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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

It feels like people still minimize pretty awful actions when they happen over the internet.

Imagine someone running up to someone with epilepsy in public and showing them strobes? What sort of deranged person does that?

Imagine someone sending death threats through snail mail over and over. Of course that's horrific! But brigaders doing it through twitter is kinda fine because "hey, you're on twitter, stupid stuff happens".

So much harassement is extremely cruel but we (myself included) tend to discount it when it happens over social media.

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Yeah, I found that I was doing this myself. I think it's because I was always posing myself the what-ifs of "well, you could just be accidentally sending something that would trigger it...", but the law can deal with intent where most software and programing problems simply can't. Where it is clear the intent was to cause harm, we should absolutely treat these things with as much seriousness as any other attempt to harm another person.

> but the law can deal with intent

How do you come to this conclusion?

So from this and your comments I take it you took it to mean they can know intent, when it's clear they can't. They can however investigate and get a pretty good idea. Software is limited to mostly instant decisions by automated process - a far cry from a court case and an investigation by professionals.

Come on, don't be dragging the discussion down like this.

If you've got something to say about mens rea, then say it.

The law can deal with "what some judge/jury conjectures that the intent might be", but it cannot deal with intent. But this weaker statement sounds like it might be implemented in software, too.

Did you read the articles?

The suspect tweeted "I know he has epilepsy" and "I hope he dies."

But sure, a judge and jury could only possibly conjecture about intent…

I read the article. The only thing that we know is (under the weak assumption that it was indeed written by him) he claimed this was his intent.

The difference is the ability to follow through with the threat. If someone sends you a mail, they have your address. If someone does it over twitter, they probably don't know where you live.

Are we going to throw 5 year olds in jail when they tell an adult male they hope they die? No, we're going to apply the same level of doctrine, how likely is it that the 5 year old can carry through with the threat?

There were a lot of nasty comments on fb on the Vice article, saying he deserved it etc.

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