-
Watchdog highlights Christmas food shopping ‘scams’ in France
Pastries with palm oil, excess packaging, inflated prices…vote for the worst ‘scam’ in this food watchdog’s annual contest
-
Epidemic alerts raised in France: see how your area is affected
Bronchiolitis is bad nationwide while flu indicators are increasing in the north and east
-
Cheaper but slower… €10 train fare for Paris to Brussels route
Ticket sales are already open for journeys up to the end of March
French culture minister apologises for teenage tweets
The French minister for culture and communications has been forced to apologise after her official Twitter account was taken over by a teenage “usurper” overnight.
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.