Hey guys Small articles about this 14 year old girl have been circulating round the 'net lately, so presumably most of you will have seen something. I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on the topic. I've been reading the comments on different news feeds and opinion seems very divided. Here's the tweet that got her into trouble: Follow up article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...joke-terror-threat-to-airline-on-Twitter.html What do you guys think? Is it reasonable she was arrested for trolling? Or is this the authorities taking themselves too seriously? Do you think legal action should be taken against trolls as a rule of thumb or not? And lastly, if this had been your daughter, what would you have done?
You know, she probably listens to Justin Beiber so she deserves anything that happens to her. People shouldn't be allowed to make threats online of this nature. It's different if I say I'm going to kick your butt and I'm not even in the same country, totally different when you're threatening international means of travel, or if you mention a state building or place of work. If this were my daughter I would make her say 50 Heil Merikuh's in the mirror and lock her in the closet for a year. (Joking, about the closet part)
I couldn't have said it better. Trolling is one thing but making comments like that kinda falls under the same category of calling in false 911 emergencies, fake bomb threats, and even pulling the fire alarm.
Face to face people get shot for carrying fake guns. I can't see that this is much better. She's foolish and I'm not saying she should suffer any ill fate, but we are responsible for our own actions.
Very reasonable response. I hate trolls with a vengeance, whether they 14 or 44. Social media is making kids these days think they're untouchable. I'd like to see her fined for the cost of the investigation, too.
At 14 years old you know right from wrong. She was clearly aware of what she was saying and was trying to provoke a reaction. Well she got one. Legal action absolutely must be taken against her but what that could constitute would be the subject of another debate. I wonder if the family she was brought up with allow this sort of behaviour or even encourage it. General behavioural patterns stem from family. In my honest opinion if it were my daughter i'd be severely dissapointed. My little girl has never let me down and this isn't something i could see her ever doing but if this scenario did arise my dissapoinment would resonate within her and i'd let her know how dissapointed i was in this behaviour. Again because of the way i try to raise my kids this situation would be avoided. My daughter is very much a daddys girl and my dissaproval would be enough. Baza
If someone wrote a letter or made a phone call threatening a terrorist atrocity then it would be taken very seriously, so it's incredibly naive of her to think that a tweet wouldn't be taken equally seriously. Like Van Zandt said, some kids seem to think that they are untouchable, so I hope that this case sends out a very clear message that there are consequences to anything you say online, and that it isn't just a bit of harmless fun. 'Cyberspace' is part of the real world, even if it seems a little hard to believe at times.
I don't know squat about Dutch law, but I'd be very surprised if legal action wasn't possible. Whether it would be considered appropriate is another matter. In this country, children can be tried for murder, for example. Obviously there is a seperate legal system for juveniles, and the punishments are not on the same scale as for adults, but there is no general exemption from punishment on the basis of age, if that makes sense. Edit: sorry, I seem to have completely mis-read your question. So I'll try again... At fourteen years of age she probably doesn't have enough money to make fining her worthwhile. They could probably fine her parents, but I'm not sure that that would serve any real purpose. I think that the girl herself has to be seen as the one punished. Any kid with a grudge against mummy and daddy could post something nasty on t'interweb and get them in trouble. Locking her up would probably be possible, but might be a bit extreme. Just going to court would probably scare the living daylights out of her, so the only real purpose that imprisoning her would serve would be to hopefully act as a deterrent to other teenagers.
This is not trolling. This is just beyond stupid. Trolling is when you lead people along making them think one thing and then tell them something that is contrary or unexpected. Like when someone calls a Christian hotline to find out about what to do during end of days and then telling them that they are Jewish. Andy Kaufman was the greatest troll that ever lived. Calling or tweeting threats ( and/or obscenities in other cases) is just really dumb. It's not the least bit funny. While I do believe that this was a stupid mistake on her part, I do hope that she learns from this.
I think its dumb. Its quite obviously not true, albeit it is a stupid comment. I can appreciate comments like that being flagged but the idea of being prosecuted for it isn't something I can get behind. This is even less of a threat than that guy who joked he was going to blow a terminal up if it got any slower. Clearly jokes. Whether they're funny or in bad taste is irrelevant. I've made a joke on facebook before about going columbine on my old workplace once because I was bored as hell and having a crappy day. It happens. People make these jokes in real life and the line's have blurred between face to face conversation and social media. The amount of people making rape threats and the like on the internet and the person getting arrested is a young girl clearly making a joke. I think that's rather stupid.
I agree that this didn't sound like a threat that anyone would be likely to take very seriously, but there wil be other cases which are less clear cut. So who decides which ones to ignore and which ones to investigate? Where do you draw the line between (a) the obvious joke, (b) the ambigious joke/threat, and (c) the obvious threat? Who is responsible for monitoring these and making the distinction? Perhaps it's better to simply have a blanket ban on making terrorist threats, real or 'funny'?
