As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests with similar demands. This feels refreshing and prove that regimes response to wide spread protests they don’t like is not that different.
Why not just allow genuinely peaceful protests and take stern police/legal action against all other forms of protest? I don't understand the logic behind cutting access to communications platforms. Seems like an indirect or roundabout way of solving the problem.
Social/IM platforms are literally where the violent ones organize. Nobody has issues with the peaceful protests, but in the past couple weeks it's become very clear that violent rioters use the excuse of the peaceful organized protest to infiltrate and wreak havoc, using the peaceful demonstrators as essentially meat shields. That needs to stop. And without readily available social/IM platforms, there's no way the violent ones can coordinate in the hundreds/thousands on a couple hours notice.
I have no idea what happens in France now, but in the past of many other countries the main place where the violent protests were really organized was not on any Social/IM platforms, even in the cases where it appeared to be so, but at the police/secret police/government HQs, where covert agents were prepared for triggering and/or leading violent actions during the protests, in order to discredit the peaceful demonstrators and enable direct action of the police against them.
Nowadays whenever you see "violent protests" and "destructions of private property by vandals during protests" you can never be certain whether they are organized by people who are against the government or by the government itself.
There are multiple videos from France showing undercover police instigating and breaking things.
Then, the government is pushing cities to denounce the most popular Left party as the instigator of the riots.
They are preparing to ban them next elections for this. It's pretty clear it's all a political maneuver to ensure it's once again Macron's party versus Marine's far right party, hoping it ensures their win against her
They normally have to ask for dates, permits, are normally driven by groups that have been around for long, they have websites, they have a list of asks, etc etc.
Compare that with violent ones that see the opportunity coming with 3-4d heads-up (because peaceful protests are normally covered with a little advance - 3-4d - by mainstream press), create an Instagram/TikTok/Whatsapp/Snapchat group, spread it aggressively thanks to zero cost of social/IM, and their only objective is to smash everything in their path (and if they manage, steal some loot to resell).
IM cannot be stopped. When a government broadcasts they will censor them, the very next step is for protesters to install something like Bitchat, which does Bluetooth-based, mesh/P2P IM-ing, and is specifically designed to resist even full-on Internet shutdowns.
The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want. Everything else is a band-aid atop an ulcer: it hides the problem for a little while, but the problem itself keeps growing regardless.
You cannot throw out the current neoliberal political regimes based on peaceful protests alone, I thought that by now that would have been obvious for most of us adults in the room who went through Occupy and the peaceful protests of the early 2010s. Tahrir wasn’t peaceful, throwing out Assad wasn’t peaceful, why do people still have the expectation that throwing out a regime that puts an investment banker as its leader is supposed to be peaceful?
Presumably, because the people who want to change things do have in-system ways to do so: joining into a new Party, preaching their views, getting elected, growing, until they convince enough people to give them the power they need to change things.
In practice there may be many roadblocks in that, so this isn't absolute. But if that's the case, it's still on the people who notice the roadblocks to convince most everyone these are real. Without that any protest will lack widespread support and be suppressed regardless.
Empirical history contradicts your claim. In reality people protest when life feels bad and when life feels bad for many many people, there are really big protests. If it gets to this point, the system has already failed, because life already feels bad.
Arguing that the system has escape hatches is just an excuse. The escape hatches have also failed, clearly, since they either haven't been used (which is their fault) or their use did not fix the system.
political movements that pose a threat to the regime's interests are suppressed much more aggressively and in much earlier stages, debanking etc.
there are many NGOs aligned with the current protests, and they receive substantial government funding, because they are in symbiosis. the regime doesn't provide funding for ideologies that actually threaten its interests.
public opinion has now reached a tipping point, any further vandalism/arson/violence will not provide a net benefit to the regime. that's why now they finally try to stop it.
2) even by french standards, this is getting out of hand
3) peaceful protest is being facilitated, the problem is, not everyone is peaceful and there isn't enough police to arrest everyone.
If you are american you have to remember that france _likes_ to protest, not in a cutesy way where you all line up and make a message out of people. No they blockade roads, factories, shopping centres and generally bring cities to a grinding halt. Spontaneously. Put it this way, the No kings protest had they been run by the french would have been visible from space.
Sometimes workers take company execs hostage (see good year 2014 and air france 2015, where execs had to literally run away)
Or more generally the yellow vest movement had rolling blockades that fucked with everything.
That's how it works. Until there's so much rioting the police can't deal with it. What should happen then? Cutting communications seems like a pretty good idea.
If the entire population of a country is rioting against the government, the government should immediately resign, or worse. What's happening right now in France bears no difference from what happened years ago in Egypt or Libya.
The rioters are causing damage they themselves will have to pay for in taxpayer dollars. So their cost of living will go up. The way French people protest is mental. I’m sure the Russians have agents on the ground inciting violence.
The people are concerned about the cost of oil I mean it’s the bombs that hit Iran that caused this not the French government.
Am I missing something? What drives people to burn shops down and assault people the next steps is assault rifles, so they should be happy without social media.
I know nothing about the present situation in France, but in the past, in many other European countries, more often than not what drove people to burn shops down during protests were covert police/government agents, taking advantage of the weaker minded between protestants, in order to enable an intervention in force by the police against the others.
This governmental tactic of using "agents provocateurs" against protests had been invented by the French themselves, a very long time ago, but now it is universally used by all governments.
How so? Anything to destabilize Europe benefits them. Something highly plausible is not a conspiracy theory, it is a sound strategic move for Russia given the circumstance. And it would be very easy to pull off since their people just fold into the crowd.
In the US, the people have the second amendment. The rooftop Koreans, Kyle Rittenhouse, etc. are examples of the counterweight ready to reign in protests gone feral.
> Kyle Rittenhouse, etc. are examples of the counterweight ready to reign in protests gone feral.
I mean yes, but that's exactly down to country "personality" and conventions which I was hinting at. France values the right to protest almost above the right to shrug. However its not like the french police are going to be nice to you because you're protesting, french police are _bastards_.
If you wander around with a gun in france, and you're not hunting, the police _will_ shoot you, and more importantly, in the spirit of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, they'll shoot you even if you're white.
This provides an incentive for the government to ensure that it creates a society that works for everyone. But this is the one thing that no government anywhere is willing to do - they find it much more convenient to use lethal force against those who complain instead.
