You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
> Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.
> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?
That is a completely accurate description of that screenshot IMO. Even if the guy who posted it was making phone calls to get thugs to beat people up and hoping they'd take it further, that post is still clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat. This is "96% of serial killers have used bread" stuff.
