the times | Thursday January 13 2022 35
Wo r l d
French pupils must be educated with a
“critical spirit” in order to better spot
disinformation and fake news, Presi-
dent Macron has said.
A range of measures, including a
national education programme, are
needed to address a flood of toxic infor-
mation that is endangering democracy,
the French leader said after receiving
proposals from a commission.
The group of 30 experts, headed by
Gérald Bronner, a sociologist, called for
a change in press laws to make internet
platforms and those who post on them
accountable before the courts.
Addressing journalists and media
bosses as he aims for re-election in
April, Macron backed the proposals
and pledged to put France on the front
line of what he called an asymmetric
combat between the purveyors of fake
news, including foreign governments,
and the regulated traditional media.
Macron said children were faced
with “a collapse in all relationships with
the truth” because of fake news and
conspiracy theories. He argued France
needed “to educate our children more
with the critical spirit, the ‘spirit of
method’ that is needed to face up to this
digital transformation”.
It was vital to “fight being shut in by
the algorithms” created by the US web
giants, which relegate everyone to their
“own bubbles on the social media”.
“We have to relaunch the spirit of the
age of enlightenment for the digital
age,” he added.
The platforms must allow users to
avoid the output of algorithms that feed
them toxic information, and advertis-
ing should be curbed to limit such feeds,
the experts said.
Journalists are accountable before
the courts for what they produce,
Children must
learn how to
spot fake news,
says Macron
Macron said. “This must be the same
for everyone who produces and distrib-
utes information — the digital plat-
forms, influencers, ordinary citizens
who sometimes play a big role in public
debate on the new platforms must have
a framework of responsibility.”
The same must apply to “propaganda
actors financed by foreign authoritari-
an regimes”, he added. “We are
not naive. We must know how to
protect ourselves against foreign
interference,” he said.
He was alluding in particular to
public and alleged covert actions by the
Kremlin to influence French opinion
and subvert elections. Macron accused
Moscow of interfering in his 2017
election, notably through a hack of his
campaign computers that led to the
posting online of thousands of
documents laced with bogus material
two days before the final round of
voting.
With an election three months away,
Macron’s praise for the traditional
media was a riposte to Éric Zemmour,
the anti-Islam candidate, who told
journalists on Monday that they were
“the most hated profession in the land”,
and called them “priests who have lost
their monopoly over the interpretation... of the world”.
The president gave no detail of meas-
ures to curb online information, but he
backed the commission’s proposal for
new legislation to allow the prosecu-
tion of individuals and platforms “for all
diffusion by digital means of news
which is known to be inexact and which
damages others”.
Over a year ago, Macron dropped
plans to control online content after
resistance from the media and press
freedom organisations, which cast
them as an attempt to licence
journalistic output according to
government criteria.
France
Charles Bremner Paris
Behind the story
F
rance takes
pride in being
the home of
Cartesian
logic and the
rules of reason that
are inculcated in the
nation’s schools
(Charles Bremner
writes).
Yet more than
60 per cent of the
population believe in
“the Great
Replacement”, the
belief preached by
Éric Zemmour, the
anti-Islam candidate
for the presidency,
according to a poll
last month.
This French-
invented theory,
embraced in America,
holds that white
Europeans are being
systematicallyreplaced through
mass immigration.
Zemmour avoids
saying who is
responsible, but he
implies that the
“global elite” is
orchestrating the
replacement.
The clash between
enlightened thinking
and a fondness for the
irrational has long
been a feature of
French life. Centuries
of absolute monarchy,
civil war and
revolutions bred
distrust in state
authority and the
church and a
willingness to discern
sinister forces at
work. The cynical
reflex to disbelieve
official explanations
prompts a readinessto swallow far-fetched
theories.
Social media has
amplified the old
propensity to see
plots. A 2018 poll by
Conspiracy Watch
and the Jean-Jaurès
think tank found that
the French were
western Europe’s
foremost believers.
The yellow-vest
protest movement
thrived on dark
theories involving
President Macron and
his supposed masters
in the elite. Yellow-
vest figureheads have
joined the antivax
movement, which
includes a violent
fringe convinced that
Covid was invented to
“cull” and enslave the
population.T
he Pope left
the Vatican to
visit a record
store run by
some old friends,
maintaining a habit of
performing mundane
tasks for himself that
endears him to thepublic and frays the
nerves of his security
detail (Philip Willan
writes).
His latest outing, to
Stereosound, a shop
near the Pantheon,
was caught on video
and posted on theRome Reports
website.
The 85-year-old
Pope left the shop
clutching a record of
classical music under
his arm, which the
Vatican said was a gift
from the shopkeepers.Pope pops
into local
record store
French left feuds over cheese and wine
France’s embattled left wing has splin-
tered further in a row pitting wine,
steak and cheese lovers against those
who prefer couscous and vegetables.
The controversy has illustrated the
gulf between old-fashioned leftists who
want to defend the white working
classes and modernisers trying to form
a coalition of minorities that ranges
from vegans to Muslims.
The feud began when Fabien
Roussel, 52, the Communist Party
presidential election candidate, said
that all French should have the
right to eat traditional fare. “A
good wine, good meat, good
cheese, that is French gastrono-
my,” he said. “The best way to
defend it is to enable the
French to have access to it.”
Sandrine Rousseau, 49, a
member of Europe Ecology
— The Greens party, accused
Roussel of excluding minoritiesand immigrants. “French gastronomy
and good eating, that is also raclette, a
Swiss dish, pizzas which are Italian,
sushi which is Japanese,” she said. She
also pointed to opinion polls saying that
couscous, from north Africa, was a fa-
vourite French dish.
Sergio Coronado, 51, a former Greens
party MP, was indignant as well. “I don’t
drink,” he said. “I’m a vegetarian. I hope
I am not anti-France.”
The argument deepened as
right-wingers leapt to support
Roussel, congratulating him for
defending the French identity in
the face of what they de-
nounced as Anglo-Sax-
on-style leftists.
Natacha Polony, a pol-
itical commentator, said:
“A naive mind might
consider that there was
no reason to get workedup about [Roussel’s comment], that the
proposal was not of hair-raising auda-
ciousness. But that would be to forget
what the left has become.”
Food has become a political battle-
ground in recent years, with rows over
some left-wing towns keeping pork out
of school canteen lunches to avoid
offending Muslims and Jews and others
offering halal menus.
The far-right mayor of Beaucaire,
near the Rhone delta in the south, was
pursued in the courts in 2018 by rights
groups when he imposed pork in the
town’s five canteens one day a week.
Other councils have infuriated con-
servatives and farmers with vegetarian
days in municipal and school catering.
A movement to protect traditional
French cuisine was launched by chefs
including Alain Ducasse and Joël
Robuchon, who said that the Gallic soul
was bound up in the traditions and
ingredients from the French soil,
not the latest “Japanese-Californian
novelty”.Adam Sage ParisROME REPORTS/REUTERS
The Pope was caught
on video as he left
the shop with a
classical record
tucked under his armd Fabien Roussel spoke in
favour of traditional fare