Threats and Coercion by WhatsApp and Social Media in Spain

Threats and coercion committed through social media have no offence of their own. They are tried under the same articles as a threat made face to face, but the channel changes two decisive things: the sentence, because the Criminal Code contains an express clause on the medium used, and the evidence, because the message is recorded and can be cropped, altered or sent from an account that is not the account holder's. As criminal lawyers in online threats and coercion cases, this article focuses on what is specific to the digital channel. The offences in the abstract are developed in our guide to the offence of threats.

When a Message Crosses the Line

The standard is neither relaxed nor tightened because the message travels through an app. A threat requires the announcement of future harm with seriousness, credibility and intimidating force sufficient to affect the freedom and security of the person addressed. The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court recalled this in judgment 97/2026 of 6 February (appeal 7058/2023), upholding an acquittal in a case where the complainant herself had described the words as a joke and stated that she did not feel threatened: without harm to the protected interest there is no substantive criminality. We examine that ruling in our commentary on the intimidating force of the words used.

What is peculiar to the channel is that text arrives stripped of intonation. A sentence understood in a face-to-face argument as letting off steam is read, months later and on a page of the case file, with a gravity it never had. Against that, the digital environment offers an evidential advantage that a spoken row does not: the full thread exists. Earlier and later messages, the immediate reaction of the person who received them, whether the relationship continued, emojis, voice notes and forwards all make it possible to reconstruct what the words actually meant. That is why the first step for the defence is not to deny the message but to demand the complete conversation.

From there, classification falls into three tiers. Where the harm announced is one of the offences listed in Art. 169 CP, this is a serious threat. Where the harm announced is not an offence, the framework is Art. 171 CP, developed in our analysis of Article 171 CP. And where the aim is not to frighten but to bend someone's will into a specific course of conduct, the applicable offence is coercion under Art. 172 CP.

The Aggravation for the Medium Used (Art. 169.1 CP)

This is the point most often overlooked and the one that can add the most sentence. Art. 169.1 CP punishes a conditional threat of harm amounting to an offence with one to five years in prison where the offender achieves the purpose and six months to three years where the purpose is not achieved. Its second paragraph adds that the penalties set out in the preceding paragraph shall be imposed in their upper half where the threats are made in writing, by telephone or by any means of communication or reproduction, or in the name of real or supposed entities or groups.

A WhatsApp message, an Instagram comment, a post on X or a TikTok video fall comfortably within "any means of communication or reproduction". The practical consequence is that the same sentence, spoken on a landing or typed into a chat, does not run through the same stretch of the sentencing range. The provision should nonetheless be read precisely: the clause sits inside paragraph 1 and refers to "the penalties set out in the preceding paragraph", so its proper scope is the conditional threat. The non-conditional threat under Art. 169.2 CP, punishable by six months to two years in prison, has no equivalent clause, and nor do the offences in Art. 171 CP.

That does not make the medium irrelevant outside Art. 169.1 CP: it is weighed when the sentence is fixed within the range, under rule 6 of Art. 66.1 CP, which requires the court to consider the offender's personal circumstances and the greater or lesser gravity of the act. The distinction matters because arguing about a mandatory upper half is not the same as arguing about where within the range the sentence should fall. The second limb of the paragraph — acting "in the name of real or supposed entities or groups" — takes on particular weight online, where messages are often sent from an account claiming to speak for a collective that may not exist. The basic offence is developed in full in our article on Art. 169 CP.

Coercion Under Art. 172 CP Without Physical Contact

Art. 172.1 CP punishes anyone who, without lawful authority, prevents another by violence from doing what the law does not prohibit, or compels them to do what they do not wish to do, whether right or wrong, with six months to three years in prison or a fine of 12 to 24 months, according to the gravity of the coercion or of the means employed. The penalties are imposed in their upper half where the coercion was aimed at preventing the exercise of a fundamental right, and also where it was aimed at preventing the lawful enjoyment of a home.