The people who destroy stuff in protests in France are people coming from the bad neighborhoods that don't work legal jobs (mostly dealers) and therefore don't pay taxes. They go there to break for fun and to loot stores for profit.
French riot police aren’t great at dealing with protests — and they protesters know this, so the protests escalate rapidly then throw in looting and you end up with a massive mess
Edit: instead of having my comments instantly shadowbanned by a coin clip, I've now been told that I'm posting too fast. That means a moderator is actively looking at my account and changing which punishment I'm subject to, but I've never received any feedback explaining why I am to be punished.
Some of the demands are well-intentioned but poorly thought through.
Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up). End result: more "fairness" on paper but the people who actually depend on government funding have less of it (e.g. for education).
So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.
> Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up).
Has this literally ever happened, like anywhere? Yeah, the Laffer curve is a very real concern and a by-product of Rolle's theorem, but we don't even know where the supposed inflection point is, much less whether any given tax reform that would cause wealthy people to pay more would go over it.
> So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.
Human psychology is weird in that they might even be okay with this as long as the perceived fairness increases. But the only way to find out would be to do an experiment. That might also help us find the inflection point in the Laffer curve.
It happened in Norway and is happening in the UK and California. Unfortunately the effect seems to be real, although IMO it may not be the taxes themselves as much as the increasingly hostile attitude towards wealth, which may cause the wealthy concern about unknown future actions.
Without a global wealth tax (which seems impossible to coordinate) then I don’t see a good solution if the goal is to extract excess wealth from UHNW individuals. This is why a Georgist land value tax scheme is probably better; it levels out real estate speculation, which is a favorite parking lot for excess wealth and which has terrible side effects. Over time this will level out wealth inequality slightly, while forcing unproductive (rent seeking) wealth into the market.
I’m in favor of a single tax (just LVT), which economists say is possible, but if you must then you could also tax stock/bond profits (trading, dividends, coupons) at a higher rate. This may be a bad idea though if it pushes investors over to foreign markets.
It's literally never happened anywhere, and the whole concept is probably just an excuse to keep taxes low.
The Laffer curve exists. It's heavily skewed to the right. Studies find the peak is probably about 80% tax rate, which we don't have to worry about accidentally exceeding.
The Laffer curve also only makes sense in the context of a government's primary purpose being to maximise its own revenues. This is clearly not how we want governments to work. If an increased tax on cigarettes causes less total cigarette tax revenue that would be widely considered a good thing.
Taxing rich people, while being a recurring topic, is not part of the current demands. It's firstly high schoolers who want a fair system after the "bac", heat during winter and a roof on their head.
You can always be assured of one thing, if the USA/west control apparatus does something defensive, it is because they’re very familiar with why it needs to be done to counter methods they’ve not only used, but successfully so to overthrow governments and cause chaos in societies.
Because very often the "peaceful protest" provides cover to rioting/looting/property destruction, and it's a lot easier to say/enforce no assembling on the street at 11pm on a Friday as part of a curfew, than to leave a carveout for assembling on that street for a "peaceful protest".
I’m sure this comment comes from a good place. I just want to say that cops escalate tensions in peaceful protests on the regular, when it fits their or their superiors narrative.
The playbook is always the same here in Germany: create a temporary limitation, like “ban use of umbrellas” or “don’t chant in arabic or irish” (both real things that happened at demos in Berlin). Then one of two things happen: either people comply, and cops create a new limitation. Or someone doesn’t comply and is violently arrested. Some people don’t like being beaten up, so they fight back. Now a peaceful protest turned into “violent police attacking thugs”.
Protest - A protest is a public expression, statement, or act of strong objection, disapproval, or dissent against a policy, law, action, or idea.
Peaceful - Peaceful is an adjective meaning free from war, violence, conflict, or disturbance, as well as quiet, calm, and untroubled
Very few protests are truly "peaceful". There will always be a grey area with protests that make them controversial and difficult to manage while "peaceful protest" is usually used as a thought terminating term. Though riots are different and probably are made up of opportunists.
During my 2 decades in the pro-life movement, I attended many events. While we ourselves did not usually call them “protests”, I can assure you that our opponents did. And 100% of the events which I attended were 100% peaceful. They were without violence, without arrests, without property damage, and often without confrontational angry words. We would often meet to pray weekly on the sidewalks.
Now we strove for peace very purposefully and diligently. We were constantly coached and trained by our leadership on how to focus, and not engage any hecklers, and how to ignore provocateurs, because there were many.
But we were always successful at maintaining peaceful and even joyful, uplifting atmospheres. That was very important to us and our cause. If anyone ran into trouble, we were always careful to observe the laws and obey the authorities. That ensured an enduring welcome for us in marches and on the public right-of-ways.
Great for you but that's not how it works in France. They have been revolting on and off for decades/centuries, and the government know how to stifle it.
The police gas and break up most peaceful protests until there is no avenue left but to clash with the police. They regularly attack, maim, and kill people (either protesters or even bystanders, like the woman who was watching from her window and was targeted by a police explosive (confirmed not an accident but intentional police violence))
Agents provocateur instigate violence and looting, but the police never interrupt them like they do the peaceful kids. The images of riots play directly into the media and government hand who play the law and order angle. As evidenced by these news which only see it as rioting and not the government preventing any kind of protest.
They are using the unrest to try and ban the most popular leftist party in France. They are destroying what's left of democracy in the country.
A minority, at least in France, is using those networks to organize (in a pro manner) illegal activities. I got in a rabbit hole browsing those groups and I was, honestly, puzzled at how this could happen in the open.
You're too naive, the whole thing was allowed to happen for purely political reasons. 99% of protesters were peaceful, those were heavily attacked by police Non politically motivated casseurs were allowed pillaged, barely any were arrested, these streets were devoid of police forces
The far right gets to blame migrants as usual
The center right (in charge right now) gets to blame the "UlTrA left"
The left gets fucked
Medias exclusively talk about the riots for days, the original demands are completely forgotten, boomers get behind the government for "LaW AnD OrDeR"
The way the French response overcomplicates things feels analogous to how founders also overcomplicate things:
> many of the conversations we have with founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with "how do I.." and the partner answering with a sentence that begins with "just".
i.e. Often the most absurdly simple solution is the best one.
