A few years back, I came across a horrifying post on an image sharing website. There were several photos of a minor, some in a bathing suit, but none explicitly of pornographic or sexual nature. Disturbing but the real horror in this particular post came in what the title/caption said. The poster simply wrote “she’s _ years old. I am going to kidnap, torture, r_pe, m_lest, impr_gnate, and then brutally m_rder her”. Those were pretty much the exact words from what I remember (except they wrote the actual words). I reported it immediately but it was deleted by the time I tried going back to the post. Never has something I’ve seen given me the creeps so much. I still think about that post often and truly hope the victim and poster were identified.
If they did track that person down, Would this be criminal considering the threat(s) weren’t made directly to the subject/victim and he never explicitly stated her identity? Posting these threats as a caption to a series of pictures should be clear enough intent, right? I get state laws differ but wouldn’t this likely fall under federal law? If not, surely this could at least be tried as obscenity?