Transposed to social media, the range of conduct reported as coercion is wide: demanding that a post be taken down under warning that something will be published, organising mass reporting to force an account to be closed, pressing someone to accept a contact, leave a group or stop posting. The defence line lies in the element of violence. The provision requires it expressly, and its extension to force exerted on the will is a judicial reading that the defence can and should test: a demand sent through a channel the recipient can mute, block or close is not automatically equivalent to the violence the provision describes. The second element — acting "without lawful authority" — is equally useful: someone who asks for the removal of content that defames them, or who exercises a right the legal system recognises, acts under a title.

Where the demand is coupled with a warning that private life will be revealed in exchange for money, the offence shifts to blackmail under Art. 171.2 CP, with two to four years in prison where all or part of what was demanded is handed over and four months to two years where it is not. And where what is announced is the dissemination of intimate images obtained with consent, Art. 197.7 CP comes into play. Outside all of these, minor coercion under Art. 172.3 CP carries a fine of one to three months and may only be prosecuted upon complaint by the aggrieved person or their legal representative.

Messages Within a Relationship and Displaying Weapons (Arts. 171.4, 171.5 and 172.2 CP)

Where the recipient is or has been the offender's wife, or a woman bound to him by a comparable emotional relationship even without cohabitation, a minor threat ceases to be a minor offence and moves to Art. 171.4 CP: six months to one year in prison or 31 to 80 days of community service and, in every case, deprivation of the right to possess and carry weapons for one year and one day to three years. The same penalty applies to a minor threat against a particularly vulnerable person living with the offender. Minor coercion in that same context follows Art. 172.2 CP, within an identical framework. This paragraph is dealt with in full in our section on minor threats within a relationship.

What is specific to the channel appears in the paragraph closing subsections 4 and 5: the penalties are imposed in their upper half where the offence is committed in the presence of minors, or takes place in the shared home or the victim's home, or is carried out in breach of a penalty under Art. 48 CP or a precautionary or preventive measure of the same nature. For a message sent remotely, the first two circumstances call for careful analysis: the place where the message is received is not automatically the place where the act is carried out, and the presence of minors in the room where a notification sounds is not the same as the act being committed in front of them. The third, by contrast, applies plainly: writing to someone protected by a communication ban in force adds the breach regardless of the content.

Art. 171.5 CP punishes with three months to one year in prison or 31 to 80 days of community service, and in every case deprivation of the right to possess and carry weapons for one to three years, anyone who makes a minor threat with weapons or other dangerous instruments against one of the persons listed in Art. 173.2 CP, other than those covered by the preceding paragraph. Transposing it to the digital channel — sending a photograph or video of a weapon — deserves argument rather than automatic acceptance: the provision frames the weapon as the instrument used to threaten, and an image conveys a representation of the weapon, not its immediate availability against the person threatened. We develop this paragraph in our analysis of minor threats involving weapons. It is also worth recalling that Art. 171.6 CP allows the court, giving reasons in the judgment and in view of the offender's personal circumstances and those attending the act, to impose the sentence one degree lower in the situations covered by subsections 4 and 5.

From the Private Message to the Public Feed

A direct message is not the same as an open post, even where the wording is identical. The Criminal Code contains no specific aggravating circumstance for making a threat public, and this should be stated clearly so that unfounded classifications are not accepted. Dissemination operates through three separate routes. The first, already noted, is the upper half under Art. 169.1 CP where a conditional threat is made through a means of communication or reproduction. The second is sentencing within the range under Art. 66.1.6 CP: the reach of the message, how long it stayed up and how many people read it are factual matters the court weighs.

The third is a separate offence. Art. 170.1 CP provides that, where threats of harm amounting to an offence are aimed at frightening the inhabitants of a town, an ethnic, cultural or religious group, or a social or professional collective, or any other group of persons, and are serious enough to achieve that, the penalties one degree above those in Art. 169 CP shall be imposed. It is the provision that comes into play where a post is not addressed to an identified individual but to a collective, a scenario typical of social media. Where the message additionally targets the group on discriminatory grounds, the classification may overlap with the hate crime under Art. 510 CP. And where the message is not an isolated announcement but persistent, repeated hounding that disrupts everyday life, the applicable offence is stalking under Art. 172 ter CP, covered in our article on stalking through social media.

Screenshot, Certification and Forensic Report: What Each One Proves

The evidential dispute in these proceedings is almost never about what the message says, but about who wrote it and whether the text produced is the text sent. It is worth ranking each source, because in practice they are treated as equivalent and they are not.

