Four women including three mothers and two men.

They will be six, aged 19 to 39, to be tried on Monday and Tuesday in Paris for having published hate messages and calls for murder on Twitter against Mila, a young woman who has been the target of stalkers since her publication of a video of criticism of Islam.

The offending tweets were posted at the end of 2020. “It shows that Twitter is the hate network.

It is the network that thrives on hate, ”said his lawyer Me Malka.

According to him, Mila, now 18, “has received more than 100,000 hate messages and death threats promising to be tied up, cut up, quartered, stoned, beheaded, with images of coffins, photo- mountings of decapitation, of his bloody head".

Among the offending tweets, some suggest "smoking her", others suggesting sexual abuse, while a user wants to "strangle her with [his] own hands".

Under police protection after these threats

The young woman was the target of a "tidal wave of hatred" after responding in January 2020 to insults on social networks about her sexual orientation through a vehement video on Islam.

Then aged 16 and a half, she had been forced to leave her high school.

She has since been living under police protection.

The young woman who claims her right to blasphemy had attracted a new round of threats after the publication of a second video, on November 14, 2020, in which she sharply launched to her detractors: “and last thing, watch your friend Allah , please.

Because my fingers in her asshole, I still haven't taken them out”.

Already eleven people sentenced last July

The Mila affair, which has become symbolic of the fight for freedom of expression and the right to blasphemy, has taken on very significant media coverage in a country marked by deadly Islamist attacks in 2015 against the satirical weekly

Charlie Hebdo

, which had published caricatures of Muhammad or against the teacher Samuel Paty beheaded in 2020 after showing these same caricatures to students.

Last July, the Paris Criminal Court had already sentenced ten people to suspended sentences of four to six months in prison for “online harassment” and the eleventh, an 18-year-old young woman, for “death threats”.

“What I want is that, all together (…) we continue to fight, had commented the young woman.

What I want is that the people who would be considered plague victims, who would be banned from social networks, be those who harass, who threaten death, who incite suicide.

I don't ever want to blame the victims again.

»

Three years in prison

The wave of hateful messages that affected Mila was "an enterprise of harassment, which had physical and psychological consequences" on the young girl, the court underlined in its judgment.

The offense of cyberbullying was created by a law of 2018. It can be constituted when several people attacking the same victim know that their words or behavior characterize a repetition, without each of these people having acted repeatedly or concertedly.

The defendants face two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros for online harassment, three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros for death threats.

Company

Lyon: Without Twitter, Mila refocuses on her artistic projects

Justice

Mila case: Investigation opened after an attack on the young woman in Lyon

  • Justice

  • Mila case

  • Islam

  • Harassment

  • Twitter

  • Charlie Hebdo