ANTHONY DOUGLAS ELONIS may have won his Supreme Court case on June 1st, but no one would mistake him for Pennsylvania’s most charming resident. When Mr Elonis’s wife left him in 2010, he turned to Facebook to lambast her under the nom de plume “Tone Dougie”. “There’s one way to love ya, but a thousand ways to kill ya,” he wrote. “And I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, Soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts. Hurry up and die bitch”.

These online scribblings, among others, earned him an indictment under a federal law that prohibits “any communication containing any threat…to injure the person of another”. Mr Elonis insisted that his posts were “therapeutic”, not threatening, and that he was just emulating the graphic lyrics of Eminem, a rapper. The jury disagreed and sentenced him to 44 months in prison.

On appeal, Mr Elonis claimed the jury had been given bad instructions. As a result of being asked to consider whether “a reasonable person” would view his statements as threats, the jury had wrenched his words from the context of his innocent intentions. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this contention and upheld Mr Elonis’s conviction.

In Elonis v United States, the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court. It was not enough, the justices said, for a jury to decide that reasonable listeners would interpret Mr Elonis’s nasty words as threats. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 8-1 ruling that “wrongdoing must be conscious to be criminal”. “What Elonis thinks”, he added, “does matter.”

Here things get tricky. If a speaker purposely threatens someone, or knows that his statement “will be viewed as a threat”, the court held, he could face conviction. But how low should the bar go? The state must now do more than prove that he should have known his post would scare somebody—ie, that he was negligent. But the court took no position on whether “recklessness”—knowing the words might frighten, and not caring—is enough to convict.

Justice Samuel Alito agreed to overturn the conviction, but criticised the chief justice for failing to answer this key question. Avoiding the issue, he wrote, “is certain to cause confusion” among lawyers and judges, who “are left to guess” what level of intent is necessary to nab someone under the law. The lone dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, would have upheld Mr Elonis’s conviction. “Our job is to decide questions,” he wrote, “not create them.”

As long as they have no intention of hurting anybody, people should now feel safe posting even the vilest content on social media. Elonis won’t clean up the internet, but it seems it will keep the feds off your Facebook page.