In addition to that of Jean-Philippe Tanguy, deputy director of Marine Le Pen's campaign, the accounts of the director of communication of the RN, Alexandre Loubet, those of the youth movement of candidate Eric Zemmour Generation Z and ZemmourTV have also been blocked.

Immediately after these accounts were blocked, a "Stopcensorship" hashtag appeared on Twitter, quickly rising to the top tweeted topics.

A Twitter spokesperson told AFP that the social network's rules had "erroneously been applied to certain accounts".

"The accounts in question are being reinstated. We have a dedicated process to appeal an action taken by Twitter if account owners believe an action was taken in error," it said. -He specifies.

Eric Zemmour and his entourage denounced "censorship" 37 days before the first round of the presidential election.

Samuel Lafont, the digital manager, counted "18 suspended accounts" including that of Generation Z, the candidate's youth movement or accounts favorable to Zemmour in English and Spanish.

"Thank you for the #StopCensure mobilization which made it possible to restore my account and that of dozens of executives involved in the presidential campaign against E. Macron", tweeted Jean-Philippe Tanguy.

On the right, the leader of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, also wondered and said that Twitter had to “explain about these account suspensions and say how they broke the rules to deserve such treatment. democracy cannot be regulated by private enterprise".

Twitter did not indicate whether this suspension had a link with the recent investigation by Le Monde into the use of the social network by supporters of Éric Zemmour.

The daily claimed in early February that his team was "artificially" inflating the candidate's presence on Twitter with "massive retweets", "automation" and "coordination" of supporter accounts.

"We do everything by hand, we don't need robots," swept the digital manager of the Zemmour team, Samuel Lafont, interviewed by AFP.

Twitter told AFP to take "very seriously the investigation of the newspaper Le Monde" and to proceed "to checks".

A spokesperson for the social network added that if it had "clear evidence" of behavior "aimed at disrupting the user experience" and "manipulation of the platform and spam", it would take "sanctions against the against the implicated accounts".

© 2022 AFP