A slander is a false accusation that aims to cause harm.
A slander is a false accusation that is made with the aim of causing harm . At the legal level, slander is called the act of imputing a crime to a subject knowing that what he is accused of never existed or was not carried out by the accused.
For slander to exist, therefore, there must be a false imputation or accusation : the person who accuses does so with the aim of harming the accused . Another possibility is that the accuser is convinced of the veracity of his accusation but acts with contempt for the truth .
This means that slander can entail fraud (when the individual knows that what he is imputing is false) or eventual fraud (he may believe that it is not false but is not interested in accessing the truth and therefore generates damage ).
Example of slander
Suppose two people are competing for the presidency of a sports club . According to different surveys, both are very even in the voting intention of the members. One of them, to tarnish the reputation of his opponent, accuses him of having received bribes from a player representative to hire his clients if he became president.
The accused defends himself by ensuring that he has never committed a crime and demands that his opponent recant. However, he does not do so and insists with the accusation in the media. Against this background, the accused denounces the other candidate for the crime of slander .
Slander is frequent on social networks.
Communication through social networks
Today, slander is an integral part of communication through social networks , although this was not the intention of the creators of the Internet. Although there are many people who take advantage of this tool to study remotely, enrich themselves culturally by reading about other countries and make friends without geographical barriers being a limit, the majority reserve a space for it in their lives not much higher than that of the afternoon soap opera.
It is important to distinguish between a slander that begins to be spread by a mobster willing to confront his enemy hand-to-hand, without fear of dying in a knife duel, and that which a user of a social network issues hidden behind a fictitious name that does not reveal no personal data to recognize or locate it. In other words, these types of gratuitous attacks, which are commonplace on the Internet today, are characterized by the cowardice of their authors.
One of the characteristics of slander is the ease with which it spreads: unlike a comment made in private, as part of a conversation between friends that both hope does not transcend the barriers of their relationship, slander is created with the purpose of humiliating the victim in front of as many people as possible.
For example, when someone decides to slander a neighbor in their building because an aspect of their personality bothers them and they want to make their life miserable until they get them to leave, they do not call a loved one to vent over the phone but instead they approach them. the most gossipy person in the community and tells him a series of lies about the neighbor, knowing that in a matter of minutes all this will be public knowledge and everyone will begin to look badly at the neighbor in question.
Something similar happens on the Internet, although the process is easier and much less involved : it is enough to make a series of incisive comments in the appropriate forums and social networks so that in a few minutes the information is deformed and spread everywhere.