Women are being threatened with violence, rape and death. Even if these are not threats people intend to carry out, to those receiving them they are deeply distressing. The threats are meant to intimidate and silence. Why should anyone put up with that?
They shouldn't. Some comments are obviously unacceptable. That's easy. The problem is, as always, where do you draw the line?
It's the comments at the margins of "acceptability" that are the most difficult to deal with and where the arguments of censorship are sure to come from. "You know it when you see it" is not easy to apply.
Threats of unlawful violence. This isn't hard.
> It's the comments at the margins
The US legal system is pretty explicitly biased towards defendants in gray areas, and most marginal cases will never be prosecuted or be thrown out by the judge.
Those that make it through to trial will have a jury determine whether a comment is a threat beyond reasonable doubt, and then the trial judge and at least two appellate judges will have to agree that the jury's verdict was not unreasonable.
Depending on the precise posture of the case, there are tens of judges and an army of clerks beyond that who may see the case cross their desks and provide at least cursory review.
And US courts pay very, very close attention to criminal cases based on speech.
I'm sure Twitter, its users and the legal system are just dying to have marginal cases decided by the courts.
What you've described is the problem I was referring to. One person says one thing, another says something else. A third party has to make the decision on whether it's acceptable or not. That's cumbersome, not very clear cut, and leads to one disgruntled party or at least some controversy.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
£385 and £600 costs.
The general idea is not worthless, but it's disconnected from reality.
The problem is that any system that could be used to prevent people from making rape threats on the Internet could and inevitably would be used to silence various forms of dissent. We have seen this sort of thing before:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitz...
Yes, Apple is the same as Walmart in laying the dead hand of censorship on popular culture with the aim of increasing its own profits, but in most cases, there is not a legal compulsion to do so.
Otherwise, you've invented a hypothetical problem leading to a hypothetical event.
I would have been happier if it had been handled with an investigation and warning and not make it to prosecution, but as far as I'm concerned, the guy deserved some nontrivial inconvenience. I'm kind of ambivalent about the fact that the conviction was quashed.
He wasn't even sent to prison. He was fined. I don't think that's a wholly unreasonable way for society to say "don't do that".
I think content platforms like twitter do have a responsibility to make their spaces reasonably safe for their users. This means not allowing one user to make threats against another.
There's a difference between hoping bad something might happen to someone, and threatening to rape them, come round to their house and stab them or telling them you've planted a bomb on their car. Would you argue otherwise?