Calls are growing louder in France for a temporary ban on social media after it became clear from a deluge of video and commentary that young rioters have been competing for online attention and using platforms to coordinate attacks, reports The Times.
After President Macron called in vain last week for social media companies to remove inflammatory content, right-wing politicians have demanded curbs on what they see as the toxic impact of TikTok and Snapchat, in particular, as favourites of rioting youths.
Since the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk at the hands of a police officer last week, social networks have been full of images of fireworks engulfing police, looters laughing and blazing cars. Videos with mocking commentary, often in the style of the video game franchise Grand Theft Auto, are scoring hundreds of thousands of likes.
At the end of the week the five most-liked videos using the hashtag “émeutes”, meaning riots, included participants mimicking Batman, Spider-Man and Transformers characters as well as clips of fights with police set to western-style music.
The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok has been egging on the action with algorithms that suggest keywords which direct users to riot videos and alert them to planned looting locations. One of these last week was “Chatelet23h”, a call to gather at 11pm in the Place du Chatelet in Paris, the scene of looting on the nearby Rue de Rivoli. On TikTok, the hashtag #emeutefrance had reached more than 2.2 million views after three days of violence.