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It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the Ki

It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm it seems pretty well established that federally chartered corporations, like the USPS and Amtrak (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebron_v._National_Railroad_Passenger_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebron_v._National_Railroad_Pa...), are bound by the first amendment, so theoretically the Fed should be as well. That means the usual "it's a private corporation!" defense of corporate censorship is probably off the table.

tombert 3y ago
I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech. However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at that point I think the "it's a private company!" defense would actually apply to the credit card companies.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    You're right in this scenario, and people need to understand the First Amendment doesn't protect "criminal" speech. OTOH, plenty of sites have been canceled simply due to their fucked-up viewpoints that are protected speech.
    - orlp 3y ago
      If KiwiFarms hosted/was responsible for illegal activities, then it is up to law enforcement to deal with it, not payment processors. It is not desirable that private infrastructure companies such as Visa or MasterCard are effectively playing as judge, jury and executioner in modern society, even if (sometimes) they are happening to do the right thing.
      - docmars 3y ago
        Agreed, especially under the guise of boycotting ideas they don't like.
  - docmars 3y ago
    Any speech could be attributed to the N-number of suicides we unfortunately see happening. This is not a good argument for censorship or punitive actions against individuals or entities whose speech was followed by a suicide with dubious / unproven connections to that speech. If any speech is to be considered targeted harassment, then let the courts decide that in a defamation (or otherwise) case to determine damages and reconciliation of those damages. Private entities should not be allowed to limit their business services to customers they suspect are behaving in a way they disapprove of, especially since these customers are not asking for tailored services such as cakes and custom websites. Payment providers are the backbone of a functioning economy, and problematic speech should never be the reason why they deny service.
  - slily 3y ago
    Last I heard, at least one of those "confirmed suicides" failed to appear in government databases, which casts doubt on its legitimacy (I assume it is one of those counted as "confirmed"), and another was associated with outside harassment and falsely attributed to KF. I don't know what the third one is. I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.
  - clove 3y ago
    This is misinformation. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied. *There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively. **See the other child comment to your post.*
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Sticks and stones
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    Then prosecute them for it? Our society probably shouldn’t depend on credit card processors to maintain law and order.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
      - callalex 3y ago
        This is a non-sequitur because the governments resolve millions to billions of disputes every day without violence as well.
        EGreg 3y ago
        But without threat of violence? What are you referring to?
      - yanderekko 3y ago
        >A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence? Good point, maybe the private financial institutions (or more!) of the country should lean into this and offer a shadow legal system whereby anyone can bring suit for any allowable reason with the ultimate threat being a sort of (nonviolent!) exile from digital society. That could surely not go wrong.
      - throwaway894345 3y ago
        The parent is claiming a serious harassment campaign which seems functionally equivalent to violence. Both are harmful, illegal activities. Also, no one is advocating violent government intervention.
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    One of those "confirmed" suicides occurred in Japan and the individual was also a US citizen. The US State Department doesn't list any suicides when it was said to have happened (June 2021 - there was one prior to that in May and another in February 2022). Reporting the death of a foreign national to their respective embassy is mandatory in Japan. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/while-abroad/death-abroad1/death-statistics.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      Japanese statistics show 6 US citizen deaths in June 2021 https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/110/400/438/976/740/616/original/e275285f7af379eb.png https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/110/... The state department is just missing data.
      - tjpnz 3y ago
        Do you have an original source for this and is there a breakdown by cause? US State Department data only accounts for non-natural causes - namely suicides and accidents.
    - jyrkesh 3y ago
      I assume you're talking about near (fka byuu)? Heartbreaking...such an unbelievably intelligent and insightful person. I had the pleasure of getting a couple direct replies from them once on an obscure subreddit under my own realname account. That turned into a few DMs, and despite the fact that I was publicly working on tech completely antithetical to their technical views, they were so gracious and thoughtful and engaged...it was truly humbling. I have my own thoughts on KF too...I wish the individuals responsible for their targeted and direct harassment had been held accountable. But I'll try to preserve some tact in their memory and leave it at that.
  - 634636346 3y ago
    Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds. However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
    - sneed_today 3y ago
      Actually it is available via the clearweb - https://sneed.today https://sneed.today.
    - tombert 3y ago
      Well wait, maybe they gave up the deplatforming effort largely because it’s not as easy to deplatform an onion site as it is to harass web hosts on Twitter. Also, wasn’t a big complaint with KF their doxxing? Even if I didn’t do any bad or illegal things, I don’t really want a bunch of trolls knowing my address.
      - subsistence234 3y ago
        But if you HAD done bad things and they WERE documented on KF, you might try even harder to get it shut down. And if you had plenty money and influential contacts, and no moral qualms, you might succeed. Only temporarily though.
    - yanderekko 3y ago
      >Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb Untrue, but once enough people know this I'm sure it'll be taken out again. I'd post the link but I'd probably be jeopardizing my YC account..
    - heywhatupboys 3y ago
  - jojobas 3y ago
