Death threats on social media: Sander Schimmelpenninck receives them every day
People dare a lot online. Death threats via someone's DM on Instagram are no longer new. Sander Schimmelpenninck receives them every day, as he tells in the documentary. 2Doc Short.
He expresses himself openly as a journalist in his pieces for the Volkskrant. In them, he talks about difficult subjects, topics that everyone has an opinion on. He now lives in Sweden with his girlfriend, who is from there.
Sometimes he hears online that he ‘will get into trouble.’ ‘Soon you won't be laughing anymore, rich kid.’ But there are also more concrete messages, such as: ‘I know you live there, I know you go to the gym there, and I know your girlfriend lives at that address in Sweden.’ ‘Handwritten letters to my in-laws in Sweden. Crazy. So it goes from vague and many to less and concrete.’
He has been bombarded with thousands of angry messages for years. No pleasant talk. ‘Those people’ who criticize online dare to threaten. And there are a lot of messages. He gets scared mainly from the amount. ‘The fact that there are so many also means that there could actually be malicious individuals among the senders. If you receive a hundred of these kinds of messages, you start to wonder how likely it is that statistically there is a person among them who really wants to do something bad. That chance naturally increases as the number of messages grows.’
How difficult is it to live with this? The fact that he no longer lives in the Netherlands is actually good for him. ‘It's of course a coincidence that my girlfriend is Swedish and that our life has turned out this way that I now live in Sweden, but it suits me very well, I must say. The knot in my stomach when I go to the Netherlands has been quite large in recent months.’
Bizarre that this is the time we live in, right? We should all be deeply ashamed.
