“We have to do worse than the other cities, we have to show that we are from Marseille. “We are going to show them who the bosses of IDF are” (Ile-de-France). For three days, from Telegram channels to Snapchat posts, the young rioters seem to have been engaging in a kind of degradation contest via social networks. On channels that can have up to 500,000 subscribers, they compete in violence thus ensuring, for some, “honor” the death of Nahel, 17, killed Tuesday in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) by a police officer.
#Nahel, #nanterre, #police, #CivilWar, etc. The keywords or trends suggested by the algorithms of Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter refer mostly to images chronicling the outbreak of violence that has affected France since Tuesday. And these short videos combining looting of shops, burning of public buildings or striking actions based on ram-cars or stolen construction machinery benefit from unprecedented exposure. Some have gone viral. “All apps, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp are barely ten years old, so compared [aux émeutes de] 2005, there is the dantesque weight of social networks, observes a Marseille police source contacted by 20 minutes. In the evening, you can see recaps of the day by city which engage in a kind of one-upmanship. Even if, in Marseille, it’s more in town that it happens and the guys seem motivated only by the lure of gain. »
An “acceleration of the geographical spread of the riots”
2005, when Facebook was still a network reserved for Harvard students, is over. And where nearly twenty years earlier the riots had taken three days to spread from Clichy-sous-Bois to all of Seine-Saint-Denis, and a week to reach all of France, the urban violence linked to the death of Nahel n It took only two days to ignite Lille, Nantes, Annecy, Villeurbanne, Lyon or even Annecy.
And social networks have participated in this “acceleration of the geographical spread of the riots”, assures 20 minutes Edouard Bouté, researcher in information and communication sciences at Paris-Sorbonne. “It’s the shallot race between cities, they want to do better than the neighbor,” says David Le Bars, secretary general of the union of commissioners of the French national police questioned by The Parisian. “It was going on a loop saying ‘we’re uniting to attack the police’. It was not as coordinated as they would have hoped, but it was a reality, ”deplores Jean-Marc Luca, departmental director of public security for Essonne.
“They intensify and accelerate the emotion”
“Social networks intensify and accelerate emotion, but it is difficult to say that they alone produce riots”, nevertheless tempers Edouard Bouté, before continuing: “attributing sole responsibility for the violence to them, as the president has typically just donethis tends to depoliticize the initial problem which is that of police violence ”.
Thus, according to the researcher, typing on Snapchat and company is not enough, it is also necessary to understand why the death of Nahel, Tuesday in Nanterre, generated this movement of anger while “a similar event, which occurred in Nice last September, did not start riots”. Last September, a 24-year-old young man was killed by a police officer after a chase and a refusal to comply.
“Social networks help make the riot memorable. To make this day that comes out of everyday life, a lasting memory. They also make it possible to produce documents that provide information, attest, and prove police violence. We dig the moral space of the intolerable there”, already considered in 2019 the researcher Romain Huet, in the columns of Release. According to experts, this need for memory, for recording on the Web is an essential part of the current social sequence. And it is moreover the circumstances of the death of Nahel, widely documented and disseminated on social networks, which set fire to the powder
“Have the identity of those who use these social networks”
And it is unsurprisingly the memory of Nahel that the rioters claim to celebrate, it is the memory of the young man from the Pablo-Picasso housing estate in Nanterre that is invoked in online discussions and videos. “The little one must honor his memory but not by burning everything”, thus slips a surfer in a discussion where different targets were mentioned in bulk: a Footlockers, a Honda dealership, police stations, luxury stores. Still, these messages, we also find version tags on the walls of cities: “Justice for Nahel. The police kill”, can we, among other things, read in Marseille following the passage of young rioters.
On the other side of the Channel, the role of social networks in the riots of August 2011 had already been raised by the British government. The executive had even considered tightening the screws and filtering their use for a while. This Friday, Emmanuel Macron assured him that “platforms and social networks” played “a considerable role in the movements of the last few days”.
“We have seen both the organization of violent rallies take place but also a form of mimicry of violence”, decided the head of state. Conclusion: “in the next few hours” several measures should be taken to, according to the president, “organize in connection with the platforms the withdrawal of the most sensitive content” but also to send requests “to have the identity of those who use these social networks to call for disorder or exacerbate violence”. From Nanterre to Hong Kong, there would be only one Snap? In May 2022, the administrator of a Telegram channel involved in the 2019 pro-democracy uprisings was sentenced to six years in prison.