A screenshot is a reproduction with no technical guarantee at all: it shows that at some point an image with that content existed on the device of the person who took it. While nobody disputes it, the court may take it at face value. From the moment the defence challenges it, the burden of supporting its authenticity and integrity returns to the party who produced it, and the screenshot alone no longer suffices. Certification of the content — drawn up by a public officer or by a trusted third party applying timestamps — fixes what had been posted, when and from which profile, but does not establish who was operating the account. Examination of the handset allows the screenshot to be compared with the original conversation and any cropping to be detected; it is also how the defence gains access to the full thread. A computer forensic report examines metadata, the application's databases and system traces, and is what allows manipulation to be confirmed or ruled out. And a judicial order addressed to the provider is the only route to records held on no handset at all.

That last route has rules of its own. Art. 588 ter j of the Criminal Procedure Act provides that electronic data held by service providers and linked to communication processes may only be released into the proceedings with judicial authorisation, after specifying the nature of the data sought and the reasons justifying disclosure. And Art. 588 octies allows the Public Prosecutor or the judicial police to require any natural or legal person to preserve specific data until that authorisation is obtained, for a maximum of ninety days, extendable once up to one hundred and eighty. The point has immediate consequences: records held on a server today may not exist in a few months, and that window constrains prosecution and defence alike. The steps for securing material before it disappears are set out in our article on proving digital harassment.

Fake Profiles, Anonymity and Proving Authorship

Proving the content of a message does not prove who wrote it, and this is the structural weakness of many prosecutions for online threats. Holding an account, a phone line or a connection is not authorship of the message. Devices shared at home, sessions left open, unlocked handsets, connections from the same domestic IP address or from a workplace network: in all of these the link between the account and the person under investigation rests on an inference, not on direct evidence. Where the only basis for the charge is that the message came from a profile bearing a name, the defence must insist that the gap be closed.

There are regulated routes for identification. Art. 588 ter k of the Criminal Procedure Act provides that, where the judicial police come across an IP address used to commit an offence online without knowing the identity of the equipment or the user's personal details, they are to ask the investigating judge to order those under a duty to cooperate to release the data enabling the terminal and the suspect to be identified and located. Art. 588 ter m allows the Public Prosecutor and the judicial police to approach providers directly to establish who holds a number or another means of communication. These are steps the defence may request just as readily as the prosecution, particularly where the hypothesis is impersonation.

The fake profile itself may also be a separate offence. Art. 172 ter.5 CP punishes with three months to one year in prison or a fine of six to twelve months anyone who, without the consent of the person concerned, uses their image to place advertisements or open fake profiles on social media, dating sites or any means of public dissemination, thereby causing them harassment, hounding or humiliation; where the victim is a minor or a person with a disability, the upper half applies. The offence requires three elements, all of which must be present: use of another person's image, absence of consent, and a resulting situation of harassment, hounding or humiliation. Creating an account in someone else's name, without their image and without that result, falls outside the provision.

If You Are Reported Over a Message

The instinctive reaction — deleting the conversation — is the worst possible decision. Deleting the thread removes precisely the context that usually favours the person defending: the earlier messages, the tone of the relationship, any reciprocity in the language used and the real reaction of the person who received it. The complaint supplies a fragment; without the rest, that fragment stands unchallenged. The sensible course is to preserve the handset and the complete conversation, not to reply, not to contact the complainant or those around them, and not to post anything about the matter.

On the technical side there are three immediate checks. The first is the prosecution requirement: Arts. 171.7 and 172.3 CP require a complaint by the aggrieved person or their legal representative, except where the injured party is one of the persons listed in Art. 173.2 CP. The second is classification: between a serious threat under Art. 169 CP, a threat under Art. 171 CP, coercion under Art. 172 CP and stalking under Art. 172 ter CP there are years of imprisonment in play, and a reclassification during the proceedings goes directly to the right of defence. The third is evidence: asking for the full conversation to be examined and, where appropriate, for a computer forensic report, before the material degrades. The procedural route from first summons to questioning is set out in our guide to the offence of threats.