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For clarification: is this still only randoms on social media, or are there notable figures/organisations taking this stance as well? (Not saying randoms on social media are harmless, but there's a major difference in degree there.)
I will note that while I'm also quite concerned about the situation in the 'States, there are widely-varying threat levels among Western nations. I don't see Australia collapsing even if given a hard shove, for instance. Canada and Europe seem to be somewhere in-between.
Empirically, social media shitposts about assaulting someone are not true threats. Has anyone ever been attacked in meatspace by an internet rando (as opposed to an ex-boyfriend or suchlike) who trolled them on social media first? I think shitposting about violence is bad and the people who do it are bad people who should feel bad, but online culture (and especially the online culture of the anti-establishment right that emerged from places like 4chan and was a major influence on early MAGA culture) disagrees with me.
I think that Paul Chambers (of the UK Twitter Joke Trial fame) was an idiot, but nobody found it worth the effort to publicly point this out.
Musk is the last person who should be complaining about failure to peformatively condemn shitposters - if the law took Musk's shitposting seriously then he would be in jail for securities fraud and Vernon Unsworth would own Tesla. Musk doesn't even condemn actual political violence when carried out by his side (I am mostly thinking about the Paul Pelosi case here), let alone shitposting.
Unless I'm missing something, we're talking about advocacy of assassination, not ITG threats of assassination. If you write a post telling people to do X, there's a possibility that people might read your post and do X. This is unfortunately true even if you weren't being serious. Hence, it is not unreasonable to be concerned about a high volume of people advocating X when X is "assassinating a high-ranked government official".
It is also not unreasonable to be concerned about the possibility of the culture war boiling over into mass violence in the USA, regardless of one's side in that war (if any). I'm thus not seeing the relevance of the tu quoque; I'm trying to get a better read on P(Boogaloo), not trying to score points.
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There's this chronic inability on the Left to call out people in their own tribe that agitate for and perpetrate violence. The Right isn't perfect either, but I didn't see this much resistance or 'gaze-aversion' when required to denounce the miscreants in their midst. And TBF, I think they too increasingly lost interest in doing so since the utility of it is less than zero.
At best, you get something like Biden's 'condemnation of ALL political violence' that only names the Proud Boys, whereas Antifa 'is just an idea'.
This arouses the suspicion that their political leadership is actually okay with somebody else doing anything between knocking over conservative BBQs to killing Elon Musk.
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I’ll also point out that no prominent anti-Trump figures are denouncing those random calls for assassination. I find little comfort in the fact that AOC has not called for an assassination when she also hasn’t called out those who have done so. Nor has she said a single word about the attacks on Tesla dealerships or the harassment of people who own Tesla vehicles. To me, this is a deafening silence signaling that while they’re unwilling to be brave enough to call for violence, they’re perfectly fine with violence happening.
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