People who make death threats on the internet should go to jail?

Carpenter

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Jul 4, 2012
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ArnRand said:
There's been a spate of high profile threats here in the UK, mainly against women in the public eye, based on some controversy about who should go an our banknotes. And there's a topic about a Bioware writer who apparently quit over threats to her family, so this seems topical.

Here's my position: The person being threatened should be able to press charges against the threatener, and no one else should be able to get involved. The punishment should be a big fine or a few weeks in jail. Repeat offences should have harsher punishments.

What's your opinion?
She didn't quit because of the threat.

No one else should be able to get involved? What does that even mean? So the "victim" has a right to press charges but the police are not allowed to arrest the "suspect" because that would mean getting involved?

Will this only apply to women or public figures, or will everyone be going to jail over this? I get about a hundred death threats from random people every few years, will all of them get to spend time in prison or pay a massive fine?

There are far more important things going on in your country right now, which may explain why there is so much strange misplaced rage directed towards public figures. But please, keep talking about how we need cyber bullying or "hurt feelings protection" laws. Everyone knows that threats are rare enough that it would never bog down law enforcement to the point of them being completely incapable of doing anything.

And people say Americans are stupid. It's not a country thing, it's a generation thing.


EDIT: Death threats are a daily thing for public figures. To say that it's a "new trend" or that it's mostly happening to women is completely dishonest or at best ignorant.

Just because the news suddenly reports something more doesn't mean it's actually happening more often.
 

daubie

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Mar 17, 2010
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If you can go to jail for threatening someone's life in real life or over the phone, why should the internet be different. It's still an interaction between two people, and occasionally people do get killed. If people can't interact in a public environment without resorting to violence maybe they should be reprimanded.
 

RickyChinese

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Aug 19, 2013
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You know that if this was a thing it'd just mean more people baiting other people into death threating them for shits and giggles.
 

verdant monkai

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Oct 30, 2011
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No its always just a bunch of goons who are all mouth and no trousers (incapable of carrying out their threats).
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Signa said:
Oh goody, false equivalence.

We go from Jennifer Hepler to ArnRand. I wonder what the difference is.

There isn't much way for me to find out exactly who the person that goes by ArnRand is.
It's really not that hard. We tend to leave data trails. There are people on the boards I visit who routinely track people down.

Could I necessarily find ArnRand? I don't know. But the beautiful thing is, a lot of people can find a lot of other people. Even people who think they're secure are not immune.

Making laws and involving law enforcement in this issue is asking the government to take control over every facet of our lives, and you do not want to live in a nanny state.
lol no. You don't need a police state to deal with threats on the internet. You deal with it like any other threat.

That's why.
So because of nonsensical false equivalence and a hysterical slippery slope fallacy?

You should have saved some time and just written "because ponies." It would have amounted to as much.

Not to mention you completely ignored the context of why I asked.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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McKinsey said:
Internet is a means of indirect communication, i.e. you may send a message to someone and that person may not even see the message because of various reasons (had the system not notified me of your response, I would never have guessed it existed). As I've said, it's a bunch of scribbles on a wall, and you may decide not to read certain scribbles if you don't feel like it.
Phone, on the other hand, provides for direct communication - you can't speak to someone unless the recipient's speaking to you. It's an intrusion into someone else's private life, and there's no real way to shield yourself from unwanted calls except to stop answering the phone altogether.
To put it in simpler terms, you can wake somebody up in the middle of the night using the phone. Try doing the same with the Internet.
I hope the difference is clear to you now.
What's clear is that you shifted the goalposts from one poorly-thought-out argument to another.

Someone might never see it, but that doesn't really mean there's no gravity to such a scenario.

Also, in the modern era, we take threats that go to voiemail seriously, even though by your logic we shouldn't. After all, there's no guarantee I'll get the notification, or check my messages.

Hooray double standards, I guess?
 

McKinsey

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Nov 14, 2011
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Zachary Amaranth said:
What's clear is that you shifted the goalposts from one poorly-thought-out argument to another.

Someone might never see it, but that doesn't really mean there's no gravity to such a scenario.

Also, in the modern era, we take threats that go to voiemail seriously, even though by your logic we shouldn't. After all, there's no guarantee I'll get the notification, or check my messages.

Hooray double standards, I guess?
So it's not important that "someone might never see it", huh.
Let's run a series of scenarios to test your logic.

So I'm in a chat with my bros and I write "Imma murder him next time I see him", and they all go along with the joke and write stuff like "Hell yeah, you totally should, maybe we'll even help you beat him to death", and then somebody copies this part of our private conversation and makes it visible to you... Should we be prosecuted?
If I go outside and paint a death threat on the walls of my house, and you happen to visit my city, go to my street, drive by and see this message, then I, according to your logic, should go to jail? And what if I write a death threat in my personal diary, and you sneak a peak in it? Also jail, right?

But let's return to the Internet. What constitutes a death threat? Look here for a second.
Look.
"Hey, just wanted you to know I'm planning to hjgfkl you in your sleep and then go to your children's room and dfghsrtr them one by one, and'm going to ENJOY IT SO MUCH."
Is it a threat? Do you think so? But I meant to write "surprise" and "tickle", it's just so hard to type long texts on a phone.

Also, what separates a bad joke from a real threat? Should we make no difference and incarcerate all angry teenagers and frustrated customers? Because we all know that doing time in jail is the best way to reform the character and turn a person into a good-natured, law-abiding citizen, am I right?

But the most important thing is - it's super easy to frame somebody online. You mentioned voicemail - well, at least with voicemail you can be pretty certain who threatens you, which is also the case with hand-written letters. That is, if you've never heard about voice and handwriting imitators... But with the Internet you can never tell - precisely because it's a means of indirect communication. Even if you pinpoint my location via IP adress you still can't tell for sure who I am. Am I the person who registered this account? Am I his friend who typed this message while the account holder was in the loo?
Do you understand that somebody can hack into your account, send a death threat and then log out, and you won't even know this happened until the police knock on you door?
 

krazykidd

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Mar 22, 2008
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How about stop going on the internet ? I mean if you get harassed on twitter , don't go on twitter . I'm not going to walk into a dark back alley waving cash around when i see shady characters standing there .
 

lacktheknack

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Jan 19, 2009
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I joked in another death-threat thread about week-long internet bans... but now that I think about it, why not?
 

Tono Makt

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Mar 24, 2012
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If speaking the death threat out loud or writing it down on a piece of paper are illegal in the jurisdiction, then I see no reason to treat death threats online any differently.