July 24 () –
The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has advocated this Monday for agreeing, together with the main social networking platforms, to “very quickly remove” content that calls for violence in order to achieve a kind of “digital public order” in the country.
With this measure, the French president tries to apply measures with which to avoid future social protests of the caliber of those registered in recent times, called after the death of a minor at the hands of the Police in Nanterre.
Those protests, which shook the country, were led to a large extent by young people who, spurred on by videos and calls on social networks, took to the streets to carry out destruction on public roads as a sign of protest.
“We must, in partnership with these platforms, manage to remove content very quickly when it calls for violence, so that we find a digital public order that allows us to avoid these spillovers,” Macron added during an interview with France2.
At the beginning of July, when the protesters still took to the streets of the main cities of the country every night, Macron already suggested the possibility of “cutting off” social networks if the protest continued to be called through them.
The protests resulted in more than 500 injuries and thousands of arrests, while two people died as part of the demonstrations. The damage to urban real estate and private properties has been valued at more than 1,000 million euros.