Social media permits Broadcasting for Free. One to All messaging. For all other media - radio, satellite, tv, phones broadcasting requires licenses. Why?
Cuz Claude Shannon told us if everyone broadcasts on the same frequency noise increases and no one hears anything forcing them into broadcasting at higher and higher power or repeating their messages more and more. Which again increases noise. So Broadcasting has always been licensed and regulated. That solved the Noise problem because people were forced to coordinate use of broadcast spectrum.
Social media platforms act as if Shannon doesn't apply. So they do exactly what Shannon predicted. Everyone is broadcasting. No one can be heard clearly. People scream louder and louder. The loudest get locked into arms races. Repeat their messages more and more. At the end of it all Noise hasnt reduced and who gets attention from one day to the next is unpredicatble. And since Platforms dont want to talk about Shannon we are all stuck in some kind of red queen dynamic. People are expending lot of energy. Results are all temporary and unpredictable.
That’s an interesting analogy, but it breaks down somewhat when the messages that get through are those chosen by the government (Facebook, Google, etc) rather than people shouting louder.
If only social media platform let individuals sort messages by time, and filter messages based on their friend groups, and weren't forced to view feeds controlled by algorithms they have no control or insight over.
I'm not sure if it should be done by the governments, but there is a huge freedom vs responsibility imbalance in broadcasting: you can reach millions of people with well crafted misinformation easily with zero responsibility, and social media algorithms actually promote misinformation as a side effect of optimizing for engagement: truth is boring.
I don't think it will get fixed in any way: there is too much money to be made.
Paraphrasing Leni, we will hang ourselves on the rope that we sold to ourselves :)
The word “government” is the group that governs. People like Musk and Zuck govern their fiefdoms with absolute power, or at best the level of power medieval kings had.
The type of power the wield would be beyond imagination for the most ruthless Roman Emperor
seems like the response is always to restrict the means of communication rather than deal with those actually organising violence. BBM back then, social platforms now.
Isn’t that sort of ironic, because BlackBerry was used disproportionately by government and corporate clients? Wouldn’t a ban basically cut off the very people who should have been favoured?
It's part of a bigger push against individual liberties in France.
In a week, we got curfew, military in the streets to control protests, blanket ban on protests in a few cities (but not uniformly applied, illegal far-right protests have been tolerated at night during curfew), an extremely violent police repression (protest control policemen in France have very violent weapons, and those resulted in lost eyes and shredded hands // and that's not counting all of the unjustified beatings in the protest while looting was happening under their eyes elsewhere), the prime minister outright lying on the fatalities, spoke person laughing at the idea of condemning violence from the police, mass arrests, proposals from the party in power to ban social media, to ban the big left party (the second one in terms of voting intentions rn), to tag people in the protests invisibly, to disenfranchise people that will get condemned for anything in those protests… and by the way completely ignoring their responsibilities in anything in this story, blaming a party that never has been in power for all the economic problems in this country.
Also, media reports amplified the part about lootings and completely eclipsed anything else (this is reportedly even worse in foreign media [0]). This resulted 2 days ago in a terrorist attack in a city named Trappes, repeatedly depicted in the media as a city full of people with immigrant background, resulting (for now) in 1 death and 5 injured. The terrorist was unstable mentally and likely under substance, and wanted to "avenge" the shopkeepers that lost their store by shooting on what he thought was the part of the cause. When confronted, media dodged their responsibility in any of it, and some even doubled down saying that people there are probably routinely evading bus fares (right when they were talking about the shooting!).
Anyway, I think this can give you my (probably somewhat biased) picture of the French political atmosphere right now.
It seems French society will soon embark on the path to total VPNization. Once the government gets a taste of blocking Internet resources, it won't stop.
Belgium introduced dns blocking to block one child porn website, and then the slippery slope gears started turning. Over a thousand websites are blocked countrywide now.
They are already trying to make them outlawed...
I don't like criticizing the country but the national motto's first word, there are making it nothing but a joke.
Apparently you are only free to hate now, and that's if you hate the right kind of people...
Bolstered by fascists united worldwide.
A shame.
All DNS servers operating in France are required to cooperate with the censorship regime, this is why Quad9 exited France. Presumably part of this new measure will be ISPs redirecting all port 53 traffic to their own resolvers.
And yes, you can in theory install the same software used to punch through the Chinese firewall, but if it doesn't appear in the app store or google play, your new VPN is as good as dead.
There are no technical solutions to political and social problems.
And rest assured, the party has a list of people and their dogs, and will use it at a moment of convenience.
Public facing VPNs are quite trivial to detect, even if you don't own your country telecom infra.
That’s not really how it works, considering how many people use them. In the recent past they just shut down all “suspicious” looking traffic when there are protests. This has false positives, which is why it’s not always active. Plus allowing VPNs in normal times acts as sort of a social pressure release.
Yes, they spy on you to see if you pirate movies, so most users already use a VPN to download their pirated medias. Thanks to Hadopi, the french already know how to bypass censorship and surveillance
France has been blocking a lot of websites, some quite popular, since at least the Nappster wars and has expanded and expanded and expanded. Recent victims are Z-library, Anna's archive, a lot of satellite TV viewing websites, illegal streaming websites, ...
Of course reasons to block websites has expanded dramatically, especially into the political realm. For political examples, websites collecting video evidence police actions during protests "Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F", a lot of extreme-right websites (some arguably not very extreme, or should I say, every year that passes the bar of what means extreme-right for blocking purposes is lowered), VPNs, oh and "right-to-be-forgotten" stuff (blocking a number of groups who published details on important French and EU political figures, generally failing to achieve their goal. For a high profile example, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy used internet censorship to hide evidence of fraud, but got convicted anyway. There's also the example of ... I don't like to agree with the extreme right on anything, BUT, it is sadly absolutely true that LFI (a far left political party, or whatever you want to call leftists that, while absolutely not tankies, are not particularly opposed to using violence to achieve their aims. I think that's fair to say about them) is using internet censorship laws for everything from protecting their members against the police to silencing even internal criticism. Of course it is ALSO true RN commits far more problematic violence)
(obviously the reason LFI wants its members protected from the police, and school administrations and ... is the organizing violence thing they do. A lot of people agree at least with the aims of the protests, and it's not like these people commit murder or anything. But they certainly do cause a lot of destruction of property)
Probably, since not many of us in Europe don't have lots of use cases for them, yet.
