The recent cancellation of Bilal Hassani’s concert provides further illustration of the power of intimidation that extremists of all stripes possess today. What happened ? The singer who defended the colors of France in the Eurovision contest and passes for one of the flag bearers of the LGBT + community had planned to do a singing tour in a cultural center of Metz. For hundreds of years the site had been a military warehouse. But here it is: before 1556, it was a church! A meager community of radicals considered that the young singer’s concert constituted a desecration for a place that had been desacralized for five hundred years.
Who cares about radicals who, in the absence of crusades, rage against the offenses that the contemporary world seems to them to produce without stopping? The producers of Bilal Hassani themselves. Frightened by the threats against the singer, they deemed it more prudent to cancel. It’s hard to know if the decision was wise in this case, but quite often in other situations like this, when institutions have the courage to hold on, not much happens.
Thus, the sociologist Nathalie Heinich, invited to give a conference at the Espace Mendès France in Poitiers (a structure dedicated to the popularization of science and social debates), saw her intervention threatened by activists claiming that she was homophobic. The case is spicy, compared with the previous one, because this time it was LGBT + activists who wanted to do censorship. For days they called for conference heckling. When she arrived, a meager army showed up and refused to listen to the remarks of the researcher at the CNRS – an opportunity to contest them was nevertheless offered to them by the debate which was to follow. The mention of the police is enough to make them clear off. The only victim in this case was the door of the establishment, ransacked in the night. Complaint was filed.
Low number of motivated people
Contrary to what happened here, there are plenty of cases where protest organizers allow themselves to be intimidated and end up agreeing to slavishly bow their backs to digital censorship. However, when one resists, one simply discovers that one has allowed oneself to be temporarily terrorized by a community that stamps its feet but weighs very little quantitatively. The power of certain minorities to transmute their body from frog to beef is a great classic, especially in political history, but it has taken a particular turn since these vociferations are now carried by social networks.
From the beginnings of what was then called the new science of networks or the web science, the researchers noticed that a small number of motivated people could influence opinion on the Internet much more than in traditional social life. Some pointed out at the beginning of the use of the Internet that it was a form of democratization of the information market since everyone, henceforth, could intervene in it. Doubtful on this subject, I underlined in The Democracy of the Gullible (PUF) that it is a democracy where some vote a lot while others never. It seemed to me, in fact, that the most motivated among our fellow citizens, those who hold strong and militant beliefs, for example, by making themselves heard beyond their natural space, could create, in the spirit of a lot, a confusion between their visibility and their representativeness.
Studies have since largely confirmed this fear. A recent research even showed that on Facebook 1% of account holders produced 33% of the posts made. Another article published in 2021 in the Journal of Communication underlines that the fact of commenting often on social networks predicts a form of political radicalism. This frequency of intervention in the digital world is also usually accompanied by the use of intimidation, insult or threat, in short, anything that the authors of the article consider to be toxic language. These vociferations are followed by effect only thanks to the pusillanimity of the institutions which give in to them. If he sometimes took the courage to oppose the censorship, he would see that, as in the fable, the frog may “expand and swell”, it will not become an ox.