A man stands accused of publishing threats against senior Google executive Marissa Mayer on Twitter.
As the San Francisco Examiner reports, prosecutors say that Gregory Calvin King sent over 20,000 messages in the form Twitter mentions to Mayer. The tweets were allegedly published between November 2010 and August 2011.
As what’s alleged to be King’s Twitter account (which contains NSFW language) demonstrates, the tweets ranged from insults (“Your body isnt very sexy either, cellulite is a huge turn-off”), to outright threats (“You know.. it’s like okay I HAVE HIV AND IM COMING TO F*** YOU SO WATCH OUT”). So numerous were the tweets that only the final two days of them are accessible from the Twitter profile page.
It’s unclear whether Mayer herself notified police of the tweets, but given that we counted around 160 tweets posted via the account alleged to belong to King on the final day of the campaign alone, it’s understandable that she would want to take action. Whether the man was a legitimate threat or not, that’s not the kind of thing you want spamming up your Twitter mentions stream.
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The Examiner quotes a San Francisco FBI spokesperson, Julie Sohn, as saying that there is no known connection between King and the Mayer. It says that King made an initial court appearance San Antonio on August 22, three days after the account he is accused of running last tweeted. A prosecutor requested he be held without bail as he posed “a danger to the safety of the community,” and he was transferred to San Francisco for prosecution on August 25. A future court date has reportedly not been set.
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