The Barcelona City Council has submitted a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office to denounce for a hate crime the authors of a message that it claims is false, spread on social networks, in which it was assured that the Civil Guard had detected 1,595 people from the Maghreb, residents of Morocco, fraudulently registered in a Horta-Guinardó residence where in reality only five lived, in order to collect social benefits and vote by mail in the municipal elections of May 28. The action, according to the aforementioned text, would favor the current mayor and BComú candidate for re-election, Ada Colau. Behind this fake news there would be, among others, according to the Consistory, a civil guard and a police inspector.
The message, which alluded to a “new scandal by the mayoress and her government team”, took this irregularity for granted, pointed out that this case is “just one of many more that will surely occur” and warned that ” if Colau wins the next municipal elections, he will be able to start thinking about where the votes are coming from.” He concluded by regretting that “Barcelona and Catalonia are drowning in a sewer of corruption and we citizens are totally helpless”.
The complaint, submitted through the Office for Non-Discrimination, explains that it has been verified that the message has been widely disseminated through social networks, through WhatsApp and Twitter, “and has obtained tens of thousands of views and many shares”, as well as “notorious publicity”.
The Councilor for Citizenship Rights, Marc Serra, assured yesterday that this information has been checked with the Civil Guard, several police forces and with the municipal register and it has been determined that this detection “never occurred”. He pointed out that “this is not an innocent lie or an isolated incident, but an organized operation to create an image of doubt in view of the next elections and to attack the same group of Maghreb people”. In his opinion, these kinds of messages want to “put the flame on the wick of racism and, through this feeling of hatred, achieve virality”.
The legal report points out that the authors, “among whom there are lawyers, psychologists, civil guards and police inspectors”, were aware “of the absolute falsity of the message due to its total inversion, not accompanied by any news or journalistic reference that would allow him to be given credibility, but instead relied on a harmful and stigmatizing deception that affirmed that Maghreb people are registered fraudulently in their homes to obtain financial aid”. The letter identifies four Twitter accounts that published the fake news and that are administered, among others, by an agent of the Civil Guard, a police inspector and a member of the far-right pro-independence collective Moviment Identitari Català (MIC), detailed Efe. The content would have been replicated by automated bots to make them viral.
The City Council sees in this message an “incitement to hatred, rancor and animosity towards the Maghreb and Moroccan community for its reason of origin because it is directly and massively attributed to the commission of a scam that affects all citizens”. In the complaint, it concludes that “these facts cannot be protected by the right to freedom of expression, since they clearly and explicitly imply contempt and humiliation” of these people “and include discriminatory messages that promote the violence also among the group of foreigners”. For this reason, remember, the facts may constitute a hate crime under article 510 of the Penal Code, which imposes prison terms of 1 to 4 years and fines of 6 to 12 months.
