How A Post-9/11 Law Can Get You Arrested For Your Emoji Choices A Brooklyn teen was charged, in part, with threatening police officers through his use of emojis. Whether the cartoons can be interpreted as terroristic threats is an open legal question. please log in to view this image NEW YORK CITY — Osiris Aristy, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn, does not hold back in his Facebook status updates. He posts about his love for blunts and cough syrup, wanting to buy his mother a bigger home, and his disdain for the police. Most of Aristy’s anti-cop status updates seem tame compared to the vitriol found all over the internet. They are not altogether different from many hip-hop lyrics, where the figure of the cop killer is sometimes an archetype of rebellion and power. But on the evening of Jan. 15, according to a criminal complaint, Aristy posted a photo of a revolver with bullets beside it, and wrote he felt “like katxhin a body right now.” A few minutes later, he posted “nigga run up on me, he gunna get blown down please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image .” An hour later, he posted, “**** the 83 104 79 98 73 PCTKKKK please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image .” (All three of the posts appear to have since been deleted.) Three days later, on Jan. 18, the New York Police Department arrested Aristy at his Bushwick home on a warrant accusing the teenager of “making a terroristic threat,” a felony that could carry seven years in prison upon conviction. None of the Facebook posts cited in the criminal complaint that led to Aristy’s arrest appear to include verbal or text-based threats to police officers. The teen’s references to law enforcement officers appear to be limited to cartoon representations of police and firearms. All of which raises a question that almost sounds silly, but is actually very serious: Can emojis be legally interpreted as terroristic threats? http://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolasmedi...-you-arrested-for-your-emoji-choic#.osrNRlymw
It's not just emojis - who's to say Tickler's famous "TWT" doesn't stand for "Terrorists will triumph"?
