I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.
Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.
> How many times have you said something along the lines of “I will kill you if you put that picture of me on Instagram!”
But his threat was much more graphic and specific. How many times have you e.g. emailed your friend’s whole family with a message along the lines of “If you post that picture online I will eviscerate you and then hang you from your mother’s dining room ceiling by your intestines as a warning.”
That is not normal friendly exaggerated banter, and would be pretty hard to play off as a joke.
Context: Ashley Williams has publicly stated a desire to "kill all men", and explicitly refused to walk that back, or clarify it as hyperbole, or apologize for the sentiment, when asked to do so.
Acknowledging this historical fact has (for multiple people) been judged a rust CoC violation so please don't go asking about it if you still value being part of that community, for some reason.
And no, "kill all men" was not considered a CoC violation itself, because Williams is far enough up in the org chart that the CoC doesn't apply, as explained by the resigning moderation team back in 2019.
> I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an antipsychiatry Reddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired.
I think anyone who is not a sociopath would consider this proof of a “substantial risk of harm”.
>Good. It is bizarre to me that one could post literal death threats online endlessly without fear of any consquences, yet if you were to yell the same threats in a public location, the police would be summoned.
That's only because the former is done anonymously and the latter can be easily be attributed to you, right? If a kid sent death threats to his classmates using his real-life facebook account, the police would be summoned too.
> realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online.
I offer no comment on the rest of your post, but this part mirrors my own experience.
My wife posted on Facebook a year or two ago about her opinion on a mainstream controversial topic, and it went viral seemingly instantaneously. Within 12 hours she'd gotten shared almost 10k times, and received hundreds of private messages. Of those, more than two dozen were direct death threats, some with the names of our children and other personal details.
> HN could be more moderated/less tolerant of abuse/disallow throwaways, and those people will just go elsewhere and continue to say what they want.
Not necessarily true. Imagine, specifically, if HN acted in a "honeypot vigilante" manner: allowing these people to think they're getting away with it, and then privately finding them and doing things to them (sending defamation suits?) that have the effect of stopping them from trolling anywhere ever again.
- "As academically interesting that this is, I think there are SERIOUS privacy concerns you're flirting with."
- "Yeah, it gets complicated."
It doesn't look complicated to me at all — you just want reputation points with your professional peers, and to hell with the patient.
This internet-mob victim has been completely doxxed to the general public: {place of work; place of residence; chronically immunocompromised (probably)}. That's an N=1 almost certainly.
Yes it would change immensely. How would HN feel if I falsely claimed I was getting death threats from members so I could get attention.
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