Incitement to racial hatred, convicted person who shares anti-Semitic posts
Likes and sharing of posts on social networks increase the risk of spreading denialist ideas. The damage is never minor
The rule that allows impunity for the particular tenuousness of the act does not apply to keyboard lions who adhere to the thinking of a community that on social denies the Shoah. Support given through sharing or likes onanti-Semitic posts. The Supreme Court thus upheld the conviction for the crime ofincitement to racial hatred, against a sympathiser of a neo-Nazi group. The appellant had not been considered an adherent of the swastika-loving group.
Likes and re-sharing of posts
Rather, it was his ability to re-circulate contents already published by prominent members of the neo-Nazi group that came into the judges' sights, as well as references and quotations from the writings of Robert Faurisson Aitken, an essayist known for his Holocaust-denying works. Also popular with the complainant were some precepts by David Lane, an American white resistance theorist, who coined the "Eighty-eight Precepts": a collection of 88 laws followed by neo-Nazis and white power supporters, useful to save the supremacy of the Aryan race. Also posted on social media was a photo of the front page of L'Espresso magazine with the headline 'The Nazis among us', in which the investigation of the group inspired by National Socialism was treated from a journalistic point of view, accompanied by comments from others, which 'revealed' how even the media attention is only the result of a Zionist conspiracy'
The no to the cause of non-punishment
The Supreme Court endorses theconviction of the Court of Appeal, which, in confirming the judgement of responsibility, had recalled that while 'the private exchange of messages or e-mails does not constitute the crime of propaganda, since they lack the necessary requirement of diffusion, the publication on social networks of material with clear negationist or discriminatory content does'.
Also denied was the application of thecause of non-punishability provided for in Article 131-bis of the Criminal Code. Non-punishability is to be excluded because "the defendant's conduct (denial of the existence of the gas chambers, of the systematic murder of the Jews and of the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary, as well as the sharing of some of the so-called 88 precepts) caused substantial damage to the protected good, also considering the chosen means of propaganda, endowed with potentially uncontrollable diffusive capacities".