    This is a bullshit take. Kiwifarms always remind users to stay away from gossip subjects. The fact that some people disregard that is the equivalent of someone reading a tabloid or "Elon Musk jet tracker" and harasses celebrities mentioned there. Also if you do what's likely to cause a KF article documenting your antics, you can be sure 4chan/8chan/countless discord channels will have a go at you as well, and those are typically not so restrained. But sure pin it where you want.
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    The nexus between KF harassment and the suicides in two of the three cases is extremely tenuous ("KF had a thread X disliked" -> "X committed suicide" -> "KF induced X's suicide") and in the third the evidence that a suicide occurred to begin with is lacking. I'm sure many, many more suicides could be linked more strongly to any of the major social media platforms. In any case, the reasons for deplatforming have always been more diverse. CloudFlare dropped KF for representing some sort of imminent and ongoing threat to human life which you'd think a good-faith review of would indicate was misguided (and thus their service should be restored.) KF has not been able to establish relationships with other hosts not because literally everyone finds them repugnant, but because entering into a public relationship with any company immediately makes that company a target for a hate campaign, and even "free speech" hosts and such have found the cost-benefit math unfavorable.
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    > They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech. and how many has reddit lead to? Just admit that they were deplatformed because a very powerful person pulled their strings at our frigging backbones of the internet for personal favors, and got the site banned there.
  - subsistence234 3y ago
    That story only holds water on social media or clickbait news.
- failuser 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - EGreg 3y ago
    How can the USA flagrantly violate sovereign airspace and jurisdiction of other countries to assassinate people with drones?
    - 1270018080 3y ago
      By carrying the biggest stick?
    - gammarator 3y ago
      … not sure if this is sarcasm…
      - EGreg 3y ago
        Why would it be sarcastic?
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Because they commit a crime of... what exactly again? They never crossed even a civil liability threshold, it's strictly a gossip site with multiple reminders never to contact gossip targets.
  - RockyMcNuts 3y ago
    is that a moral objection to cutting off Kiwi Farms, because a drone strike is more moral, fair, due process etc.? or an argument on efficiency grounds, that the payment system is an insufficiently effective form of annihilation?
prometheus76 3y ago
The Federal Reserve is a private company with a chair that is chosen by the President of the US with advice and consent from the Senate, and serves a four-year term. There is no term limitation for this office. The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.
- globalreset 3y ago
  ... https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-de...
- 634636346 3y ago
  >The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy. I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    We are both correct.
  - dools 3y ago
    Not only that but the cash swapped for bonds is also a liability of the government, so it is just swapping one liability for another. What we call government debt is just an operational vestige.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  public / private is a false dilemma trusts, foundations, and a host of other entities are ‘orphaned’ entities and is essentially a third category which is more accurate for the Federal Reserve as well The Board of Governors is a public entity with an appointment, and the rest of the entity has a rotation of members and pretty full autonomy on how it runs on the inside at the employee level
cempaka 3y ago
Isn't it the case that you still have to have a relationship with a bank to have an account to transfer into or out of via FedNow in the first place? In that case I don't think this would change the picture at all. It's not the intention to help the unbanked pariahs, that's for sure.
- 634636346 3y ago
  There are still almost 5k banks in the US. Unlike Zelle, if this opens to all of them, all you need is one bank.
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    I presume the system uses bank account and routing numbers? So besides concerns with sharing that information with the public, concerned citizens will figure out who they bank with, and will most likely be able to easily pressure the bank to drop them. Certain things should be difficult to accomplish in a functional society anyways, and administering a profitable hate group is one of those things. If not bankrupted by their lack of credit card access, they'll eventually run into legal troubles from the damage they cause to innocent people.
    - salawat 3y ago
      I'm sure British loyalists circa 1776 would have agreed with you.
      - evantbyrne 3y ago
        Nonsense comparison. We're talking about business partnerships. If everyone with a shred of decency turns your organization away, that's a great litmus test for its existence. Worry about the next revolution being banked when that becomes a real concern, not over an online troll farm that tries to convince vulnerable people to end their lives.
        polski-g 3y ago
hammock 3y ago
What is the Kiwi Farms?
- jcadam 3y ago
  Be happy that you do not know.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  A toxic website where online trolls discuss other personalities, mostly online, in a toxic way.
- lmm 3y ago
  A discussion forum similar to, say, Something Awful (or indeed HN), with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views.
  - Gabriel_Martin 3y ago
    “Mocking online misbehavior” is pretty generous.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Pretty accurate. You make yourself a name suing a waxing salon for not waxing your balls, you get a KF thread. You harass a github project for accepting contributions from a hardcore Christian, you get a KF thread. You declare "everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic and you need to point it all out", you get a KF thread.
  - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    >with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views. A less generous interpretation is that they coordinate harassment campaigns against transgender people and have caused at least three suicides.
    - 3y ago
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
Hopefully it resolves it. I don't want to live in a society where Mastercard or Visa defines if your business is "moral" enough to operate. Then you have Obama with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point trying to circumvent the Congress and the Judiciary.
bauruine 3y ago
A less controversal site, at least on hn, may be wikileaks https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...

