What a Twit! Woman becomes Spain’s first to be convicted of using social media to provoke hatred

A STUDENT from southern Spain has become the first in the country to be convicted of a crime based on Twitter rants.

Alba Gonzalez Camancho, 21, posted messages calling for a far-left terrorist organization to return to arms and kill politicians.

Spain’s national court convicted her of inciting terrorism using a social-media network, the first verdict of its kind involving tweets in Spain.

The New York Times reports: “The case is also one of a recent few that have pushed social media into courtrooms worldwide and raised issues of the limits of speech in the ether of the Internet. In January, two people received prison sentences in Britain for posting threatening messages against a prominent feminist campaigner. The same month, a federal judge in the United States sentenced a man to 16 months in prison for threatening on Twitter to kill President Obama.”

Camacho claims she is unaffiliated with any political organization. But her tweets called on a group known as the GRAPO – which killed more than 80 people mostly in the late 1970s and 1980s – to rise up again with arms.

One of the tweets called for the killing of the conservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy.

A judge agreed with a prosecutor who said González Camacho had tweeted messages with an ideological content that was “highly radicalized and violent,” violating an article in the Spanish Constitution that prohibits any apology for or glorification of terrorism.

Camacho was sentenced to one year in prison, which will be avoided under a plea bargain as she has no prior criminal record.