When Emmanuel Macron appointed esteemed historian Pap Ndiaye as the first black man to be France’s minister for education, says Philippe Bernard in Le Monde, it “unleashed a barrage of criticism and insults”. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen called it a “terrifying choice”; others involved in the “violent verbal stoning” denounced the bookish 57-year-old as an agent of the “deconstruction of our country”, a “racialist”, an “indigenist” and an “Islamo-leftist”. The fact that so many found it “offensive” for a Frenchman of mixed race (Ndiaye has a Senegalese father) to rise so high in the government shows just how bogus France’s claims to egalité really are.

Twitter is “in chaos” under Elon Musk’s ownership, says Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, and Facebook is faring no better: it has lost “hundreds of billions of dollars in value” and Mark Zuckerberg has had to sack 11,000 employees. The thing is, “social media was never a natural way to work, play and socialise”. When it first emerged in the early 2000s with sites like Friendster and MySpace, a different term was used: social networks. As the name suggests, social networks “involved connecting, not publishing”; they were about building or deepening relationships, “mostly with people you knew”. Zuckerberg’s original vision for Facebook, after all, was to “connect every person in the world”.