Swatting is incredibly dangerous. I fear many see it as a prank but when you get cops with guns charging into what they think is a dangerous situation then people get hurt.
Then you have harassment laws https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/harassment.... There are specific Cyberstalking laws.
They don't harass or even troll. It's literally one of the core rules of the site. Look (and laugh) but don't touch! If you ever try to organize something on-site, you'll get down-voted, your post deleted and potentially even banned. Attempting to swat isn't just not allowed on the site, but most members call out actual attempts as stupid, dangerous and evil!
Posting publicly available info and then pointing and laughing, is not stalking or harassment.
I guess my point is that any action against them should be for specific crimes committed by law enforcement. Not de-platforming by an angry mob. The nice thing about falling back on the justice system is you need to prove your claims. So if there is no crime here then there is no action required against Kiwi Farms. But if there is then there is a valid path to justice that doesn't involve the mob getting their way without any due process.
You also have to remember where those claims are coming from.. Vice isn't exactly the most unbias or trustworthy source. Just barely above clickbait in quality and more overtly political on these types of issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Harassment
It's kind of funny that you talk about an "alleged body count" when the site literally put up an actual counter of the people whose suicide they encouraged.
[0]: https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/chloe-sagal-death-12028...
[1]: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=308671
[2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-...
It seems very much like you've been reading fud from opportunistic people.. and from the sound of it some of the same people who threw Chloe under the bus the day it happened.
The problem is that just about nobody outside of KF has any reason at all to know anything about them, besides what they hear second hand from people who are upset with them.
Saying one word on the forum even hinting at the encouragement of what they term "GayOps" - or interacting directly with / harassing the subjects, is perhaps the only bannable offense there is. And that's not a term of endearment, and this is not a wink, wink, nudge thing. I know your mind wants to reject this, but it is the case. There's no secret chatroom. If there is it's a completely separate community because they wouldn't be able to talk to the actual community about any of it. The forum OGs will attempt to mock you into submission before things get to that point. The vast majority of the users have no interest in messing with them and it is against the culture. A few people will try to talk to the subjects on Twitter and in 7 years I've never once seen it go past that. Not once.
99% of their activity is screencapping public tweets, making mean-spirited quips about them, and... and nothing. That's it. That's what they do. People aren't mad about what KF does. They think they are, because people aren't capable of thinking clearly about this, particularly when they're the targets. People are really mad about what they say. They just can't believe it's legal to say the horrible things they say. But it is. And they're mad about where and how the Kiwis direct attention. And the more postmodern targets have lately taken to yapping about what they've termed "stochastic terrorism". That's the idea that the speech on the forum raises the statistical likelihood that somebody might decide to commit a crime OR that a target might commit suicide. Stochastic terrorism. This is how they're able to say with a straight face that the Kiwis are terrorists, committing terrorism, in addition to being nazis, fascists, alt-right, inciting violence and all the standard by the book things that you people have taken to calling every single person who doesn't exercise their right to talk about shit in the way you think they should.
Almost everything I've ever read about Kiwi Farms was blatant and obvious lies with an obvious agenda.
Anything outside of that I'll admit I'm probably wrong or at best uninformed. I have no doubt that in this day and age they're being attacked in bad faith by the media.
But yes, they're attacked almost exclusively in bad faith by everybody. Everybody. As soon as somebody says "There's a website dedicated to making trans people commit suicide!" in this our Age of Outrage, there is a part of most people that wants to believe it immediately.
Which really makes me wonder why the media doesn't stick to reporting on what they actually say and do. Why isn't that bad enough? It would still make everyone mad.
If someone wants to know another's axioms, it's easy to simply preface questions with that context. Absent that, the audience will infer what the writers intentions are. Usually when the audience guesses wrong we don't blame the audience, we instead respond back with polite critique that the author's words were unclear.
Maybe I've been on the internet too much, but there's been times when it's clear the Sorcratic method was being used as a rhetorical device with great effect rather than a knowledge transference device. We can both agree that's maladaptive behavior.
This might actually be a good technique. It is very difficult to convey good faith intentions on todays internet.