Twitter users turned Sunday’s French presidential election into a battle between a green Hungarian wine and a red Dutch cheese in a bid to get round tough laws banning result predictions.
The #RadioLondres hashtag was the top France trend on Twitter during the first-round presidential vote, in homage to World War II codes broadcast to Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France from the BBC in London.
But French citizens have written a new codebook in a subversive bid to get round laws that mean anyone announcing vote predictions before polls closed at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) could be fined up to 75,000 euros (100,000 dollars).
“Tune in to #RadioLondres so as not to know the figures we don’t want to know before 8:00 pm,” said one ironic tweet.
“Dutch cheese at 27 euros, Tokai wine at 25 euros,” read one tweet as poll percentage predictions were published abroad.
The thing is, this would still be prosecuted if perpetrated by broadcast media. So it wasn’t the code per se that allowed them to circumvent the law. So the questions are:
- Why is an in-spirit violation not prosecuted when carried out in a decentralized communication network?
- Would just nakedly forecasting the outcome also escape prosecution if done on Twitter? (As opposed to the usual things people nakedly do on Twitter.)
The pointer was from @handeh.
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April 23, 2012 at 1:27 pm
twicker
They do, indeed, appear to be thinking of prosecuting this (at least, by the latest update – list line) – which is rather bizarre.
As for why *not* to prosecute, I’d say that this is a use of asymmetry:
For the Twitter users, there’s next-to-no cost to do this; for the broadcast commission, each prosecution will be expensive in a time of reduced budgets. They might still do it; however, my bet is going to be that they’ll leave these folks alone and will just go after major broadcasters.
As it happens, it reminds me of an experience that Georgia Tech had in the early ’90s:
Tech has a campus in Metz, France (Georgia Tech Lorraine).
France passed a law stating that all websites hosted in France must be either 100% in French or have French translations for every page.
France prosecuted Georgia Tech for not following the law.
Georgia Tech complied with the law. Which is why the Georgia Tech Lorraine website – http://www.georgiatech-metz.fr/ – is hosted in Atlanta, GA.
If the broadcast commission really *does* decide to prosecute, then, next time … well … Italy’s nice this time of year. Spain, too. And London is but a train trip through the Chunnel …
April 23, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Emil
The same happens in Bulgarian elections (or at least it used to happen years ago, when I last followed an election).
The election law there also prohibits the public announcement of election results before all voting booths have closed. But radio stations would track fake “competitions” among songs whose titles included references to the traditional symbolic colors of each party (red/blue/yellow/green/orange/etc etc (you can imagine how many colors there are in a parliamentary democracy, haha)).
As far as I know, no one was ever convicted of anything. Though that may be saying something about Bulgarian courts, rather than the distinction between broadcasting and decentralized communication.