Twitter and Telegram forced to disclose administrator information

The Paris judicial court ordered, on August 13, Twitter and Telegram to communicate to the presidential movement LREM the identity of the owner of two accounts showing the characteristics of the official accounts of the political party. Stanislas Guerini, the general delegate of LREM, explained to the site Capital, receive “feedback from activists who believe they are dealing with official communication channels of the movement, which is a source of confusion”.

It is a Twitter account with 400 subscribers and a Telegram group with 1,500 subscribers, both created in 2019 and entitled Pôle Central En Marche. Upon discovering the existence of these two accounts, on February 4, 2021, La République en Marche officials attempted to contact the administrator in order to clarify the situation with him, but to no avail. Last June, the party therefore decided to take legal action and summon the companies Telegram Messenger LLP, Twitter INC and Twitter France SA to obtain its identity.

#LaREM therefore refuses (would) to an association dealing with the dimension of #PresidentialMajority what others are doing on that of his backyard, either.
Now is not a one-sided witch hunt but a central gathering of all our political sensitivities.
1/n https://t.co/u7f9jZAN0h pic.twitter.com/pYAgBhu0s0

– Pôle Central E … M … (meeting in September) (@PoleCentral_EM) August 23, 2021

“The lifting of anonymity on social networks is possible”

Believing that “the resumption of the characteristics of the official accounts of LREM could be parasitic”, the judicial court of Paris ruled in favor of the political movement and ordered Twitter and Telegram to give it all the information allowing to identify the owner of these two accounts. A victory for LREM’s lawyer, Julie Jacob, for whom this decision “shows that the lifting of anonymity on social networks is possible”.

In reaction to this decision, the administrator, who still refuses to give his identity, renamed his accounts “Pôle Central E… M…”. And taking screenshots to show that the presidential movement allowed other accounts to flourish with the characteristics of official LREM accounts, he denounced a “unilateral witch hunt”.