Last night I hopped on Twitter to see the reaction to the Zimmerman verdict, and was not particularly surprised to see a number of death threats and other threats of violence. Here are a few of them:
Here is a blowup of the picture he had:
This fella has since protected his tweets. But he did get this positive feedback from someone else eager to go kill Zimmerman:
This nice gentleman has established a Facebook page where he is soliciting pledges to kill Zimmerman:
Here is the Facebook page, which I assume will be deleted in due course, so I am providing this screenshot:
Still more:
And more:
And more:
And more:
In case there is any doubt about what is meant here, the user helpfully clarified:
Many of the tweets have been deleted, whether by the users or by Twitter, so we are having to make do with screenshots. If any of the embeds above disappear, let me know, and I will replace them with screenshots.
You might wonder why I am giving these people attention. The main reason is because I would like law enforcement to give them attention. Several of these tweets strike me as true threats that should lead to an arrest.
Anyone interested in learning these people’s true identities and reporting them to law enforcement, go ahead. I have little faith that law enforcement will do anything, because law enforcement doesn’t seem to care about anything that happens on the Internet unless the President himself is being threatened. But if anyone decides to make a report, I am preserving some of the evidence right here.
In addition, the comments are revealing about our culture. There were many, many more tweets along the lines of “I hope Zimmerman will be killed” — such as this tweet:
Or this:
I couldn’t possibly embed or screenshot them all.
Why are people reacting like this? Well, in large part, it’s because many people are just terrible people. But there is one factor contributing to the way people feel: Big Media.
Let’s be thankful that, so far, Big Media’s rank distortions about this case have not resulted in riots, but just a lot of threats on Twitter and Facebook.
. . . at least so far.
UPDATE: Twitchy has an excellent and distressing roundup of threats to kill Zimmerman jurors.
UPDATE x2: Twitchy has also collected several other threats to kill Zimmerman here and here. There are more reactions to the charming tweet by “Gunzo” in the latter link.