tombert 3y ago

I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech. However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at that point I think the "it's a private company!" defense would actually apply to the credit card companies.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  You're right in this scenario, and people need to understand the First Amendment doesn't protect "criminal" speech. OTOH, plenty of sites have been canceled simply due to their fucked-up viewpoints that are protected speech.
  - orlp 3y ago
    If KiwiFarms hosted/was responsible for illegal activities, then it is up to law enforcement to deal with it, not payment processors. It is not desirable that private infrastructure companies such as Visa or MasterCard are effectively playing as judge, jury and executioner in modern society, even if (sometimes) they are happening to do the right thing.
    - docmars 3y ago
      Agreed, especially under the guise of boycotting ideas they don't like.
- docmars 3y ago
  Any speech could be attributed to the N-number of suicides we unfortunately see happening. This is not a good argument for censorship or punitive actions against individuals or entities whose speech was followed by a suicide with dubious / unproven connections to that speech. If any speech is to be considered targeted harassment, then let the courts decide that in a defamation (or otherwise) case to determine damages and reconciliation of those damages. Private entities should not be allowed to limit their business services to customers they suspect are behaving in a way they disapprove of, especially since these customers are not asking for tailored services such as cakes and custom websites. Payment providers are the backbone of a functioning economy, and problematic speech should never be the reason why they deny service.
- slily 3y ago
  Last I heard, at least one of those "confirmed suicides" failed to appear in government databases, which casts doubt on its legitimacy (I assume it is one of those counted as "confirmed"), and another was associated with outside harassment and falsely attributed to KF. I don't know what the third one is. I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.
- clove 3y ago
  This is misinformation. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied. *There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively. **See the other child comment to your post.*
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Sticks and stones
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  Then prosecute them for it? Our society probably shouldn’t depend on credit card processors to maintain law and order.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
    - callalex 3y ago
      This is a non-sequitur because the governments resolve millions to billions of disputes every day without violence as well.
      - EGreg 3y ago
        But without threat of violence? What are you referring to?
    - yanderekko 3y ago
      >A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence? Good point, maybe the private financial institutions (or more!) of the country should lean into this and offer a shadow legal system whereby anyone can bring suit for any allowable reason with the ultimate threat being a sort of (nonviolent!) exile from digital society. That could surely not go wrong.
    - throwaway894345 3y ago
      The parent is claiming a serious harassment campaign which seems functionally equivalent to violence. Both are harmful, illegal activities. Also, no one is advocating violent government intervention.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  One of those "confirmed" suicides occurred in Japan and the individual was also a US citizen. The US State Department doesn't list any suicides when it was said to have happened (June 2021 - there was one prior to that in May and another in February 2022). Reporting the death of a foreign national to their respective embassy is mandatory in Japan. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/while-abroad/death-abroad1/death-statistics.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Japanese statistics show 6 US citizen deaths in June 2021 https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/110/400/438/976/740/616/original/e275285f7af379eb.png https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/110/... The state department is just missing data.
    - tjpnz 3y ago
      Do you have an original source for this and is there a breakdown by cause? US State Department data only accounts for non-natural causes - namely suicides and accidents.
