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Death Threats and Online Content Moderation
Death threats, on the face it, appear to be exactly the sort of content that an online platform ought to censor – or ‘moderate’, as the preferred and obscuring term has it. Surely it is impermissible to threaten someone’s life and surely it is appropriate for online spaces like Facebook – or now Meta – to remove such speech.
But what if the statement isn’t really an urge towards violence, nor a declaration of one’s intent to kill? Sometimes, when people make death threats, say to dictators, might that really be more of a political slogan or a form of critique? What if there is no intent…
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