(Pictured: further proof that France is objectively the worst country on Earth. Tl;dr at the bottom of this post.)
FOR FRENCH PEOPLE: I'd suggest you get a VPN right away. The French government may instruct French ISPs to block us entirely in the future. For the poors,
ProtonVPN is the best free one out there. Just be aware that free VPNs mean mountains of captchas when Googling anything. For the record though, we
will not give anything to the French gov regarding you (unless you massively fedpost so please don't do that).
Right on the heels of them arresting the Telegram CEO and trying to force Rumble to censor certain channels they don't like, the straguettes have come for us too.
To explain:
This is the part of
the law they're referencing up above:
Where an enforceable court decision has ordered a measure to prevent access to an online public communication service whose content falls within the offences referred to in A of IV of Article 6, the administrative authority, contacted where appropriate by any interested person, may request persons whose business is to offer access to online public communication services, hosting service providers or any person or category of persons covered by this court decision, for a period not exceeding the remaining period for the measures ordered by this decision, to prevent access to any online public communication service that it has previously identified as reproducing the content of the service mentioned by said decision, in whole or in substantial terms. Under the same conditions and for the same duration, the administrative authority may request the operator of a service based on the classification or referencing, by means of computer algorithms, of content offered or posted online by third parties to stop the referencing of electronic addresses giving access to the online public communication services mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.
Persons whose activity consists in providing hosting services contribute to the fight against the dissemination of content constituting the offences mentioned in articles 211-2,222-33,222-33-1-1,222-33-2 to 222-33-2-3,222-39,223-13,225-4-13,225-5,225-6,227-18 to 227-22 to 227-24,412-8,413-13,413-14,421-2-5,431-6,433-3,433-3-1,521-1-2 and 521-1-3 and in the second paragraph of article 222-33-3 of the penal code as well as in the fifth seventh and eighth paragraphs of article 24 and article 24 bis of the law of 29 July 1881 on freedom of the press.
And here's Article 222-33-3 that makes them hate us:
Recording and disseminating images of violence
The act of knowingly recording, by any means whatsoever, on any medium whatsoever, images relating to the commission of these offences constitutes an act of complicity in the intentional attacks on the integrity of the person provided for in Articles 222-1 to 222-14-1 and 222-23 to 222-31 and 222-33 and is punishable by the penalties provided for in these Articles.
The act of disseminating the recording of such images is punishable by five years' imprisonment and a fine of €75,000.
These "attacks" specified above include both murder and mere manslaughter. So basically, posting anything other than pure accidents (and maybe suicide but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a law against that one too) is not okay according to the French government.
However, they don't specify exactly which part of the code we violated (sexual assault, murder, etc), nor do they provide any examples. This, I assume, is because they hate the site as a whole and think hosting videos of people dying is equivalent to condoning the actions taken in all the videos here, going off the legal code above.
We've had censor-happy governments get mad at us about specific pages before (usually about stuff concerning their own citizens). A couple third-world shitholes have even blocked our site without warning, but France is the first one that's been actively hostile towards the site as a whole (according to the letter, Google
may block search results even outside France after further review).
The true irony? They claim that "
communication to the public by electronic means is free." Then immediately after that they go into detail about all the ways it is decidedly
not free. Thankfully, we have American hosting where we aren't beholden to the whims of doublethinking censor-happy Euros.
Tl;dr France is
-ing about videos of people dying and trying to make Google censor our site in their search results. France le bad, America #1
