Counterman had a history of making violent threats to women and was on supervised release from one such federal conviction during the two years he continuously messaged Whalen.

The ruling did not go that far, saying prosecutors need only show that a speaker acted recklessly, meaning the person was “aware that others could regard his statements as threatening violence and delivers them anyway.”

This goes to your point which, hyperbole aside, I think the bar for judging a statement as a threat unless it is unequivocal in its phrasing or the perpetrator literally admits their intent is set impossibly high here. I can’t see how you get a more clear cut situation of where someone ought to understand that their words were causing distress.

In this scenario you literally have the authorities going “what you’re doing is threatening people.” The person then goes on to keep doing that thing, and then somehow successfully fields the defense that “he didn’t understand that it was coming off as threatening.”