But things like our (Spain's) "internet shall not be 100% available during La Liga football matches" or our neighbors thinking of blocking DNS to stop political activism, surely will continue to make this number raise, albeit slowly.
I know there’s a subsection of the internet who for some reason believe VPNs are the solution to everything and better than sliced bread, but VPNs are absolutely unnecessary (and frankly overkill) for these types of blocks. All you have to do is change the DNS service on your machine, which is trivial even for non-technical users and unlike a VPN doesn’t disrupt anything about your computer usage.
You can install an app like 1.1.1.1 to use Cloudflare and there are many apps that will do it for generic DNS. Or manually but you will need to create DNS Profile and install it. It is not hard to generate one, but it is usually used for encrypted DNS which you should be using anyway.
> I know how to do that with a computer but not iPhones. Androids are probably easier to set up.
I don’t understand this type of comment which is so prevalent on HN. If you don’t know, why do you assume something else is easier or harder? It takes less time to do this web search than to reply to a comment. Here’s how to change it on both iOS and Android, from the same website:
Seems like he really wants to limit the spread of videos showcasing the behaviour of the protesters, and their backgrounds... This goes hand in hand with his pathetic speech about how it's all fake news and AI.
When people are rioting for things that didn't happen, because they think they did, because of messages being sent to them by an enemy, then you stop that enemy.
Although the current riots precisely start because stuff that did not happen: having a stable teacher (or at all) for the courses they’re suppose to study.
Real rioters will dive into no-DNS internet communication. Most internet protocols were designed with DNS independence in mind (read the email RFC, email addresses can have IP literals instead of DNS names which is of paramount importance, which I use BTW).
Namely, in the end, they will have to switch off telecommunication as a whole... well, if they are not interested in gathering intelligence about the rioters.
And then real rioters will have 'mesh communication devices', and then govs will need EM jammers too.
Sooo... govs should work on good and wide spread EM jammers instead of trying to to block DNS...
You're talking about core groups who think about protesting all day. But 99.9% of these people are not that, they're average people who are fed up of the government stealing all their money and giving it to themselves and billionaires while the country crumbles. (USA could learn something from them)
These are kids who use messenger/whatsapp etc. No they won't be bothered to even switch messenger. The goal isn't to shut down some criminal network it's to just make word of mouth spread in 10 minutes instead of 1 I reckon.
As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests with similar demands. This feels refreshing and prove that regimes response to wide spread protests they don’t like is not that different.
But please don’t call it European spring.
We’re limited to harsh winters and very hot summers now, I’m not sure there’s an European spring left.
great idea! enjoy Euro Spring :)
Maybe Libya should bomb the shit out of France this time?
Interestingly enough, Libya did in fact bomb France two decades before France bombed Libya, via the multiple terrorist proxy Gaddafi financed.
please don't threaten people with a good time
euro winter, literal freezing of rights I guess
And literal freezing of Europe at the current gas prices.
I mean it's europes fall right now not spring
Why not just allow genuinely peaceful protests and take stern police/legal action against all other forms of protest? I don't understand the logic behind cutting access to communications platforms. Seems like an indirect or roundabout way of solving the problem.
Social/IM platforms are literally where the violent ones organize. Nobody has issues with the peaceful protests, but in the past couple weeks it's become very clear that violent rioters use the excuse of the peaceful organized protest to infiltrate and wreak havoc, using the peaceful demonstrators as essentially meat shields. That needs to stop. And without readily available social/IM platforms, there's no way the violent ones can coordinate in the hundreds/thousands on a couple hours notice.
I have no idea what happens in France now, but in the past of many other countries the main place where the violent protests were really organized was not on any Social/IM platforms, even in the cases where it appeared to be so, but at the police/secret police/government HQs, where covert agents were prepared for triggering and/or leading violent actions during the protests, in order to discredit the peaceful demonstrators and enable direct action of the police against them.
Nowadays whenever you see "violent protests" and "destructions of private property by vandals during protests" you can never be certain whether they are organized by people who are against the government or by the government itself.
There are multiple videos from France showing undercover police instigating and breaking things.
Then, the government is pushing cities to denounce the most popular Left party as the instigator of the riots.
They are preparing to ban them next elections for this. It's pretty clear it's all a political maneuver to ensure it's once again Macron's party versus Marine's far right party, hoping it ensures their win against her
But even if Le Pen's far right party wins, Macron will still be pretty happy with that, far happier than if a left party won.
yeah all the looters are actually secret police agents
How do you think non violent and peaceful demonstrators organise?
They normally have to ask for dates, permits, are normally driven by groups that have been around for long, they have websites, they have a list of asks, etc etc.
Compare that with violent ones that see the opportunity coming with 3-4d heads-up (because peaceful protests are normally covered with a little advance - 3-4d - by mainstream press), create an Instagram/TikTok/Whatsapp/Snapchat group, spread it aggressively thanks to zero cost of social/IM, and their only objective is to smash everything in their path (and if they manage, steal some loot to resell).
When have you last been to a protest? Besides us nerds on hackernews, no one visits a website nowadays.
Also many "violent" protesters are organized, and even more so have to be to stay as safe as possible.
IM cannot be stopped. When a government broadcasts they will censor them, the very next step is for protesters to install something like Bitchat, which does Bluetooth-based, mesh/P2P IM-ing, and is specifically designed to resist even full-on Internet shutdowns.
The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want. Everything else is a band-aid atop an ulcer: it hides the problem for a little while, but the problem itself keeps growing regardless.
> The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want.
We The People's desires are mutually exclusive.
We want lots of benefits, low taxes; high government spending/services, a stable currency; economic growth, low inflation; security, freedom; etc.
Representative democratic government is the reconciliation between those wants.
So no, the answer isn't as simple as giving the people what they want.
There's plenty of evidence that representative democratic governments aren't actually representative.
You cannot throw out the current neoliberal political regimes based on peaceful protests alone, I thought that by now that would have been obvious for most of us adults in the room who went through Occupy and the peaceful protests of the early 2010s. Tahrir wasn’t peaceful, throwing out Assad wasn’t peaceful, why do people still have the expectation that throwing out a regime that puts an investment banker as its leader is supposed to be peaceful?
