What, if anything, should website admins do when users post threatening messages on-line? Internet law experts generally agree there is no legal onus on site owners or users to notify police. Investigating each and every threatening post from what is essentially mostly anonymous visitors would be impossibly time-consuming and expensive.
On-line chat rooms have quickly mushroomed into virtual communities where people can reinvent themselves behind screen names. But on-line forums can also free some users to post exaggerations or lies, making it difficult for webmasters to distinguish fact from fiction. And many of those message boards are patrolled by volunteers who may not be able to recognize a problem because they are young and/or not trained as mental health professionals.
During the past few years, a handful of chat room users who published violent messages have been prosecuted, but such threats rarely are carried out, legal experts say. Websites where the threats are posted are rarely sued because they"re not legally bound to alert police, said Nicolas Terry, an Internet law expert at Saint Louis University"s Center for Health Law Studies.