The Supreme Court just made the Web even more hostile for women

You have to mean it before it's a crime. So said the Supreme Court in a ruling about online threats of violence. The opinion reverses a lower court's conviction of a man who fantasized on Facebook about killing his ex-wife. That may ease the fear many of us have about inadvertently putting something on the Internet that gets misconstrued. But the finding is a major setback for those trying to make the Web a less hateful and hostile place, particularly for women. Women are subject to tremendous amounts of harassment online. It's on Periscope. It's on blogs. It has forced some women to flee their homes. It's unfair, pervasive and seemingly unstoppable, though not for lack of trying. Entire teams of people -- the New Republic once called them Deciders -- now help tech companies police hateful speech with a mix of human oversight and computer algorithms.

If the Supreme Court had ruled the other way, it wouldn't have necessarily eased the burden on these folks. But it might have offered them, the perpetrators and the victims of hate speech a bit more guidance. The case's outcome instead places even greater responsibility on tech companies to figure out strong harassment policies on their own, and on the people who write and struggle to enforce them judiciously, often on a case-by-case basis. To require that victims be convinced of a genuine threat and to prove they're not imagining it is an impossible ask. It's basically a request for mind-reading, for threat recipients to get inside their terrorizers' heads. This might not be a problem if, as a rule, everyone on the Internet treated one another like decent human beings and nobody ever maligned anyone. But that is not the Internet we know. Our Internet is often filled with hostility, harassment and bigotry. And the fact that many of its users -- particularly women -- are regularly forced to deal with it should give us pause before we celebrate too loudly our newly upheld freedom to make threats against them.