If you’re a denizen of Twitterland, you may remember this.
Back in December, after a particularly (and bizarrely) combative interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald got into it with the raging Twitter trolls that make up the Trumpling faithful.
Eichenwald was engaging the trolls, doing his nasty liberal thing, and for those of us who stand on the outside of both of those groups, it was entertaining, for awhile.
Then it got ugly.
Eichenwald has written before about his struggles with epilepsy, so it wasn’t a secret.
A Twitter account called @jew_goldstein — which has since been suspended — responded to Eichenwald with a gif of flashing strobe lights and a message: “You deserve a seizure for that post.”
Shortly after, Eichenwald’s account tweeted: “This is his wife, you caused a seizure. I have your information and have called the police to report the assault.”
Yup. Somebody tried to deliberately set off an epileptic seizure in Eichenwald.
When Eichenwald hit Twitter again, it was to inform everyone that he was pursuing charges against the Twitter troll.
For self-protection, I am taking a short twitter break. I will be spending that time with my lawyers & law enforcement going after 1 of u…
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 16, 2016
Last night, for the second time, a deplorable aware I have epilepsy tweeted a strobe at me with the message "you deserve a seizure' on it…
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 16, 2016
The latest news is that an arrest has been made.
An FBI spokesman said the name of the suspect has not been released but confirmed that an arrest was made, Dallas News reported.
I don’t know what the person can be charged with or how it will play out, but if it goes to trial, it will be an interesting case study in using social media as a weapon to harm.
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