[AmericanChopper]

News outlets have been doing this since long before Twitter was a thing. Any time you hear/read “x is facing criticism...”, “x is under pressure...”, “x is being praised...”, “many people are saying...”, “people familiar with the issue...”, “inside/anonymous sources...”, “x calls for...”, “experts say/warn...”, everything you hear/read after that point is 100% curated editorial opinion, and news outlets have been pedalling that for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to read the news.

Those kinds of statements are so vague that they’re pretty much always guaranteed to be true, so you don’t even need to provide a factual basis for them, but before Twitter news outlets would just go and interview random uninformed passers by on the street and gather a couple of good common-man sound bites to reinforce whatever bad opinion it is they’re pushing. My favourite technique that I’ve seen become more common over the past few years is to print an article claiming “x is facing online death threats” for anybody they want to generate some sympathetic support for. Are such headlines true? Almost certainly. Would that headline be true for any public figure you can possibly think of? Almost certainly.

[PaulKeeble]

Even nobodies on the internet have received death threats, haven’t we all had at least one at this point? I don't even remember how many I have had now. Given I have been using the internet since the late 1990s its got to average at least 1 a year but some years like the Usenet years I received a lot more than that average. Its probably less than 100 but I have no idea how many it actually is. I received many of these post about Java (the programming language) and not objectionable things, I received one for a post showing a no op stream!

[HeadsUpHigh]

I've gotten death threats on Reddit from people that I have never even argued with. The guy was deeply mentally ill with some kind of superiority complex so it came as no surprise. Anyway it made me think of how much identifying information I might have left behind and if someone patient enough to go through my entire comment history could doxx me. I've been using new accounts every couple months ever since while trying to change the subs I comment on every now and then.

[smabie]

Hell, some guy I cut off while driving told me to go kill myself today! It's unfortunate that comments that most everyone would disregard as meaning very much take on some weight online. It's pure cancer and is destroying the world.

It's trivially easy to affect real change on Twitter through bots, so it should come as no surprise that that's exactly what's happening.

Twitter isn't disgusting because of what people say on it, it's disgusting because of how it makes people feel.