Gone are the days that someone can post on social media that he or she will perform a violent act and everyone can feign unawareness. The chances that no one saw your online activity is diminishing every day as keywords filter out the mundane posts and highlight the topics that we are searching for when we aimlessly scroll through our phones. The overabundance of hashtags help, as well. Given our country’s continued political discourse, every threat must be taken seriously, especially the ones that are made online since they can be viewed from almost every side of the world and are easily prevented. However, the problem continues to be that many of these threats—even the ones that threaten someone’s life—are laughed off because of our own disbelieving amusement. Many people also have a tendency to glorify those who are “dramatic” and others “uncomfortably avoid” anyone who may exhibit the telltale signs of a mental illness.

Lee Kendra Childs, 19, was shot and killed in Houston, Texas on Sept. 13. Twitter users immediately created #RIPKendra to pay tribute to the young woman who lost her life one day before her 20th birthday. Despite there not being any confirmation as to who killed Childs, Facebook user Quoyaa Taylor has accused Childs’ boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend—whose name is unknown—as being involved in the shooting.

Taylor’s assertion is in response to a series of tweets that the unknown girl posted. In the tweets, the young woman stated that she was planning to “kill them people” and that “nothing makes [her] mad about a b*tch saying she was with my n****.” After Taylor spread these tweets for her Facebook friends to see, other social media users began to express the troubling nature of these posts. One user, @rubypilots hit the nail on the head when discussing how we glorify actions “in the name of love.”

People have a tendency to over-romanticize actions that are taken when it is done to “win someone back” and oftentimes lose sight of the bigger picture. Hurting someone is not romantic and it will be punishable if she is confirmed as the killer or an accomplice in the shooting. The sooner that people realize that making a threat is not synonymous with “a declaration of love,” the sooner they will also think twice before deciding not to speak up.

Our silence has a more profound effect than many people seem to realize. There were users who retweeted and liked the threatening tweets, most likely laughing to their friends about how this young woman is “being overdramatic” about her ex-boyfriend. However, once the “joke” became a violent reality, Childs’ life was lost and her two-year-old daughter was plunged into the reality before she is cognizant of it that she will grow up without a mother. We must be cautious about every potentially violent or dangerous action that we see on social media and view it as a serious concern. If we choose not to, then we risk these types of situations happening repeatedly when they could be prevented if someone had contacted Twitter to track the IP address of the user in question.

The biggest mistake that we can make when we are online is underestimating the people that we do not know. No one is aware when the person on the other side is joking or serious, so we should not assume that our interpretation of what they said is how they meant for it to be understood. There are many unstable people in the world and their various mental health issues are not for anyone’s amusement. Moreover, if we take every action as a joke, then we will miss the crucial indicators that someone’s life may be in danger.