France Almost Pulled the Plug on Social Media. Here’s How Ordinary People Can Stay Online Anyway [from a young Adelaide computer engineer]

On October 22, 2026, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu sent a letter to the CEOs of the country's four main mobile operators. He asked them to prepare to block Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram by DNS filtering for several hours. X was added to the list afterward. The trigger was recent urban violence and protests; the government argued that the platforms had become tools for organising looting, coordinating groups, and tracking police movements.

The block was supposed to go live at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 24. Staff were put on call. In the end the order was never given. Hundreds of thousands still marched, tens of thousands of police were deployed, and nearly a thousand arrests were made. But the plan itself was real, timed, and staffed.

What the meeting minutes reveal is more instructive than the fact that the switch was never flipped. The government wanted a targeted cut, mainly mobile data, limited geographically, sparing home fiber where possible. The operators said they could not do that cleanly or quickly. Orange pointed out that simply changing the DNS server on a phone would restore access. The operators wanted a formal, published order; the government preferred a quiet private instruction and a press release thirty minutes before the lights went out.

This was not the first attempt. In 2024 the French government blocked TikTok in New Caledonia during unrest. The Council of State later ruled the measure illegal for being disproportionate and indefinite. Yet the same court left the door ajar: under "exceptional circumstances," and if "indispensable," temporary interruption can be justified. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has since said the government retains the option of suspending networks. The legal brakes are being tested, not removed.

Internet shutdowns are not binary. Saadia Azim of the Internet Society has noted that the useful question is not "do I have internet?" but "which layers of the stack still work?" France's planned action was the lightest kind: platform-level DNS or IP blocking while the rest of the network stayed up. A VPN or Tor usually defeats that. More aggressive censors move next to detecting and killing VPN and Tor traffic by its distinctive "shape." Russia's TSPU system has become a testing ground for this; ordinary WireGuard handshakes fall quickly, while obfuscated protocols (AmneziaWG, VLESS Reality) and Tor bridges with pluggable transports (obfs4, Snowflake, WebTunnel) survive longer, until they too are targeted.

Heavier measures include regional mobile-data blackouts (Russia has scaled these dramatically) or full national cuts (Iran in January 2026 throttled, then severed connectivity for more than sixty hours). In the extreme case, only phone-to-phone radios remain.

The Reclaim the Net piece, linked below, that reported the French plan ends with a straightforward checklist. The logic is simple: tools you have never used, and apps you have never tested offline with the people you need to reach, are useless once the network is restricted.

Install, while stores still work, at least two VPNs from different providers, one of them capable of disguising its protocol. Download the APKs or installers from the projects' own sites so you can reinstall if the apps are later removed from stores. Test both, including protocol switching.

Install Tor Browser (Onion Browser on iOS) and Orbot. Practice connecting with bridges. Save the methods for obtaining new bridges (Telegram bot, email) while you still can.

In Signal, note the location of the censorship-circumvention setting and save a few trusted proxy links (signal.tube) from people you know. The option only becomes available once Signal itself is blocked.

Choose one mesh or offline messaging app: Bitchat (Bluetooth phone-to-phone), Briar (Android, contact-only, audited), or Meshtastic (with LoRa radios for longer range), and test it with your actual group while Wi-Fi and mobile data are switched off. One phone is a brick; a mesh needs density.

Free "crisis" VPNs that appear in stores during unrest should be avoided; many have been linked to questionable ownership or weak security. Apps already installed continue to work after store removal, but they stop receiving updates.

Access Now recorded a record number of platform-blocking incidents in 2025. Russia, Iran, India, Uganda, and Nepal have all demonstrated variants of the same playbook. In each case, people who already had circumvention tools or mesh apps installed could keep communicating; those who waited to download them discovered the store was unreachable or the app had been pulled.

The French episode is notable mainly because it happened in a Western European democracy with independent courts, and because the technical and logistical friction was still high enough to stop it this time. The government heard the operators' objections and filed them away. Next time the preparation may be better.

Setting up the tools costs an evening. Waiting until the moment the DNS filter is applied, the app stores are restricted, or the mobile data is throttled can cost the ability to speak, to coordinate, or simply to see what is happening. The plan was not used in October 2026. The idea that governments can and should be able to silence platforms during unrest was not rejected. That is the part worth preparing for.

https://reclaimthenet.org/france-had-a-plan-to-shut-down-social-media-you-need-a-plan-to-stay-online