France’s four mobile operators – Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues Telecom – received a letter from the country’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu on October 22, asking them to be prepared to block Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram for several hours on October 24 and 25, in case of a repeat of the previous week’s urban violence, the website Blast is reported.
The request was made in a letter to the heads of the four companies, and the original idea was to block the three platforms at around 2pm on Saturday, October 24, by using DNS filtering that would stop the domain names from being resolved. The four companies are the only ones in France with their own mobile networks, and the letter instructed them to “anticipate as of today” the technical work needed, so that “if I give the instruction,” they could “proceed without delay with the temporary suspension of the services concerned, for a period of a few hours.”
In it, Lecornu wrote that he wanted “to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in the event of a recurrence of urban violence.”
The platforms in question were first Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, and X was added later.
The decision on whether to go ahead with the plan would be made “on the weekend of October 24 and 25, depending on the operational context.”
The letter explained that the reason was the protests that took place on October 17 and 18, when social networks, according to Lecornu, played “a decisive role not only in the crystallization and virality of illicit calls to action but also as levers for the operational coordination of violence.”
He was referring to what he said was “the organization of looting, exchanges about targets, the movement of groups or the positions of law enforcement.”
Lecornu asked the operators to maintain “the confidentiality necessary for preparing this measure,” which he said “at this stage, is only exploratory in nature.”
The following day, a 70-minute videoconference was held, attended by the government’s general secretariat, the Prime Minister’s office, the Directorate General for Enterprises, and the four operators’ legal representatives. The government wanted the block to be limited to mobile and to certain areas, but the operators said they were unable to do that at such short notice.
They also warned that users would be able to circumvent the block by using a VPN or another messaging app, and that they could not guarantee the block would work.
Their lawyers meanwhile objected to the national scope of the planned measure, questioned whether it was necessary given how easy it would be to circumvent, and whether it was proportionate to shut down three platforms for up to 12 hours. They also wondered if milder measures had been considered.
The operators also wanted the instruction to be given in a signed, dated, and published act – with Orange insisting on a formal order – while the government wanted to do it with a private instruction to each company, with nothing published in the official journal.
The plan was to inform the public with a press release 30 minutes before the block was introduced, without going into technical details. The four companies did put their staff on call over the weekend, but in the end, the block did not happen. The Prime Minister’s office has refused to comment on the story for now.
On Saturday, October 24, protests against the rising cost of living brought 410,000 people onto the streets, according to the Interior Ministry, and 800,000 according to the CGT union. Some 70,000 police and gendarmes were deployed, and nearly 1,000 people were arrested.
Blast writes that the fear now is that the government will try to go for the block at the next protests.
On April 1, 2025, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, ruled that the May 2024 TikTok block in New Caledonia, ordered by then-Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, was illegal, as it caused “a disproportionate infringement of the rights and freedoms” of those who challenged it.
The court said that such a shutdown affects “freedom of expression, free communication of thoughts and opinions, the right to private and family life,” and can only be allowed in exceptional circumstances, when indispensable, when there is no other, less invasive measure that can be implemented right away, and only for as long as it takes to find an alternative.
The 2024 block was wrong, the court said, because it was “a total interruption of the service for an indefinite period linked solely to the persistence of the disorder.”
As Reclaim The Net has reported, Attal, who is now the 2027 presidential candidate for the ruling party Renaissance, is still of the same mind, telling RTL on October 19 that he wanted “a temporary, targeted block on the territories where the riots take place,” and writing on X: “During riots, we must be able to temporarily and selectively block access to certain platforms to stop the herd effect.”
When the RTL host reminded him that the state had been condemned for the TikTok block, Attal said: “Temporarily. The State Council said that social networks could be blocked.”
Earlier this month, Nicolas Isnard, the mayor of Salon-de-Provence, proposed “a mechanism that would consist of cutting off minors’ access to social media for limited periods.”
A lawyer, Jonathan Elkaim, reacted by saying, “If you deprive everyone of a communication service for the sake of a tiny minority that is only there for chaos, is that really proportionate?”
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez this week said that “social networks are becoming a real problem” and that the Council of State’s 2025 ruling “is something that has obviously not escaped me.”
This was followed by the offline messenger app Bitchat shooting to the top of France’s App Store social category.
Meanwhile, Digital Minister Anne Le Hénanff has already called in representatives of Discord, Meta, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, and X to urge them to remove content that the government considers to be inciting violence.
Shutting down these platforms would have silenced not only the looters but also the many citizens who were using them to document the riots and the police response, and who were in that way acting as eyewitnesses. The plan was not carried out this time, but it was prepared, timed, and staffed, and next time, it may not be the operators who manage to stop it.
