French bank shuts down customer accounts over mild criticism

A French bank has barred one of its customers for criticizing its services on Twitter, wrote Le Parisien. The bank, Société Générale, closed the professional, personal, joint, and children’s accounts of Julie Goislard, a Parisien who took to Twitter to complain about the bank’s conduct.

Goislard was fed up after an electronic payment terminal stopped working. She called the bank 36 times, but received no reply. As a last resort, she took to Twitter.

“Agence de Clichy, the distributor does not work, no envelopes for checks...the queue gets longer,” she tweeted, posting a picture of the line.

But the bank didn’t like her attitude. “I received a call from the director of the agency, not to help me and find a solution to my problem, but to tell me to stop tweeting and to threaten me to close my account,” she later tweeted.

The bank then sent her a letter to terminate her bank accounts within two months. To resolve the issue, Goislard set up an appointment with the bank’s director. “It lasted exactly six minutes...It was totally impossible to discuss and the manager told us that he was doing what he wanted and that he could even close all of our accounts," she said.

Decrypt has reached out to Société Générale and will update this story if we hear back.

It didn’t take long for Bitcoiners to jump on this as an example of how Bitcoin is open for anyone to use. The million-follower strong Bitcoin handle—which recently changed hands and nobody knows who runs it—tweeted the story, adding, “The Bitcoin network can only engage in user discrimination based on digital signatures & cryptographic proofs.”

Which, when you think about it, isn’t user discrimination at all.