President Emmanuel Macron Blames Social Media And 'Intoxicating' Video Games For French Youth Riots

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, has pointed to video games and social media as contributing factors to the widespread escalation of riots across his country.
France has been going through six days of protests after the police fatally shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent, in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. Protesters are voicing their demands for justice and an immediate halt to police brutality.

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On Sunday night, over 45,000 police officers and gendarmes were deployed across the country by the security forces. Meanwhile, the total number of detainees has risen to 2,000, with an average age of 17 years old, according to CNN.
"It's the responsibility of parents to keep them at home," Macron said, referring to the young age of most of the rioters. "It's not the state's job to act in their place."
Moreover, the head of state has made a call to social media companies to take action against the dissemination of the "most sensitive" content related to the unrest, and mentioned the role of popular platforms such as Snap Inc.'s SNAP Snapchat and ByteDance Ltd's TikTok, saying they've been used as spaces to organize the uproars.
"Platforms and networks are playing a major role in the events of recent days. We've seen them: Snapchat, TikTok, and several others serve as places where violent gatherings have been organized, but there's also a form of mimicry of the violence which for some young people leads them to lose touch with reality," Macron said, as reported by The Local.
Macron announced that the authorities would be taking steps to request social networks to disclose the identities of individuals who exploit these platforms to propagate violence.
A Snapchat spokesperson responded, telling the Associated Press: "Violence has devastating consequences, and we have zero tolerance for content that promotes or incites hatred or violent behavior on any part of Snapchat. We proactively moderate this type of content and when we find it, we remove it and take appropriate action. We do allow content that is factually reporting on the situation."

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Macron Says Video Games Are To Blame

Referring to the young protestors, the 45-year-old president commented, "We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living out, in the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them."
Macron's assessment of the ongoing disturbances overlooks critical issues such as police brutality, the widening gap in housing and income inequality, and the inadequacy of "colorblind" policies concerning race in France.
Although video games have frequently been targeted as a convenient scapegoat for acts of violence, there remains a lack of scientific evidence establishing a direct link between violence depicted in video games and actual violent behavior.

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Image credits: European Parliament on Wikimedia Commons and Zoa.Arts on Shutterstock