Presumably, because the people who want to change things do have in-system ways to do so: joining into a new Party, preaching their views, getting elected, growing, until they convince enough people to give them the power they need to change things.
In practice there may be many roadblocks in that, so this isn't absolute. But if that's the case, it's still on the people who notice the roadblocks to convince most everyone these are real. Without that any protest will lack widespread support and be suppressed regardless.
Empirical history contradicts your claim. In reality people protest when life feels bad and when life feels bad for many many people, there are really big protests. If it gets to this point, the system has already failed, because life already feels bad.
Arguing that the system has escape hatches is just an excuse. The escape hatches have also failed, clearly, since they either haven't been used (which is their fault) or their use did not fix the system.
political movements that pose a threat to the regime's interests are suppressed much more aggressively and in much earlier stages, debanking etc.
there are many NGOs aligned with the current protests, and they receive substantial government funding, because they are in symbiosis. the regime doesn't provide funding for ideologies that actually threaten its interests.
public opinion has now reached a tipping point, any further vandalism/arson/violence will not provide a net benefit to the regime. that's why now they finally try to stop it.
Because:
1) its france, Rioting is a national sport
2) even by french standards, this is getting out of hand
3) peaceful protest is being facilitated, the problem is, not everyone is peaceful and there isn't enough police to arrest everyone.
If you are american you have to remember that france _likes_ to protest, not in a cutesy way where you all line up and make a message out of people. No they blockade roads, factories, shopping centres and generally bring cities to a grinding halt. Spontaneously. Put it this way, the No kings protest had they been run by the french would have been visible from space.
Sometimes workers take company execs hostage (see good year 2014 and air france 2015, where execs had to literally run away)
Or more generally the yellow vest movement had rolling blockades that fucked with everything.
Who gets to decide what’s a genuine protest and what isn’t?
What happens if agents of the state initiate the violence?
That's how it works. Until there's so much rioting the police can't deal with it. What should happen then? Cutting communications seems like a pretty good idea.
If the entire population of a country is rioting against the government, the government should immediately resign, or worse. What's happening right now in France bears no difference from what happened years ago in Egypt or Libya.
The rioters are causing damage they themselves will have to pay for in taxpayer dollars. So their cost of living will go up. The way French people protest is mental. I’m sure the Russians have agents on the ground inciting violence.
The people are concerned about the cost of oil I mean it’s the bombs that hit Iran that caused this not the French government.
Am I missing something? What drives people to burn shops down and assault people the next steps is assault rifles, so they should be happy without social media.
I know nothing about the present situation in France, but in the past, in many other European countries, more often than not what drove people to burn shops down during protests were covert police/government agents, taking advantage of the weaker minded between protestants, in order to enable an intervention in force by the police against the others.
This governmental tactic of using "agents provocateurs" against protests had been invented by the French themselves, a very long time ago, but now it is universally used by all governments.
> The rioters are causing damage they themselves will have to pay for in taxpayer dollars. So their cost of living will go up.
Pensions cost 400+ billions a year, it's not the couple of millions of euros of damage that will change anything.
How much damage happened during the 1789 revolution? What about he US civil war?
If that's how you read the situation you're a complete tool
I believe there are a huge amount of bots in this thread. It’s wild.
The _rioters_ aren't concerned with anything other than looting.
What is a rioter and how do you identify one?
"I’m sure the Russians have agents on the ground inciting violence."
the "russian bot" thing made sense. this is just conspiritardation.
How so? Anything to destabilize Europe benefits them. Something highly plausible is not a conspiracy theory, it is a sound strategic move for Russia given the circumstance. And it would be very easy to pull off since their people just fold into the crowd.
> The way French people protest is mental
I mean yes, but then france is on the 5th republic now, so unlike the USA where they just sit and take it, they riot until something happens.
And what if nothing happens? Then they created a fucking mess and injuring people instead of being civil and participating in the political process.
In the US, the people have the second amendment. The rooftop Koreans, Kyle Rittenhouse, etc. are examples of the counterweight ready to reign in protests gone feral.
The US people don't use their second amendment. The French are better at following the intent of the US constitution than the US are.
> Kyle Rittenhouse, etc. are examples of the counterweight ready to reign in protests gone feral.
I mean yes, but that's exactly down to country "personality" and conventions which I was hinting at. France values the right to protest almost above the right to shrug. However its not like the french police are going to be nice to you because you're protesting, french police are _bastards_.
If you wander around with a gun in france, and you're not hunting, the police _will_ shoot you, and more importantly, in the spirit of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, they'll shoot you even if you're white.
Yeah you also have Hegseth, Trump, still no arrest for the Epstein files, etc.
Don't boast too much about the US lmao
I don’t understand faulting Trump for Epstein.
Epstein died in 2019. Biden was in office from 2021 to 2025, no files were released.
Trump took office in January of 2025, since then some ( but not all? ) files have been released.
Why fault Trump but not Biden? Didn’t Trump actually do better?
Trump is the one who said you should elect him because he'll release the Epstein files if he gets elected.
> What drives people to burn shops
Simple:it's "If society doesn't work for me, then it's better that it works for no one"
This provides an incentive for the government to ensure that it creates a society that works for everyone. But this is the one thing that no government anywhere is willing to do - they find it much more convenient to use lethal force against those who complain instead.
When the people in charge care more about property than people, this is what happens.
Property belongs to people. Caring about property is caring about people.
The people who destroy stuff in protests in France are people coming from the bad neighborhoods that don't work legal jobs (mostly dealers) and therefore don't pay taxes. They go there to break for fun and to loot stores for profit.
Do you have any evidence of this? Apart from your racism ofc. Because we have evidence of the police doing and instigating the destruction
Why are you talking about race? I said bad neighborhoods. The vast majority of people there are white French.
Because bad neighborhoods are most generally seen as the HLM banlieue where most are not "white". It's a pretty obvious dog whistle from the RN.
Those people do come from the HLM banlieues, doesn't say anything about their race.
> That's how it works. Until there's so much rioting the police can't deal with it
Hundreds of videos of riot police beating kids and women, kids lost eyes, hands, feet, etc.
