On February 8, 2019, the
“
LOL League
”
affair broke out , a Facebook group including journalists, accused of cyberharassment.
Five years after this worldwide scandal and the dismissals it caused, many elements support the thesis of a media frenzy.
“It’s a textbook case of media hype, the proportions it has taken are crazy
,” Loris Guémart, former mediator of Arrêt sur images (ASI), told AFP.
Under his pen, ASI is the only French media to have conducted a critical rereading of its coverage, at the end of 2021. At the international level, only the
New York Times
did the same, in April 2021.
“La Ligue du LOL”
is the name of a private Facebook group, created in 2010, which brought together around thirty members including young journalists and communicators.
In early 2019, members of the group were accused of having committed cyberharassment on Twitter in the early 2010s, mainly against feminist activists.
Having its roots in the small milieu of Parisian Twitter, this affair had worldwide media resonance.
It had provoked debates on sexism in journalism and online violence.
However, on the justice side, the Paris prosecutor's investigation into harassment was dismissed in February 2022, for
“insufficiently characterized offense”
.
Also readLOL League: an online survey on sexism in editorial offices
“The witch hunt begins”
Surveys carried out by the sites L'ADN and Next INpact in early 2020, then
Marianne
in 2021, had already concluded that there was an
“unprecedented media frenzy”
.
Like ASI and the
New York Times
, they pointed out the fact that the LOL League had been wrongly described as the instigator of coordinated cyberharassment actions, carried out by all its members.
“In reality, only a few members (...) were accused of obscene jokes, crude photomontages or repeated mockery, and not the group as a whole
,” corrected the
New York Times
.
It all started on Friday February 8, 2019, with an article from Libération
's verification service
, Checknews:
“Did the LOL League really exist and harass feminists on social networks?”
It follows accusations that emerged on Twitter.
After the article, the affair grew all weekend on the networks and a list of names was broadcast.
“The witch hunt begins, with threats of death and rape
,” a member of the LOL League who requested anonymity told AFP.
The first layoffs fell on Monday, the start of massive media coverage.
In the meantime, some of the accused published apologies, which they regret today, before remaining silent.
“I wrote an apology tweet at 2 a.m., in tears, after being bombarded with threats and insults
,” recalls the former editor-in-chief of Inrocks, accused of a telephone hoax .
“Written under pressure, these apologies were taken as admissions of guilt
,” adds Alexandre Hervaud, former head of
Libération
’s web service .
Main criticisms of the accused towards the media: a
“lack of verification”
of the accusations, in the context of post-MeToo freedom of speech, and a
“false”
or even
“conspiracy”
presentation of the group.
“It was presented as a “boys’ club” (group of men) of journalists, while many of the members were not journalists and there were a good third of women
,” protests the former member.
Freeze on images
“does not say that the affair did not deserve any article”
, underlines Loris Guémart.
“But it deserved neither the tone of most articles nor the volume of media content published
. ”
“A feeling of waste and bitterness”
One of the alleged victims contacted by AFP rejects the idea of an outburst:
“There was a normal reaction from the media to revelations of harassment by journalists”
.
Former journalist Iris Gaudin, who also denounced harassment, is more measured:
“After having veered in one direction, the media should not veer in the other.
This would risk harming the victims and the real suffering they endured
.
According to Alexandre Hervaud, the story hit the media because it filled
“a lack of emblematic cases linked to MeToo”
in French journalism.
“There were shameful titles, like “The League of LOL could be our Weinstein affair””
(American producer accused and then convicted of rape), chokes Alexandre Hervaud in reference to a column in Le Monde.
Asked by AFP, the daily did not respond.
Former manager of the L'Express site, now at Télérama, Emma Defaud retains from this period
"a feeling of waste and bitterness"
.
“The problem is having done so much and having read so much,”
she analyzes, while having
“no doubt about the fact that a lot of people have suffered from the nuisance of certain people”
members of the LOL League.
“This subject deserved to be addressed, I am not calling into question the work of Libération”
with the Checknews article,
“but it was taken up in a form of urgency and a race for shallots rather unworthy of the profession
,” she adds.
Today at Arrêt sur images, Robin Andraca is the author of this triggering article.
“It was impossible to imagine the consequences that this paper would have
,” he confided to AFP.
According to him, it
“was intended to tell a form of paradox: journalists gave lessons in feminism but were accused of having wanted to silence a feminist message a few years earlier on social networks”
.
“I saw my subject being taken up by other media and I admit that I did not always recognize the story that I had tried to tell
,” he assures.