Comment by theprincess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theprincess | Hacker News Reader

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> Where's the harm?

The harm is in stochastic terrorism. You can make up lies that are intended to spur people who feel they have nothing to lose into action.

https://csl.mpg.de/en/projects/philosophical-and-public-secu...).

It's similar to the concept of blood libel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

For example, imagine that online discourse on some fringe website that has a few hundred thousand members devolves into a theory that some house in your neighborhood is harboring a secret dungeon full of children underneath it. There is no direct threat to you per se, but a few hundred thousand people think that a house - maybe your house - has a basement full of unspeakable horrors. As the rumor spreads and grows the chances of your house being broken into by one of the believers goes up exponentially. Suddenly nobody in your neighborhood is safe anymore as random weirdos keep scoping out your houses and following you to and from the grocery to see if you're the one with the dungeon beneath your house. Eventually one of these weirdos pulls a gun on your neighbor and demands to see his basement and while there was no dungeon the firearm accidentally went off and killed your neighbor. Your neighbor's death would trace directly back to the spread of this rumor.

That's a ridiculous standard that makes pretty much anything and everything harmful, especially criticism.

How do you determine in advance which speech will be the precursor to an act of 'stochastic terrorism', without also penalizing speech that will not?

Is it possible to accurately define this in law and policy, such that actions against it can be fairly enforced?

We have a term for the type of speech that spurs stochastic terrorism already. It's blood libel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

If you spread lies about a group that demonizes them you put members of that group at risk.

For instance, if I started a viral rumor that white male computer programmers all keep sex slaves under their houses and enough people believed it a lot of the people on this website would suddenly be living much more difficult and dangerous lives as lots of strangers would assume that they were evil monsters who needed to be put down for the sake of children without even getting to know them. The murder rate against white male computer programmers might even rise noticeably as they became a target for random violence by people who wanted to do a "good deed" on their way out of this life.

So are you saying that if someone tweets something ridiculous like "Did you know that Jews drink the blood of murdered Christian infants? #zionists", they should be arrested and charged for this?

That seems to me a highly disproportionate infringement of this person's freedom of expression, as well as being completely pointless. If you're going to have the police arrest people for posting conspiracist idiocy on the internet, they'd have no time left to investigate real crimes that meaningfully affect people.

> they should be arrested and charged for this?

If it reaches a point of causing public disorder or harming the general welfare of a democratic society, then why not arrest?

The question should always remain "why arrest" and I submit anyone who is unsure why that is should, themselves, suffer arrest and imprisonment for no less than 3 months to help answer their question.

Sometimes law enforcement has to choose to not enforce a law, so “why not arrest” is just as important of a question as “why arrest” when choosing to enforce a law.

Are you ok with BDS and all other Palestinian human-rights advocacy being nuked off the face of the internet for "anti-Semitism" within moments of handing the anti-"stochastic terrorism" powers to the government ? What about any video of IDF doing anything wrong? Even the recent articles about the killed Palestinian journalist could be used for Nefarious Purposes

stochastic terrorism

Is there a more intellectually dishonest idea? That someone somewhere could misconstrue your words as a call to violence by virtue of the large number of people in the world? And what better way to enforce censorship than to selectively enforce this idea on the topics most important to the party in power?

So... you think it's a total coincidence that after lots of people start talking about specific acts of violence, people start doing them? There's no connection at all?

> dishonest idea

stochastic terrorism appears to be the academic way of saying “inciting mob violence”

seems pretty straightfoward and honest, to me

> stochastic terrorism appears to be the academic way of saying “inciting mob violence”

Do you have an example where you think those two concepts could be used interchangeably in academia?

I weren't able to find one and I don't think those terms describe similar ideas. Mob dynamics might be about scale in some form, but they are usually not about what we would commonly refer to as terrorism.

The OP article refers to the following research:

“As described by leading scholars, stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ (Hamm and Spaaij, 2017)”

maybe inciting “distributed mob violence” would be a better way to translate it for laymen.

Is the BDS movement an example of stochastic terrorism? Someone told me they exist to inspire hate crimes against Jewish and Israeli citizens.

Are hasbara organizations stochastic terrorist in nature? Someone told me they exist to distract from settler-colonial violence against Palestinians.

Who should get to decide which warrants investigation?

I’d have to refer you to places like Southern Poverty or law enforcement to identify specific sponsors of terror.

I believe that, in the United States, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and congress are the ones who decide what warrants investigation, generally speaking.

If you think your law enforcement should decide which political speech is terrorism, you have many home countries to choose from -- from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia -- but the U.S. is not one of them. Best of luck!

If I go stab a bunch of people and say BLM inspired me to do it, does BLM become a stochastic terrorism organization? Is Jodie Foster a stochastic terrorist for seducing Hinckley Jr with her looks?

You can place blame anywhere depending on your agenda.

> If I go stab a bunch of people and say BLM inspired me to do it, does BLM become a stochastic terrorism organization?

That would depend on what evidence you can show to the court that convinces them that you were actually inspired by them.

The court of law operates with letters in the mail, not comments on a website.

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