Cyberstalking on Social Media in Spain: What Evidence You Need

The offence of stalking (Art. 172 ter CP) punishes anyone who harasses a person insistently and repeatedly, seriously altering the development of their daily life. In the digital age, harassment occurs mostly through WhatsApp, Instagram, calls and the creation of fake profiles.

How to Prove Digital Harassment

Simple "screenshots" may be insufficient if challenged. It is necessary to provide technological certifications (notarial records of display or timestamps from trusted third parties) to secure the evidence. The key to the offence is proving the "serious alteration of daily life": that the victim had to change phone number, close social media accounts or modify their daily routines because of the harassment.

What Conduct Article 172 ter Punishes

The provision describes several forms of harassment which, transferred to the digital environment, are very recognisable:

• Surveillance and seeking proximity: obsessively monitoring the victim's activity, their connections, their posts or their location.
• Repeated contact by any means: constant messages via WhatsApp or social media, insistent calls, emails or continuous interactions despite the recipient's express refusal.
• Misuse of personal data: using the victim's identity or data, for instance through fake profiles, so that third parties contact them or to sign them up for services they never requested.

What is decisive is not any isolated message but the pattern: a sustained strategy of harassment over time that invades the life of the person being stalked.

The Two Pillars: Insistence and Serious Alteration

For an offence to exist, two elements must concur. The first is repetition: the conduct must be insistent and repeated, which rules out one-off episodes or isolated arguments. The second is the result: the serious alteration of the victim's daily life. Mere annoyance or discomfort is not enough; the person being harassed must have had to change their habits.

That is why proving the impact is as important as proving the messages: the change of phone number, the closure of accounts, the modification of schedules or routes and, where applicable, the medical or psychological reports documenting the consequences of the harassment all serve as elements corroborating the account.

How to Secure Digital Evidence Step by Step

The golden rule is delete nothing: keep the original conversations on the device, not just the screenshots. From there, the content should be certified as soon as possible through a notarial record of display or through a trusted third party applying timestamps, so that it is fixed what was published, when and from which profile. If the case reaches trial and the other side challenges the screenshots, that certification — together with the expert examination of the device — will be what sustains the prosecution.

If You Are the One Accused

The defence against a stalking accusation is built on the same pillars of the offence, but in reverse:

• Lack of repetition: showing that the contacts were occasional, spaced out or responded to legitimate reasons (shared children, pending work or financial matters).
• Reciprocal communications: producing the complete conversations where the complainant also initiated or maintained contact, because the full context can dismantle the image of one-sided harassment.
• No serious alteration: questioning whether the complainant's daily life has really changed, if there is no objective support for that impact.
• Challenging the evidence: demanding technical proof of the authorship and integrity of the messages, especially when only screenshots are produced.

Whether you are suffering the harassment or have been reported, time is the decisive factor: digital evidence is volatile, platforms remove content and fake profiles disappear from one day to the next. Securing today, with guarantees of authenticity, what may no longer exist tomorrow is, in practice, what ends up deciding these proceedings one way or the other.