Re:How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-...
by MBCook on Monday March 20, 2017 @09:37PM
(#13919107)
The only thing I can point to us this is one of the few cases where some piece of atrocious online harassment actually ended up with someone being held accountable in anyway. There have been plenty of cases of death threats and bomb threats and other such things that didn't seem to trigger any kind of real response.
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Re:How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-...
by just2n on Monday March 20, 2017 @10:14PM
(#13919310)
They typically don't qualify as criminal threats in those cases. The FBI does investigate quite a few of these and I've seen more than a few from FOIAs that don't result in arrests because they fall short of being criminal. I'm still surprised at just how often nothing is done about swatting.
I find this case interesting. While it's far beyond acceptable or fair play even in good fun and trolling to do something like sending someone who suffers from epilepsy a gif known to trigger a seizure, it's being classed as stalking in this case. I'm curious to see the evidence and what precedent this sets, because it seems like a stretch to call it stalking from what I understand of this case, which is admittedly not too much.
A good side effect of this is that hopefully it prompts companies to provide better protections against this, because it's rather unique in terms of medical conditions interacting with technology and has a lot of potential to cause harm.
Re:How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-...
by a_bonobo on Monday March 20, 2017 @09:47PM
(#13919160)
Isn't it way easier now to find harassers on Twitter because Twitter made a telephone number linked to the account mandatory in some (all?) cases?
Re:How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-...
by TheSpiceIsLife on Monday March 20, 2017 @09:44PM
(#13919142)
Good point.
Maybe there are many other cases but they go under- / un-reported?