A Michigan sheriff who campaigned for former President Donald Trump has filed criminal charges against a woman for writing nasty tweets about anti-mask nurses who were talking during a public meeting.
Deadline Detroit reports that Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy is seeking criminal charges against Howell, Michigan resident Kasey Helton for writing tweets that made anti-mask activists feel "legitimately threatened, harassed and intimidated."
Helton's tweets were made during a local board of education meeting in which several women who identified themselves as nurses criticized school mask policies.
Helton referred to one anti-mask nurse as "Nurse E.Coli," which she then accompanied with a poop emoji. She also tagged the nurse's purported employer and asked them if the nurse was really on their staff.
She also described another anti-mask nurse as a "dangerous RN sponsored by Schoolcraft College" a "pathetic purveyor of health misinformation."
Sheriff Murphy defended pressing charges over the tweets, despite the fact that they merely contained personal insults rather than physical threats of violence.
""If it were just posts disagreeing with something that was said at a public meeting, we would not have done an investigation," he said. "This, for us, is a test to see where that line is... if they say it rises to the level of criminality. We’ve become uncivilized when it comes to social media and people take pot shots at people all day long. OK, there’s freedom of speech, but there’s also lines that need to be drawn in the sand."
