French President Emmanuel Macron has some theories as to why riots have erupted across France following the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old delivery driver: mainly TikTok, Snapchat and video games.
The teenager was shot dead during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday, June 27. according to the Associated Press. Nahel, identified only by his first name, died at the scene and his early death exacerbated growing tensions between French police and residents of the Nanterre neighborhood and beyond.
Videos shared online in the final days of the unrest show police firing tear gas at crowds and protesters setting cars on fire, burning rubbish and looting. AP
Macron said social media played a “significant role” in fueling the ongoing unrest, citing both Snapchat and TikTok as examples. He laid out plans to work with tech companies to remove “the most sensitive content” and said he expected “a spirit of responsibility from these platforms.” And French police are reportedly investigating the identities of those posting on social media calls for the protests to continue.
“Violence is devastating and we have zero tolerance for content that encourages or incites hatred or violent behavior in any part of Snapchat,” said a Snapchat spokesperson AP. “We proactively moderate this type of content and if we find it, we remove it and take appropriate action. We allow content that is factual about the situation.”
French President believes video games are contributing to the unrest
But Macron doesn’t just believe these crappy phone apps are to blame for the ongoing protests — he’s also got his eye on video games. “We sometimes get the feeling that some of them are acting out the video games that got them high on the street,” he said. It’s not because of police brutality, of course, or because of an increase in housing and income inequality, or because of that Racial policy in France is simply: “Be color blind.”.” (Nahel was an Arab.)
Protests surrounding police brutality are nothing new in France, with citizens en masse protesting the 2020 police killing of George Floyd In 2005, riots broke out after two young boys were killed while trying to escape from the police in the commune of Clichy-sous-Bois in Paris. During the 2005 riots, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency.
Using video games as a scapegoat for violence isn’t new — they’ve been derided as a cause of mass shootings since the 1999 Columbine massacre Fox News came up with the excuse after the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. However, scientific research does not indicate a connection between the two.
As said psychologist Dr. Rachel Kowert my city in June 2022, “We studied [the connection] for 20 years and there are no consistent results that would even suggest that they are in any way directly linked, whereas we have quite a number of research associations such as pure crime, low frustration tolerance and past experiences of violence. and all these things that are very well established in research as predictors of violent behavior, but we ignore them because they are confusing societal issues.”
