Over 12,000 tweets are calling for Trump's assassination. Here's how the Secret Service handles it. Image: Kaster/AP/REX/Shutterstock In the 12 days since Donald Trump took the oath of office, a steady stream of social media posts have called for the new president's assassination. The U.S. Secret Service, however, or even Twitter and Facebook themselves, doesn't seem to be jumping onto many of these posts. But there have been reports of agents knocking on the doors of social media users. The U.S. Secret Service could not be reached for official comment about how they handle social media posts threatening to assassinate the sitting president. On the platform side, Facebook and Twitter have policies in place to take down threatening posts. Facebook similarly said under their "credible threats policy" they remove posts showing intent to kill the president. Franklin, the former Secret Service agent, said because Trump heavily uses social media to talk about controversial executive actions and ideas, he is being targeted on Twitter more than Barack Obama or George W. Bush were during their presidencies, at least in these first days. Image: Official DHS photo/Barry Bahler Franklin says for law enforcement it's not about the person or politics of the president, but about protecting the office.
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In the 12 days since Donald Trump took the oath of office, a steady stream of social media posts have called for the new president’s assassination.
The posts are pretty basic and many are jokes or sarcastic or hyperbolic — but there are a lot of them. In a Dataminr search of Twitter posts since Inauguration Day containing the phrase “assassinate Trump” nearly 12,000 tweets came up.
The U.S. Secret Service, however, or even Twitter and Facebook themselves, doesn’t seem to be jumping onto many of these posts. When several users were asked about their recent “assassinate Trump” posts, all of them said they hadn’t been contacted by anyone about their post and they all remain up.
But there have been reports of agents knocking on the doors of social media users. A Kentucky woman who tweeted, “If someone was cruel enough to assassinate MLK, maybe someone will be kind enough to assassinate Trump,” is currently being investigated by the Secret Service, according to the Associated Press.
An Ohio man tweeted several messages about killing Trump on election night, according to NBC News. The Secret Service questioned him the next day and he was charged with making threats to the then president-elect.
Former U.S. Secret Service special agent Tim Franklin, who is now a criminology and criminal justice professor of counterterrorism and cybercrimes at Arizona State University, said in a phone call Tuesday that “it’s the people who have a true and genuine intent to do harm that the Secret Service is worried about.”
That’s why one-off posts and people with no record of threatening messages tend to get passed over. He said the Secret Service is looking out for trends and consistent behavior,…
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