Mocejón's murder sparks racist hoaxes | Spain

Sunday morning, a young man with his face covered murdered an 11-year-old boy by stabbing him ten times while the minor was playing a football match in Mocejón (Toledo). The young man, aged 20 and who was spending a few days in the city with relatives, He confessed to the crime before the Civil Guard this Monday. when he was arrested. Summary secrecy was decreed and information about the progress of the investigation is therefore minimal. However, from the very beginning, possible descriptions of the murderer spread on social networks: “rather small”, “blonde”, “light skinned”, etc. Many of them did not come from research sources. They were therefore pure conjecture.

Unverified data filled the information gap, to which was added the agitator and president of Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF), Alvise Pérez, who shared a screenshot of the news on his Telegram channel, where he has almost 700,000 subscribers, relating this crime with an event that occurred in Madrid a few days before and adding a racist connotation. Alvise rekindled the fear of foreigners: “Today’s news: Another 16-year-old boy was seriously injured when he was stabbed in the back by five men on a street in San Blas-Canillejas,” he wrote. However, in the Madrid case, there were no unaccompanied foreign minors involved, but they were arrested after officers contacted their relatives and, in addition, the police investigation links the attack to a fight between youth gangs.

The racist remarks of MEP SALF do not stop there. For his supporters to link the crime to migrants, broadcast a video on Telegram of a group of black citizens with backpacks and the message: “Currently T2 in Madrid”. It is difficult to verify the origin of the video, at least there is no doubt that it dates from those dates, since all the people who appear in it are dressed warmly or have a jacket hanging from their arm. But it was there, visible to all his followers, who could forward it to their personal groups or comment on it with their loved ones.

A few hours later he published in We are less than 5,000 people and we live peacefully. Now there are rapes, robberies and the murder of this 10-year-old boy. More fear of foreigners. The message has been viewed more than a million times. In another publication, he pointed out that there was a mosque in Mocejón and attached a graph with the nationalities of origin of the migrants registered in this city. Without indicating the source, of course, and in disinformation: he did not indicate the source of his data and did not give the real size of the migrant population of the city: he only showed the percentage of inhabitants born abroad by country when the foreign population, according to the INE, represents only 8.5% (423 people) of the citizens of Mocejón.

The spokesperson for the family of the murdered child, Asell Sánchez, is a cousin of the minor's mother and worked as a journalist on the show Missionaries around the world of THIRTEEN. From his first appearances, he indicated to the media that the family did not want to criminalize anyone and wanted to exclude any responsibility for the murder of the group of migrants housed in the municipal hotel mentioned by Alvise. Perhaps because they wanted to establish the idea that the perpetrator of the crime was a foreigner and he denied it, Sánchez was singled out on the networks, he was criticized for having visited Africa and photographed African children.

He denounced in an interview with COPE the harassment he suffered. “They tell me I have blood on my hands for taking pictures in Africa,” he said. In I would check the hard drive of this Asell Sánchez-Vicente. “It gives a bad image,” tweeted a follower of National November. —the far-right group that emerged during the Ferraz protests—; The message was accompanied by two promotional photos of the television program. Others shared the statements of the spokesperson with the same images and threatening: “The spokesperson of the family is this guy, there are people who deserve all the evil that happens to them. Poor child, Spain has no solution”, trying to make believe that the crimes committed by immigrants – again, this case is not one of them – are caused by those who are missionaries or volunteers on the African continent.

The government delegate in Castile-La Mancha, Milagros Tolón, He criticised the “hate mongers” at a press conference. “who took advantage of a human misfortune, like the death of an 11-year-old child, to pour all their hatred on the networks” and called these platforms a “garbage dump” when cases like this occur.

More X-streaming

Since Elon Musk took over the social network Twitter, which he renamed X, extremist messages, misleading posts, hoaxes and disrespect have been widely disseminated by the algorithm. The tycoon took sides in the American campaign gave voice to hoaxers claiming that Democrats were planning to commit election fraud, posted AI-generated images of Kamala Harris, and gave clear path for Donald Trump so that he comes back to the platform and gets drunk on his messages. The algorithm rewards these types of posts, But this large audience isn't just due to this technology. Verified accounts, those of paying users, also have a wider distribution, which leads them to reach more people and more users to react – for better or worse – with the content, which generates a wider audience and distribution.

Carmela Rios, journalist specializing in social networks, claims that “the ultra, racist, false content, the political hoaxes and the publications of the extreme right agitators, with Musk's messages, of courseare systematically recommended in the 'For You' tab and since this tab exists on the platform, no more posts from accounts that we do not follow. Before, the Twitter user could better limit what appeared on his home page, now it becomes more and more complicated.

To this, adds Rios, is added “the lack of moderation teams of content, which means that the greatest atrocities remain in X and accumulate on others without anything happening. When X had moderation power, we could report it in the hope that the content would be removed,” he explains. In addition, institutions and communication companies had interlocutors from the social network in Spain, who “accelerated moderation” with Twitter in the event of hoaxes or massive disinformation, he comments.

It is now more difficult to put an end to these practices, as demonstrated by the disinformation and lies spread by MEP Alvise Pérez, even though The SALF leader is the most active on Telegram. Most of the racist hoaxes spread in this area are dubious or false.