More and more of them are defying health rules, starting with wearing a mask in public spaces. Who are these anti-masks? Profile of those whose counter-speech is gaining momentum on social networks.
- If it is not comparable to the United States, the anti-mask movement is gaining momentum in France.
- 63% of anti-maskers are women, 36% are executives.
“No study proves that wearing a mask protects others or protects us”, “Refuse the tests! Refuse the compulsory wearing of the mask and the masked areas”, “At home I am FREE to breathe correctly and just like the fact that I will never buy a mask, I will ALWAYS do what I want!”
Here are the kind of messages posted daily on Facebook. Within the “Compulsory anti-mask” or “Collectif anti-masques!” groups, thousands of Internet users are mobilizing to challenge the health recommendations of health agencies or the government. Starting with wearing a mask, which they consider liberticidal and useless.
Mainly women in their fifties CSP+
But who are they? Associate professor of social sciences and researcher at SciencesPo Grenoble, Antoine Bristielle carried out a survey of 1,000 anti-maskers contacted via Facebook groups to draw up their robot portrait.
Asked by France info, he details: 63% of anti-masks are women. Most of them are people from high socio-professional categories: among those questioned, 36% are executives or come from higher intellectual professions, while anti-maskers only represent 18% of the total population. “People who are also quite old, with an average of about fifty years old, and also with a fairly high level of education, with an average Bac 2″says the researcher.
What brings them together, in addition to their anti-mask position, is their distrust of political and media institutions: only 6% of them say they have confidence in the presidential institution and 2% in political parties. In the 2017 presidential election, 42% did not vote in the first round and, among those who voted, 27% chose Marine Le Pen and 19% Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
A conspiratorial profile
Anti-masks are also followers of pseudo-scientific arguments and conspiratorial theses, reveals the study conducted by Antoine Bristielle. Thus, 52% of respondents believe in the Illuminati (compared to 27% in the French population), 56% in the “great replacement” (25% in the French population) or even 52% in a “Zionist plot” (compared to 22% in France ). “For example, too, when asked if they think the Ministry of Health is in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to hide the truth about the harmfulness of vaccines, there are 90% of anti-masks who are d agree with this statement”completes Antoine Bristielle on Franceinfo.
For Jérôme Fourquet, director of the Opinion department of Ifop, however, the French anti-mask movement should not be compared with those, much more extensive, which exist in the United States or in Germany. Calling back in The world that two thirds of French people are in favor of the obligation to wear a mask in public space, he estimates that “the major effect is not so much likely to be seen in anti-mask demonstrations or the unlikely formation of an anti-mask party, but in the number of people who will say to themselves: ‘Actually, they don’t know anything, I don’t believe it anymore, I’m stopping everything’.”
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