The video has gone viral on X. You can hear screams and, in the background, some Red Cross volunteers walking away silently to avoid problems. Those who shout are three people: “The Red Mafia, it’s good that you walk around when everything is clean. What do you do with the money of the Spanish people instead of helping them? “Fuck you!” they scream. It is just one of the many verbal attacks of which there is evidence, but the harassment against the NGO is reaching a limit that has triggered all the alarms in the institution. Every day they register more than 70,000 hate messages, and the number grows daily.
The concern among those responsible is maximum. In fact, the fear of an attack occurring is in the environment. There were already incidents when the La Palma volcano. The volunteers were spat on, they were shaken… the red line is very thin and it can go further from there. At the NGO’s headquarters in Madrid, a kind of “crisis cabinet” has been created that seeks the best strategy to stop these abuses, and they hope to be able to announce concrete measures in the coming days.
On social networks like X, insults and hoaxes are the order of the day. Also in the Telegram or WhatsApp groups of the extreme right. You don’t have to do much research to find out who is behind it.
In the aforementioned video, for example, one of those who screams is—as users have been able to identify—the exalted woman who, with her arm raised, during confinement he asked to be allowed to attend mass in the Valley of the Fallen. Another could be a member of the far-right organizations FACTA and National Democracy, from whom the prosecution is asking for 4 years in prison for an alleged crime of attack.
The networks
Marcelino Madrigal, security and social media expert, explains that “behind these types of campaigns there is usually a small number of accounts, which are the ones that start the campaign. Then, automated bots and their followers do the rest until the message goes viral. These accounts are the same ones that usually originate all far-right campaigns; The Red Cross is just the piece they want to collect now.”
According to the study carried out by Madrigalthe campaign began on November 3 and most of the messages occur on the Telegram account of MEP Alvise Pérez (this channel alone adds more than the other 56 analyzed). Among the topics discussed are all the hoaxes that have circulated these days: destruction of medications, abandonment of those affected, money that the institution spends on personnel… Among the most cited words are “help”, “people” or “money”, but others such as “moors”, “shit”, “pateras” or “illegals” are also repeated.
Spread hoaxes are easy to dismantle, but as Madrigal points out, “they spread faster than the truth.” For example, these accounts say that the Red Cross has not been present in Zone 0, when on the 30th they deployed 49 teams of volunteers, welcomed 584 people and gave food to more than 6,260 neighbors. Nor is the narrative true that 92% of the money the institution received in subsidies (514 million) is for personnel expenses. The entity’s (audited) data reflects that the amount allocated to salaries is 29% (330 million euros). The only thing that has any semblance of truth is that they destroy the medications they receive: all institutions do it, since either they are expired or they are useless because it is not known what storage conditions they present.
“The problem,” adds Madrigal, “is not so much the hoaxes, since they are dismantled in a few hours, but the people who spread them. That is where we must act if we want to stop these types of attacks.” That, and more transparency on the part of the institutions, are their two proposals to stop the spread of this content.
The origin and why
“The campaign against the Red Cross has a specific start date, and it is the photo of a volunteer hugging a Senegalese immigrant who is crying inconsolably on Tarajal beach, after having crossed the Ceuta border. Until then, nothing had happened; But from that moment on, the NGO has become the center of a smear campaign by the extreme right,” explains journalist Miquel Ramos.
The image was taken on May 18, 2021. The young volunteer in the photo was Luna Reyes, 20 years old, whom the immigrant (Abdoú) hugged as soon as she saw him arrive. “It was then,” explains this expert in far-right movements, “when messages began to circulate accusing the Red Cross of serving only immigrants and neglecting Spaniards. Then they added more elements.
“While everyone celebrated the photo as a reflection of the best of the human condition, the extreme right began an attack, first against it, and then against the Red Cross. Since then, the discredit campaign has continued, and was particularly virulent during the explosion of the La Palma volcano in September 2021. Since then the trickle has been constant, and always linked to the xenophobic and anti-migrant narrative of the extreme right.
Do these messages that are repeated and repeated from bot farms and that are directed at a very specific audience resonate? “Without a doubt, X is the most visible, but the important thing is that the campaign is also carried out in WhatsApp or Telegram groups. In the end, by seeing them so many times, many people who do not maintain a very specific political position, who are not interested in these issues or without judgment, are exposed to them many times a day. And that’s when we discover that a friend or acquaintance we didn’t expect uses these same arguments in a conversation. “It is being very harmful.”
And, of course, there is one more element. Dozens of far-right associations have gone to the so-called ‘ground zero’ to collaborate in the cleanup efforts. Delegitimizing the Red Cross is also a way to value their work and present themselves as protagonists. Attacking the NGO is their way of making people believe that their help has been more useful and if, in the process, they get someone to stop donating to it and allocate their money to them, the better.
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