French online hate under fire

Vowed heavy fines for online platforms that fail to remove hate speech

Having initially welcomed the “yellow vest” movement as giving a voice to France’s voiceless, digital affairs minister Mounir Mahjoubi is now trying to purge social media of the racist bile and other hate speech spewed by often faceless users.

The 34-year-old web entrepreneur was one of the first in President Emmanuel Macron’s government to establish a rapport with the demonstrators at a time when most of the political class was running scared.

He has since been trying to take the heat out of French public debate in the street and on the internet as France battles an outpouring of anti-Semitism unseen since World War 2.

With swastikas being scrawled in areas around Paris and a Jewish academic mobbed by hostile protesters in the street, Mahjoubi has found himself on the frontline.

He has called out Twitter especially for ignoring calls to work with French regulators on establishing filters for hate speech.

“I am very angry with them,” the minister said in an interview last week, reading aloud some of the endless stream of racist and homophobic messages he has received, especially since going public about his homosexuality in 2018.

Mahjoubi has vowed heavy fines for online platforms that fail to remove hate speech in the 24 hours after it has been reported by users.

He has also used his social media savvy and humble origins in a poor immigrant family to try and bridge the divide between Macron’s little-loved government and disaffected voters.

But even as he tackles the enormous task of curbing incendiary hate speech, the selfmade minister is eyeing his next challenge.

In the interview, he made no secret of his ambition to become the French capital’s first mayor of Arab origin.

Macron’s Republic on the Move party has yet to pick a candidate to try to unseat Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo in 2019’s elections.

But Mahjoubi, who was elected to parliament in the city’s multi-ethnic 19th district in 2017, has his pitch ready.

“My parents came from Morocco with nothing in the 1970s and their son became a minister, purely thanks to Paris.

“I want the city to do that for everybody,” he said.

The self-described geek, who began working at 16 in the call centre of an internet service provider, has extensive experience in internet safety.

Mahjoubi was one of several high-achieving technocrats appointed to the new government, and in the follow-up parliamentary elections, he toppled Socialist Party leader JeanChristophe Cambadelis, one of several heavyweights ousted by Macron’s centrist insurgents.

In the eyes of many voters, however, the newcomers turned out no better.

Faced with the worst crisis of Macron’s presidency the affable young minister remained glued to social media and attempted to foster dialogue.

In one of his first forays into yellow vest territory, he popped up among the viewers of a Facebook Live broadcast to ask if the host Maxime Nicolle, a radical protest leader, would “agree to talk”.

The pair later faced off on a TV debate, one of several encounters between protesters and Mahjoubi, who also spent a day shadowing a caregiver and struggling single mother.

At these and other such meetings, Mahjoubi plays salesman for the “grand national debate” launched by Macron in January to garner feedback on the government’s policies. –