Progressive Politics

Stochastic terrorism is an analytic description used in scholarship and counterterrorism to describe a mass-mediated process in which hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across communication platforms, elevates the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by unknown individuals, even without direct coordination or explicit orders.

That's just a fancier version of the thing that I said. I know full well what it means, and it's what I described, and what your definition here states:

That Stochastic terrorism is when acts of terroristic violence, carried out by individuals, become more likely in certain social or media environments.

Racists egging each other on in an 8chan thread might or might not lead to a specific individual shooting up a Walmart, but that environment produces an elevated risk of someone doing that, when they otherwise wouldn't have.

how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition?

Because that's not what Stochastic means.

In statistics, Stochastic is a word which describes a kind of randomness. There's a slight technical distinction between something being Stochastic vs random, in stats. But the way that it's used in Political Science and Terrorism Studies, they're synonymous.

The thing in Stochastic Terrorism which is Stochastic, or random, is the acts of terrorism themselves, not the media environment which produces them. You seem to be confusing the casual mechanism (media environment) as the thing that's Stochastic, when it's actually the effect (the terrorism), which is what's random.

Is dissemination of bigotry via social media Stochastic? I mean... Maybe? These things are often carried out in a very intentional way. A lot of online and IRL transphobia, for example, is carried out by people who are a part of distinct groups, with goals, hierarchies, and people who hand down orders. Which isn't Stochastic. So that's not inherently the case.

Now, if someone on Lemmy calls me a tr*nny unprompted, then yeah, that would be an example of stochastic behavior. Maybe that guy comes from an instance which doesn't moderate transphobia, Incentivizing transphobes to gather there, that can lead to a higher statistical likelihood of slur throwing on Lemmy.

But that's Stochastic behavior, not Stochastic terrorism. Terrorism is a morally neutral description of something very specific: acts of violence carried out with the intent to spark fear or panic in a population.

Sam Altman or Elon Musk making yes-man robots that sometimes talk people into acts of violence is bad, and morally reprehensible ...but it's not terrorism.

If the robot talks a guy into killing his family in the name of Donald Trump, that's not terrorism.

If the robot talks someone into blowing up a bank because it fed him antisemitic conspiracies, then that would be terrorism, because he's trying to terrorize the cabal of Jewish bankers that he believes exists.

But the act of making the robot, or profiting off of it, or whatever, isn't itself terrorism. You've just made a petri dish more efficient than 8chan.

Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.

it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?

No Patrick, Those things aren't stochastic terrorism either. Yes, that guy did bad things and should be punished for them. Yes it resulted in deaths. But he didn't do it specifically to kill people, or terrorize them for a political purpose. Those are externalities. He did it to make more money. And he did it with, as you said, a giant network... Which even if it somehow counted as terrorism (which it doesn't), would make it traditional terrorism, not Stochastic.

zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.

I agree that this is also bad, but it's neither Stochastic, nor Terrorism. Outside of Burgerland, in the decade preceding Trump, Facebook helped create a media environment in Myanmar, which spurred on a mix of Stochastic and traditional terrorism, in addition to state violence, against the Rohingya people. That's awful and I think Zuckerberg should be tried for his role in the facilitation of genocide. But the act of poorly and irresponsibly moderating Facebook is not Terrorism.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thompson is an stochastic murderer, not terrorist. Trump and Altman are both, Murdoch is a terrorist. There are differences.