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Using emojii can result in criminal charges

psionl0

Skeptical about skeptics
psionl0
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Sep 29, 2010
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When I was a teenager, my friends and I would sometimes make hand grenade throwing gestures when we passed our old high school. It never occurred to us that the police might be paranoid enough to view that as a criminal act.

We live in different times today:
A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using emoji🔫🔪. She’s not alone.

........................

The 12-year-old from Fairfax, Va., has been charged with threatening her school after police said she posted a message on Instagram in December laden with gun, bomb and knife emojis.
Click to expand...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...minal-charges-for-using-emoji-shes-not-alone/
 
Unfortunately, the site thinks I've seen too many articles to not demand a subscription before seeing more. Unfortunately, the chance for advertising doesn't seem to be enough anymore for news outlets.

So... let me just say that I'd like to use that emoji when this happens.
 
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From the looks of it, context is involved. Just the addition of "meet me in the library," which the emoji set augmented sort of suggests to me that there actually was a reference to violence at school. I also haven't seen the full context of the conversation. There could even be social contexts amongst the peer group that does not appear in the online setting.

So yeah... "emoji use" being the cause is a bit off. It's not the method of saying it that is the issue here. It's the message itself and what it was intended to convey -- probably in jest, but keep in mind that the Columbine duo were reputedly laughing their butts off all the way through the event, and their journals seemed to have a lot of humor in them. Something being a joke and a sincere threat aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
 
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As far as I'm concerned if it's a crime to "make threats" the medium, language and form of communication shouldn't matter as the law should cover all forms of communication.

The important issue would seemingly be that someone threatens someone or something with violence and harm, not that they used morse code or sign language to do so.
 
I saw this coming. The big push toward getting females in STEM. Now we have a girl using a computer to threaten someone. Doesn't the Koran warn us about this?
 
Why shouldn't certain emojii be considered threats? They are symbols, just as words are. If I (knife through a heart) you, then is this very different from saying that I want to stab you in the heart (especially when used in a matching context rather than a paragraph stating that you broke my heart)? Same with pictures- an angry note to a Black guy attached to a picture of a lynching is clearly a threat.

Sometimes people seem to think that a threat sent through the Internet is not a threat. No, the Internet is just another means of communication. Of course a threat sent to someone in a country 5000 miles away is less likely to be realized than is a threat to someone upstairs, but whether sent by computer or post office doesn't change the nature of the threat itself. In many ways the apparent anonymity of the Internet makes it easier for people to sent threats, but also makes the threats more frightening.
 
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