Speaking in Paris on the evening of Wednesday, May 15, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced that the high commissioner for the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia had "banned TikTok" across the entire archipelago, in addition to a series of measures aimed at restoring order, including deploying military personnel to protect strategic sites.
Neither Attal nor High Commissioner Louis Le Franc specified why TikTok had been targeted in particular. However, according to messages from local government representatives shared by New Caledonians on Facebook, the app had been targeted because "messages of hatred and calls for violence" had been shared on it. For the past three days, New Caledonia has been gripped by intense clashes, which have left four people dead, including two gendarmes, amid opposition from Kanak pro-independence groups to a contested reform of the local electorate. (The Kanak are New Caledonia's indigenous people.)
The ban was made possible by the declaration of a state of emergency, on Wednesday evening (Paris time). This temporary measure enables French authorities to take exceptional measures and restrict certain public freedoms to deal with a particularly serious situation. In particular, it empowers the prime minister to request that access to an online public communication service that is "provoking the commission of acts of terrorism or advocating them" be blocked within the country.
The authorities have other legal means at their disposal for blocking access to applications or websites in France, but the state of emergency provides the most expedient response in this respect. An administrative ban on terrorist or child pornography websites, for example, requires a timeframe of at least 24 hours.
The main method used by the French authorities to block access to a site or application is based on the use of the domain name system (DNS), the routing system that sends internet users to the correct server when they attempt to access a domain name. Each network operator has its own registry which matches Tiktok.com to the address of the social media platform's servers. In the event of a ban, the authorities ask operators to make their DNS "lie" to their users, and redirect them to an incorrect address.
This simple method works just as well for blocking web browsing via a computer as it does for the TikTok app, which needs to communicate with the social media platform's servers to update users' feeds and load videos. It is nevertheless considered to be a fragile solution, as it can be bypassed on both computers and smartphones, where it is possible for users to change their DNS, so as not to use those of their operator or internet service provider.
According to online posts by residents of the archipelago, only the TikTok mobile app has been affected by the blockage, as the prime minister's office has confirmed, in a statement to news channel BFM-TV. New Caledonia's mobile phone network infrastructure is, in fact, managed entirely by a single operator, Mobilis, which belongs to the New Caledonia Post and Telecommunications Office (OPT-NC). This makes implementing widespread bans much simpler and quicker than if the measure had concerned mainland France and its plethora of operators.
No. In France, and more widely in the European Union, this appears to be a first. In the summer of 2023, during the riots that affected many towns in mainland France, President Emmanuel Macron had raised the idea of "cutting off social media" when "things get out of hand." In particular, the Interior Ministry had singled out Snapchat's "map" feature, believing that this tool, which displays in real time the locations where large quantities of messages are posted, could have played a role in gathering rioters together, although this has not been proven.
TikTok has not responded to a request for comment on the ban. The measure has been criticized, on other social media platforms, by supporters of the New Caledonian pro-independence movement, human rights activists who have considered it to be a repressive measure to curb freedom, and leading figures from the decolonial and the pro-Russian movements. On Wednesday, government-aligned MP Eric Bothorel (from Macron's Renaissance party), an expert on digital affairs, publicly questioned whether this measure could be "counter-productive by helping to fuel the narrative of those who seek to harm us by portraying the French state as repressive."
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.