The "Yellow Jackets" Riots In France Are What Happens When Facebook Gets Involved With Local News

[.99center]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/france-paris-yellow-jackets-facebook
The Yellow Jackets movement is what happens when you point Facebook's traffic hose at France's small towns. The question now is: How do you turn it off?

By Ryan Broderick

This week, protesters scaled the Arc de Triomphe, burned cars, and clashed with police in the third consecutive weekend of riots in France. More than 300 people were arrested in Paris last weekend alone, and 37,000 law enforcement officers have been deployed around the country to restore order.

The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests have only gotten more violent since they began last month. Three people have died, hundreds more have been injured. To hear the protesters tell it, they’re marching through the streets to fight back against rising fuel prices and the high cost of living in the country. Beyond that, though, it’s an ideological free-for-all. Fights have also been witnessed among demonstrators, and some have sent death threats to other protesters.

But what’s happening right now in France isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Yellow Jackets movement — named for the protesters’ brightly colored safety vests — is a beast born almost entirely from Facebook. And it’s only getting more popular. Recent polls indicate the majority of France now supports the protesters. The Yellow Jackets communicate almost entirely on small, decentralized Facebook pages. They coordinate via memes and viral videos. Whatever gets shared the most becomes part of their platform.

Due to the way algorithm changes made earlier this year interacted with the fierce devotion in France to local and regional identity, the country is now facing some of the worst riots in many years — and in Paris, the worst in half a century.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/france-paris-yellow-jackets-facebook

[Claritie Pixie]

1. Facebooks needs to be heavily regulated or better yet - go defunct.

[SunSeeker]

2. I'm sure Putin is happy with this. nt

[.99center]

3. Putin and the far right.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[MineralMan]

4. Here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, those yellow safety vests

became the uniform of daytime burglars for a while. Since people are used to seeing them on utility workers and other working people, the burglars were donning them so they could walk up people's driveways without raising the suspicions of neighbors.

It worked, but only for a short time. Now, it's the working folks who are getting the police called on them for doing their jobs. The burglary thing got some press attention and people started calling 911 every time some utility worker was on the job. The situation is still not really resolved here.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. And yet you find the article admits that this didn't coincide with Facebook prioritising local news

That was in January; the article says "by the spring, the protest movement had more or less died down", and the complaints about fuel prices "didn’t really pick up steam until this October":

So, in less than two weeks, what you end up with is this: A Change.org petition with fewer than 1,500 subscribers gets talked about on a local radio station. The radio appearance is written up by a local news site. The article is shared to a local Facebook page. Thanks to an algorithm change that is now emphasizing local discussion, the article dominates the conversation in a small town. Two men from the same suburb then turn the petition into a Facebook event. A duplicate petition goes viral within the local Facebook groups. Then a daily newspaper writes up the original petition. This second article about the petition also goes viral. So does the original petition. And then the rest of French media follows.

I think BuzzFeed has gone back to its old ways of sensationalist headlines. This involves radio, change.org, a daily paper and "the rest of the French media" as well as Facebook.