@_nicolassarkozy , an account created in September 2010 and clearly labeled as a satirical Sarkozy impersonation, was suspended on Feburary 16th.

Powerful People & Targeted Botnets: the End of @ Political Satire?

@_nicolassarkozy was managed by Kaboul.fr, a French political and satirical online webzine, that holds many other satirical Twitter accounts, like @_Carla_Bruni, Sarkozy's wife, @_Jacques_Chirac, the former french president, and @FrancoisHolland, Sarkozy's main competitor in the ongoing presidential race.

In fact, the official response, leaked to Pastebin shows Twitter describing the account as "engag(ing) in non-parody impersonation." The chance that the parodic nature of the account could be missed is slight.

More troubling, three other accounts, all clearly opposing Sarkozy's political views, were suspended at the same time: @mafranceforte, @fortefrance and @SarkozyCaSuffit. Those accounts were not related to Kaboul.fr, nor impersonating local politicians, but straight-ahead, and recently-created, politically-oriented Twitter accounts.

Although the news is making a huge buzz in France, it isn't the first time a such censorship has occurred in the country. Other Twitter accounts that were problematic to the French president's personal brand management were massively suspended last summer, those belonging to French gossip website Mixbeat.

A total 29 accounts managed by Mixbeat where suspended during July 2011. The only three of theirs that weren't suspended were created from a different I.P. address, according to Mixbeat's Carl de Canada.

All other accounts opened since by Carl de Canada have ended up being suspended, and despite a public dispute with Twitter, and many posts publised on Mixbeat, the website is still unable to be on Twitter in any way, fighting some mysterious forces and an uncooperative Twitter customer service.

The Gallic Infowar @Twitter

Information war on Twitter is a common practice, especialy since the beginning of the Arab Spring, in January 2011. Twitter has proven to be a solid propaganda platform used by many authoritarian regimes.

Twitter botnets, consisting of a network of centrally-controled twitter accounts, are a common practice. By mass-reporting a targeted account as spam, a group can easily get a Twitter account suspended.

But according to Mixbeat, this is not what happened to its accounts. Carl de Canada claims some special messenger from Sarkozy asked Twitter to suspend them.

Still, the Twitter botnet "targeted spam report" technique could explain the three other suspicious account suspensions which occured last thursday. Such tools are quite common, and are actualy far from being the most sophisticated infowar tool made to cheat and deceive social networks. The U.S. army accidentaly posted in June 2010 a call for proposals on its website for a very sophisticated software called "persona management." A Twitter botnet is far from being as complex.

France is one of, if not the leader in online warfare, when it comes to digital weaponry designed to be used against civilian using the Internet. A market recently estimated by Wikileaks to around $US10 billion. France sells Internet surveillance technology to numerous African and Middle East countries, including Syria , Iran and Qaddafi's Libya. Both Twitter and Facebook are battlefields for dictatorships willing to extend political oppression to the online world, and, since the Tunisian Revolution, the market is skyrocketing.

As Sarkozy officially opened the race for the presidency in France last week, it looks like this will be France's first presidential election in which the Internet could play a major role. But it also looks like it will not be, in any way, what happend during Obama's first run for the presidency. In France, the Internet will most probably be used in a very dirty way.

As we say in the startup world: eat your own dogfood

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

This last week was one of the most intense moments for the French and Arabic social media sphere since the arrival of Web 2.0. The Tunisian revolution, which has been growing both on the ground and online since Dec. 17, came to a double climax. Yesterday, dictator Zine al Abidine Ben Ali announced the immediate end of all Net censorship and then released the last bloggers still in jail. Among them was Slim Amamou, a writer for ReadWriteWeb France and a national hero.

Today, Ben Ali left the country, as of this afternoon his plane is supposedly heading for Saudi Arabia. ReadWriteWeb France has a special relationship with Tunisia and its social media and digital activist scene.

A year ago, after publishing a post written by Jillian C. York about Islamist harassment, we ourself got harassed. After a few months of investigations and many posts, we discovered the Islamists we were facing were, in fact, Ben Ali's Internet police, who were terrorizing the online Tunisian population.

