After Josh Hadley, a film-maker and journalist, referred to shooting the president on Twitter, he lost a job amid reported Secret Service scrutiny

Crackdown on man who trolled Trump went too far, free speech experts say

Donald Trump may be this country’s Twitter-troll-in-chief, but those tempted to troll him back, beware.

A writer who has addressed about 30 tweets to Trump – some of them including off-color jokes about assassination – was investigated by the Secret Service under circumstances that press freedom experts are calling “troubling”.

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Josh Hadley, a 41-year-old freelance film journalist and podcaster from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, told the Guardian he had been “trolling” Trump on Twitter for about a year.

“I’ve been kind of mean, but I don’t think any of them can be construed as threats,” he said. “I’m trying to be funny. I was trying to get a reaction out of him.”

All of his tweets to Trump are critical, but none appear to contain any credible threats. Hadley marked Trump’s inauguration day by tweeting a slightly altered quote from the Oliver Stone movie U Turn: “Thousands of people die every day … why can’t you be one of them?” On New Year’s Day, he wrote: “Do you think if I shot @RealDonaldTrump Jodie Foster would love me?” (John Hinckley Jr, who shot Ronald Reagan, wrote to the actor before the attack.)

A single Twitter account with about 430 followers may seem insignificant on Twitter, where threads often become cesspools of harassment and abuse, but on Wednesday, Hadley received shocking news from one of his employers, the Grindhouse Channel. Hadley had a regular gig writing about 1,000 words a week for the Roku channel’s website.

“It has come to our attention that you have been sending more than one electronic message or ‘Tweet’ to @RealDonaldTrump that can be construed as threatening over the past few months,” Hadley’s boss Darrin Uzynski wrote in an email. Sending threats to a sitting president or presidential candidate was a criminal offense, Uzynski added, and the company was severing its contract with him “upon advice of counsel”.

Uzynski later told Hadley that the company had been contacted by the Secret Service, prompting the firing.

While free speech experts say that it is not unusual for the Secret Service to contact people over online threats, the scope of the investigation into Hadley raises red flags.

Uzynski said he had been called by a Secret Service agent, who told him about Hadley’s tweets and asked whether his drafts had been edited to remove “inflammatory” statements.

“The word ‘inflammatory’ was used a lot,” Uzynski said. “They wanted to know if we cut anything out … if he had been attempting to publish things that were inflammatory.”

Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said: “They have no business asking about what’s in a journalist’s work product or the earlier draft, when they have no reason to believe that there is a real threat ... It’s a significant leap too far.”

The Secret Service refused to comment, citing a policy not to “confirm, deny, or comment on any investigation or whether one exists”.

Aaron Mackey, a legal fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed that expanding an investigation into a tweet to cover “all other expressive activity” was “troubling”.

“In this case, we have an inquiry that is spinning far beyond the original speech, trying to get access to a journalistic work product that has not been published,” he said. “That raises a very clear potential first amendment issue when it comes to journalist’s ability to protect their own work product.”

“Does this mean that anyone who makes a joke that works at a publication, that the publication then becomes a target?” Mackey asked.

The question is of particular importance now, given the Trump administration’s open hostility to the press. Last Wednesday, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon railed against the media, which he said should “keep its mouth shut”, in an interview with the New York Times.

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For Hadley, the experience has been disquieting. “I’m afraid that any knock on the door is going to be ‘Agent Friendly’ waiting to take me for an interrogation.”

Hadley maintained that his tweets were just jokes, not threats. He said he had not deleted any tweets, a statement which the Guardian has not been able to verify. He does acknowledge that he made one other attempt to communicate directly with Trump, however: an email sent to Trump’s campaign staff last year, requesting an interview with the then candidate for his podcast. He never heard back.