The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
That's effectively what a supreme court justice said should be the case last week.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/29/supreme-c...
Were you thinking of a different quote from your source? This quote, which seemed closest to your intent, does not at all say what you were suggesting.
Since 1948, all people are due the basic human right of dignity. Sacred caste or not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Hum...
“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.“
And otherwise:
“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”
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.
Is it possible to accurately define this in law and policy, such that actions against it can be fairly enforced?
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.
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.
If it reaches a point of causing public disorder or harming the general welfare of a democratic society, then why not arrest?
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?
stochastic terrorism appears to be the academic way of saying “inciting mob violence”
seems pretty straightfoward and honest, to me
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.
“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.
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 believe that, in the United States, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and congress are the ones who decide what warrants investigation, generally speaking.
You can place blame anywhere depending on your agenda.
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.