  - jyrkesh 3y ago
    I assume you're talking about near (fka byuu)? Heartbreaking...such an unbelievably intelligent and insightful person. I had the pleasure of getting a couple direct replies from them once on an obscure subreddit under my own realname account. That turned into a few DMs, and despite the fact that I was publicly working on tech completely antithetical to their technical views, they were so gracious and thoughtful and engaged...it was truly humbling. I have my own thoughts on KF too...I wish the individuals responsible for their targeted and direct harassment had been held accountable. But I'll try to preserve some tact in their memory and leave it at that.
- 634636346 3y ago
  Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds. However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
  - sneed_today 3y ago
    Actually it is available via the clearweb - https://sneed.today https://sneed.today.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Well wait, maybe they gave up the deplatforming effort largely because it’s not as easy to deplatform an onion site as it is to harass web hosts on Twitter. Also, wasn’t a big complaint with KF their doxxing? Even if I didn’t do any bad or illegal things, I don’t really want a bunch of trolls knowing my address.
    - subsistence234 3y ago
      But if you HAD done bad things and they WERE documented on KF, you might try even harder to get it shut down. And if you had plenty money and influential contacts, and no moral qualms, you might succeed. Only temporarily though.
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    >Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb Untrue, but once enough people know this I'm sure it'll be taken out again. I'd post the link but I'd probably be jeopardizing my YC account..
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
- jojobas 3y ago
  This is a bullshit take. Kiwifarms always remind users to stay away from gossip subjects. The fact that some people disregard that is the equivalent of someone reading a tabloid or "Elon Musk jet tracker" and harasses celebrities mentioned there. Also if you do what's likely to cause a KF article documenting your antics, you can be sure 4chan/8chan/countless discord channels will have a go at you as well, and those are typically not so restrained. But sure pin it where you want.
- yanderekko 3y ago
  The nexus between KF harassment and the suicides in two of the three cases is extremely tenuous ("KF had a thread X disliked" -> "X committed suicide" -> "KF induced X's suicide") and in the third the evidence that a suicide occurred to begin with is lacking. I'm sure many, many more suicides could be linked more strongly to any of the major social media platforms. In any case, the reasons for deplatforming have always been more diverse. CloudFlare dropped KF for representing some sort of imminent and ongoing threat to human life which you'd think a good-faith review of would indicate was misguided (and thus their service should be restored.) KF has not been able to establish relationships with other hosts not because literally everyone finds them repugnant, but because entering into a public relationship with any company immediately makes that company a target for a hate campaign, and even "free speech" hosts and such have found the cost-benefit math unfavorable.
- heywhatupboys 3y ago
  > They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech. and how many has reddit lead to? Just admit that they were deplatformed because a very powerful person pulled their strings at our frigging backbones of the internet for personal favors, and got the site banned there.
- subsistence234 3y ago
  That story only holds water on social media or clickbait news.
failuser 3y ago
[flagged]
- EGreg 3y ago
  How can the USA flagrantly violate sovereign airspace and jurisdiction of other countries to assassinate people with drones?
  - 1270018080 3y ago
    By carrying the biggest stick?
  - gammarator 3y ago
    … not sure if this is sarcasm…
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Why would it be sarcastic?
- jojobas 3y ago
  Because they commit a crime of... what exactly again? They never crossed even a civil liability threshold, it's strictly a gossip site with multiple reminders never to contact gossip targets.
- RockyMcNuts 3y ago
  is that a moral objection to cutting off Kiwi Farms, because a drone strike is more moral, fair, due process etc.? or an argument on efficiency grounds, that the payment system is an insufficiently effective form of annihilation?

