On 22 October 2026, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote to Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Iliad (Free) and Altice France (SFR). According to Clubic's account of the leaked letter, he asked them to prepare to suspend TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram notably on mobile networks for a few hours, using DNS filtering, if violence recurred during the 24 October protests. Blast, which first published the letter, reports that X was added to the list afterwards. No block was triggered. The plan still deserves scrutiny, because the government has shown it considers such a block available.
The strongest case for the government
The government's concern is not frivolous. The letter, as Clubic describes it, accuses social networks of helping coordinate the looting of 17-18 October. Platforms can spread calls to violence faster than police can respond, and a short, targeted pause is less destructive than a curfew or a mass deployment of force. The Conseil d'État has also accepted the underlying logic in principle. In New Caledonia it held that the Prime Minister, noting how TikTok's algorithms had accelerated the unrest, was entitled to consider an interruption of access when no other technical means were immediately available.
A democracy that cannot respond to a genuine emergency will face pressure to improvise. That is the strongest argument for Lecornu's letter.
What the court actually allowed
The argument fails on the court's own terms. In its decision of 1 April 2025 (nos. 494511, 494583 and 495174), the Conseil d'État ruled the May 2024 TikTok block in New Caledonia illegal. Its press release states the general rule: an administrative authority may in principle cut access to an online public communication service only where the law provides for it, given the harm to freedom of expression, free communication of ideas, privacy and freedom of commerce.
The court carved out a narrow exception for exceptional circumstances. Even then, the measure is lawful only on three cumulative conditions:
- it must be indispensable to deal with events of particular gravity;
- no technical means may exist to adopt less intrusive alternative measures immediately;
- the interruption must last no longer than needed to find and implement those alternatives.
The New Caledonia block failed because it was a total cut-off of indeterminate length, tied only to the persistence of disorder. The court pointed to alternatives such as disabling specific features. The New Caledonia block ran from 15 to 29 May 2024, according to the Conseil d'État's reasoning as reported by Next, and the court still annulled it.
Why the October plan looks weaker
By Clubic's account, Matignon relied on that April 2025 decision. The reports do not say what legal basis the letter cited, and it left the legal conditions to a meeting on 23 October. Operator representatives questioned whether a nationwide scope was necessary and proportionate, that the measure was easy to circumvent, and that less drastic options had not been exhausted. That tracks the court's second and third conditions closely.
The scale also differs. New Caledonia was an overseas territory in a state of emergency, with riots that, in the court's words, caused several deaths. The 24 October demonstrations drew 400,000 people by the Interior Ministry's count and 800,000 by the CGT's. A mobile-network block across metropolitan France would touch millions of people who were not involved in any violence, including those using the platforms to organise peacefully, to reach family or to follow the news.
The operators also asked for a signed, dated, reasoned and published decree, and Orange specifically asked for an arrêté. Matignon, per Clubic, instead issued a simple instruction to each operator, with a public announcement about 30 minutes before the planned activation. A restriction on speech that the court says needs strict conditions should be written down, reasoned and reviewable before the event. A short instruction does not meet that bar.
The practical problems
DNS filtering is blunt and easy to evade. Changing a resolver or using a VPN defeats it, so determined organisers can route around it while ordinary users cannot. Clubic reports that the operators said they could not implement a mobile-only, zone-specific block quickly and could not guarantee it would work. The letter also asked for secrecy and included a clause letting each operator stop if its network was at risk. A measure that is secret, that may break the network and that can be bypassed is a poor instrument for public safety.
The disclosure cost matters too. Telling the networks to prepare, and then naming X after the fact, shows that the list of platforms can change within days. That uncertainty chills lawful speech. It also gives authoritarian governments a European precedent to cite when they impose their own shutdowns.
A proportionate path
The pro-innovation answer is not to deny the state any tools. It is to require that those tools be built in advance and bounded in law. Three steps would help.
- Legislate. If Parliament believes a short suspension power is needed, it should debate the triggers, duration limits and judicial review, rather than leave the matter to the theory of exceptional circumstances.
- Prefer targeted tools. The court named feature-level blocking and cooperation with the platform. Takedown orders for specific incitement, and direct escalation with platforms' trust-and-safety teams, should be exhausted and documented first.
- Publish and review. Any decision should be public, reasoned and dated, with a hard expiry, so a judge can assess it quickly.
The 24 October protests passed without a shutdown, and that is the best outcome. The risk is that the letter becomes a template for the next protest. The Conseil d'État has said what a lawful shutdown requires, and the letter, as reported, met none of those requirements. If the executive wants this power, it should ask Parliament for it openly.