At a time when social media platforms boast of taking bold measures to suppress “hate speech” and “disinformation,” Catholic news website Crux reported on Monday that Twitter allowed thousands of tweets to be posted in Spain under the hashtag #FuegoAlClero, which means “Set Fire to the Clergy.”
The tweets used words and images to call for Catholic churches to be set on fire, with the priests burned alive.
Crux explained that the hashtag began as a campaign by Marxist Twitter accounts to support Spanish educational reforms that would give the government more control over religious instruction in public schools and limit funding for Catholic educational institutions.
“However, the trending topic was accompanied by calls to burn down churches because ‘the only church that illuminates is the one that is in flames,’ signed by ‘the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn,’” Crux reported.
“By Tuesday evening, Twitter had done nothing about the tweets, despite thousands of users complaining the hashtag was inciting hatred and a direct violation of the company’s rules against ‘violence, harassment and other similar types of behavior,’” the report continued.
One of the images Crux reposted was a cartoon of Catholic priests with their heads transformed into balls of fire. Other observers spotted Photoshops of priests on fire, coupled with slogans like “Anyone who wants a priest should pay for it” and “No to public financing of the Catholic Church, or any other religion.” #FuegoAlClero posts railed against Catholic priests as “pedophiles,” “homophobes,” and “thieves.”
Spanish users of Twitter, including many non-Catholics, wondered how the priest-burning hashtag could be tolerated by the social media platform, which ostensibly has strict rules against hateful speech and incitements to violence. Critics noted #FuegoAlClero was not a matter of a few hotheads ranting at each other in the furthest reaches of the Internet; it became a “trending topic,” one of the most popular hashtags in Spain.
On Wednesday, another hashtag supportive of Catholic priests, #YoApoyoAlClero (“I Support the Clergy”) became a trending topic on Spanish Twitter. Posts under this hashtag celebrated the Catholic clergy for charitable works around the world, denounced #FuegoAlClero for its bigotry, and criticized Twitter Spain CEO Nathalie Picquot for allowing the priest-burning hashtag to trend.
#FuegoAlClero critics in Spain frequently pointed to Twitter’s censorship of tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump, and its successful effort to suppress news harmful to Trump’s opponent Joe Biden, as evidence of the social media platform’s hypocrisy. Many also recalled a previous hashtag, #MataraAbascal, that was allowed to trend on Twitter even though it called for the assassination of a politician, Vox Party leader Santiago Abascal.
Spanish Catholics have long memories of the Communists murdering and mutilating thousands of priests and monks during the Red Terror of the 1930s, when churches were burned and the government refused to intervene. Many of the victims were beatified as saints by the Catholic Church in recent years. The symbolism of Marxist groups passing around cartoons of burning priests would be particularly outrageous to Spanish Catholics in light of this terrible history.
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