Eh, maybe, but don't most of these laws mostly fail to work across international borders anyway?
I mean, I haven't seen many cryptolocker authors appearing before US courts. And wikileaks remains online despite the best efforts of US authorities.
Surely anything that could shut down or block kiwifarms could do the same to wikileaks and pirate bay and sci-hub?
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
Then why do people who issue takedown requests get plastered all over the site and harassed?
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)
As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.
You should read up on what actually happened, one a unbiased source. Which si not Wikipedia.
The sources that are allowed/disallowed and their respective biases (e.g. what they publish or don't say) are a big factor.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807942
[2]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
[3]https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-ne...
The first link is from Destiny, a well-known (albeit controversial) online figure. It seems to be a factual timeline of events with citations for every claim made, which is far from an opinion piece.
Completely dismissing the content because you believe it must be biased is somewhat ironic.
Would you at least then concede that the Wikipedia article is also unreliable and biased?
> One is bordering on an attack piece.
Which one? If you're referring to the piece published by Destiny, what constitutes an "attack piece" if all the claims made are rigorously cited? Would being an attack piece invalidate the claims even if they're demonstrably true?
[1]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
Moreover, if it's about the situation mentioned earlier this year on HN, it's problematic because of its complexity and gravity. Even with just facts and only facts, the change of the narrative (ie. the order you present the facts in) is enough for the same reasonable person to come to opposite conclusions. And that's before accounting for rhetorical devices that aim to manipulate the reader while still not crossing the line and sticking to facts - happily employed by both sides of the discussion in staggering quantities. (Then, of course, there's the other 90% of sources full of lies and fabrications, but let's leave those alone on HN at least...)
In short - it's not worth the hassle unless you're invested in the matter enough to care a lot, and once you are, odds are you won't post an unbiased source anyway. You'll need to do your own research, wade through a metric crapton of some of the worst humanity has to offer, and form your own opinion based on that. I don't think there's a shortcut here.
Come on, that is the literal fucking purpose of infrastructure. Water/sewage doesn't get to refuse to flush my toilet because the content of my stool doesn't meet their nutritional expectations.
> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence
It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.
Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.
> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her
"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.
Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.
Just on this specific point: this is not a particularly weird scenario at all. There are very strong rules about what you can and cannot send in the mail, and these rules are enforced. The most obvious example is the Comstock laws, which regulate "obscene and immoral materials" sent through the mail (including things like information about birth control). They're from the 1800s, but several are still on the books. It's not a strange concept at all in American law to regulate what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort of the fine lines.
You know what would counter disinformation? Links to analysis of kiwifarms with methodology and citations. E.g. what proportion of threads (from, say, a random sample of 20) contain doxxing on the first page?
> Edit: I've now done this. Looks like about 25%. Damn, that's high.
There's probably a fallacy or term for this, but this is one of those situations where if you catch someone doing one thing, it gives you just enough credibility to exaggerate other features without proof-- and people will believe the whole thing.
Doxxing is the easiest claim to verify, and though unwelcome, it's not a crime. "Harassment" in this context is conflated with "accountability," which is relevant when you consider who exactly their "victims" are and what KF accuses each of them of in turn. None of them are random nobodies minding their own business-- most if not all of Kiwi Farms' "victims" are public e-celebrities or influencers they accuse of being complicit in some form of fraud, abuse, child solicitation or other shenanigans, so it seems clear to me why such "victims" would want evidence of their own criminal behavior erased from the internet.
I've said it elsewhere, but nobody ever accuses KF of being liars. If they're posting defamatory content, there are established legal channels available to address that-- the site and its owner are reside in the most litigious country on earth. Yet there are no channels to suppress publication of truthful information (or opinion)...which I would argue is the real reason for the histrionics of the opposition.
