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> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force. This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference

• kybernetyk 4y ago
  So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
  • cowtools 4y ago
    Is this referring to the "slate star codex" incident a couple years back?
    • atdrummond 4y ago
      That and likely how Taylor Lorenz handled the Libs of Tik Tok unmasking.
      • _vvaw 4y ago
        ”Unmasking” is merely code for “doxing someone we don’t like.” Someone’s full legal name is all you really need to look them up on people-finder websites, which IMO are the real problem and in urgent need of regulation.
        • atdrummond 4y ago
          I think the issue was mainly that (from the viewpoint of those complaining) she harassed the LoTT’s family at their homes and then went live with the article before giving anyone connected to LoTT (including LoTT herself) sufficient time to address her questions and statements. I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
          • _vvaw 4y ago
            She published LoTT’s full legal name and enough of a description to positively locate her on Spokeo/White Pages/etc. That is a common cop-out for Twitter mobs; posting the ready-made parts for such a search but not the actual home address, so in the poster’s eyes it technically isn’t “doxing.”
        • tedivm 4y ago
          There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
          • atdrummond 4y ago
            There is no such counter on Kiwifarms - at most they’ve front paged claims (totally unsourced and totally unfounded) by Keffals and others that KF has caused three or more suicides. A reminder, by the way, that Keffals has used her platform to promote the use of DIY HRT by minors. (https://t.co/4dnauozhuS https://t.co/4dnauozhuS) KF was the first to find evidence of Keffals flirting with underage trans children in her discord (known as her Femboy Ranch) and, despite my dislike of KF, her campaign seems mostly committed to memory holing these events.
            • howinteresting 4y ago
              What you've linked to is a DIY HRT guide sponsored by her. This is an essential resource for trans people in most of the world -- not all parts of the world are as progressive as the San Francisco Bay Area. There's no mention of minors on that website. It's not reasonable to try and restrict this information from minors either. edit: responding to post from deepdriver below: your first link is from a vicious transphobe who in the very first line misgenders trans women and girls, and the second post has blatant anti-Semitism in it within the first couple of sentences. Also, the packaging is pretty cringe, but saying that it is explicitly targeting kids is ridiculous -- I've seen plenty of adults with that aesthetic. If you really care about unlicensed pharmacies on the internet, you would encourage easier access to HRT so that trans teens don't have to resort to this. edit: responding to other post from Banana699 below: The thing that separates you and me is that the scientific evidence clearly indicates that gender dysphoria is real, and that social and medical transition is greatly helpful. My "ideology" is to follow the science, understanding that it has limitations but that it is the best known way to understand reality.
  • danShumway 4y ago
    If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline. But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
    • flkiwi 4y ago
      There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else. The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
    • tomjen3 4y ago
      Their cover up of Stalins holocaust in Ukraine probably killed more people than there are transpeople in the US. Their support of the Iraq war caused an unknowable amount of damage. From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
• xupybd 4y ago
  No that's why this issue should have been dealt with promptly and firmly by a justice system not by a corporate choice. We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
  • danShumway 4y ago
    Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA. Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that. In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
    • mlyle 4y ago
      > Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices. Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
• stale2002 4y ago
  Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal. Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit. That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
  • danShumway 4y ago
    > nobody has proven their actions to be illegal It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably. I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government. I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack. Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • swat535 4y ago
• zackees 4y ago
  Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News. The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online. We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong. The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
• LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc. The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
  • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical
  • howinteresting 4y ago
• AllegedAlec 4y ago
  > doxing Doxxing isn't illegal. > harassing people with threats of violence How do you know that A: the person whose name I won't say isn't lying, because that person's a professional victim. And B: if that person isn't lying, that those threats came from Kiwi Farms users.
• StillLrning123 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • HereIGoAgain 4y ago
    Is bullshit.. That's why it's a paradox. Intolerance of "intolerance" is intolerance! And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
    • danShumway 4y ago
      [flagged]
• herbst 4y ago
  Kiwifarms also serves a weird specific role. Many of the people people discussed there do propagate harmful things. Like normalizing cutting, starving, violence and much more. There is no control instance for things like this. Normalizing harmful things ok YouTube in front of children is not cool, we all know YouTube barely cares either. For a concrete example look into Chris Chan and how Kiwifarms was literally the only instance out there protecting Chris from way more evil groups. My point is even if Kiwifarms is a hateful environment, I think they serve a purpose in our society.
• HereIGoAgain 4y ago
  Where are these so-called threats of physical harm and real-world harassment? People keep saying this but never even attempt to back it up with anything more than the allegation.