Emmanuel Macron with readers of the daily newspaper "La Voix du Nord" in Arras, France, on November 19, 2025. FRANCOIS LO PRESTI/AFP
By the end of the year, President Emmanuel Macron will have completed his "tour of France" – and more precisely of France's regional newspapers – with half a dozen debates across the country. On Wednesday, November 19, the northern daily La Voix du Nord hosted him in Arras for a "major debate" on "democracy being tested by social media and algorithms," just one week after a similar event hosted by La Dépêche du Midi in Toulouse. In the coming weeks, at least four other major regional papers will also be asked by the Elysée Palace to organize the same kind of event.
However, nothing concrete came out of the more than two hours of discussion on Wednesday between the president and the readers of La Voix du Nord, in which the president reiterated his ambition to define a "digital age of majority" at age 15. In the Gambetta high school in Arras, a school marked by the October 2023 murder of French teacher Dominique Bernard by a former student who had become a radical Islamist, the president also promised to "do everything possible to establish a professional label" for social media and news sites, in order to indicate which are trustworthy and to fight disinformation.
