PARIS The banners and bullhorns of protest are being replaced in volatile French neighborhoods by mobile phone messages and Skyblog, a Web site hosting messages inflammatory enough to prompt three criminal prosecutions this week.
Police officials are saying that youths have coordinated local arson attacks using mobile phone messages, and have arrested three people for comments on the online diaries known as blogs that are hosted by Skyblog. The site belongs to the nationwide radio station Skyrock, which has four million listeners daily and claims the largest audience of any radio station among 13-to-24-year-olds.
The Skyblog site says that it hosts more than three million blogs, with new ones coming online at a pace of 20,000 a day, and is possibly the most popular meeting point for French youths on the Internet.
Those prosecuted for inciting violence in their postings this week included a 14-year-old from Aix-en-Provence who called on rioters to attack police stations, according to Justice Minister Pascal Clément.
Blog entries of those arrested also included ones calling on youths in the Paris region to rise up at once in a coordinated attack. "Unite, Ile-de-France, and burn the cops," one of the postings said, according to Agence France-Presse. "Go to the nearest police station and burn it."
Another message called on youths in housing projects to start arson attacks between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Friday.
Under French law, such calls to violence can result in sentences of one to seven years in prison.
Judicial officials said the three youths arrested did not know one another, but had all used Skyblog to send out their message.
Speaking during a press conference on Monday, the director general of the police, Michel Gaudin, condemned some blog entries as "real calls to violence."
Through blog entries, he added, the police have been able to watch development of a competition between housing projects to produce the most violence and damage.
Following the arrests, a spokesman for Skyrock issued a statement that the station would block any blog content deemed too inflammatory. "Whatever you do, I do not want you to use my name," the spokesman added. "You can imagine from what is happening in the suburbs that if someone finds out that we deleted their blog, it could mean a bullet in the head."
Censorship of Skyblog became severe enough by Tuesday afternoon to become a major topic of conversation on the most popular blogs. Postings on a memorial blog that features photos of the youths whose deaths inspired the unrest, bouna93.skyblog.com, emphasized the need for polite postings.
"I am sorry about your comments that disappeared," the host, operating under the name Bouna93, said. "This blog was created as a homage to our friends Bouna and Zied and not to insult them or others."
Anti-government statements are peppered throughout commentaries on the blog aulnaysousboi01.skyblog.com, which has been keeping an hourly diary of events in the suburbs.
"Sarkozy propaganda must stop," said one unidentified commentary, referring to the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many of the well-publicized riot incidents, including the fatal beating of a 61-year-old man by a hooded youth in a Paris suburb. "The old guy killed by the youths had nothing to do with the riots," the commentary said.
A recent speech by the president and founder of the radio station Skyrock, Pierre Belanger, described how he intended to develop a dialogue with and among young people in France.
"We are targeting the first generation to have grown up after the Internet and mobile phone revolutions," Belanger said. "Eighty percent of our listeners have access to Internet and 90 percent own a cellular phone." Rather than traditional-style radio broadcasting, he said, he wanted a conversation with French youth over Internet and SMS messages.
Suburban youths are not the only ones blogging. Éric Raoult, a member of Parliament representing the troubled Seine-Saint-Denis region, has blogged many events, including his decision to place the region under curfew.
"It is unfortunate we have arrived at this point," a person identified as Lionel commented. "How is it that parents did not already make that decision themselves?"
Official Web sites have also been hit by hacking and Google "bombing." For a time over the weekend the French version of Google returned the home page for the French president's political party when users typed in a search for Paris and the words "riot" or "suburb" in French.
The Web site, www.u-m-p.org, features a banner advertisement of Sarkozy, whose hard-line policing tactics are blamed by many in the suburbs as alienating the youth there.
Another Web site taken over by hackers was the municipal Web site of Clichy-sous-Bois, the commune in which the unrest began. An article declaring the town mayor had resigned was posted on the Web site and sent out to all who had signed up for the municipal e-mail newsletter.
A tersely worded press release on the Clichy-sous-Bois site denounces the act as illegal and insists it has no impact on the status of the mayor: "Of course the information was a lie and does not have any legal standing."
