You could probably just make an example out of a couple of particularly bad threats every 3 months and reduce the number of threats significantly with that. The question is what does that actually achieve? A couple of people will simply turn to Tor or similar services, while others might post less but still kill people. It might rob law enforcement of the ability to develop some sort of system that can sort through the noise and prevent a few of these incidents in the future.

I doubt that would change much.

And law enforcement does thwart these kinds of attacks on a fairly regular basis, we just don’t hear about them as much. The same day that El Paso occurred, the FBI arrested a kid in Lubbock who was trying to obtain an assault weapon with the intent to perpetrate a mass shooting[0]. It’s not like the feds are totally incapable.

Like it or not, relying on sigint from social media isn’t going to stop many of these attacks. 8chan is full of trolls who parrot off one another, there’s just no reliable way to determine who’s just trolling and who is serious.

Our gun laws and the purchasing loopholes that exist desperately need to be addressed.

0: https://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Feds-Texas-man-planning-ma...

They don't need to process all of them, just a relatively small number of public examples.

Sweden has a reality TV show whit that very premise and it is called trollhunters. They choose a hate comment and then proceed to locate and confront the author. When done they also sometimes help the target of the hate, by example helping them filling a police report.

The show is followed with vigilantist justice as the people they locate usually end up receiving a lot of harassment from the public, and the benefit of making examples of people has not had any effect in decreasing hate messages online.

An interesting side note is that when you actually go after hate messages online, the gender stereotype of young male start to melt and you get a new stereotype. It is people with a lot of free time and who feel ignored by society. A typical example is thus middle age women.

However turning that hate towards going on a killing spree is unlikely for a middle age woman even if they say things like "someone should go down there and kill everyone", so there is a high rate of noise-to-massacre.

A lot of people who feel powerless use very strong language precisely because they feel like nothing they do matters. They often don't really mean it literally and wouldn't say it if they actually felt like anyone listened to anything they said.

They basically exaggerate their real desire, hoping that if they express their feelings strongly enough, it might lead to some very small action because their experience is that they are mostly not taken seriously and what they say mostly makes no impact. This is probably true of a lot of middle aged women.

I don't approve of the vigilante model, it just increases the general animosity in society. I'd rather there be public prosecutions of violence-advocating speech through the legal process.