France’s PM asked telecoms to ready a social media blackout for the protests

Sébastien Lecornu sent a letter on the 22nd to Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom telling them to prepare to temporarily cut access to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X if the weekend protests turned violent. The plan used DNS filtering aimed mainly at mobile networks for a few hours. Operators flagged legal problems and said it would be easy to bypass with a VPN. The block was never switched on. The letter called it exploratory and asked them to keep it quiet.

‼️ BREAKING – They don’t want you to know.
France’s PM has reportedly asked FOUR major telecoms companies to prepare to BLOCK access to X, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. So unrest can be buried.
But you know really it’s the suppression of information. To shut you up. You wont…
— Bernie (@Artemisfornow) October 24, 2026