After days of destruction, Macron blames a familiar bogeyman: video games

After days of nationwide unrest in France over alleged racial profiling and police accountability, President Emmanuel Macron has laid the blame on social media and video games, sparking international criticism.

The backdrop: Lately, France has been rocked by protests and violence with thousands of cars and buildings set ablaze, resulting in an estimated $1.1 billion in damage, all sparked by the police killing of a teenager in late June.
* Thousands of young people have been arrested since the riots commenced.
* Macron has attributed the violence in part to video games and social media, claiming that they have inspired acts of vandalism and disconnected youth from reality.

Historical perspective: The debate over whether video games trigger violence is almost fifty years old and surfaced again in the 1990s with the development of realistic first-person shooter games.
* Despite numerous studies debunking a causal link between video games and violent behavior, politicians still resort to blaming video games.
* Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former US President Donald Trump have previously blamed video games for incidents of violence.

The experts’ response: Researcher Christopher Ferguson, an expert on the impact of video games, argues that violent behavior can be predicted more accurately by factors like difficult family environments, poverty, and mental health disorders.
* His extensive research has consistently found no link between violent video games and violent crimes.
* Violence in video games has increased in popularity while overall violent crime has reduced significantly in the US from 1993 to 2020.

The larger issue: Ferguson suggests that the shift of blame to video games diverts attention from failures in government policy and social inequalities.
* He argues that removing video games wouldn’t reduce aggression or improve lives, and emphasizes the need for deep policy and societal changes.

View original article on NPR

This summary was created by an AI system. The use of this summary is subject to our Terms of Service.

Contact us about this post

Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *