KF's lead admin states it plainly: use a VPN, because KF complies with subpoenas. If folks were committing high-end acts of terrorism against elected officials regularly, the baddies might not be safe.
But if you're a trans streamer with a small following, if the folks coordinating attacks on you are diligent enough to make sure they're doing so off-platform, behind a VPN, calling folks while obscuring their identities, and so on? There's no chance for you.
I led a team in infiltrating a small community that acted as KF does. Even with screenshots in hand, even being on Discord, the Discord T&S team couldn't do very much for us because we didn't have nearly enough evidence in hand. We had to do a public exposé with what we had in hand and basically bluff that these folks could get in trouble as a result. Only that, along with the fact that we had bits and pieces enough of their identities, got them to go away. There's absolutely no way that I can tell that anyone would be taking anyone else to court. The best we could do was make our group so hard to attack that it wasn't worth it.
How is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this?
so the problem is actually somewhere else.
That doesn't mean they don't lower the barrier to entry for good, bad, and ostensibly not bad but we all know whose side they're on actors alike. Just means my comment and lived experiences were just not perfectly applicable.
It needs to go through a trial. That's what its for.
Having experienced it firsthand, I know that to not be the case. Good luck serving the subpoenas on Large Faceless Internet Giant(tm) and John Does 1-100, especially when you don't have anything near the standard of evidence necessary to do that or the law degree necessary to make such filings. Good luck doing anything less than that, because no one actually cares as long as the money keeps flowing.
The only way I could prove malice was by infiltrating their community. The only way I could shut them down was to sow enough distrust that they couldn't operate and to expose their malice to the world. And you know what? Our coordinated effort won out. We only had to fight an uphill battle against complete strangers, with our real lives put at risk. And they aren't so much as banned from the platform. They just know well enough not to mess with us again. Just the one group, because any other group could swing by and make our lives hard again.
And I'm not even the person who was being attacked. I'm privileged enough that I could have turned away and told them they were on their own. Just like some folks running some companies that help these folks do their dirty work. I didn't, because helping someone without any other recourse was the right thing to do.
I doubt they'd be as happy if sites that host speech critical of MTG were being held responsible for contributing to the three SWATings she had recently, to name the most recent example, but this is too emotional and I think people want the corps to respond because they know that the law is harder to change.
More generally, swatting people is bad (and also illegal!), people should not do it. Sites that encourage it should not be supported. No equivocation there.
So, when someone does a thing that's designed to hurt both Kiwifarms and MTG and your assumption is that KF is responsible?
> More generally, swatting people is bad (and also illegal!), people should not do it.
I'd agree, anyone caught doing this should be imprisoned for attempted murder. I worry more about people trying to expand this list to anyone adjacent to them or critical of that person who does not engage in such harassment or any platform they use to speak, even when that platform removes anyone doing such things.
That said if we do go down that road, FB, Twitter & co. should be first on the chopping block and I won't miss them.
> Sites that encourage it should not be supported.
I don't visit KF, except that I read their response earlier regarding the byuu thing (when they were being DDoS'd which prevented them from responding much) and it didn't seem like the platform had meaningfully encouraged this or interacted with byuu in any way.
It's a sad loss, because I was loosely acquainted with byuu and byuu's work and you can see some of those comments between us here on HN. I also did what little I could to try to help find that package of lost video games, not that I actually was able to contribute anything, but I tried.
Despite KF getting lots of blame, I didn't actually see any proof of them participating in that in any meaningful way. Maybe I missed something, because again, I don't actually use that site and I only went there to look at what was going on with the story since it involved byuu.
But the response was pretty clear that there was a small thread with people not even interacting with byuu and it's hard to see a link between that and driving someone to suicide. None of the articles I read about the whole thing actually did anything but quote someone who said there was a link, so with no evidence but some person I don't know's say-so, I'd say that case is rather weak by people who already hate KF.
Feel free to point to more showing that KF is bad, because to me they're just another angry part of the internet, kinda like FB or Twitter, that I tend to avoid for that very reason. I'm suspect that they in particular should be deplatformed compared to the other platforms, though, because to me they're all angry nasty things that have driven people to suicide.
