Analyzing attacks on public figures between 1949 and 1995, the report found that 68 per cent of attackers targeted government officials, with only 19 per cent taking an interest in celebrities.Â
Those numbers shifted drastically between 1995 and 2015, falling to 38 per cent for government officials and rising to 34 per cent for celebrities. What changed between those two periods? Social media became prevalent.Â
Apps like Facebook and Instagram have made celebrities more accessible. Audiences know as much about a movie star’s daily routine as they do a close family member, which creates an unhealthy familiarity.
The consequences can be volatile. On the one hand, that illusion of intimacy builds unshakable loyalty between celebrities and their fans. Audiences cannot help but develop an obsessive adoration for the stars they follow online.
On the other hand, they take every perceived mistake from those celebrities as a personal insult, leading to death threats. Some individuals have accused celebrities of using death threats as a smokescreen. They want to bury the criticism from their followers beneath an outpouring of sympathy from the public.
Even if they existed, surely those death threats are harmless. People use the internet to vent all the time. It doesn’t make them dangerous, does it?
But would you call a stranger’s online comments harmless if he threatened to rape your children in front of you before separating your head from its neck? Probably not. Philip Grindell from epwired.com believes that people who communicate threats are unlikely to carry them out. He compared death threats to wolves.
Out in the wild, howling wolves are not dangerous. Howling is a form of communication. In contrast, a hunting wolf does so silently because howling warns its prey. Death threats are similar. Stalkers know that death threats encourage celebrities to heighten their security.
Therefore, any demented individual who wants to harm you is unlikely to alert you ahead of time by sending death threats. That said, Philip Eli from Vice believes that death threats are harmful even when the sender fails to follow through because of the anxiety they induce.
Think about it. You may ignore a stranger who threatens to strangle you because of a silly comment you made on social media. But if they even hint at the possibility of poisoning your children because they want you to experience the anguish of watching them die, you may pull them out of school for a few weeks, just to be safe.
And before you ask, the answer is yes. Death threats are that aggressive. They carry an insidious tone that compels victims to transform their lifestyles dramatically. Some celebrities abandon Hollywood because they can’t take the paranoia.
Others spend enormous sums on additional security. You also have those who become hermits, locking themselves away in expensive apartments and only emerging every few months to fulfill their professional obligations. With that in mind, we should not dismiss death threats as silly hyperbole.
Refrain from using unnecessarily violent language. Don’t assume that everyone online knows you are joking when you threaten to kill them. The last thing you want is a lawsuit from a frightened stranger.
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