This Western government just abruptly cut off TikTok to deafening silence

This Western government just abruptly cut off TikTok to deafening silence

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Much has been made of the controversy in the U.S. over banning the social media app, TikTok, under the ludicrous premise that it’s a Chinese Trojan horse responsible for kids being dumb. And now a country historically synonymous with revolution and revolt is now pinning recent unrest on TikTok, blocking the app since May 14 on part of its territory, in the absence of any actual receipts.

Until now, the French government was seen as having generally sidestepped the TikTok ban debate at home. Little did anyone know that it would one day just blow past all the messy controversy and due process, and unilaterally enact a ban instead – all under the convenient guise of “security,” naturally.

The French interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, speaking at a parliamentary commission last week on recent riots in New Caledonia, an overseas French territory, said that the government had considered working hand in hand with the publicly owned internet provider there to cut off 3G, 4G, and 5G internet, and reducing it to 2G.

That would allow people to send text messages at most, but not to use apps or social media — or even pay for a burger and fries with a banking card.

They ultimately tossed out that crowd-pleaser. Instead, the French government, in conjunction with their pals in the local government of New Caledonia, decided to leave the i nternet alone and ban TikTok instead. Based on precisely what existential proof of the app’s responsibility? The decision was made based on the “ theory of exceptional circumstances,” Darmanin told a parliamentary hearing. Which apparently just means that the government has a theory that in exceptional circumstances, they can do whatever they want, even if it smacks of authoritarianism. Kind of like they’ve done when they recently demanded Parisians apply to get a QR code via a bureaucratic "security check" if they want to move around outside their own home during the upcoming Paris Summer Olympic Games. Pretty sure that anyone who’s going to make trouble will be sure to have their QR code. But the French government has a theory that they won’t.

During the riots in mainland France in June of last year over a 17-year- old of North African origin getting killed by a French cop in suburban Paris for failing to abide by a traffic stop, the government reportedly contacted online platforms like TikTok and Snapchat and asked them to censor content the government considered problematic. Of course, all of this censorship under the pretext of curtailing unrest could never end up becoming a precedent resulting someday in more extensive censorship for other things that establishment politicians consider inconvenient, right? Some of them are already cheering this first outright ban on TikTok as a step in the right direction when it comes to stopping the Russian and Chinese bogeymen, which they consider to be lurking behind everything that counters their narratives.

Some opposition politicians, notably on the anti-establishment Left, are demanding that the government show its work on the TikTok ban and to actually connect the dots and prove how exactly TikTok and other social media apps are directly responsible for fueling the violence in New Caledonia, rather than just operating on hunches and theories. Because, of course, riots in France just suddenly became a thing when social media like TikTok came along. Hey, anyone have a viral TikTok clip from the French Revolution in 1789?

Scapegoating social media is more convenient than French President Emmanuel Macron and the government having to revisit the policy that set off this whole crisis — one that would mean adding thousands more voters to electoral lists of the South Pacific French archipelago if residents have been living there for 10 years, thereby giving newcomers more power to dilute the electoral voice of the native Kanaks on a land which, up until the recent expiration of the 1998 Noumea Accord with France, had much greater political autonomy.

But the French establishment was blaming social media in New Caledonia, Macron condemned video games for causing last summer’s riots around mainland France. He had a theory that young people were going around setting France on fire because they couldn’t differentiate between life behind a screen and the reality away from one. Experts said that his theory was wrong, which doesn’t really bode well for this new theory that TikTok causes riots. Not that truth matters much when confronted with ideological considerations. There’s a fitting French saying that’s quite fitting here: If you want to put your dog down, just accuse him of having rabies.