© Kaster/AP/REX/Shutterstock The U.S. Secret Service serves to protect the office of the president, whether that's at a parade or online.
The posts are pretty basic and many are jokes or sarcastic or hyperbolic — but there are a lot of them. In a Dataminr search of Twitter posts since Inauguration Day containing the phrase "assassinate Trump" more than 12,000 tweets came up.
The U.S. Secret Service, however, or even Twitter and Facebook themselves, doesn't seem to be jumping onto many of these posts. When we asked several users about their recent "assassinate Trump" posts, all of them said they hadn't been contacted by anyone about their post and they all remain up.
But there have been reports of agents knocking on the doors of social media users. A Kentucky woman who tweeted, "If someone was cruel enough to assassinate MLK, maybe someone will be kind enough to assassinate Trump," is currently being investigated by the Secret Service, according to the Associated Press.
An Ohio man tweeted several messages about killing Trump on election night, according to NBC News. The Secret Service questioned him the next day and he was charged with making threats to the then president-elect.
"It's the people who have a true and genuine intent to do harm that the Secret Service is worried about."Former U.S. Secret Service special agent Tim Franklin, who is now a criminology and criminal justice professor of counterterrorism and cybercrimes at Arizona State University, said in a phone call Tuesday that "it's the people who have a true and genuine intent to do harm that the Secret Service is worried about."
Comment: What media lock-down looks like in Turkey as it approaches full Fascism, a gift from declaring a state of emergency: The media is directly controlled by the government or indirectly controlled by government regulation or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship is essential. The repression involves the whole gamut from installing colonial trustees; elimination of structure; usurping or closing down print publications, radio and TV stations and web sites; targeting journalists for opinions, prose and 'subliminal messages'; withdrawing press cards and passports, and taking into custody any the state deems questionable. Tyranny.