A Texas teen could face up to eight years in prison over a comment left on Facebook that took place as part of an exchange about the online game League of Legends. Justin Carter was 18 years old back in Feburary of this year when a series of comments between him and a friend about the game took a turn for the worse.

LoL is a highly competitive game and is well known for bringing out “trash talk” and other similar culturally defined types of language—and it isn’t rare for this talk to spill out from headphone microphones and into online forums. This time an argument spilled out onto Facebook when a friend of Justin’s called him “insane.”

“Someone had said something to the effect of ‘Oh you’re insane, you’re crazy, you’re messed up in the head,’ to which he replied ‘Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the next two lines were lol and jk.,” Justin’s father, Jack Carter, said to a local news channel about the case.

Due to his public comment, Justin Carter was arrested a month later and charged with making a terroristic threat. He has been in jail since March 27 awaiting court proceedings.

This isn’t the first time a teen’s comments on Facebook brought charges of “terroristic threats” and the possibility of hefty multi-year prison sentences to bear. May of this year, in Massachusetts, Cameron D’Ambrosio, a teen aspiring to be a rap artist posted lyrics that alluded to the Boston bombings and was arrested on similar charges. In that case, the prosecution sought to bring charges of “threats to make a bomb or hijack a vehicle” carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. A grand jury has since refused to indict him.

Cultural exclusivity and the problem of expanding the circle

As I mentioned above, video gamer culture has greatly enhanced and expanded the way that trash talk functions—and I probably don’t need to elucidate readers on how rappers use their own trash talk and violent lingo in their own art (the entire idea of the explicit lyrics label isn’t just about something as prude as a lyricist saying a “bad” word.) People say things all the time that have no malice or intent to do violence or harm behind them all the time (even teenagers) but most of these comments are made in the privacy of our own homes, circles of friends, or locales.

The actual words rarely escape the context in which they were said.

Social media has changed all of that to a dramatic extent and the this case of the Justin, the League of Legends gamer, really brings that to light. In his commentary to KHOU about his son’s arrest Jack Carter wanted to enlighten the world that social media “is not a playground.” He focused on the fact that what you say no longer disappears into ephemera, it’s stored somewhere, searchable, and could come back to harm you in the future.

However, the problem here is not the phrases used by these two teenagers were jokes or lyrics in bad taste or even a tad socially irresponsible. It’s that both of these instances we have people making culturally acceptable jokes or commentary for the context that they were speaking in that escaped that context due to the preservation and prevalence of social media. The Boston bombings and school massacres that have struck our mainstream culture have left psychic scars that may be difficult to process for adults, let alone teens, and speech and expression is how humans process tragedy. In Justin’s case it was a gesture of bravado, told as a joke.

That rap lyrics or a joke led to threats of legal proceedings, huge damage done to these kid’s futures, and that authorities chose to pillory them for speech shows a huge disregard for individual liberties perpetrated by these police departments. Social media isn’t to blame here, since stories of this have surfaced since teenagers used to keep paper journals (purloined or read by third parties who then presented them to authorities) the outcome has been similar.

Social media is a playground; it’s just that everyone can hear you

…and some people listening are not very good at their jobs.

Civil authorities often bow to political expedience instead of functional security practices. In both cases Facebook comments lead to obviously disproportional responses from local police—so disproportionate that simply sending an officer to knock on a parent’s door may have still been inappropriate. Escalating immediately to arrest without even investigating the rest of Justin’s publicly available comments shows a willful disregard for basic professional integrity.

“In light of recent situations, statements such as the one Justin made are taken seriously,” said an Austin police detective in a statement.

Statements like these are is essentially all noise no signal and this is also at the root of the problem we’re seeing arise out of these two cases: police work being done without regard for actual security practice that takes into account detective work. If this statement were actually true, I’d hate to see what the police would do if they suddenly became aware of every Xbox conversation, half the messages in World of Warcraft battlegrounds, and almost all of League of Legends chat itself. That police department would vanish into a very dark hole and never be seen again.

These two cases alone will not suddenly cause people (especially teenagers) to stop posting sarcastic comments on their Facebook timelines. It’s going to keep happening. If law enforcement cannot catch up with the way that social media leaps over the boundaries between local an external culture then we’ll all have to worry about social media all the time.

The cautionary tale here doesn’t help the everyday-Jill, but it does give our community a resounding reason to demand that if our law enforcement agents feel the need to access our personal social media (or blithely break privacy such as PRISM) that they don’t screw up the job.