The amount of threats and harassment that social media platform users get away with is appalling and needs to be policed.
In April, President Donald Trump incited an expansive response to a tweet he sent that attacked U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.
Trump’s tweet at Omar, one of the first Muslim women in Congress, was a video that combined some comments Omar made about 9/11 with a video of the twin towers disaster.
The tweet that Trump made was one thing, but it spawned hundreds of death threats toward Omar from random Twitter trolls.
Cybersecurity expert Chad Loder compiled those threats toward Omar combining search terms such as “noose” and “bullet” with her two Twitter accounts, netting hundreds of hits, according to a Washington Post article.
“If it’s possible for me, as a single guy working for a couple hours over the weekend, to put a little search dashboard together, to find huge numbers of death threats against Omar, there is no reason why Twitter couldn’t do the same thing,” he said in the article.
A lot of those tweets have since been deleted by the users, but it’s not appropriate that someone can just make a death threat toward a government figure, delete the threat and then go on their merry way as if nothing happened.
This kind of behavior on social media is fairly commonplace, and it’s not just directed toward people in the U.S. government.
Athletes, like Los Angeles Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman, are common victims of threats.
He said he received death threats on Instagram for a controversial no-call in the 2018 NFC Championship game against the New Orleans Saints, according to ESPN.
“Yeah, I had like one or two death threats,” Robey-Coleman said.
I can’t imagine being in the shoes of a person who plays a game for a living and has people say they want to kill him for it.
People who use their social media accounts to make these kinds of remarks are hiding behind what they consider to be the safety of their keyboards.
Last revised in March, Twitter’s policy on violent threats reads, “You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.”
The consequences for violating the terms are an immediate and permanent suspension of an account.
Big whoop, suspending an account for a threat serves almost no purpose.
Creating a new Twitter account takes a couple minutes at most, and that person could go right back to what they were doing.
The FBI finally appears to be doing something about policing threats, albeit only in response to matters of national security.
The bureau is taking proposals from vendors to pull data from social media platforms in order to “proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests,” according to a Washington Post article.
Should the FBI be involved in every death threat toward someone that gets thrown out on social media?
Absolutely not. But the consequences need to be more severe than just an account suspension.
Hopefully the day will come when people can no longer say whatever they want and think they’re safe behind a screen.
