After an 11-year-old boy was stabbed while playing football near Mocejón, Spain’s judiciary faced a wave of misinformation linking the suspect to immigrant communities, particularly unaccompanied minors from north Africa. On August 22, 2024, a Spanish judge publicly called for ending social-media anonymity because of this spread of hate-fuelled disinformation. The claim that the attackers were definitively immigrants is false and was amplified online before the facts were verified; police later arrested a 20-year-old Spanish man with no confirmed immigration-status link. The narrative was used to stoke anti-immigration sentiment, showing how quickly misinformation takes hold.