The ones that can spell the group they're supposedly from? The ones where you can check their past history (we know that information's already on file and only a few clicks away) and see if it looks even remotely like they're a terrorist sympathizer? I think my opinion on this comes from two main areas: The first one which I don't expect people to agree with me on is I'm one of those guys who opposes government oversight and limitation on the internet. The second though is that I think if someone wants to commit a terrorist act, firstly I assume they don't post it on twitter in advance, then its going to happen. You can't really prevent a well thought out and executed attack. The effects of it come down to what you do afterwards. Much the same as how the airport people started sexually assaulting everyone after 9/11 (which incidentally made airports a much more lucrative target seeing as how it increased queue times) then if you decide to prosecute everyone who makes a dumb comment on the internet on the off chance that one of them in every few hundred if not more might actually be planning to do something then I think you've lost before the attacks even happen. Which to my understanding is the entire point of terrorism. The amount of people who actually die in terrorist attacks is hideously disproportionate to the amount of panic it causes. I'm not trying to say people dying isn't bad, but look for example at the Boston Marathon bombing. There was no way to have prevented that attack and the coverage afterwards was insane. Innocent people had their lives massively disrupted by false accusations, news covered the search for the other dude non stop with barely any other thing happening across the rest of the globe getting so much as a mention, and even after the guy was arrested people were flipping their crap about how he should be tried. All that over an explosion that killed a couple of people. edit: Ironically that sort of attention is exactly why these sort of jokes are a thing. They created such a huge culture of fame and freak out over terrorist actions that actual terrorists can be inspired knowing they'll get their infamy, and jokers will know it will cause a reaction. If there was a media blackout over terrorism instead of making it centre stage for the next few weeks I doubt this tweet would've ever been made. I appreciate this has turned into a general rant about terrorists winning but I'm trying to get my point across that to me this just smacks of a hideously over reactive society to the idea of terrorism if we're justifying arresting a clearly joking 14 year old because ohmygod terrorism. This is without even taking this into the levels of how America will arrest a clearly joking 14 year old for making a joke about blowing up an airport on twitter, an over reaction to a threat of future violence, but refuses to do anything on gun control to counter actual violence that has happened and continues to happen on a much larger scale with far, far, far larger casualty rates than terrorism. I appreciate there's brits saying they support this too so its not purely an American thing, but its another point that's bugging me when I think about this.
That's an accepted spelling of Al Qaeda. The airline doesn't have to do any of those things, a threat was made, they have to report it, just in case So you're cool with the distribution of child pornography? Calling in a bomb threat used to be standard operating procedure for terrorist groups. America hasn't done anything to this 14 year old girl.
This is beyond stupid. Especially, straight afterwards, she stated she was joking and is scared. What exactly was she charged with? She couldn't spell Al Qaeda correctly. This seems a little fishy to me. She's a Dutch girl in Rotterdam, what jurisdiction do the FBI have here? I'm left a little confused. Great job police! Waste taxpayers money on 14 year old obvious trolls, instead of solving every day crimes. *facepalm*
How did you get from limitations on the internet to distribution of child pornography? How are they even remotely the same? Even without limitations child pornography is illegal.
Which I've said I'm fine with. Its the follow up arrest I'm in disagreement with. -sigh- I knew that answer was coming. Can we assume that when I say I don't like government oversight I'm referring to stopping people saying what they want, not that I'm condoning that sort of thing? If it helps I also oppose groups that organize female genital mutilation, organizing murders, and planning to beat up girl scouts for their cookie money. If you can't use common sense enough to notice the difference between making lame bad taste jokes on the internet and propping up pedophile rings then do me a favor and just don't reply to my posts. And I'm assuming it was called it by groups/people who didn't have the standard account of a 14 year old girl? Out of interest how many of those called in threats were stopped because of the call in? Yep that's my mistake. I got caught up mid-rant in it being American Airlines.
This. I doubt the fine will happen, but the arrest and investigation alone would be enough to terrify most teenagers. That said, anyone remember the guy who tweeted about Fabrice Muamba who was jailed for the best part of 2 months IIRC? If I remember correctly then, the judge wanted to make an example of him to internet trolls everywhere. I wouldn't be entirely surprised or saddened if something similar happened here. Yup. I've read a fair few comments about she was "just blowing steam" and "just being a teenager". The thing is, people are prone to panic. They're also prone to do stupid stuff when they panic. If that had escalated, it wouldn't be a case of "oh yeah, just having fun" any more and I think she needs to understand how stupid her comments were. I haven't heard anything concrete on this one, but the general suggestion seems to be that she tried to hide it from her parents. I wouldn't be surprised if she did this off her own back though, given the rebellious nature of most hormonal teenagers. Ouch, that would hurt. I'm in the position I know my daughter enough to know she's not dumb enough to do something like that now and I'd hope she'd never try. But I know she's sure as hell lose most of her electronic device privileges in the process if she did do something like that. Especially if it got her arrested. Lol Now you mention it, if I'd found social media when I was younger and it was as big as it is now, I'd probably have done some ridiculously stupid stuff myself. #selfie.
