Leaked Letter: France's Prime Minister Told Phone Companies to Get Ready to Switch Off Social Media

France's government quietly told the country's four big phone companies to be ready to cut off social media on command, two days before hundreds of thousands of people marched in protest across the country on Saturday.

The French investigative site Blast published the letter on Saturday evening. Dated Oct. 22 and signed by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, it is addressed to the heads of Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Free and SFR. It asks them to prepare, starting immediately, to block access to Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram "without delay" and "for a few hours" if the government gives the order, according to the French telecom site AlloForfait, which reviewed the document.

Lecornu wrote that he wanted "the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services" if urban violence happened again (our translation). The letter says the decision could come over the weekend of Oct. 24 and 25, "depending on the operational context."

X was added after. The letter itself names three apps. According to Blast, Elon Musk's X was put on the list after the letter went out, so the platform a French minister attacked by name less than two weeks ago would have gone dark too.

How it would have worked

The plan was a DNS block, the kind that stops a phone carrier's servers from finding an app's address. It would hit phones on mobile networks first; home internet would be spared "as far as possible," AlloForfait reported. Blast said activation had been considered for early Saturday afternoon. No source has reported that a shutdown actually happened.

The letter cites no law. It points to a meeting of the companies' legal directors on Oct. 23. Minutes of that 70-minute video call, seen by Blast, describe exchanges that were "far from consensual." The government took the view that a separate order to each company would be enough, with nothing published in France's official journal. The carriers voiced doubts and said they could not build the capability on short notice, Turkey's Anadolu Agency reported from the Blast documents.

The letter also asks the carriers to keep the plan confidential, calling it "exploratory" at this stage. In public, the prime minister's office had talked only about "enhanced dialogue" with Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Discord and Google. Neither the government nor the carriers had commented on the documents as of Saturday night.

The street

The weekend it was written for turned violent. More than 400,000 people rallied across France on Saturday over school funding and living costs, the Associated Press reported. The Interior Ministry counted 410,000; the CGT union claimed nearly 800,000. The Paris march turned ugly near its end, with masked protesters hurling objects and fireworks at police, who answered with tear gas and water cannons. Police made nearly 1,000 arrests.

It follows the Oct. 17 and 18 riots that Lecornu's letter cites, when looters hit cities across France and the government imposed curfews in parts of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Nice. The government blames the hard-left France Unbowed party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for stoking the violence, which the party denies. Protests spread across Europe on Saturday, with soldiers guarding central Milan and clashes in Rome, Turin and Albania's capital, Tirana.

France has done this before

In 2024, Paris blocked TikTok in New Caledonia during riots there. On April 1, 2025, France's Council of State, its top administrative court, struck that ban down, ruling that cutting off a service without a law allowing it is only possible in exceptional circumstances, when nothing less drastic will work. Lecornu's letter borrows some of that language: only "a few hours," and a suspension "as targeted as possible."

Leading French politicians want the power written down. Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a likely presidential candidate, has called for authorities to be able to "temporarily and selectively block access to certain platforms" during riots, Cybernews reported.

And the government has been circling Musk's platform for weeks. On Oct. 14, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused Musk of running "massive online harassment campaigns" against European leaders, The Guardian reported. Musk has kept X open to the kind of posts European governments keep pressing platforms to take down.

Why it matters. Rioters can be arrested, and in France nearly 1,000 were on Saturday alone. Switching off the apps millions of law-abiding citizens use to talk, report and film what is happening in their own streets is a different thing. A government that plans it in secret, with no law behind it, is telling its people what it thinks of their right to speak.