The press conference of three senators from the central bloc (Laurent Lafon, Agnès Evren and Sylvie Robert), presenting the publication of a report on the regulation of information in the digital space, has already caused a heated debate for a week. A concept missing from the report, but which captures its essence and used by Laurent Lafon, thickens the debate: the concept of domestic intervention. This was seen as a symptom of a desire to control information and even censorship. Citizens who organize to defend their vision of the world and tell the public their story must now be seen as rebels who threaten the democratic order. Engaging in politics involves moving in the direction of the regime, not in the opposite direction. Threatened by the emergence of a nationalist camp, the regime intends to treat contrary stories as inflammatory gestures. And information formatted in a way that makes it look bad will often be labeled as “fake news.”
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The Diverse Regime Doesn’t Believe in Pluralism
This report should be included in the recent history of the transformation of public space. The big problem is an almost Weberian formula: who has a monopoly on legitimate history in the media? What about other stories that legally contradict the dominant story, but to which we give no legitimacy? We can, of course, try to ban them legally, but at the same time we can make them invisible, suspend them, erase them – these are methods of dealing with dissent that are specific to the “rule of law.”
Don’t we find here the media labeling project once led by Emmanuel Macron, which followed his long-expressed desire to create a system that distinguishes real news from fake? A small ecosystem that claims to have a lot of experience in combating disinformation, wonderfully analyzed by Paul Sugi in Le Figarohas a sad habit of likening to disinformation what contradicts the worldview of the extreme center (cult of diversity, immigration, post-nationalism).
Naturally, when he censors, he pretends not to: he improves the quality of democratic debate by ridding it of conspiratorial or extremist garbage. This will improve the quality of information and place responsibility for this task on an active bureaucracy and experts. “scientists” belonging “civil society”. This report is the culmination of the central bloc’s project on information and social media regulation, from the aviation law to the present day. The extreme center is no longer content with fighting its opponents: it dreams of ousting them from public space.
The concept of intervention resurfaced during Brexit and Trump’s first victory.
© AFP
The concept of intervention resurfaced during Brexit and Trump’s first victory. These two victories should not have happened. They could only be explained by the destruction of the democratic mechanism. Thus, we explained the first by Russian interference, the second by the role of Cambridge Analytica. We will increasingly blame social networks: they make possible the mass dissemination of information or ideologies previously filtered by the media. We saw this ten years later in Romania: the concept of foreign intervention makes it possible to overturn elections whose results are considered disappointing. Likewise, today Elon Musk is accused of interfering in European elections – those who do this do not use this concept when talking about Barack Obama’s interference in French affairs. Tomorrow’s elections in Western Europe are likely to be canceled on this basis.
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There is a theory of democracy here that is associated not so much with popular sovereignty as with progressivism – one can even talk about pluralism. The Diverse Regime does not believe in pluralism as classically defined – by which I mean a pluralism that recognizes that truly controversial philosophies and the parties that support them confront each other in the heart of the city. He reinvents it from an ideologically oriented point of view. Doctrines that must be fused with the meaning of history have the right to a privileged exposure in the public space, they will enter the republican arc and will be protected from others by a cordon of sanctity. As for doctrines considered retrograde, we will tolerate them (but we can also combat them with anti-hate speech laws) as long as they are considered residual, but we give ourselves the right to declare a state of emergency if they are in a position to prevail. From now on, we will do whatever is necessary to ban them directly or not. To do this, we equate them to the extreme right. This allows them to not react and declare them a danger to everyone, and then stage a massive exorcism to drive her out of town.
Mathieu Boc-Cote.
© Anthony Quittet