This article examines a Danish criminal case concerning a high school student who posted a picture on Instagram with the caption ‘I’ll be the next
school shooter guys, lmao, watch out’ (Danish: jeg bliver den næste school
shooter guys, lmao, watch out). Reactions to – or uptakes on (Freadman,
1994, 2002) – the Instagram post were split between two types; some took
it as a threat and some took it as a joke. Building on theory on threatening communications (e.g. Bojsen-Møller, Auken, Devitt, & Christensen, 2020;
Fraser, 1998; T. Gales, 2019; Solan & Tiersma, 2005), on humor (Billig, 2005;
Norrick, 2010; Tsakona, 2017) and on genre theory (Devitt, 2009; Freadman,
2012, 2020; Miller, 1984), this article studies the diverging uptakes as they are
presented within the court case through examination of both transcripts of
audio recordings from the court room and court documents. The findings
of this study show that while linguistic interpretation is mostly limited to
the netcronym ‘lmao’, other non-linguistic behaviors are often used as justification for a particular interpretation of the linguistic behavior. Not only
the prosecuted utterance itself, but also the utterances’ uptakes, i.e. an essential aspect of its context, have a bearing on the outcome of the case and
the assessment of the defendant’s intent. As such, this study offers important
insight into an area that T. Gales (2019) argues is in need of further interdisciplinary research, namely how contextual features can influence the outcome
of criminal cases concerning disputed threats