That was nine month ago. This summer, Slim Amamou published a story showing a sophisticated DNS spoofing technique used by Ali's Internet police to steal Tunisians' logins and passwords for Facebook, Gmail and Live.com. It revealed the capabilities of Ben Ali's cyberarmy to the Tunisian people and the French-speaking hacking community. (This force, according to our sources, was made up of at least 600 government men and a few contractors.) Ben Ali's cyber police was in fact operating some a kind of community management - but on a country-wide scale.

Ben Ali poster, Al Kaf, Tunisia, March 2010

What happened this week has nothing to do with previous Twitter-revolutions (sorry Iran), and is more about Facebook than Twitter anyway. Social media was not just a tool to communicate and coordinate action, it was a tool to create worldwide support in little time. From a retweet to an Anonymous LOIC attack, a blog post or a translation, millions have shown their support and took action.

Anonymous have proven to be a mature political entity. And although they could do childish stuff again, what they did with #optunisia was, without any doubt, helpful. In Tunisia, not only did many teen turn Anonymous, but the vast majority of the population supported their actions. Beside a few public figures who took action and spoke up, Anonymous was here, in the name of some sort of global consciousness, not only to show the Tunisians the support of millions of people worldwide, but also to help and give a hand.

Those of us who enjoy freedom and democracy should definitely be thankful for that. Tunisia is a young country, with a very high level of education. With a 16% penetration rate - the highest in Africa (with Mauritius) - Facebook is not only hugely popular there, but it was, until yesterday, the only social-anything available. Up to that point, no YouTube, no Flickr, tons of censored websites (including many pages from RWW France), and it was still Africa's most active online community.

Transition will not be easy, but there's a bright future ahead for this country, which will leverage social technologies like no other. Jailing Slim Amamou last week was a terrible mistake for Ben Ali. The founding member of the local Pirate Party, a Net Neutrality advocate, and author in an international and influential blog like ReadWriteWeb, Slim was at the crossroad of a movement that could be mobilized and ready to fight in just a click. And this is precisely what happened.

Free Slim images by hasan.almustafa; window photo by Panegyrics of Granovetter

It is important for an American audience to understand that we have nothing like the First Amendment in France, and that freedom of speech is not granted in every circumstance; any kind of hate speech, for example, is illegal. Applying censorship to the Web to make it compliant with French laws would eventually censor millions of websites (not to mention lead to blind copyright enforcement).

Fabrice Epelboin, the editor of the French edition of ReadWriteWeb, took an active part in fighting the HADOPI "three strike and you're out" law. He's a Creative Common evengelist, an entrepreneur and is active in social media and webTV.

The recently leaked report is supposed to guide the UMP, the country's ruling party, but politics in France are very fuzzy right now when it comes to the Internet.

September will likely see the French Senate approve the LOPPSI law, which allows for net censorship. Child pornography is ostensibly the target, just like in Australia, but it's already expanding to other kind of content, despite promises made by the State Secretary for Digital Economy made during the debate last January.

Other freedom-frightening bills could be on their way as well. UMP Senator Jean-Louis Masson is pushing for a piece of legislation that would make it mandatory for bloggers to register their identity before being allowed to express themselves online. UMP Senator Jean-René Lecerf wants new French ID cards to be embedded with a chip so that connecting to the Internet would be - according to his plan - impossible without proper identification.

Caught between democracy and the free market, the constitution is coming into direct conflict with the digital age. France is at a crossroads.

Net Neutrality and the 2012 Elections

Net neutrality's fate is now in the hands of a more progressive group of MPs who will start working on the bill in a few weeks. Lionel Tardy is among the very few in the right-wing UMP party who net citizens hold in high esteem; he strongly opposed the HADOPI law (which targets illegal file sharing) and understands the inner mechanics of the digital age. Hervé Mariton, who recently lead a working group on ethics and online interactions, has shown some interest in ideas coming from outside the anti net neutrality lobbies. Laure de la Raudière (right), who leads the group of MPs in charge of the upcoming net neutrality bill at the Assembly, is open to new ideas and also understand the Internet and its social impacts (a very rare characteristic among French politicians).

