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Should we monitor blogs and social media for death threats?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

In the wake of last night’s fatal shooting at an LA Fitness outside of Pittsburgh, PA, a thought occurred to me that I felt I’d write a quick entry about, perhaps to generate some discussion particularly with my UW MCDM counterparts. Within 24 hours we get news that the alleged shooter, George Sodini, blogged for months and months about his “exit plan”, or his plan to end his life and take as many people at the gym he worked-out at with him. His shooting rampage plans were right there on the web for all of the world to see, but it seems no one took notice, either because no one saw the blog or cared to read the thing, or because Sodini himself did little to promote his writings anyway. However, this isn’t the first time that plans for such rampages have surfaced on-line before the events took place – it’s just that usually the posts are discovered by people after the fact. In light of this and other examples of different killers’ obvious pre-meditations posted on-line in advance of the deadly events they carry out, the general question I pose is thus:

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Tags: death threats, metrics, monitoring, monitoring the web, shooting rampages, social media, social media tools, Sodini, tools, tracking
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