A man in the US has been arrested after he told his followers that he would start shooting at passerbys if he got 100 retweets on microblogging site Twitter.
The 20-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested on Wednesday after the authorities were alerted to the man’s claims and deemed it a serious enough threat after Twitter users saw the man’s potentially lethal tweet.
Dakkari Dijon McAnuff appeared before a state judge last night and was sent to jail in lieu of paying a US$50,000 for making threatening, criminal behaviour.
The original tweet showed McAnuff in a photo holding an rifle aimed out of his front door with the caption, “100 (retweets) and I’ll shoot someone walking.”
Based off of McAnuff’s tweet, the Los Angeles Police Department was able to locate the man at his home. Officers arrested him and confiscated his weapon, a low-powered air-rifle.
Because of his actions, his Twitter account has subsequently been deleted.
Threats of a physical nature are now commonplace on social media and police forces across the globe have been monitoring the likes of Twitter and Facebook with greater caution, as seen with the recent arrests of two individuals in the UK for making rape threats against journalist Caroline Criado-Perez.
