> since when is "doxxing" a crime?

The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?

The swats were not verified as coming from KF, and they said they oppose that sort of thing. I noticed that some of the people KF had threads on, were targeted specifically because they overstep the boundaries of what KF considers acceptable (for instance the "Ralph Retort" blogger).

You could still argue that Kiwifarms still "enables" people who are even worse than them, in the same way that certain glossy magazines enable harassment of various celebrities. Certainly Kiwifarms themselves get worked up over people who merely "enable" bad things, so they don't have that much non-hypocritical leg to stand on. Still, we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest.

(The "credible bomb threats" was IMO not very credible, it was a fresh account claiming to be able to commandeer out Irish paramilitaries to bomb multiple sites in minutes. And the post was reported instantly, and removed within minutes. That's something that could happen to all sites that allow public comments.)

> we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest

There was editorial control. Someone to be held accountable, and someone making decisions knowing that. User-generated content is different. I am less certain of any prescription for the problem than I am in the difference being salient. Heuristics that work on print media aren’t easily translated to social.

Kiwifarms has editorial control, though. Posts advocating swatting or violence are removed, and their users banned.

Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party.

If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked?

The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.

> started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame?

If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble.

> journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society

There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.

The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0].

And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate.

[0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...

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