Zero video of the police intervening during the looting, not a single police officer in any of the looted streets
French riot police aren’t great at dealing with protests — and they protesters know this, so the protests escalate rapidly then throw in looting and you end up with a massive mess
The looting is done by the police.
Edit: instead of having my comments instantly shadowbanned by a coin clip, I've now been told that I'm posting too fast. That means a moderator is actively looking at my account and changing which punishment I'm subject to, but I've never received any feedback explaining why I am to be punished.
Afaik everyone has always been rate limited.
I don't seem to be rate limited? Check my comment timestamps and see for yourself.
How about giving in to the demands of protestors?
Some of the demands are well-intentioned but poorly thought through.
Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up). End result: more "fairness" on paper but the people who actually depend on government funding have less of it (e.g. for education).
So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.
> Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up).
Has this literally ever happened, like anywhere? Yeah, the Laffer curve is a very real concern and a by-product of Rolle's theorem, but we don't even know where the supposed inflection point is, much less whether any given tax reform that would cause wealthy people to pay more would go over it.
> So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.
Human psychology is weird in that they might even be okay with this as long as the perceived fairness increases. But the only way to find out would be to do an experiment. That might also help us find the inflection point in the Laffer curve.
It happened in Norway and is happening in the UK and California. Unfortunately the effect seems to be real, although IMO it may not be the taxes themselves as much as the increasingly hostile attitude towards wealth, which may cause the wealthy concern about unknown future actions.
Without a global wealth tax (which seems impossible to coordinate) then I don’t see a good solution if the goal is to extract excess wealth from UHNW individuals. This is why a Georgist land value tax scheme is probably better; it levels out real estate speculation, which is a favorite parking lot for excess wealth and which has terrible side effects. Over time this will level out wealth inequality slightly, while forcing unproductive (rent seeking) wealth into the market.
I’m in favor of a single tax (just LVT), which economists say is possible, but if you must then you could also tax stock/bond profits (trading, dividends, coupons) at a higher rate. This may be a bad idea though if it pushes investors over to foreign markets.
It's literally never happened anywhere, and the whole concept is probably just an excuse to keep taxes low.
The Laffer curve exists. It's heavily skewed to the right. Studies find the peak is probably about 80% tax rate, which we don't have to worry about accidentally exceeding.
The Laffer curve also only makes sense in the context of a government's primary purpose being to maximise its own revenues. This is clearly not how we want governments to work. If an increased tax on cigarettes causes less total cigarette tax revenue that would be widely considered a good thing.
Taxing rich people, while being a recurring topic, is not part of the current demands. It's firstly high schoolers who want a fair system after the "bac", heat during winter and a roof on their head.
Make property tax progressive based on all owned assets. No one can evade that.
Yes they can, how will you attribute someone's monero coins to them?
It depends on which part of the curve you are on
Because they know the tradecraft.
You can always be assured of one thing, if the USA/west control apparatus does something defensive, it is because they’re very familiar with why it needs to be done to counter methods they’ve not only used, but successfully so to overthrow governments and cause chaos in societies.
Because very often the "peaceful protest" provides cover to rioting/looting/property destruction, and it's a lot easier to say/enforce no assembling on the street at 11pm on a Friday as part of a curfew, than to leave a carveout for assembling on that street for a "peaceful protest".
I’m sure this comment comes from a good place. I just want to say that cops escalate tensions in peaceful protests on the regular, when it fits their or their superiors narrative.
The playbook is always the same here in Germany: create a temporary limitation, like “ban use of umbrellas” or “don’t chant in arabic or irish” (both real things that happened at demos in Berlin). Then one of two things happen: either people comply, and cops create a new limitation. Or someone doesn’t comply and is violently arrested. Some people don’t like being beaten up, so they fight back. Now a peaceful protest turned into “violent police attacking thugs”.
Protest - A protest is a public expression, statement, or act of strong objection, disapproval, or dissent against a policy, law, action, or idea.
Peaceful - Peaceful is an adjective meaning free from war, violence, conflict, or disturbance, as well as quiet, calm, and untroubled
Very few protests are truly "peaceful". There will always be a grey area with protests that make them controversial and difficult to manage while "peaceful protest" is usually used as a thought terminating term. Though riots are different and probably are made up of opportunists.
During my 2 decades in the pro-life movement, I attended many events. While we ourselves did not usually call them “protests”, I can assure you that our opponents did. And 100% of the events which I attended were 100% peaceful. They were without violence, without arrests, without property damage, and often without confrontational angry words. We would often meet to pray weekly on the sidewalks.
Now we strove for peace very purposefully and diligently. We were constantly coached and trained by our leadership on how to focus, and not engage any hecklers, and how to ignore provocateurs, because there were many.
But we were always successful at maintaining peaceful and even joyful, uplifting atmospheres. That was very important to us and our cause. If anyone ran into trouble, we were always careful to observe the laws and obey the authorities. That ensured an enduring welcome for us in marches and on the public right-of-ways.
Great for you but that's not how it works in France. They have been revolting on and off for decades/centuries, and the government know how to stifle it.
The police gas and break up most peaceful protests until there is no avenue left but to clash with the police. They regularly attack, maim, and kill people (either protesters or even bystanders, like the woman who was watching from her window and was targeted by a police explosive (confirmed not an accident but intentional police violence))
Agents provocateur instigate violence and looting, but the police never interrupt them like they do the peaceful kids. The images of riots play directly into the media and government hand who play the law and order angle. As evidenced by these news which only see it as rioting and not the government preventing any kind of protest.
They are using the unrest to try and ban the most popular leftist party in France. They are destroying what's left of democracy in the country.
A minority, at least in France, is using those networks to organize (in a pro manner) illegal activities. I got in a rabbit hole browsing those groups and I was, honestly, puzzled at how this could happen in the open.
Which activities?
You're too naive, the whole thing was allowed to happen for purely political reasons. 99% of protesters were peaceful, those were heavily attacked by police Non politically motivated casseurs were allowed pillaged, barely any were arrested, these streets were devoid of police forces
The far right gets to blame migrants as usual
The center right (in charge right now) gets to blame the "UlTrA left"
The left gets fucked
Medias exclusively talk about the riots for days, the original demands are completely forgotten, boomers get behind the government for "LaW AnD OrDeR"
Genius idea!
