Cyberbullying during Covid: suspended prison sentences for “anti-vaccines”

Suspended prison sentences of four to six months. This is the sanction decided this Wednesday, December 20, against ten vaccine opponents for cyberbullying two parliamentarians and a doctor during the Covid pandemic in 2021.

The court also imposed on an eleventh man, already convicted eight times, a sentence of 120 days, a fine of 15 euros each, which adds up to a total of 1,800 euros in fines that could lead to days in prison if he does not pay them. The first 10 defendants were also fined 500 euros. Everyone will have to compensate the victims.

telegram channel

These seven women and four men, of all ages and backgrounds, appeared in October for moral harassment after participating in digital raids against MP Isabelle Rauch, Senator Nicole Bonnefoy and hospital doctor Michel Slama in 2021.

At that time, the accused exchanged on the Telegram channel with “V_V”, an “anti-vax” group born in Italy and which brings together hundreds of sympathizers in France.

In this group, posts published on social media (often in favor of the government’s vaccination policy) were designated as “targeted,” the president explained when delivering his judgment.

Group members were instructed to mass post “prescripted and malicious” comments.

“No harm intended”

Among the messages received: “accomplices of genocide”, “collaborators of a Nazi system”, “pro-Nazi psychopaths”, as well as photomontages of the recipient’s face covered with a swastika.

During the trial, the vast majority of the defendants admitted to having published the messages, ensuring that they had “no intention to do harm,” the court recalled. But “the modus operandi” of the “VV” was “known to its members”, who therefore could not “ignore” that they were contributing to a “massive sending” of malicious messages.

This “wave, this hatred”, as the MP for Moselle Isabelle Rauch (Horizons, ex-LREM) said in the hearing, the victim of thousands of messages, like the PS senator Nicole Bonnefoy (Charente) and the doctor at the university hospital of Amiens. Picardie Michel Slama, had seriously affected his private and professional life, the president recalled in his decision, mentioning stress, sleep disorders, self-censorship and fear for his safety.