Evening reflections on "Freedom of Speech" and the French Ministry of Truth

Well, it had to happen: introducing French Response, the new ‘counter-speech’ account of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

An official channel that speaks not of diplomacy, peace, or international cooperation — but of monitoring, policing, and disciplining the online conversation. This is not an account meant to inform. It is an account meant to correct, to push back, to frame what may be said and what must remain unsaid.

A channel that openly assumes its role as an ideological watchdog under the pleasant disguise of ‘transparency’, as if free expression itself had become a foreign threat to be contained. You can feel the spirit of the age:

The state no longer listens to citizens — it monitors them. It no longer debates — it corrects.
It no longer seeks to convince — it seeks to regulate speech as though it were a public hazard.

The government now speaks to the people the way one speaks to a population to be supervised. And when a social platform becomes too free, too unpredictable, too alive — the response is not dialogue, but a “French Response”. In genuine democracies, governments communicate. They do not create an official counter-strike unit to interfere in conversations between citizens. This is a shift. Another one. A sign of a state that cannot endure democratic disorder — which is precisely what freedom looks like. Once, the role of the state was to guarantee liberty.

Today, it feels compelled to oversee it. And make no mistake: when a government feels the need to monitor platforms, correct opinions, and intervene in narratives it does not control, it is never out of love for truth. It is out of fear of losing control.

French Response is not an information account. It is a barometer of the government’s anxiety. And its mere existence tells us more than any of its posts ever will.

Lise Santolini

Gerry Nolan - The Islander commentary

It’s strange, in a way almost ceremonial, when a state chooses to reveal what it has become.

All I did was speak freely. And in response, the French government stepped forward — calmly, politely, bureaucratically,  to correct me. That alone tells you where we are.

Think about that. A continent with a shrinking industrial base now claims the right to police the global public square, to dictate not only what Europeans may say, but what the world may say on platforms it does not own, in jurisdictions it does not govern, under laws no citizen ever voted for.

This is not regulation. This is extra-territorial censorship disguised as simple consumer protection.

And France, the country of Voltaire, Hugo, Zola; the country that once staged revolutions merely to remind kings who ruled whom, now deploys bureaucrats to inspect online metaphors like customs officers inspecting luggage for contraband.

That is the tragedy. Not merely the censorship, but the collapse of a national soul.

De Gaulle once said that France could not be France without grandeur. Today, greatness has been replaced by grievance and debate by digital supervision. A Republic that once defied empires now behaves like a minor prefecture of an anxious EU superstate, terrified of what its own citizens might think if left unmonitored.

This is why the DSA exists. Because Europe’s elites have lost the argument, lost the public, and lost the confidence to face either. So they turn to an Orwellian control structure. To fines for tech companies that refuse secret deals made in the shade. To algorithmic control. To interface mandates.

To “trusted flaggers.” To researchers chosen like clergy. To a Ministry of Truth that corrects citizens the way colonial officers once corrected subjects.

And when French Response quotes legal articles at me, it isn’t offering clarity. It’s confessing panic. It’s revealing that the ruling class no longer fears Russia or China or disinformation, it fears the awakening of and reckoning from its own population.

They quoted Articles 25, 39, 40 as though reciting scripture. But each one is a stepping stone in a system that has abandoned persuasion for bureaucratic compulsion:

Art. 25 — “redesign interfaces we don’t like.”
Art. 39 — “expose your ad networks to us.”
Art. 40 — “hand over your data to researchers we control.”

And looming over all of it: The threat to annihilate any platform that does not comply.
A state does not build a Ministry of Truth to protect the truth. It builds it to protect itself from the people who can recognize it.

France knows this. Brussels knows this.
Every EU government now enforcing the DSA knows this. The only ones they hope won’t realize it are the citizens, which is why even a single dissenting sentence must be supervised.

But of course they didn’t reply to correct me.
They replied because I said something they can no longer afford to hear echoed.

And here is the final truth, the one that ends the illusion... When the Republic begins policing speech, it is no longer a Republic, only a weak power in its most frightened form. And the ruling class knows one thing above all, that if Europe could vote on the Europe that exists today, this Europe would not survive the night.

Gerry Nolan