The way the French response overcomplicates things feels analogous to how founders also overcomplicate things:
> many of the conversations we have with founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with "how do I.." and the partner answering with a sentence that begins with "just".
i.e. Often the most absurdly simple solution is the best one.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ&t=654s
Social media permits Broadcasting for Free. One to All messaging. For all other media - radio, satellite, tv, phones broadcasting requires licenses. Why?
Cuz Claude Shannon told us if everyone broadcasts on the same frequency noise increases and no one hears anything forcing them into broadcasting at higher and higher power or repeating their messages more and more. Which again increases noise. So Broadcasting has always been licensed and regulated. That solved the Noise problem because people were forced to coordinate use of broadcast spectrum.
Social media platforms act as if Shannon doesn't apply. So they do exactly what Shannon predicted. Everyone is broadcasting. No one can be heard clearly. People scream louder and louder. The loudest get locked into arms races. Repeat their messages more and more. At the end of it all Noise hasnt reduced and who gets attention from one day to the next is unpredicatble. And since Platforms dont want to talk about Shannon we are all stuck in some kind of red queen dynamic. People are expending lot of energy. Results are all temporary and unpredictable.
That’s an interesting analogy, but it breaks down somewhat when the messages that get through are those chosen by the government (Facebook, Google, etc) rather than people shouting louder.
If only social media platform let individuals sort messages by time, and filter messages based on their friend groups, and weren't forced to view feeds controlled by algorithms they have no control or insight over.
You mixing broadcast band physical phenomenon with censorship.
Are you suggesting that governments should regulate platforms more, like they do physical spectrum?
I dont know the solution. But I think Shannon is being brushed under the carpet. Noise levels and random outcomes speak for themselves.
I'm not sure if it should be done by the governments, but there is a huge freedom vs responsibility imbalance in broadcasting: you can reach millions of people with well crafted misinformation easily with zero responsibility, and social media algorithms actually promote misinformation as a side effect of optimizing for engagement: truth is boring. I don't think it will get fixed in any way: there is too much money to be made. Paraphrasing Leni, we will hang ourselves on the rope that we sold to ourselves :)
The word “government” is the group that governs. People like Musk and Zuck govern their fiefdoms with absolute power, or at best the level of power medieval kings had.
The type of power the wield would be beyond imagination for the most ruthless Roman Emperor
During the 2011 London riots, there were proposals to ban Blackberry.
seems like the response is always to restrict the means of communication rather than deal with those actually organising violence. BBM back then, social platforms now.
Isn’t that sort of ironic, because BlackBerry was used disproportionately by government and corporate clients? Wouldn’t a ban basically cut off the very people who should have been favoured?
At the time all the kids were on BBM and the businesses had moved to iOS.
It's part of a bigger push against individual liberties in France.
In a week, we got curfew, military in the streets to control protests, blanket ban on protests in a few cities (but not uniformly applied, illegal far-right protests have been tolerated at night during curfew), an extremely violent police repression (protest control policemen in France have very violent weapons, and those resulted in lost eyes and shredded hands // and that's not counting all of the unjustified beatings in the protest while looting was happening under their eyes elsewhere), the prime minister outright lying on the fatalities, spoke person laughing at the idea of condemning violence from the police, mass arrests, proposals from the party in power to ban social media, to ban the big left party (the second one in terms of voting intentions rn), to tag people in the protests invisibly, to disenfranchise people that will get condemned for anything in those protests… and by the way completely ignoring their responsibilities in anything in this story, blaming a party that never has been in power for all the economic problems in this country.
Next years are going to be fun :)
Also, media reports amplified the part about lootings and completely eclipsed anything else (this is reportedly even worse in foreign media [0]). This resulted 2 days ago in a terrorist attack in a city named Trappes, repeatedly depicted in the media as a city full of people with immigrant background, resulting (for now) in 1 death and 5 injured. The terrorist was unstable mentally and likely under substance, and wanted to "avenge" the shopkeepers that lost their store by shooting on what he thought was the part of the cause. When confronted, media dodged their responsibility in any of it, and some even doubled down saying that people there are probably routinely evading bus fares (right when they were talking about the shooting!).
Anyway, I think this can give you my (probably somewhat biased) picture of the French political atmosphere right now.
[0]: https://alliance4europe.eu/report/eu-unrest-report-%c2%b7-ho...
It seems French society will soon embark on the path to total VPNization. Once the government gets a taste of blocking Internet resources, it won't stop.
Belgium introduced dns blocking to block one child porn website, and then the slippery slope gears started turning. Over a thousand websites are blocked countrywide now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Be...
exactly. and soon possibly decentralized apps/sm too like bitchat blew up during the protests.
They are already trying to make them outlawed... I don't like criticizing the country but the national motto's first word, there are making it nothing but a joke. Apparently you are only free to hate now, and that's if you hate the right kind of people... Bolstered by fascists united worldwide. A shame.
> It seems French society will soon embark on the path to total VPNization.
Don't worry we'll embark on the protofascism path before and it'll bring its own share of problems
Aren't you already on that path now and that's why the population is revolting against it?
“liberticide”
Parfait.
If that were actually to happen, France would no longer be a democracy. At that point, violence against the state would be entirely legitimate.
It has already happened, and that's why there is currently much violence against the state.
Angleter, Liberté, Pomme de terr
title says DNS, article says access, so which is it?
All DNS servers operating in France are required to cooperate with the censorship regime, this is why Quad9 exited France. Presumably part of this new measure will be ISPs redirecting all port 53 traffic to their own resolvers.
Hahahaha
Good luck France.
You'd think a 1st world country would know about VPNs but not this one
And that's how VPNs are banned through DPI.
And yes, you can in theory install the same software used to punch through the Chinese firewall, but if it doesn't appear in the app store or google play, your new VPN is as good as dead.
There are no technical solutions to political and social problems.
Everyone and his dog uses VPNs in China.
And when the police needs a reason to put you away for a while, everyone and their dog can get arrested for illicit internet traffic.
Trivial bypasses only fuel further government abuse. Your VPN is about as strong as your kneecaps in an authoritarian regime.
And rest assured, the party has a list of people and their dogs, and will use it at a moment of convenience. Public facing VPNs are quite trivial to detect, even if you don't own your country telecom infra.
