Supreme Court’s ruling on online harassment outrages victims, advocates
Experts worry that a decision giving First Amendment protection to online abuse will make a growing problem worse
By
Taylor Lorenz
June 29, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT
LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, just
minutes after the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a man who’d made relentless online threats to a stranger, ruling that the threats were protected by the First Amendment, Patrick Tomlinson began receiving harassing text messages.
“SCOTUS just ruled that our conversations aren’t harassment as I’ve never threatened you,” read one message Tomlinson shared with The Post. “It’s just two friends enjoying each other’s company.”
Tomlinson was outraged. “It’s beyond irresponsible,” Tomlinson said of the court’s decision. “It’s a catastrophic ruling for victims of online harassment.”
For the past five years, Tomlinson’s life has been turned upside down by a community of aggressive cyberstalkers and trolls. They began tormenting Tomlinson and his wife after Tomlinson posted a tweet in 2018 saying he didn’t find the comedian Norm Macdonald funny. What should have been a benign tweet got sucked up into online forums where far-right extremist trolls congregate. They fixated on Tomlinson, and he became the target of relentless abuse.
Tomlinson, an author, has had the police sent to his home more than 43 times in swatting incidents. He said stalkers have stolen his personal information and impersonated him in an effort to destroy his credit score. They’ve flooded sites with one-star reviews of his books, in some cases before the books were even released. His family members have been harassed with text messages and calls, he said.
Last October, one of Tomlinson’s stalkers flew from Boston to Milwaukee to film Tomlinson through his windows. The stalker then uploaded footage of Tomlinson to YouTube set to the song “Somebody’s Watching Me.” The stalker also visited a bar where Tomlinson sometimes works and live-streamed himself with two dolls, one of which was meant to represent Tomlinson’s wife. YouTube took the videos down.
Tomlinson, like many victims, filed a lawsuit against the owners of a forum he accused of driving harassment toward him, but he lost and now owes tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision just added to his sense of defeat, he said.
“It’s brought me to the conclusion that nondigital natives simply do not understand this environment,” he said. “They do not understand the world that’s been created, and the world we all live in. And they should not be making rulings that are going to be setting precedent about how the internet will be regulated and policies for decades.
“It’s not an option to just not exist online,” he said, adding that there really is no meaningful distinction between one’s online presence and real life. “Anybody who still thinks that distinction exists is … divorced from the experiences of hundreds of millions of people.”
