“Congratulations to our French Internet users who defend our beautiful tricolor flag on Reddit! France needs you, the Reconquest is also on Reddit. “But what is Éric Zemmour talking about, this Monday morning, on Twitter? From a “battle” between Internet users that occurred overnight on “Reddit Place”, a collaborative virtual canvas whose production, launched on April 1, ends this Monday evening. Explanations.
What is Reddit Place?
“R/place” is basically a virtual canvas, where users can place individual pixels at a rate of one every five minutes. Depending on the will of the thousands of users who take part, gigantic artistic mosaics can thus be created… or undone. The operation, launched for the first time on April 1, 2017, was repeated on April 1, 2022… Quickly, the famous canvas was filled with flags, logos, or other distinctive signs of different communities across the planet… before become an “identity” battlefield between “tech” influencers.
What happened ?
This Sunday evening, at the initiative of Kameto, one of the main French streamers on the Twitch platform, the French community took it into their heads to appropriate a substantial part of this space to display a huge tricolor flag and an Eiffel Tower. Needless to say, the initiative was variously appreciated in Spain or in the United States, where other influencers tried to destroy the French work.
The French flag, which featured prominently on this virtual canvas, was indeed the victim of an “attack” by Spanish and American communities according to hundreds of tweets shared on Twitter. The French flag decked out with an Eiffel Tower was first replaced partly by a childish character, then by a licentious image.
Faced with this “aggression”, several personalities from the gamers’ favorite platform, Twitch, have decided to launch a “counter-attack” to save the symbols of France. Among them, Zerator, another streamer, and his community close to one million members. In the evening, he challenges them: “Well, the Spaniards and the Americans think that we use scripts when we are the most committed community on the Internet, we have proven it several times, so it will be just one more time. I’m coming into battle, it’s gone too far. Come. “In a few hours, the French symbols reappear, also with the help of other figures sometimes more “general public” like Squeezie or also HugoDécrypte.
What reactions?
On the political side, it was Éric Zemmour who took over this event to support this patriotic fight. “The Reconquest is also done on Reddit” thus claims the far-right candidate.
For some, on the other hand, this initiative would not really give a good image of France. The designer Boidin has sharply criticized this initiative. “While we already had two flags with pretty works on them, taking up so much space is ridiculous and inevitably attracts the wrath of others” common “in addition to endangering the other two flags,” says the illustrator. “To change, we pass for big idiots of chauvinists in the eyes of the world and it’s not the RT of” Zemmort » who will say the opposite, ”he insists.
This Monday morning, the fight was still ongoing to keep the symbol of the nation in place until the limit, set this evening Monday, at midnight ‚by Reddit. The slightly smaller tricolor flag was accompanied by a watermark Zidane, a crescent and a triumphal arch… giving a more artistic side to this French “victory”.