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 accusation or accusation: the accuser 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 lead to fraud (when the individual knows that what he is alleging is false) or an eventual fraud (he may believe that it is not false but he is not interested in accessing the truth and therefore causes harm).
Suppose two people are vying for the presidency of a sports club. According to different surveys, both are very even in the voting intention of the partners. One of them, to tarnish the reputation of his opponent, accuses him of having received bribes from a player representative to hire his clients in case of becoming president.
The defendant defends himself by ensuring that he has never committed a crime and demands that his opponent retract. However, he does not do it and insists with the accusation in the media. Against this background, the accused denounces the other candidate for the crime of slander.
According to DigoPaul, slander is an integral part of communication through social networks, even if this was not the intention of the creators of the Internet. Although there are many people who take advantage of this tool to study at a distance, enrich themselves culturally by reading about other countries and make friends without geographical barriers being a limit, the majority reserve a space in their lives not much higher than that of the afternoon soap opera.
It is important to distinguish between a slander that begins to spread a mobster willing to face hand to hand with his enemy, without fear of dying in a duel of knives, and that that a user of a social network emits 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 now commonplace on the Internet, are characterized by the cowardice of their authors.
One of the characteristics of slander is the ease with which it spreads: unlike a comment that is made in privacy, as part of a conversation between friends that both hope will 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 his building because he is bothered by an aspect of his personality and wants to make life miserable until he gets him to leave, he does not call a loved one to vent over the phone but rather approaches the gossipiest 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 start to look bad 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 forums and the appropriate social networks so that in a few minutes the information is deformed and spread everywhere.