[anigbrowl]

blocking exposure to the speech could have serious unintended consequences. It could people unaware of specific threats and expose them to harm.

'ignoring the trolls' suffers from precisely the same problem - more so, as passive awareness of the threat may be construed as acceptance thereof by the threatening party. Basically you're placing the burden of assessing severity on the recipient and removing any leverage they have to mitigate it once they're aware of it.

Do not suggest 'report it to the police' or I will start linking cases in which people did that, were ignored, and were then murdered - at which point the free speech evangelists are nowhere to be found.

[travisoneill1]

> at which point the free speech evangelists are nowhere to be found

I'll let you skip that step. Since the vast majority of cases are false positives and police don't have the resources to follow up on all of them, it is inevitable that your example will happen. There is no such thing as a 0% failure rate. Your dismissal of the report to police option because it is not 100% effective is too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

[anigbrowl]

Sounds like we're quite some way from an 0% failure rate. 11% of a population of murder victims (n=231) had a restraining order in place against their killer at the time of the homicide. Although only a small number of all the restraining orders issued result in homicide, courts in one state found that domestic violence restraining orders were violated about 1/3 of the time, whilers self-reported a total closer to 60%.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18523113

http://extras.denverpost.com/news/violence/viol0912.htm

'too ridiculous to be taken seriously' - I'll put hard data up against epistemological hand-waving any day of the week. I fact-check my claims before I state them publicly.