PARIS — French Digital Minister Clara Chappaz hit back on Friday against allegations that her office did not do enough to stop a controversial 12-day-long livestream that ended with an influencer’s death.
“As a minister, you cannot decide to shut down a site,” Chappaz said in an interview with FranceInfo. “There’s no red button.”
The digital ministry, French digital regulator Arcom and the site that hosted the livestream, Kick, have all been the subject of intense scrutiny since the death of Raphaël Graven, a 46-year-old better known by his streaming alias Jean Pormanove, sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning.
Chappaz told FranceInfo that she had an “extremely tense” conversation with Kick and accused the company of failing to accept the gravity of the situation.
“We are dealing with people on the other side of the world, via videoconference, in T-shirts, slouched over, who do not realize the seriousness of what’s happening,” she said.
Though the exact cause of his death remains under investigation, Graven was repeatedly belittled and subjected to physical abuse throughout the marathon livestream and in other videos posted to Kick in recent months.
French authorities had been alerted to the instance of Graven, an army veteran, being mistreated on live streams as early as December after a report from French investigative outlet Mediapart. As part of its investigation, Mediapart reached out to Arcom and to Chappaz’s office, but did not receive an immediate response from the ministry.
Arcom responded that it was not certain that Kick had legal representation within the European Union, Mediapart reported.
After arresting two suspects in January, a case in the southern city of Nice fell apart after prosecutors there said that both the purported victims and perpetrators denied that any crimes had been committed.
Arcom was then alerted in February to the mistreatment of Graven online by the French Human Rights League, an NGO, which received no reply. The league’s president said it typically takes six months for Arcom to reply to a complaint.
Asked during the interview whether she had taken the initial reports seriously enough, Chappaz responded that she took it “very seriously” as she does with all matters concerning digital regulation but noted that “we live in a digital world where, until recently, there were no rules.”
“It is urgent that we escape this digital Wild West,” she said. “Is it easy? No. Is it fast enough? No.”
Kick, an Australian-based livestream host for gamers known for its lax approach to moderation, responded to Graven’s death by sending its “sincere condolences” to his family and committing to “cooperate fully with the authorities” in a post on X on Wednesday. By Friday, Graven’s Kick channel had been restored, though some videos appeared to have been removed.
Kick said that it had reactivated the channel to make its content accessible to investigators, but Arcom, in a statement, condemned the move.
“Making recordings on the ‘jeanpormanove’ channel available to the authorities cannot justify lifting the block on the channel for the general public,” the statement read, saying the decision “goes against the platform’s initial announcements, which seemed to have taken into account the seriousness of recent events.”
With fewer than 45 million users within the European Union, Kick is not subject to supervision by the European Commission as it is not a so-called “very large” platform. But the European Digital Services Act still requires all platforms operating within the EU to have a representative somewhere in the bloc.
Chappaz said Friday it appeared the company had waited to appoint a representative until after Graven’s death. She said French authorities were in the process of verifying if that individual or office was “in fact a legal representative.”
The Commission told POLITICO Wednesday that Kick had notified it of a legal representative in Malta, meaning it fell to the Maltese regulator to order Kick to moderate its illegal content or fine the platform under the DSA.
But the Malta Communications Authority told POLITICO that as of Wednesday, Kick had not notified them of a legal representative.
Kick’s terms and conditions state that the site, which was created in Australia, is based in England and therefore under its jurisdiction, without mentioning a representative in the EU.
Kick did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for a response to Chappaz’s allegations on Friday.
In a previous request for comment, Kick declined to confirm to POLITICO whether Graven’s JeanPormanove channel, which the streamer had featured on social media to promote the platform, had breached its terms of use in recent months. These explicitly prohibit “content that depicts or incites abject violence, including serious harm, suffering or death.”
Eliza Gkritsi and Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report.
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