For example, a 13-year-old girl tweets to the account: “Can you remove my tweet, it has already been removed and I didn’t mean it.” Given the media reports, it can be concluded that sending threatening tweets is more often done by the younger generation of Twitter users. Whether this is actually reflected in the police reports is the question. It could be that the young perpetrators in particular become the subject of the news. The 17-year-old sender of the threatening tweet after the Alphen incident said in court that he had not considered the ultimate consequences of his threatening tweet.
A 17-year-old female sender of the threat to commit a terrorist attack on her school also motivated in the program 'De wereld draait door' that she was not aware at the time that it had this impact. In many cases it appears to be about adolescent behavior, with young perpetrators testing the boundaries of what is and is not allowed on Twitter. Tom Postmes, professor of social lebanon phone number list psychology at the University of Groningen, indicated that Twitter is still new to the user and takes some getting used to. Boundaries have to be formed gradually. Young people have a large audience when using Twitter. Everyone can read their message, which makes it extra exciting to find this boundary between all those other people.
Fortunately, in many cases the police investigate the background of the sender of the threatening tweet. The police employ internet surveillance officers who actively search for such threatening texts on social media. After an arrest, even the costs of police deployment can be recovered from the sender. In this way, the police send a clear signal to the perpetrator that the distribution of such messages is not permitted and will not be tolerated. The survey also shows that the majority (70%) believe that a threatening tweet should be taken just as seriously by the police as all other threats.