The Supreme Court vacated a Colorado man's stalking conviction on Tuesday in a 7-2 ruling that sets new guidelines on how online harassment can be protected under the First Amendment if not a "true threat."

Justice Elena Kagan penned the majority in Counterman v. Colorado in favor of Billy Counterman, who was convicted of stalking after sending repeated Facebook messages to female musician Coles Whalen that made her fear for her safety.

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The ruling vacates a lower court's ruling that Counterman's messages were excluded from First Amendment protections for freedom of speech. The majority held that prosecutors must show a defendant had some subjective understanding of his statements' threatening nature.

"The State must show that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence," Kagan wrote. "The State need not prove any more demanding form of subjective intent to threaten another."

The majority was joined by conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, along with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented in two separate writings. Thomas also joined Barrett's dissent.

The pair of dissenting justices took stiff aim at the majority, with Barrett saying, "It should be easy to choose between these positions" and that the majority was giving true threats "preferential treatment."

"The Court holds that speakers must recklessly disregard the threatening nature of their speech to lose constitutional protection. Because this unjustifiably grants true threats preferential treatment, I respectfully dissent," Barrett wrote.

The high court sent the case back for further proceedings because Counterman was prosecuted under the "objective" standard. While he gets another chance, he does not get the truly subjective standard that he desired.

Some of the contents of more than 1,000 online messages Counterman sent to Whalen suggested he knew her whereabouts and told her to "die" and "f*** off permanently."

Counterman was given a 4-1/2 year prison sentence but challenged his stalking conviction after a state court ruled that his messages to Whalen constituted a true threat, which the Supreme Court has said is excluded from First Amendment protections.

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Counterman's counsel argued the court should instead impose a subjective test that considers the speaker's intent, arguing he didn't intend to threaten Whalen, citing mental illness and delusions.

A trial court denied Counterman's First Amendment defense before a jury convicted him in 2017. He appealed and was rejected by the Colorado Court of Appeals, followed by a rejection from the Colorado Supreme Court.