The French National Assembly, which used to follow whatever the government proposed during the HADOPI legislation, is now aware that the opposition among net citizens is very high.

Online publications such as Numerama and PCinpact, which strongly opposed the HADOPI law from day one, have seen a huge growth in their audience the last two years. The same goes for blogs like Korben.info and ReadWriteWeb France, which are also opposed to the death of net neutrality, and who have seen a significant increase in readership in the traditional journalism and political landscapes.

MPs now realize their own elections, which will take place in 2012, could be in jeopardy if they continue on the current path, and most Internet and political spin doctors (including former presidential counselors) admit that the way the government has handled Internet issues is catastrophic and could lead to a very serious problem during the 2012 presidential election year.

Will this be enough to prevent a digital civil war between a government that sees the Internet as its main source of problems and its netizens?

If net neutrality isn't dead yet, then free enterprise and innovation is hurting, and free speech - the American way - which has been enjoyed since the beginning of the Web 2.0 era by French netizens, will follow closely behind.

Lead photo by Taramisu; second photo D.R. Laure de la Raudière.

The way the French government handles the booming French digital revolution is quite unique. But the Google tax is just the tip of the iceberg, and is part of a very frightening story, at least for a country that thinks of itself as the inventor of modern democracy.

This guest post was written by Fabrice Epelboin, the editor of the French edition of ReadWriteWeb. He took an active part in fighting the HADOPI "three strike and you're out" law. He's a Creative Common evengelist, an entrepreneur and is active in social media and webTV.

The HADOPI law, known abroad as "three strike and you're out," will monitor file sharing, and will cut Internet access - after three warnings - to illegal file sharers. But wait. One more thing: French netizens, to prove their innocence will have to install special spyware, which will report their every move to the French administration.

The law, which led to an intense battle between the blogosphere and the government, was rejected by the French Assembly when it was first voted on. Then it was rejected by the French Supreme Court after a second vote, and received some severe warnings from the European Union. A third vote was needed by the French Assembly to pass the law, despite a close to zero support within the French population.

Happy new year

2010 is a brand new year. HADOPI has been voted on and there's nothing we can do about it anymore, even if it still makes the headlines in the local bloggosphere for its technical difficulties, or that it will probably be a financial disaster, or, more recently, because its brand-new logo illegally used a font licenced exclusively to France Telecom, the state-owned leading French ISP.

This year, President Sarkozy has a new law to pass regarding the Internet. Its name is LOPPSI, and only a small part of it is related to the Internet: filtering it.

The LOPPSI law, which could be voted on in March, will make filtering the French Internet a reality, "the Chinese way", like Deputy Jacque Myard recently said. Contacts have been established between the French UMP party and the Chinese Communist Party to talk about "Democracy and Internet access" (video, in French), and just like in Australia, pedophiles were used as a very good reason to filter the Internet.

But recently, child molesters weren't even used as an excuse. President Sarkozy announced filtering will be used to "automatically de-pollute networks and servers used for piracy." Greentech? Think again.

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Beta

If nothing is done, within a year, not only might Big Brother-like spyware be mandatory on every French computer, but everything that goes through its pipes could be scanned for possible copyright infringement.

France is more and more looking like a beta test for the proposed multi-country Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and it's not looking good for free speech and democracy.

So far, not a single French newspaper has written anything about ACTA, and before the first battle against HADOPI was won, last March, by the opposition at the French National Assembly, very few had written about HADOPI. The same is happening again with LOPPSI; if you want some information, the only place to go is the Internet and the blogosphere.

Filtering the French Internet has not made the news, either here in France or in the international press: everything is about the Google Tax. Don't let this fool you. In France, the truth is elsewhere.

France-China photo by Flickr user neo2004pf. Face photo by Flickr user Alexx Sky Productions.