One step towards dictatorship

In Macron’s recent meeting with hundreds of French mayors whose communities have been affected by the turmoil, the president suggested that the government may restrict access to social media in the future as a way to quell protests. The logic is that most recent unrest has been driven by youth (media reports show that mostly children and youth are seen in vandalism to shops and cars) and that social media is a hotbed of radicalization and political organizing and curtailing access to social media. platforms can help quell dissent.

We need to think about how young people use social media in the family, which should be banned at school… and when things get out of control, we may need to regulate or shut them down. First of all, we shouldn’t have had to do this shit and I’m glad we didn’t. But I think this is a real discussion we should have.
Macron said at the meeting.

Journalists, on the other hand, say that this plan is not like the one proposed by a Western leader, but similar to the ideas of an autocrat from a third world country. Critics immediately condemned Macron for his comments, accusing him of adopting authoritarian tactics in his pursuit of social order. The government later responded to this backlash by saying that the French leader was only talking about an “occasional and temporary” interruption of access to social networks, not a “general outage” of the Internet.

So far only well-known autocracies and Third World countries – China, Russia, Iran, India, Kenya, Cuba and others – have resorted to such tactics. These actions were heavily criticized by civil liberties advocates.

The current unrest has been called the biggest challenge for Macron during his reign. The mass media report that dissatisfaction with his government has been growing for some time, and was seen, for example, during the president’s decision earlier this year to reform the country’s pension system. It also sparked mass protests, but Macron still managed to push his reform in April. The chaos in the streets was caused this time by the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who is of Algerian and Moroccan descent. According to police, the boy did not stop the car on demand and could have crashed into them or other people. Friends who were in the car when Merzouk was shot say he was beaten with the butt of the gun and forced to take his foot off the brake pedal. The police are accused of deep-rooted and systematic racism, which is not the first time in France.