French Media Question Election Reporting Rules PARIS - After months of noisy campaigning in the presidential race - rousing the crowds, pressing flesh, inundating Twitter - France's politicians and pollsters fell silent at midnight Friday, by law. Until 8 p.m. Sunday, election day, when the last polling places close in the first round of voting, the country's 10 presidential candidates may not give speeches or interviews, distribute fliers or update their campaign Web sites or Facebook pages. And no media outlet, pollster or citizen is to publish voting data of any kind - no leaked exit polls, no hints on Twitter - on pain of a fine of up to 75,000 euros, or $99,000. Traditionally France discovers the initial results together, all at once, at 8 p.m. on election night. This year, however, the great, borderless Internet may disrupt the best plans of the French authorities. In recent weeks, media organizations in neighboring Belgium and Switzerland - where public interest in the French election runs high, but feelings of civic duty toward France run low - have made known their intent to publish results from districts where polls close at 6 p.m. as soon as they are available, around 6:30 p.m., 90 defiant minutes before authorized by French law. Those announcements have set off a minor polemic in France about the value of the rules. Some French officials and journalists have argued that they are critical to French democracy. Others call them outdated, ineffectual and absurd, the same words they have used to describe the country's "equal time" regulations that require each candidate, no matter how marginal, to be given the same airtime on television and radio in the campaign's final weeks. In the last French presidential election, in 2007, Web sites in Belgium and Switzerland that published early results were overwhelmed by Internet traffic. But since then, the use of online social networks has exploded here, as everywhere. In 2007, Facebook counted just a few hundred thousand French users; now there are about 25 million, more than a third of the country's population, and about 5 million Twitter accounts. Already, Twitter users have begun dreaming up code words to communicate early election results, in an effort to avoid incurring costly penalties. French authorities say they fear that information gleaned from foreign Web sites and circulated in France may disrupt the election. Anyone in France found to have published early results could be fined up to $5,000, and up to $99,000, for publishing polling data. Foreign media are also subject to the French regulations and penalties, Mattias Guyomar, the general secretary of the government's polling auditor, told the leftist newspaper Libération this week. The state prosecutor in Paris, François Molins, said in a statement that he had arranged for the judicial police to immediately investigate any apparent violation of the law. And polling agencies have said they will not issue results under embargo to any outlet that has said it will challenge the law. "This is about ensuring that the last voter to arrive at a voting office has the same information as the first," Mr. Guyomar said. It's a democratic fundamental of the election. There is some legal precedent for such an approach, said Olivier Hugot, a Paris lawyer specializing in Internet law, though he added that a conviction was highly unlikely. "The only thing that would allow us to avoid this question would be filtering," as practiced in less democratic countries like China and Iran, Mr. Hugot said. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in his re-election bid has sought to cast himself as the candidate of modernity, has become an outspoken critic of the rules. "We're not going to prohibit people from going on the site of The New York Times to learn the results," Mr. Sarkozy told RTL radio on Friday. Are we going to put up a digital border? Are we going to jam computers? What world are we living in, ultimately? French polling agencies, most of whom say they do not conduct exit polls because they are too expensive, have agreed to withhold early returns from foreign media outlets. Most major French television and radio stations, as well as some newspapers, have said they will respect the law, regardless of what is done by media outlets just over the border. The newspaper Le Monde will comply with the regulations, said Érik Izraelewicz, the top editorial executive at the paper, though he objects to the rules. He reached that decision, he said, after consulting lawyers and editors at other publications. "These are rules that make no sense anymore," Mr. Izraelewicz said, calling them "impracticable" and "archaic." Libération sharply criticized the rules this week. "Do polls make the election?" a top Libération editor, Sylvain Bourmeau, wrote in an editorial. The question is as old as the tool. And the response barely any younger: As of today, no research has shown the slightest effect of the publication of a survey of voter intent. Mr. Bourmeau signed his column with a mischievous postscript: "P.S.: rendezvous Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on Libération.fr."