Occupy Wall Street Twitter Death Threat Spurs NYPD Probe

Occupy Wall Street returned to its ideological home at Zuccotti Park this past Saturday to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the movement and, not much later after they arrived, police evicted the occupying protesters. As you may expect, the protesters did not go quietly into the night and an ensuing clash with police resulted in 73 arrests.

While this is becoming frighteningly common when Occupy protesters and police lock horns, later that night one supporter tweeted this troubling message: “we wont make a difference if we dont kill a cop or 2.” The tweet has since been deleted but the user, whose Twitter user name is @Smackema1, the name anonCan0n, and a bio that lists the user’s location with the abbreviation for the state of Florida, has continued to retweet articles quoting the tweet and other comments regarding what was said.

According to New York Daily News, the New York Police Department is seeking a subpoena to learn the identity of the person who managed the Twitter account.

The Daily News managed to locate the user and, speaking with the news outlet, the unidentified man shared the following explanation: “It’s not like I meant anything of it. Who takes anything like that seriously? I’m in Florida, what am I going to do?”

Uh, it would appear that police will take very seriously not-so-subtle calls for murder. The Floridian Twitterer might still be learning how this confounded Twitterscape works since the account was only created on November 10, 2010, and didn’t really start becoming active until earlier this month.

@Smackema1 added more tweets and retweets after the incendiary comment from Saturday. They’re not exactly the most pacifying words you’ll read today, but he appears to be having a relatively small cultural second or two.

Note: going all militia-style by stating how you’ve got a license for weapons isn’t exactly the best way to mollify the antagonism and convince people you didn’t mean anything by what you said.

As of this morning, @Smackema1 was futilely trying to shout down the internet in an ensuing flame war that’s undoubtedly giving him a brutal lesson in this internet thing. Anybody want to take bets on whether @Smackema1 was surprised to find out that people can actually read what he says on the internet?