Nadine Osman
Far-right movements in Spain are mimicking their US counterparts and using social media to spread anti-Muslim hate and misinformation, according to research by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
In its report titled ‘Reckoning with Reconquista,’ published on May 3, the NCRI demonstrates how the La Reconquista [reconquest] movement was popularised by the far-right party Vox during the 2019 election, when ‘there was a network of 2,897 retweets with the word Reconquista mentioning the @vox_es Twitter account.’
‘In April 2019, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, VOX’s vice secretary of international relations, said, “Europe is what it is thanks to Spain–thanks to our contribution, ever since the Middle Ages, to stopping the spread and the expanse of Islam.”’
The party also sparked outrage when it shared an Islamophobic film depicting a future in which Muslims implement Sharia law in southern Spain. ‘Both of these controversies demonstrate how anti-Muslim tropes characterise Vox and contextualise its Reconquista platform,’ explains the Institute. Vox, whose members express strongly anti-immigrant views, hold 52 seats, the third-largest number, in Spain’s 350-member lower legislative chamber.
The party’s Twitter account was briefly suspended in 2020 for accusing its critics of promoting paedophilia, and again in 2021 for inciting hatred against Muslims.
According to the study, La Reconquista Twitter accounts impersonate Muslim immigrants to spread incendiary content and incite ethnic and political tensions.
The study published a screenshot of one such tweet by @MohamedLahman. The fake account, featuring the Moroccan flag, crescent, and Kabbah emojis in the Twitter handle, appears to make Muslims ungrateful in a tweet directed against Christians.
‘Today the nuns offered me free room to sleep in while I figured out my documentation. This is the cubbyhole they wanted to keep me in. Christians are infidels and insolidares. I denounced them and took money to go to a five-star hotel. Stop with the racism,’ the account tweeted on January 5 with a photo of a small bedroom.
The report also shows that anti-Muslim rhetoric from accounts linked to La Reconquista soared following an attack on two Catholic churches in the southern city of Algeciras in January. The perpetrator, an illegal Moroccan immigrant, is now jailed in the psychiatric ward of the prison, awaiting the results of a judicial probe.
The NCRI reported a spike in anti-Muslim rhetoric on Twitter from January 25–26, following the attack. 3,500 tweets were pulled where four key words were used in the search, including the moros [moors], islamismo [Islamism], yihadista [Jihadist], and Reconquista.
‘The word yihadista had the highest peak with roughly 600 uses at 20:00 on January 25, 2023. While this term is not always associated with radical anti-Muslim sentiment, the spike in its use demonstrates how the conversation on Twitter was influenced by the attack in Algeciras.
The next largest spike was for the word “moros” with close to 200 uses at 21:00 on January 25, 2023. This word is used more frequently as a slur, which makes its increased use during the spike more alarming. The other two words studied, “islamismo” and “reconquista”, saw much smaller jumps in use.’
The movement also exploit Twitter’s loose rules to evade suspension and create new accounts after being banned.
‘La Reconquista movement borrows tactics from far-right groups in the US, for example using Pepe the Frog, a mascot for white supremacists and anti-government groups in the US.
In one Reconquista meme, Pepe is shown wearing the garb of a 16th-century Spanish conquistador. The movement also borrows the same rhetoric used by far-right groups in the US, including the spread of misleading claims about trans rights, COVID-19 vaccines, feminism, climate change, and foreign policy.
The report also demonstrated how malicious fake news persisted on Twitter for weeks following the Algeciras attack.
‘On March 5, a video was posted on Twitter by @MeghUpdates claiming to show a Spanish doctor being attacked by a “radical migrant husband” after asking his wife to remove her hijab for a medical examination, received over 7,000,000 views.’
However, it was later revealed that the clip was not taken in Spain, in 2023, but rather on September 21, 2021, in Nizhnevartovsk, Siberia. A man assaulted a physician who conducted a physical evaluation of his wife.
Bakhridden Azimov, the Tajikistan-born husband of the patient, assaulted the doctor because he called his wife’s skin “beautiful,” not because he asked her to remove her hijab.
Joel Finkelstein, the co-founder of the NCRI, reflects on how far-right groups in many countries learn from one another, copying each other’s successes. He warns that this is a recipe for disaster and that the rhetoric could lead to real-world violence.
“This is a recipe for disaster,” Finkelstein told the AP. “All over the world we´re seeing different manifestations of the same kind of problem. The flags are all different, but it´s remarkable how similar the memes are.”
It is important for governments and social media platforms to take action to curb the spread of hate speech and prevent the potential for real-world violence.
