One of the risks whenever governments try to curb what they see as offensive speech is that other kinds of speech are often caught in the same net, and that poses a very real risk for freedom of speech and for freedom of the press. One of the most recent examples comes from Spain, where a vague anti-terrorism law has been used to charge and even imprison musicians and other artists.
In a new report on the phenomenon, entitled “Tweet… If You Dare,” Amnesty International looked at the rise in prosecutions under Article 578 of the country’s criminal code, which prohibits “glorifying terrorism” and “humiliating the victims of terrorism.” The law has been around since 2000, but was amended in 2015 and since then prosecutions and convictions have risen sharply.
Freedom of expression in Spain is under attack. The government is targeting a whole range of online speech–from politically controversial song lyrics to simple jokes–under the catch-all categories of “glorifying terrorism” and “humiliating the victims of terrorism.” Social media users, journalists, lawyers and musicians have been prosecuted [and] the result is increasing self-censorship and a broader chilling effect on freedom of expression in Spain.
Among those who have been hit by the law are a musician who tweeted a joke about sending the king a cake-bomb for his birthday and was sentenced to a year in prison, and a rapper who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for writing songs that the government said glorified terrorism and insulted the crown. A filmmaker and a journalist have also been charged under the anti-terrorism law, and a student who tweeted jokes about the assassination of the Spanish prime minister in 1973 was also sentenced to a year in prison, although her sentence was suspended after a public outcry.
Some free-speech advocates are afraid that new laws either in force or being considered in Germany, France and even the United Kingdom could accelerate this problem. In all three countries, legislators say they are concerned about hate speech, online harassment and fake news, but the definition of those problems is so vague there is a risk that other kinds of speech could also be criminalized—especially when enforcement of those rules gets outsourced to platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter.