The land of the free and the home of the brave and your right to be a louse is protected underneath the law. Just because someone wishes you were dead does not mean they want you dead. When you are a blogger with raging personality like “Joe My God” creator, Joe Jervis, you have to expect some uppercuts to the chin every now and then.
Joe Jervis has received some so-called “shocking” tweets in response to the tweets that he put out this weekend mentioning the FRC shooting in our nation’s capital. It seems where others have great sympathy about the ordeal “Joe My God” had other feelings to express.
Now to be fair, Joe Jervis was not responding to the shooting but to the reaction from all those playing the blame game, trying to shift some attention and responsibility onto the SPLC, saying that the situation stemmed from the FRC being on the advocacy group’s “hate-organization” watch list. But, when it comes to twitter people, wishing death on a person by misunderstanding is good enough.
Joe Jervis was tweeted pictures of someone hanging from a crane implying they can’t wait to see the "go-hard" writer's life ending in such fashion. According to The Advocate, when Jervis presented the evidence of such a threat Twitter responded:
"We have a policy against violent threats, but the content of this account lacks the specificity to meet the criteria of an actionable threat. Receiving these types of messages can be frustrating; however, removing content does not resolve the issue, but instead can make the situation worse,
Twitter-folks have proverbially killed off or threatens to kill more people than the holocaust. Every time you are on Twitter someone either wants you dead or believes you deserve death. Remember the situation that people kept tweeting out “RIP Bill Cosby?” Mr. Cosby had to make a formal plea for everyone to stop tweeting that message because it upset his family. People really believed he was dead and if your family believes twitter-people before they call your cell phone to find out, there is a problem.
Officials at Twitter were probably thinking the same thing we all were thinking. Take your lumps like a man. When you take on a writing voice that has no “godly” or “turn the other cheek” personality, you have to expect to get back what you give. That is like a being a boxer and not expecting to get hit. If you want that type of job then go into cake-baking.
Twitter has no sympathy for those that tweet unsympathetic statements and with so many users sending their 140-characters or less messages, your skin has to be tough as leather. The twitter universe is hard to police and most of the time you have to take any implied threats as a grain of salt. So, if you expect Twitter to give any special concern to your “special” death threat, you better think again.
Joe, my god, just say “what the hell” and move on.
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