Yeah he used the term "violence" as a drop in substitute for the term "troll". Not to dismiss that one can incite or promote violence via trolling, but they are not unanimously equivalent.
2. Strength of emotion or of a destructive natural force
2 devalues 1. Don't do it.
You're broadening / redirecting that definition. One can have violent feelings or reactions to something, such as someone suffering PTSD, mental breakdown, emotional reaction to medicine. But one can't just claim that words that they don't like spoken by someone are violence committed on them. At that point you get into the "you're raping me with your thoughts" and that's just irrationality. If one were irrational words will no longer retain meaning anyway.
'An action that intentionally hurts other people' sufficed for me. Why do so many HN commenters have trouble reading this simple idea?
Because for most folks it's always meant physical harm. People using "violence" to describe being insulted are trying to capture the emotional value of the real definition to add weight to their argument. All this does is devalue the word.
He does, he is being deliberately dishonest to get attention. Ironic, given his criticism of twitter as a medium.