And I'm pretty sure that on FB in particular, someone was successfully sued for that, which already puts them a level worse than what I've seen proven of KF so far.
Byuu was targeted by 4chan terrorists who just used his history with KiwiFarms for misdirection. Taking down KiwiFarms may stop some, but not all of the terrorism associated around it.
When kf doxxes someone, and she's swatted the next day, yeah I'll blame the site that posted her address the day before and is known for inciting swatting attacks.
> That said if we do go down that road, FB, Twitter & co. should be first on the chopping block and I won't miss them.
I don't follow, KF doesn't remove, and even tacitly (and not so tacitly) encourages, harassment, while that isn't true of FB or twitter or even reddit.
> I don't follow, KF doesn't remove, and even tacitly (and not so tacitly) encourages, harassment, while that isn't true of FB or twitter or even reddit.
If "harassment" is the legal type (i.e. true threats), that's not first amendment protected and those who post it can be charged criminally. That's not generally something the platform is liable for.
That said, FB and others have been sued in similar circumstances:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2022/04/12/mother-sues-f...
Like, your defense here seems to amount to "what they're doing isn't technically illegal", which, sure, but that's not a defense to most people.
If you want to prohibit speech to white supremacists, fine, let’s pass a law and if it doesn’t hold constitutional muster, go ahead convince everyone to amend the constitution. But since our founding fathers made this process difficult on purpose, let’s take a different approach: that’s what social justice is. It is anti-democratic mob lunacy where corporations and governments are playing a proxy authoritarian game.
The idea that this is what "we agreed as a society" is absurd. The justice system is a thing that evolved in our society largely as a result of powerful people feeding it when it protects their interests.
The people elect representatives to pass and/or change laws.
What you're saying is we should disregard voting because you know best - an argument famously supported by every genocidal maniac in the 20th century.
I loathe about American exceptionalism, but the constitution and American legal system truly is: https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0
Certainly online harassment leading to someone committing suicide is.
KF is a platform that facilitates these activities.
Not in the USA, no.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
> Certainly online harassment leading to someone committing suicide is.
Harassment can be, but here "harassment" means making threats of violence, not just criticizing someone. That falls under "true threats":
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threats
Note that the older "fighting words" doctrine is probably obsolete and even then only applies to face-to-face conversation. For more on that see the prior link to Popehat.
Documenting people's lives is not harassment.
To have all of your privacy taken away from you.
The US is rather unique in their absolutist view of free speech and other countries don't work the same way. Generally, for example, this would be a violation of UK law.
First - if KF is guilty of crimes that would stop CloudFlare from providing them services - then it's both reasonable and normal for people to encourage CloudFlare to act before a verdict. It's extremely common for commercial actors to have policies based on their impressions of likely criminality (i.e. credit card transactions are marked fraudulent before a court of law weighs in). Also, even though it's impossible to perfectly provide services to all 'good' customers and deny services to all 'bad' customers - it seems desirable to minimize the services you provide to 'bad' customers. I.e. It's good to cut off likely fraudulent transactions before a court verdict and we should encourage companies to act ahead of verdicts.
So if you think a customer is probably doing something you'd cut off service for if it was determined in court, you should generally change your posture towards that customer somewhat. This is often a difficult determination and a difficult line to draw - but it's clearly a good thing to try and do.
Second, the ability to prove a case in court depends on a great number of elements aligning. There are a number of scenarios where an actor is doing things that, could they be proved in court, would get them denied service - but for reasons unrelated to the actions themselves a determination cannot be made. The moral weight of providing services to those actors is the same and it's still desirable for companies to seek to avoid providing services to bad actors. Your legal responsibility is different, but you would still like to avoid serving clients whose actions you abhor.
Otherwise, you get into the position where moral action is impossible outside of the opinion of an authority. Let's say you see a stranger's bag grabbed by someone else on the street - would you say the only moral course of action is to cooperate with an official investigation (if one happens)?
Then I'm sure these activists will have no trouble moving proving their arguments in a courtroom, which is the proper space for such an assertion to be adjudicated.