cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/476735
Rioting in France continues following the police killing of a teenage boy if North African descent.
Love how the Examiner makes it easy for readers to recognize it as a right-leaning source of news.
Citing race multiple times, along with nationalities… And the family name of the 17 year-old (we know the name over here, but newspapers don’t print it).
Many of the looters and rioters that have been arrested (and charged already) admit that their actions have nothing to do with what happened. They are using it as an excuse to act out.
There are systematic problems here in France that cannot be excused or defended. What happened may happen again and can be seen around the world. Gentrification pushes low income families to certain parts of the city. In France, not every school is equal, so low income areas get poorer education, there are higher dropout rates, etc. Police do racially profile and it so happens that many of these low income families come from different parts of Africa. I live about an hour from Paris and see it where I live. My mother-in-law lives in a small town in France, and they burned down the McDonald’s last night.
Nahel was one of these dropouts who had been stopped by the police multiple times. His death has been deemed a murder. The riots are now out of control and I am a little concerned that either someone will be killed tonight, or the riots will last weeks… Or a state of emergency will be invoked which could mean restrictions on digital communications because the riots are being organised using Telegram.
From a technology standpoint, does the French government have the ability to just shut down the internet like that? Admittedly I don’t have a deep understanding of how the internet works, but I thought it was more decentralized than that, at least outside of China.
Oh, I don’t know. If they did it wouldn’t be the internet, just certain services like Telegram. Politicians over here, like in other countries, have been grumbling over encrypted chat apps for some time. And different articles and politicians have been labelling the rioters as terrorists so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was at least an attempt or proposition for some sort of law banning or prohibiting any chat client that cannot identify sender and recipient in the near future.