prometheus76 3y ago

The Federal Reserve is a private company with a chair that is chosen by the President of the US with advice and consent from the Senate, and serves a four-year term. There is no term limitation for this office. The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.

globalreset 3y ago
... https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-de...
634636346 3y ago
>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy. I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  We are both correct.
- dools 3y ago
  Not only that but the cash swapped for bonds is also a liability of the government, so it is just swapping one liability for another. What we call government debt is just an operational vestige.
yieldcrv 3y ago
public / private is a false dilemma trusts, foundations, and a host of other entities are ‘orphaned’ entities and is essentially a third category which is more accurate for the Federal Reserve as well The Board of Governors is a public entity with an appointment, and the rest of the entity has a rotation of members and pretty full autonomy on how it runs on the inside at the employee level

cempaka 3y ago

Isn't it the case that you still have to have a relationship with a bank to have an account to transfer into or out of via FedNow in the first place? In that case I don't think this would change the picture at all. It's not the intention to help the unbanked pariahs, that's for sure.

634636346 3y ago
There are still almost 5k banks in the US. Unlike Zelle, if this opens to all of them, all you need is one bank.
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  I presume the system uses bank account and routing numbers? So besides concerns with sharing that information with the public, concerned citizens will figure out who they bank with, and will most likely be able to easily pressure the bank to drop them. Certain things should be difficult to accomplish in a functional society anyways, and administering a profitable hate group is one of those things. If not bankrupted by their lack of credit card access, they'll eventually run into legal troubles from the damage they cause to innocent people.
  - salawat 3y ago
    I'm sure British loyalists circa 1776 would have agreed with you.
    - evantbyrne 3y ago
      Nonsense comparison. We're talking about business partnerships. If everyone with a shred of decency turns your organization away, that's a great litmus test for its existence. Worry about the next revolution being banked when that becomes a real concern, not over an online troll farm that tries to convince vulnerable people to end their lives.
      - polski-g 3y ago

hammock 3y ago

What is the Kiwi Farms?

jcadam 3y ago
Be happy that you do not know.
LegitShady 3y ago
A toxic website where online trolls discuss other personalities, mostly online, in a toxic way.
lmm 3y ago
A discussion forum similar to, say, Something Awful (or indeed HN), with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views.
- Gabriel_Martin 3y ago
  “Mocking online misbehavior” is pretty generous.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Pretty accurate. You make yourself a name suing a waxing salon for not waxing your balls, you get a KF thread. You harass a github project for accepting contributions from a hardcore Christian, you get a KF thread. You declare "everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic and you need to point it all out", you get a KF thread.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  >with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views. A less generous interpretation is that they coordinate harassment campaigns against transgender people and have caused at least three suicides.
  - 3y ago

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

Hopefully it resolves it. I don't want to live in a society where Mastercard or Visa defines if your business is "moral" enough to operate. Then you have Obama with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point trying to circumvent the Congress and the Judiciary.

bauruine 3y ago

A less controversal site, at least on hn, may be wikileaks https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...