Why Online Harassment Is Still Ruining Lives -- And How We Can Stop It

In 2010, Anthony Elonis threatened his estranged wife by writing rants on his Facebook page such as, "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." For making these threats, a federal district court sentenced him to more than three years in prison. On June 1, the Supreme Court voided that conviction, explaining that the standard the court had used to judge whether Elonis's threats were "true threats" was not sufficient. The district court had asked jurors to consider only whether the threats would cause a reasonable person to be afraid. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that juries should also consider whether the defendant intended to make a true threat.

The ruling will make it more difficult than ever to prosecute the authors of online death and rape threats. But for people disappointed by that decision, there was one promising aspect to the ruling, and it has more to do with what the court didn’t say than what it did: "It implicitly suggests that threats online are no different [than threats made via other interstate communication methods]," said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland who has studied online harassment since 2007. "The Court was invited to address that question, and declined." By not drawing a distinction between threats made online and threats made in other ways, the court implied that both should be handled the same way.