Interesting AFP news from Spain:
A Barcelona court on Tuesday sentenced a policeman to 15 months in jail for posting a video on Twitter…
He allegedly spread xenophobic hate on Twitter, fabricated an incident that never happened and claimed it to be covered up by “mainstream media”.
The civil guard in 2019 posted a 45-second video showing a man viciously punching and kicking a woman unconscious and then trying to remove her clothes. While the incident took place in China, he wrote it showed the rape of a woman in the coastal town of Canet de Mar at the hands of a minor who arrived in Spain without his parents. He also claimed in the post, which was seen nearly 22,000 times, that mainstream media was covering up the rape. Public prosecutors said the man had published several other racist and xenophobic messages on social media. They had been seeking a two-year jail term but just before his trial, the policeman admitted the crime and accepted a shorter sentence in exchange, the court in Barcelona said.
Twitter let hateful disinformation from this policeman’s account run for so long that it gathered tens of thousands of views.
The thread of this story, such as an authority being forced to admit crime, stands in stark difference from America.
Latest news out of California is that celebrities still act like their authority/influence used to breed disinformation on Twitter is some kind of strategy to win a seat in government.
Former Giants first baseman Aubrey Huff’s first foray into politics does not appear to be going well. […] Huff has gotten attention for his offensive online musings since retiring. Among his most controversial comments were: Suggesting kidnapping Iranian women (then saying it was a joke), implying he and his sons would need more guns if Bernie Sanders became president and slamming the Giants for hiring Alyssa Nakken as a coach. His Twitter account was suspended late last year for violating COVID misinformation policies.
Sounds like if that policeman in Spain instead had played sports in America he wouldn’t be facing jail, he’d be running campaigns and fundraisers to breed hate crimes.