Maybe you phrased it wrong, but the user cannot post death threats online without fear of consequences, it's just not the platform who the consequences fall upon.

A better analogy to a public location would be holding the city liable for not removing a death threat someone affixed into some city-owned monument.

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.

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.

That's not a strong argument at all. Spouting death threats gets you arrested if you do it in public (and someone records it or calls the cops), so it should also lead to a time-limited or permanent ban from social networks.

Social networks are not a free-for-all zone.

I imagine there'd be a lot fewer death threats if there was de facto official tolerance for them.

Inciting violence against a person makes you responsible for the violence that follows; let's not pretend this is something different - it's not.

Ridiculous. Maybe we should prosecute people who talk about overthrowing the government on twitter with treason - they're threats! And safety is important!

These threats on the internet aren't acceptable, but neither is your reaction to them. There is a vast difference between threatening someone and actually doing something, and the way our criminal justice system treats sexual crimes borders on cruel and unusual.

You're saying that someone should have the rest of their life ruined because they made a lewd threat on the internet? We've all heard the story of the kid who went streaking on a dare but happened to be near a playground so now he's labeled a sexual predator for the rest of his life. Do you really think that is a good response to this kind of thing?

>As a father myself, this kind of behaviour makes me sick and I cannot understand people who feel they need to defend these kinds of sick comments.

Punishing someone won't ease the anxiety you feel about the safety of your kids; there will always be something else waiting to ruin their innocence. You probably confuse people saying your reaction to these comments is extreme with people defending the comments. Regardless, you want to label someone a sexual predator so that you can feel better about the fact that you're scared for your kids. That is disgusting and scarier to me than anonymous threats to my family on the internet.

I absolutely do - and I agree with basically everything you say. What I'm not sure about is where the law draws the line.

Twitter [social media] feels like a real problem for abuse, because instead of saying "anything goes, leave or stay at will" or moderating according to community rules, they claim no responsibility or interest and simply refer to the police.

I don't have answers, and I know defending my right to be a dick to someone for bad posting on some forum somewhere is somewhat pathetic. I just feel like "people could be fined or sent to prison for using deliberately harmful, threatening or offensive language" is dangerous. I'm pretty sure on the last one I've got some jail time coming - especially if the offence can be taken by someone to whom it isn't addressed...

Unless we lock down the internet and give up anonymity then it's something we have to accept.

Citation Needed. I suspect the number of real threats are approximately the same as the number of people that have really fucked my mum.

Isn't the doxxing the problem then? It seems like the focus is in the wrong place.

Don't we already have laws on the books to stop harrassement? Don't we have laws to stop from inciting violence? If we need to strenghen them then that's an opportunity for discussion. Do we need to talk about our free speech laws? I frankly think it's time to have that discussion, and not quite because of the reason you may think.

Neither of those discussions is this discussion though, and that's my issue here. Facebook is (as another more eloquent commenter said) a megaphone. Why are we blaming the megaphone?

I think pretty much everyone involved here, aside from the children, ought to be ashamed of themselves. I don't buy into the idea that people ought to be driven out of society though.

So this person should get a penalty which in some ways is more severe than what murderers get?

> No, blaming victim is obviously irrational.

Okay, but I mean, if I publish my own name and address in a public space, and then someone else who doesn't like me takes that information and republishes it in a manner I disapprove of, is that person still a doxer?

That's an extreme example but doxing almost never involves information which is not already publicly accessible to someone stubborn enough. It just involves following threads, correlating information, using public databases, etc.

This is nonsense. If you are subjected to continuous, vitriolic, realistic rape threats on Twitter then this is inevitably going to stress you and make you feel somewhat unhappy or unsafe. But if you are a 14-year-old, or otherwise particularly vulnerable, then they may cause acute depression or suicide.

This Act isn't about antivaxxers or climate change deniers. It is about revenge porn and vicious cyberbullying, and I am not prepared to stand up for either.

Umm no, it's not very thin. There's a gargantuan difference between posting something on Twitter and murdering someone.

It isn't tolerated, but there is no recourse for response. Words said on the streets can be met with physical response, meaning directly removing the offending individual by force, or even physically harming them for their behavior.

Words said online can only be met by moderator response, which is always delayed, easily shrugged off and rarely an actual punishment.

Okay that is a very weird response.

I feel like I need to state that shooting someone over a verbal disagreement is obviously wrong and obviously would be inappropriate and would obviously reflect negatively on the moral standards and character of the person doing the shooting, and it would obviously be appropriate to view someone who was willing to shoot someone over a passing insult negatively or at the very least to say they may have some issues.

And I don't like the vague insinuation here that lower-income Americans are inherently violent or that crime/violence within lower-income communities is culturally motivated.

> My point is that the internet is already an extremely private place.

Saying that you don't see a set of privacy violations as relevant or worth caring about is a lot different than saying that the Internet is private. The Internet is not private and you're not denying in any of these threads that the privacy violations people are bringing up exist -- you're saying they don't matter and that the Internet is private enough. Be careful not to confuse your personal standards about how private the Internet should be with more neutral descriptions about what risks do or don't exist online.

> and that’s stupid and insulting.

Be careful, I've been told that's apparently fighting words ;)

What do you have that demonstrates that they're even in our community?

> Internet geeks have weird and sadistic ways of dispensing "justice." That's unfortunate, but even worse is what they decide to point their magnifying glass at.

Not "Internet geeks". Anonymous mobs of dubious maturity and intelligence have weird and sadistic ways of dispensing "justice", on and off the internet.

This is not unique to technology, it's not unique to women, it's not unique to issues of sexism, and it's not unique to Twitter.

As I've noted numerous times in this thread, Olivia Wilde, an actress, received similarly hateful and disgusting Twitter messages for daring to insult Justin Beiber, a pop musician whose primary fanbase seems to be pre-teens and teens.

Something tells me that the people that were offended enough to send hate mail and treets were not angry "internet geeks".

In the context of this discussion, about an article about online harassment, this is a very disingenuous straw man. Yes, there are other problems in the world, but this isn't the forum to debate them.