Bad Ideas
What Happens When You Tweet a Death Threat to the President?
Quite possibly the worst tweet you can send
Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do, and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make.
Every day, millions of people go on Twitter and tweet bad things. People pretend to be an orange juice brand with depression, or engage in fantasies about elected officials. Others tweet bad opinions so that they can write newspaper columns about being yelled at for their bad opinions. There is, however, one bad tweet that’s worse than all the rest, and it’s just six words: “I want to kill the president.”
So what happens if you tweet a death threat to the president?
Before we go any further, let’s just be unequivocal here: You should not, under any circumstances, post death threats online, or off, including one directed at the president. Please don’t do it.
Posting threats against the president is also against the law. Title 18, section 871 of the United States Code explicitly prohibits “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States…
