‘Death Threats’ Trend on Twitter Illegal?

WOW! With all of the social media tools available to any idiot’s fingertips, the s*it pot gets stirred up WAY more than it should.

At one time back before the 80′s, you couldn’t see people lashing-out simultaneously around the world, until MySpace, Facebook and the biggest cork board of all- Twitter was born.

Twitter is a great tool that many people use to express themselves. Most people like to state what they ate, where they are going, where they are, where they’ve been, and who they are with. Then the other people on Twitter, use it to vent out their negative frustrations and ideas.

Some of the negative Nelly type people, will state that they’ve had a crappy day, their boss sucks, their life sucks, or they’ll lash-out at anyone. Today, Twitter is in the news, because a select group of people claim that they’d like to kill the same person! Yep, they are tweeting death threats like it’s ‘okay’! More about that in a second…

Are there just too many people out there making vile statements, that the ‘Internet Police’ can’t catch them all? Or is there some kind of silent law, where you are allowed to make expressive yet threatening statements? How far, is too far?

Well, for instance, there are a bunch of Twitter users who are making similar statements regarding the man George Zimmerman who shot and killed 17-year-old ‘hoodie’ boy Trayvon Martin. Various tweeters made statements saying that they ‘wanted to kill Zimmerman themselves’ after learning that Zimmerman was set free after his court hearing on April 20, 2012.

Twitchy.com collected a few of those threatening tweets from people, and put the photos of the tweets on their site. It makes me wonder again, how far is too far? Are tweets like this crossing the line?

One girl on Twitter named @Mslips88 said, “someone pass me a gun, imma go follow zimmerman, shoot and kill him and say #imstandingmyground.” Another boy @_jetsettersUP said, “I think imma personally kill George Zimmerman ..anyone’s welcome to join (:” Leggggoooo!.” You can see more here.

I did a little bit of research on ‘threats on Twitter’ via Google, and it directed me to Twitter support pages. Twitter advises you to call the police if threatened, IF blocking or unfollowing doesn’t work first. You can also ‘file a ticket for an abusive Twitter user’, and then maybe the user will get deleted by the Twitter team.

I looked around on some other sites, trying to figure out if death threats can cause someone jail time, punishment etc., and this might surprise you as it did me, but the law won’t waste their time on your case unless you have ‘reasonable fear’ to back up the threat. Apparently there has to be evidence of a bulk of harassment, especially done in a physical radius of you- all done repeatedly to ‘induce your fear’. You would start your claim with filing a police report, explaining what’s going on with the threat. Cyber bullying and threats don’t seem to be a serious matter in the eyes of the law! Go figure!

If someone is threatening a political figure, that could be considered ‘treason’, just for threatening their death- even if the person threatening is joking. These types would get a case faster than a civilian dealing with an everyday stalker. That’s not a surprise!

Unfortunately, I suppose it’s sort of ‘okay’ for people to continue to tweet ignorant expressions on their Twitter, as the law can’t do all that much to stop it. There aren’t enough Internet Police to control ignorant fingers, so let there be ignorance! They just make the educated people look smarter! That’s a plus.