Clay Calvert, a communications professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, writes in the Huffington Post about the case of a Kentucky man who was arrested for allegedly making terroristic threats and supposedly threatening to kill students when he posted lyrics by the metal band Exodus on his Facebook page. According to the band, the song with lyrics like '"student bodies lying dead in the halls, a blood splattered treatise of hate'" was inspired by the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho and was not meant to endorse mass shootings. As Calvert notes, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear a case this fall involving Anthony Elonis, who was sentenced to federal prison for his violent postings on Facebook. Elonis said they were therapeutic rap lyrics, but a jury found an objectively reasonable person could view them as threats.
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