The invasion of the US Capitol in Washington will not only have fueled fears about threats to democracy.
The decision of Twitter, then Facebook, to censor certain messages from Donald Trump on January 6, before completely suspending his accounts, offended part of the political class.
Including on this side of the Atlantic.
Where the question of the advisability of censorship on social networks, like that of the legitimacy of platforms to do so or not, is debated.
Asked a few hours after the events on France 2, Marine Le Pen launches as follows:
"Donald Trump must condemn what happened, if at all he can do it ... There is a real questioning who questions us, we French too: Can large private companies like digital giants decide who has the right to speak, what do we have the right to say?
"
Read also: Capture of the Capitol: the day the American democracy fractured
The European deputy National Rally (RN) Gilbert Collard is indignant, a few hours later on BFM TV, in the same tone:
“Even if I do not endorse everything that the current American president can say, I hate any form censorship that is not subject to prior judicial review.
It is giving extraordinary power to a private organization.
"
When the president of the party
Patriots
, Florian Philippot, pointed out that when CNews
" Erdogan calls for violence on Twitter, it's never censored while Trump is. "
To read also: Trump banned from Facebook: "It's not up to GAFA to decide what to say or not to say"
In the ranks of the left, at the other end of the political spectrum, several voices also denounce the freedom granted to the GAFA.
In a long video, posted on his YouTube account Thursday, the leader of rebellious France thus alerts his supporters to the censorship used by Facebook and Twitter against the President of the United States:
"We can say to ourselves, a little cynically so much the better,
begins Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
But if we agree, that means that we accept the principle that the people to whom we entrust the communications, cut them off [...] Today it is Trump's interventions, tomorrow it may be something else.
We have before us this danger, that social networks will be cut off from us too. ”
Guest of Sud radio this Friday, the spokesperson for the Communist Party, Ian Brossat, abounds: “
I hate Trump.
I hate his ideas.
But that he cannot express them on Twitter and that a head of state still in activity is censored, that poses a subject. "
Censorship on (and by) social networks of political content not relating to a criminal offense also exists in France.
The nationalist anti-immigration movement, Génération identitaire, was thus deprived of a Facebook page for a while, before seeing several of its publications deleted last May, because they were deemed to be contrary to “Facebook community standards”.
The non-registered member, Emmanuelle Ménard, has had her Twitter account suspended three times.
After making fun of Greta Thunberg or after specifying that the perpetrator of the Nice attack was a migrant, last October.
Adopted by the National Assembly in May 2020, the law aimed at combating
“cyber hate”
carried by LREM deputy Laetitia Avia intended to go further.
By forcing platforms and search engines to remove
"obviously"
hateful
content within 24 hours
, under penalty of heavy fines.
A provision deemed contrary to the Constitution in June, in particular because of the lack of prior intervention by a judge.
In front of deputies, just hours before the invasion of the capitol on Wednesday, the Secretary of State in charge of the digital transition, Cédric O, will have defended the resumption of the objectives of the Avia law, in the future bill on the principles of the Republic.
A concomitance which will not have escaped Marine Le Pen: "
It is a real question at a time when we ourselves, in France, are proposed to pass laws like the Avia law, which we seem to want to bring back in the debate, and which transfers to these digital giants the task of censoring opinions.
Watch out for this.
Let us learn from what happened and from the exacerbation that all this could have caused on the American political situation.
"
