VIENNA: When it comes to the problem of online hate speech, the culprits behind the keyboards and smartphones can take some surprising forms -- just take 74-year-old Viennese retiree Ms H.
Angered by an article she read on the internet a year ago, the outwardly unassuming former midwife reacted with a Facebook outburst in which she said all immigrants should be poisoned on arrival in Austria. She said the comment was "spontaneous", written in the heat of the moment.
But in the eyes of the law it could have amounted to the criminal offence of "incitement to hatred and violence". "The police summoned me and said I didn’t have the right to write that," says Ms H. "I thought it wouldn’t go any further than that."