Dear Mr. President,

Online threats encase the world-wide web like they’re viruses. They can seriously make someone suffer due to the feeling of anxiety and concern if it truly will happen. Also, certain people attract more threats than others, those that speak up will expect more violence directed at them. Everyone doesn’t seem to know the safe and efficient way of stopping this would be to enforce a specific law.

In “Hate crimes in Cyberspace” it states, “Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse.” A lot of people are very familiar with this, but being targetted never crosses their mind. When faced with this type of a situation, it can cause anxiety for the victim. For someone in this wide world to be targeted with violent and terrifying threats and by someone they might’ve met or seen is indeed terrifying. It also doesn’t make you feel any safer knowing law enforcement won’t help unless it’s a large scale one. In “Enforce Existing Laws to Combat Online Threats,” it states how law enforcement doesn’t take this matter seriously at all. They believe it’s all just talk and silly rants. They’ll only care about large scale threats rather than the ones everyday people experience.

However, in court you can’t exactly file charges on someone who threatened you. For instance, the prosecutor, Kym Worthy, won’t file charges against three men who have threatened officers. Kym Worthy states that “another agency can review the cases and charge the men.” The reason why is due to a lack of evidence and poor investigation and though the posts were disturbing you need beyond a reasonable doubt in a court.

Hereby, I suggest we enforce a certain law. There is a law that states it is a crime to threaten bodily injury to another person, whether it’s as a threat or not.

Signed,

A student.