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Laetitia Avia. Wikipedia

Macronista proposes harsh law against online ‘hate speech’

French MP, Laetitia Avia, a Togolese immigrant and avid Macronista, has been pushing for censoring free speech on the Internet. A French journalist argues that Avia has been playing the part of the perfect "victim".

Published: July 6, 2019, 9:31 am

    Paris

    On July 23, 2017, five days after being elected as a member of parliament, Avia was accused of biting the shoulder of a taxi driver after he refused her proposal to settle the transaction with a credit card.

    When asked about her violent behaviour, she declined to comment. “A difficult event,” was all she would say. Yet this image of her is not very flattering. Not only does she seem to be an aggressive woman, but ultimately, especially, that a real victim of her aggression should be ignored.

    And in terms of consideration and media influence, the 31-year-old and third sibling of four children, further announced that she would not be filing a complaint against the driver, thus encouraging more speculation about her motive for assaulting the driver.

    Avia, a lawyer whose phenomenal rise started at Sciences Po in Paris, has also been the subject of much discussion about race-based affirmative action, since she happens to be black, is a woman, and an immigrant, says French journalist Solange Bied-Charreton. The university’s values incidentally are based on “openness”.

    Immediately after her visit to the Rue Saint-Guillaume, where she met with Emmanuel Macron, an Inspector of Finance at the time, she was appointed as one of the rapporteurs of the Darrois commission for the reform of the “professions of law” (2009).

    Avia holds a Master of Economic Law, obtained in 2008, from a LLM in Comparative Law at Mc Gill University in Canada. Today, Laetitia Avia is an inescapable face of the Macronistas, perhaps even a symbol, as the indispensable representative of the black “oppressed minority”.

    Her proposals to tackle “online trolling” is based on her personal experience of so many “racist insults” on Twitter. “It’s incredibly rare that I don’t get anything,” she said.

    French MPs are currently debating her draft law to stop “hate speech” online which she has been preparing for the last year and inspired by German legislation that came into force in 2018.

    She hopes to stop racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia on social media with her law, because according to her “self-regulation has failed”.

    The first measure will require social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube to create a button to report abusive messages while the second major part of the draft bill will also increase the liabilities and potential penalties for social networks.

    The draft law also proposes creating a new crime – failing to remove abusive content.

    But critics say the law will make tech giants the ultimate arbiters of online speech, effectively shutting down free speech since it will also cover search engines.

    Avia has however been insisting on harsh penalties and strict deadlines. “Even this last weekend, I flagged a comment that called me a ‘black bitch’ and I got a response saying that it didn’t contravene the platform’s user conditions.”

    Before tackling the thorny issue of online “hate speech”, the lawyer had issued a bill against so-called “glottophobie” – or mocking someone’s accent – in the fall of 2018. Thus Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had made fun of the accent of a Toulouse journalist, has been accused of such “discrimination”.

    Not surprisingly, Avia’s command of the French language is a little shaky. She told the National Assembly at the time: “This bill is my own story, that of a woman who no longer accepts being insulted as [being a] negress (sic) on social networks. It is also that of thousands of our fellow citizens who are victims or witnesses every day of serious attacks on human dignity.”

    French journalist and human rights activist Zineb El Rhazoui recalled on Twitter that the rapporteur of the bill has not provided for any sanction against the dissemination of those verses in the Quran that instructs believers “to kill the apostates” of Islam.

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