That’s not really how it works, considering how many people use them. In the recent past they just shut down all “suspicious” looking traffic when there are protests. This has false positives, which is why it’s not always active. Plus allowing VPNs in normal times acts as sort of a social pressure release.
You’d think people on hacker news would know about bypassing DPI…
Only Chinese people know about it because they have to. French people have no idea what's the capabilities of SOTA DPI because why would they?
Not implying I agree with the decision, but I don’t think VPNs make this less effective. VPNs may be used by what, 0.1% of all users?
~20% in France, by one estimate (https://browsec.com/en/blog/vpn-usage-statistics)
Yes, they spy on you to see if you pirate movies, so most users already use a VPN to download their pirated medias. Thanks to Hadopi, the french already know how to bypass censorship and surveillance
Blocking popular websites is certainly going to boost this number, dramatically.
France has been blocking a lot of websites, some quite popular, since at least the Nappster wars and has expanded and expanded and expanded. Recent victims are Z-library, Anna's archive, a lot of satellite TV viewing websites, illegal streaming websites, ...
Of course reasons to block websites has expanded dramatically, especially into the political realm. For political examples, websites collecting video evidence police actions during protests "Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F", a lot of extreme-right websites (some arguably not very extreme, or should I say, every year that passes the bar of what means extreme-right for blocking purposes is lowered), VPNs, oh and "right-to-be-forgotten" stuff (blocking a number of groups who published details on important French and EU political figures, generally failing to achieve their goal. For a high profile example, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy used internet censorship to hide evidence of fraud, but got convicted anyway. There's also the example of ... I don't like to agree with the extreme right on anything, BUT, it is sadly absolutely true that LFI (a far left political party, or whatever you want to call leftists that, while absolutely not tankies, are not particularly opposed to using violence to achieve their aims. I think that's fair to say about them) is using internet censorship laws for everything from protecting their members against the police to silencing even internal criticism. Of course it is ALSO true RN commits far more problematic violence)
(obviously the reason LFI wants its members protected from the police, and school administrations and ... is the organizing violence thing they do. A lot of people agree at least with the aims of the protests, and it's not like these people commit murder or anything. But they certainly do cause a lot of destruction of property)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France
> VPNs may be used by what, 0.1% of all users?
Probably, since not many of us in Europe don't have lots of use cases for them, yet.
But things like our (Spain's) "internet shall not be 100% available during La Liga football matches" or our neighbors thinking of blocking DNS to stop political activism, surely will continue to make this number raise, albeit slowly.
They'll just ban VPNs from existing
I know there’s a subsection of the internet who for some reason believe VPNs are the solution to everything and better than sliced bread, but VPNs are absolutely unnecessary (and frankly overkill) for these types of blocks. All you have to do is change the DNS service on your machine, which is trivial even for non-technical users and unlike a VPN doesn’t disrupt anything about your computer usage.
Can I change the DNS on my iPhone? I know how to do that with a computer but not iPhones. Androids are probably easier to set up.
You can install an app like 1.1.1.1 to use Cloudflare and there are many apps that will do it for generic DNS. Or manually but you will need to create DNS Profile and install it. It is not hard to generate one, but it is usually used for encrypted DNS which you should be using anyway.
There’s no setting for mobile data, but for WiFi you can go into the network settings and override DNS.
> I know how to do that with a computer but not iPhones. Androids are probably easier to set up.
I don’t understand this type of comment which is so prevalent on HN. If you don’t know, why do you assume something else is easier or harder? It takes less time to do this web search than to reply to a comment. Here’s how to change it on both iOS and Android, from the same website:
https://www.howtogeek.com/261701/how-to-change-the-dns-serve...
https://www.howtogeek.com/787039/how-to-change-your-dns-serv...
Doesn’t seem meaningfully different to me.
Is that still how it works? What about browsers like Chrome that default to DoH?
"Students" from 3th world do not know about VPNs.
Why are there so many bots in this thread trying to blame the whole thing on immigration?
Seems like he really wants to limit the spread of videos showcasing the behaviour of the protesters, and their backgrounds... This goes hand in hand with his pathetic speech about how it's all fake news and AI.
Protesters are the normal jille-jaunes and teenagers, throw in the typical French burning tyres, smashing cars etc, nothing new.
The looting is mainly the immigrants.
Can we have this worldwide and forever?
Censorship.
I am all for eliminating the antisocial media and the billionaires behind them as well, but I fail to see how censorship fixes anything.
antisocial media is far more accurate than the original name.
When people are rioting for things that didn't happen, because they think they did, because of messages being sent to them by an enemy, then you stop that enemy.
Although the current riots precisely start because stuff that did not happen: having a stable teacher (or at all) for the courses they’re suppose to study.
This is dystopian.
Meta’s content algo is engineered for sensationalism. It inherently encourages instability.
People socializing at all inherently encourages instability for the government.
Not if the government is for, by, and of the people.
It always is, it's just the definition of "people" that shifts.
“No way this could have been prevented” – the people oppressed by the government said after giving unlimited power to the government.
For more on the algorithm not being good
https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-ignores-brazilian...
Instability isn’t a bad thing through, that’s what drives progress.
Want more stability? Shut down medias for a year before any elections to "smooth" the public debate.
Lol
Wait till you read some of the far left or right newspapers and leaflets in France. Why aren't those being banned?
The far left: more free healthcare, fix heating in schools
The far right: expel immigrants
I can't tell any difference between these. They both seem like equally invalid opinions.
Real rioters will dive into no-DNS internet communication. Most internet protocols were designed with DNS independence in mind (read the email RFC, email addresses can have IP literals instead of DNS names which is of paramount importance, which I use BTW).
Namely, in the end, they will have to switch off telecommunication as a whole... well, if they are not interested in gathering intelligence about the rioters.
And then real rioters will have 'mesh communication devices', and then govs will need EM jammers too.
Sooo... govs should work on good and wide spread EM jammers instead of trying to to block DNS...
You're talking about core groups who think about protesting all day. But 99.9% of these people are not that, they're average people who are fed up of the government stealing all their money and giving it to themselves and billionaires while the country crumbles. (USA could learn something from them)
These are kids who use messenger/whatsapp etc. No they won't be bothered to even switch messenger. The goal isn't to shut down some criminal network it's to just make word of mouth spread in 10 minutes instead of 1 I reckon.