The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide if threats made on social media are credible threats. Anthony Elonis was convicted of making threats to his estranged wife, an FBI agent. He appealed to the Supreme Court contending that under the Constitution and the federal threat statute, a jury must find not just that a reasonable person would interpret the words as threatening, but that he actually intended his words to be threatening.
So are threats on social media credible? We talk about this with Catherine Cerulli, director of the Susan B. Anthony Center and the Laboratory for Interpersonal Violence, and Scott Malouf, an attorney who specializes in evidence derived from social media.