Often that's exactly what it is. People coming to your (or your relatives) homes, people physically attacking others at workplaces and restaurants. People setting up fires and behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them. We have seen many examples. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.

...can you give some examples?

No they can’t. They’re hoping if they beg enough they might get some trickle down economics. We all know this is not a discussion of facts or reason.

You certainly seem to know that.

Tim Pool is swatted regularly for example. Tucker Carlson had to move after his home was attacked. There was an attack on Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a lot of such stories.

They don't care since they don't like those people. It's not based on principles.

I wonder how you missed what is happening in the US for the last decade. Are you living in a country far from the US with spotty internet connection? Do you generally not care what happens here but are mildly curious right now? Before spending time to compile the lust of examples I'd like to understand how comes you missed all of them, despite them being widely published and discussed.

I’ll take that as a no.

You can take it any way you like. If you're not interested in hearing, I'm not interested in wasting time collecting the data, only for you to dismiss it with some lame excuse, it's just be a complete waste of time for me - it's impossible to convince a person that decided upfront not to be convinced.

> behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them

Such as the wave of attacks on drag events.

Like this: https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/nypd-says-3-people-attacked-wi... ?

In this particular case, there was an attempt at terrorizing Elon IRL. So why shouldn't attacks on him therefore count as "stochastic terrorism", insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept?

as others are indicating, at least some of the problems here are:

- he recognizes that it’s reasonable to take actions if an account *might* influence his real life.

— he mocks others and declares they’re unreasonable when they ask twitter for help.

- sometimes he even escalates the threats towards others, portrays them as hysterical and starts ranting about town-squares and woke cancel culture.

I agree that insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept, Elon has probably also engaged in it.

That's a terrible premise to start a conversation on HN. Let's not use extreme concepts invented by ideologues + controversial figures being petty as the basis for thought experiments.

Stochastic terrorism may be an extreme concept invented by ideologues, but the fact remains that if you have a big platform and you criticize someone harshly, that might cause crazies in your audience to go after them. So as a society we should figure out what is and isn't acceptable behavior here, and invent rules to apply universally and impartially.

You can't censor your way out of this problem regardless. People will still post Elon's flights details elsewhere.

Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.

The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.