They're still trying to present Chris-chan as some sort of sob story because Kiwi Farms was mean to him or something; the guy raped his own mother. Keffals is no better, crying to the fucking media about being SWATed by Kiwi Farms when their own account sounded more like a search warrant being executed. byuu was caught faking his own death before, but he's totally dead this time and it's totally Kiwi Farms' fault for making him commit suicide again. Attention whores, all of them. Cry me a fucking river.
I imagine the moderators giving the same "No, please, don't do this" with the exact same level of authority as Willy Wonka telling people "no don't":
It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.
Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc. (aka, "doxxing") is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
If KF truly discouraged harassment, they'd do what every other sane site does and immediately delete the post and ban the user that posted it.
Chris Chan has been a notorious and divisive figure online long before the existence of the Kiwi Farms. They are arguably one of the most well-known Internet personalities.
Merely referring to them as "a trans woman" throws away a massive amount of context why Kiwi Farms (and many other sites) seems so obsessed.
Also, what does labeling the person as trans (or anything else) have to do with harassment?
These threads exist. They're easy to find. I've seen them before and they're absolutely abhorrent.
Another commenter said they checked themselves
> Edit: I have now accessed the site and confirm a culture of doxxing, with 3 of the 10 opening posts proudly having "doxx" sections.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327204
> Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327642
Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else. I really wish I could understand the mentality of thinking otherwise. Are you really so hung up on "thinking for yourself" that you automatically assume anything said by the mainstream media is a lie? Skepticism is great and I highly encourage it, but automatic knee-jerk rejection is not skepticism, it's basically setting you up for falling for reverse psychology. Just because the mainstream media says one thing while fringe reporters say something else does not automatically mean the mainstream is lying.
Two notes:
1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
2. "Does more than zero research" is a very high bar that few meet. The number of people I've found on the internet who cite primary sources, government stats/papers and scientific papers is less than 0% to the nearest tenth of a percent. While its true that sometimes research can take half an hour or more, so often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
Ideally everyone would do research and cite real sources, in practice less than one in a thousand do.
There's a difference between an honest archive of potentially reprehensible things that might motivate someone to harass someone and a site which actively promotes harassment. Example, _Something Awful_ (at least back in the day).
Would KF be better, in your mind, if the threads contained links to archive sites whose archives contained the doxxing information, but they didn't repost it on KF? Separate the comments from the data?
> often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
The claim is that the police/courts/government are actively ignoring sex-trafficking and child sex when they perceive there to be a racial group of perpetrators, so one would expect the stats on prosecutions to be misleading. It's not about which race is more likely to commit a crime in Britain, but which races are potentially being "allowed" to and thus which victims are unlikely to be helped. The claim is not that Muslims or Pakistanis are more rapey than other people, just that they're less likely to be prosecuted in Britain's current legal climate.
There is a comment by a police officer "The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found a chief inspector told a missing child’s father that Rotherham “would erupt” if it knew that multiple Asian gangs were sexually abusing children" which indicates a blindness towards certain groups, and because the issue is police perception of their ability to prosecute without being called racist, that chief inspector's view is relevant to likelihood of investigation and arrest and therefore prosecution.
A UK parliament study on the issue deliberately clouds the issue by saying "The vast majority of convicted child-sex offenders in the UK are single White men", which shouldn't surprising in a country where the majority is white. This misses the claim of unequal police attention though, which is the real issue.
I don't think you researched the actual claims of the people who brought that up and thus haven't disproven it.
That's only your opinion. What OP says about KF is still correct.
No, it really isn't.
> Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for [doxxing] is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
Yes, I acknowledge it's all public, but that doesn't explain why you would want to aggregate that information and post it in a public forum and make it easier to acquire. What purpose does it achieve?
I do not recall seeing those in the threads I looked at (which all have an opening post collecting information about the individual).
Can you confirm what proportion, if any, of main posts had that info? Can you also confirm that KF does not have a policy of removing that info?
I can't access kiwifarms at the moment to check, but I strongly suspect that information is in obscure posts by individuals and their "community" as a whole does not condone it and it is removed where obvious.
Primary sources analysed either a good methodology are by far the best way to learn about a subject.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
>That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.