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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

I think criticizing people for running websites like “theholocaustisfake” is less like “attacking people for having bad thoughts” and a bit more like “attacking people for poisoning the well”.

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Violating their expected privacy, fostering moralistic vigilante justice against them, and creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions -- that's "poisoning the well" in a far worse way.

> Violating their expected privacy

They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

> creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions

The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.

> They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

I disagree with this. I think they did have a reasonable expectation of anonymity, they just didn't do a great job at protecting it. Per the article it seems like Epik accept fake names and cryptocurrency; they could have done that and avoided this mess.

I'd expect my registrar to protect my personal address, for example, despite the website being my full name. And for my other domains I absolutely would expect them to protect my identity because I paid for WHOIS protection. And none of them are even remotely controversial.

> The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.

Also disagree. It's an opinion, but a wrong one that they should face social opprobrium for.

Do you think a political opinion like 'taxes are too high and should be lowered" is on the same moral footing as misinformation like 'the holocaust did not really happen' ?

They may well be. You can make that judgement for yourself; but you haven't the right to make it for me.

I have personally known people who honestly believed the Holocaust had been exaggerated in scope. They were wrong, but telling them "shut up!" wasn't going to help educate them. Showing them some of the stuff linked from here [1] did.

[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/combating-...

> but you haven't the right to make it for me.

That’s why they were asking, not stating a fact. You also dodged the question.

The issue isn't people's opinion. Was everyone whose privacy was violated saying "that the holocaust did not happen"? And who exactly is the arbiter of what's acceptable, if not the law? The issue is that the people who released this data were not law enforcers, they were vigilantes. Maybe some people hold vigilanties in high regard, but I don't. If someone says something you don't like or something you think is inaccurate, reply to it, inform people of what's wrong and convince them of why you believe you are right -- don't trample all over their legal rights. The violations of privacy were indiscriminate and based on the reputation of the company not the individuals -- not that targeting privacy violations would have made things any more legal or acceptable. The loss of expectations to legal privacy are a horrible "poisoning of the well" and eventually hurts everyone.

Loss of privacy has happened in the past, like with Wikileaks from which Pizzagate originated.

>If someone says something you don't like or something you think is inaccurate, reply to it, inform people of what's wrong and convince them of why you believe you are right

President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, wrote: "A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on."

Fighting misinformation is way harder than spreading it. Because misinformation spreads virally because it's clickbait and interesting, while fact checks are boring.

Abandoning rights and freedoms in the name of expediency is also a lot easier than standing up for them. And recovering those rights and freedoms once lost will be a long and miserable process.

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