The chapter explores threat in social comments in Twitter/X posts on current political events (the war in Ukraine, the EU parliamentary elections and the US presidential elections), focusing on emotion-geared fear-inducing threat language related to the pathetic (Aristotelian) persuasive appeal. Adopting a pragmatic analysis perspective, the study applies a typology of threat acts and threat strategies and uses interactional stance analysis to identify how speakers from two different cultural backgrounds position themselves in relation to the ongoing asynchronous interaction in terms of evaluation and intentionality. It also addresses the potential uptake by addressees in relation to stereotypes associated with different segments of sociocultural communities. The chapter studies the context-dependent nature of threat and fear with the aim of identifying similarities and differences in the way Czech and Polish commentators on social media address the selected current political topics. The analysis suggests that the pathetic persuasive appeal based on threat and induced fear in the Czech and Polish Twitter/X posts is triggered by reference to a source different from the authors of the posts, typically a threatening agent located in threatening scenarios visualised to the addressees. Cross-cultural differences concern primarily the specific sources of threat and predominant stereotypes to which the persuasive strategies refer.