What't the Deal With People Who Send Anonymous Threats? I Don't Know Either But I Take a Look at the Problem

You can never get through the news anymore without reading about people getting death threats. Some of them are graphic and specific. Some of them mention killing or harming family members. Others say that the recipient or a spouse or daughter will or should be raped. There are people who receive dozens, hundreds even thousands of these.

Recipients include politicians, whistle-blowers (how dare you reveal the truth!), victims of alleged crimes (how dare you accuse the perpetrators of the crime!) some are activists health care workers and some are athletes or coaches or the kin of an athlete or coach. This is one of the stranger ones. Threatening someone because they miss-kicked a ball.

I’m staggered by the sheer number of people who issue such threats. It’s not a handful of kooks. It’s one helluva lot of kooks, spread out all over the country and the rest of the world.

I’m curious about the mindset of these people. Some are surely angry about what their target did or didn’t do and the best way to tell someone they upset you is by saying that they should be killed. I imagine others think they can intimidate the recipient into changing their behavior or beliefs. 

I would venture to guess that the main consequences of receiving a death threat can be anything from irritation to crippling fear. Is that what threateners want to do? Scare people? What’s the point? You’ve made someone nervous and frightened. Maybe caused serious anxiety. Are you proud of that? Is it mission accomplished? Really, is this the way to make the world a better place?

What kind of people send death threats? They come from all ideologies from all parts of the world. What do these people have in common? I would imagine one thing is cowardice. They are certainly not brave enough to confront someone in person, if they had the chance. 

These are doubtless powerless people — as many of us are or at least feel. It’s a way of “doing” something. You’re angry about someone has done. It may be a celebrity, it may be a woman alleging rape, it may be state senator. What can you do? You have no influence in a situation that strikes a nerve in you. So telling the person that they should be tortured and killed must feel like “doing something.” It also gets the anger out of your system — or it least is intended to.

Of course a lot of concentrated threats on one person can sometimes have an effect. Maybe the person will withdraw from the campaign, or drop their lawsuit or not print the rest of the story out of fear for their or their family’s lives. Is this the way to accomplish change? Win over opponents? Using the truth, logic, reasoning or  persuading must seem useless or too difficult.

Threatening an athlete for a mistake in a match is a really bizarre one. Don’t you think the person feels bad enough as it is? How does it help to tell them that they should be dead? 

I notice that people like the idea of punishing people for their mistakes. I recall my college football team losing a close game. A running back had fumbled the ball away in a key moment. A lot of people in an online forum were suggesting that in the next practices he should have to run extra wind sprints to teach him a lesson. I wondered if they thought that the player was unaware of the costliness of his miscue and that it was something he should avoid in future. Maybe they thought the coaches wouldn’t know how to instruct him in better ball security so that punishing him was the only answer.

I’d still like to know who these people are who send threatening emails, texts, social media posts and the like. There must be a helluva lot of them who walk among us as regular people. Our neighbors, co-workers, bus drivers, grocery clerks, lawyers maybe. Who knows?

Question: Do I think the prevalence of anonymous death threats tells us something disturbing about human nature generally, or something more specific about the culture we've created through social media? Answer: Death threats predate the internet age, they are a tale as old as time. What the internet has done is make it easy to send a lot of such messages and to send them anonymously. Indeed anonymity is key to the existence of those who threaten. If they had to sign their missives and include their contact information….well, there’d be an awfully significant drop in such threats.

I’m kind of stuck here. There seems little that can be done about the problem. Maybe if we could improve the public discourse — difficult to do in the age of Trumpy. I’m sometimes struck by how easy it is to send threatening messages online. Can something be done about that without inhibiting free speech? 

I got a threatening message once. It was generic and thus pretty easy to ignore. But getting lots of them with some specificity would be a different matter. I don’t know that it would scare me but it might depress me. Maybe just what the sender wants.

Honestly I don’t know how to end this. It’s not something you can put a smiley face on. It seems out of my ken to offer a solution. In many ways we live in a sad world filled with sad people who do awful things. Inexplicable things. 

Here's a thought. How about we counter death threats by sending people "life promises." A little note to someone we don't know telling them that they are valued and wishing them all the best. Might try that.