Blogs received a lot of attention in France last week when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced that funds will be set aside for monitoring blogs that rioters are using to incite violence and perpetrate hate speech.
This measure came after police noticed the unusual amount of traffic in the French cyberspace, a significant amount of which was hate speech. Investigations have opened against three teenagers who, on their blogs, appealed to people to turn violent.
One of them asked readers to go to the nearest police station and burn it. Another widely quoted appeal asked all youths in housing projects to start arson between 9:30 and 10:30 on Friday, November 11.
At one level, the Internet is an effective medium for coordinating mass movements, but unfortunately this power can also be used for subversive activity. It is highly likely that, in future, blogs may be used to coordinate violence. But the French issue needs to be looked at closely. For instance, the three arrested teenagers did not know each other, and prima facie, the blogs were consequences of arbitrary outrage, and not part of a larger, orchestrated plan.
Blogs being used for coordinating protests is not new. Anti-globalisation protestors have successfully used blogs and cellular text messages (both of which are also in use in France) to coordinate gatherings that take police by surprise.
Curiously, the blogs on the Paris violence are mostly hosted on Skyblogs, a blogging service provided by Skyrock, France’s most popular radio station for people in the 17-24 age group. In his thesis titled Beur FM, Agent of Integration or Ghettoisation?, University of Westminster masters student Bridget Knapper identifies Skyrock as being popular among the emigrant beur youth, as their programming is primarily rap.
The discontent among Beurs, emigrants from the Maghreb countries (primarily Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) is identified as the root cause behind the present riots. The second and third generation emigrants, the beur youth, mostly, are the rioters.
They form the counter culture in France, which as Knapper’s paper suggests, Skyrock cater to. So, the online community that evolved around Skyblogs was the online sanctuary of the beur youth.
It would seem blogs were not being deliberately used to spread hate speech, a role radio played during the Rwandan genocide. The rants, are a natural expression of the irate online mob. Skyblogs was their online space. They shout and swear there, like they would have in a secluded street at night.
There is nothing about blogs that make it particularly conducive for coordinating violence apart from the inherent characteristics of the Internet, which is common to many other tools.
