Le Figaro, titled “Trump is censored by the ‘virtual police'”, pointed out that “it is precisely the absence of filters that makes social networks so powerful, and therein lies the problem: they thus remove the editorial responsibility from the media, which must take responsibility for the information and opinions published. The system has come to the end of its logic. Through unilateral decisions, social networks have accelerated the end of their extraterritorial privileges. National and international norms have become necessary.”
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