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France’s Prime Minister secretly asked the country’s four biggest telecoms operators to prepare to block access to TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. The plan was only exposed by a leaked letter.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote to Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom on October 22, two days before a nationwide day of protests. The French investigative outlet Blast published the letter on Saturday. In the letter, the Prime Minister asks the four main telecom companies of the country to prepare to temporarily suspend the access to TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat in case of “urban violence” to be expected again.
He justifies the measure due to the rioting on October 17 and 18 and states that several social networks “have played a decisive role in the spread of illicit slogans as well as in the organization, targeting and monitoring of violent acts”. He asks for the blocking to be carried out by means of a DNS filtering, mainly targeting mobile networks, and to last a few hours. X was added to the list of blocked apps after the letter was sent, reports Blast. The prime minister requests that the operators keep the plan “confidential” and states that it is only “exploratory” in nature.
The operators pushed back. According to Clubic, which cited minutes of an October 23 video call between the operators’ lawyers and the government, the companies said they would be unable to put in place the kind of restrictions Lecornu envisaged on such short notice. They could not limit the block to mobile phones or to certain geographic areas, and anyone with even a basic understanding of the internet would be able to circumvent any block by simply changing to a VPN or altering their DNS settings.
No blackout was ever triggered on Saturday. Clubic reported that the march went off peacefully with 400,000 participants according to the Interior Ministry and 800,000 according to the CGT. The letter from Matignon to the 4 telecom operators contained no legal basis for a shutdown of the 3 apps.
This is why the leak is so disturbing. Michael Shellenberger shared the story on X, where it drew more than 379,000 views, and posted a translation of the letter. He pointed to video of rioters in Paris posted by Andy Ngo and wrote that the real concern appears to be that people can see these videos. Whatever the motivation, the effect of such a blackout would be the same. A government that is losing control of the streets wanted the power to switch off the apps that allow people to film the police and the violence on the streets.
The leak matters therefore because with on-call teams in place at operators, this plan could be reactivated at any time of subsequent mobilizations. For the moment, nothing from the Prime Minister’s office nor from the government’s response suggests that this would not be the case. Clubic thus asks the question that is now haunting France.
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