Endangered Species: Travel Blogger – About Getting Death Threats – What would you do?

This morning I received an e-mail from a fellow travel blogger. The mail contained a comment of a reader who is not amused by the author’s posts, to say the least.

The comment reads [off course I have edited out the foul language]:

Youguys have nothing but trying s**ttiest to pick on someone else’s business website and whatever youguys are doing is such a bad idea.
I will find out who the f**k youguys are and hire some sort of vietnamese gangs to f**k anyone whoever are female in your f**king
family.
then I would love to see your f**kin’ head chopped off and have all kinds of s**t down in your f**kin’ neck, alright?
Don’t go around and do things like that and if I ever get to see this kind of s**t once more then since I know who the f**k you are and you better be careful…
Thanks for the co-operation…

Sic! This is not funny. What to do? Erase it as spam? My first reaction is “A big no! Lodge a complaint with the provider through which the comment was posted and the provider used as “e-mail” adress.”…but it is very easy to impersonate somebody so there is no guaranty the perpetrator will be found. Furthermore I would lodge a complaint with the local police.

So most likely it won’t help. However further than that you couldn’t go if you’re an average blogger on a small budget (smaller at least than the Landlord of my prior post who can afford to sue first and talk later). Maybe it helps getting it out of your system.

If you look up death threats in various search engines you get all sorts of results. At least you’ll see it happens more. Austrian based I.P.I. International Press Institute from which I borrowed the picture, watches over Free Speach. But further than noticing that journalists are threatened and even murdered and offering public concern. They offer no handbook how to handle threats…

The incident kept in the back of my mind and I decided to post about it. Recently another befriended travel blogger got a threat of a civil law suit and took a sabattical week to get it out of his system. I hope this helps my friend getting it out of his system. I also hope the community of travel bloggers offers some thoughts here.