What might sound a bit exaggerating by the current free-speech standards, violence threats posted on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) have formed the basis of a court case between a hip-hop artist and the United States government.
Anthony Elonis posted threats against his ex-wife on Facebook and, after coming under the legal scanner, later claimed that these threats were rap lyrics. Elonis started a string of posts on Facebook with violent message and threats addressed to his wife and the FBI investigator approaching his house.
One of his posts included a message,
“There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts. Hurry up and die, bitch, so I can bust this nut all over your corpse from atop your shallow grave.”
Not only this but he later wrote a post saying,
“Tell [my son] he should dress up as matricide for Halloween. I don’t know what his costume would entail though. Maybe [my ex-wife’s] head on a stick?”
After receiving multiple threats over Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) social network, Elonis’s wife took a protective order from the court in 2010 and Elonis was charged with multiple felonies that include “any threat to injure the person of another.” Elonis was charged with a 44-months sentence out of which he has served three.
A court hearing would commence on December 1 for overturning Elonis’s conviction. While talking about the case, John Elwood, lawyer representing Elonis, said,
“There are all types of different speech that are different from what we might be used to and what jurors might be used to. He meant this as a way of working through all of the stress that he was under and all the bad things that had happened.”
This article has been written by Prakash Pandey.
