At the beginning of the week, a law court handed down the first sentence in Spain for spreading hoaxes and deception disguised as news (fake news).

As chance would have it, the man found guilty is a Guardia Civil officer, who had used his social-media account to claim that immigrant youths had carried out the brutal beating of a woman in a video that he had posted.

However, the incident really took place in China – not Spain, and it had nothing do with immigrant teens.

There are millions of fake-news items circulating on social media and even when they are exposed for what they are, they spring back to life after a while and people continue to click on them and take them as Gospel.

Their whole reason for existence is to spread hate and alarm.

Such is the constant barrage of porkies on the Internet that the Policía Nacional based in the city of Granada, had to post a warning on their social-media account, pointing out that there is no truth to the existence of a gang in the city that uses disinfectant hand gel to put their victims to sleep in order to steal their possessions.

The fictitious gang are called Manos Limpios (Clean Hands) whose members supposedly passed themselves off as NGO volunteers, armed with bottle of hand gels, promoting hand cleansing against Covid.

Editorial comment: this is the Seaside Gazette; we don’t do conspiracy theories 😉

(News: City & Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)