by Juliette Collen
PARIS (AFP) -
The French blogosphere is abuzz with outrage and derision over a 24-year-old appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy to keep an eye on what is being said about the president on the World Wide Web.
"Sarkozy's little cop," "Sarkozy's eye on the net," and "KGB Web" are some of the comments and videos posted since Nicolas Princen on Monday joined the president's communications team as an Internet advisor at the Elysee palace.
He is "in charge of monitoring what is circulating on the Web about the president of the republic: blogs, news sites, videos ... just as one might do for a traditional press review," explained an advisor at the Elysee.
His appointment came after a string of embarrassing incidents involving the president became Internet hits, such as a video of Sarkozy's verbal attack on a man at an agricultural fair or footage of him apparently drunk at a press conference last year at a G8 summit.
There are also countless blogs and websites set up to mock or satirise the leader, whose popularity has been plummeting and whose right-wing UMP party suffered heavy losses in local elections last Sunday.
Every day about 10,000 postings are made about the president and "80 percent of them are critical," said Nicolas Vanbremeersch, founder of a political blogging network "La Republique des blogs."
The appointment of Princen, who worked on the website of Sarkozy's presidential campaign last year, has sparked derision but also serious concerns among the online community.
One satirical video posted on Dailymotion begins with a poster showing the Soviet symbols the hammer and sickle and bearing the words "KGB Web - Elysee."
It then shows a man in a wig, his face covered in bandages, advising viewers that they should follow his example and be careful about what they say about the president.
"I don't want to end up in a jail, tortured," said the man.
A blog, http://detoutetderiensurtoutderiendailleurs.blogspot, said the appointment "can only be another sign of a hardening on the part of the authorities towards one of the last sources of completely free information."
Olivier Monnot, of the www.blogonautes.fr site that monitors French blogs, said "the irony is that Nicolas Princen is in charge of monitoring the 'buzz' about Sarkozy and he finds himself at the centre of 'buzz.'"
Appointing someone to monitor the Web is not in itself worrying, he said, but "if it serves as a base to intimidate bloggers and muzzle freedom of expression, then it's a problem."
For the journalist Pierre Haski, who spent many years at the daily newspaper Liberation before joining the online news site Rue89, Princen's appointment "marks the recognition by the Elysee that what is said on the Internet is more important than might have been thought."
He added that it was up to Princen to show, through his work, that the online community need not be worried.
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