French culture minister apologises for teenage tweets

Tens of messages appeared on the Ministère Culture @MinistereCC ‘official’ account last night over a period of around four hours, including a mixture of humorous replies, jokes, and some rather offensive expletives, written in a relaxed, ‘young’ style, with slang words, and few capital letters, punctuation, or full sentences.

Other Twitter users largely found the situation humorous, with many simply tweeting screenshots of the account. One user - the RTL France journalist Benjamin Hue - comically described the account as “freewheeling this evening”, and posted a video of the feed.

Today the office of the minister, Françoise Nyssen, published a statement apologising for the “indesirable tweets”, and confirmed the account had not been hacked; rather it had been used in error by the 13-year-old son of one of the people in charge of the account.

The boy was said to have accessed the account through a computer or a phone already connected to it, and so did not need to ‘hack’ or use a password to get in.

All the tweets in question have since been deleted, but some screenshots remain.

A personal Twitter account apparently belonging to the boy in question has also since been deleted.