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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

"I support free speech except the things that I don't like"

The site in question is one of the most notorious doxxing and harassment forums, linked to multiple suicides of their victims over the years. I'm not sure what principled political speech you think is being protected here.

Transparency in a society is extremely important. It is a fundamental right to gather and publish information bringing to the publics attention harmful, disturbing and potentially illegal behavior.

What principled political speech should be protected you ask? My answer is investigative journalism.

If you believe investigative journalism should exist and plays an important function in society, you should have no problem with outlets doing that.

Harassing, doxxing, and swatting random people on social media is not investigative journalism.

Guess we should take down traditional media as well then when they dox LibsOfTiktok and other creators so that the Twitter mob can harass and SWAT them, since they can't hide behind 'journalism'. Or does it only apply to the bad guys?

It's a pretty big false equivalence to say revealing the name of a prominent psuedonymous account linked to doxxing, harassment and bomb threats is remotely the same as what KF or Libs of TikTok do.

How exactly is Kiwi Farms helping with this when the vast majority of their forum threads are like "LOL tr--ns talking about X." Seriously, just go skim their site, tell me exactly where they fulfill this function?

KF is not "investigative journalism." It's just a site where people gather to point and laugh at mentally ill people with a web presence. Anything they dig up on someone is in service to that singular goal. There's no reason to pretend that they do what they do for any other reason. Clouflare shouldn't be shutting down websites because of their content, but making fun of mentally ill people is not "an important function in society".

Free speech is a good, but it is not the highest good. We do not need to throw civil society away because it might infringe on free speech.

Civil society is a good, but it is not the highest good. We do not need to throw free speech away because it might infringe on civility. Especially when it's out and away from public and attention minding it's own business.

I don't understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that, if we could choose, we should choose free speech over civil society?

I broadly support free speech, but not hate speech.

"Hate speech" is ill-defined, basically it's just "speech that people with enough power don't like." and what that is can changes at any time.

Many people more intelligent than you (and me) have spent many decades thinking about this issue. E.g. if you can show in court that KF is defaming someone, you can go after them, or if you can show they're involved in other illegal activities. But "I don't like some of the things they're saying on their own forum" is NOT a valid reason.

The Soviet equivalent of this is saying you support free speech but not for capitalists.

The Daily Stormer is a Nazi website dedicated to promoting genocide and organizing people who support genocide. That's not "things that I don't like" unless your argument is that we shouldn't actually do anything about genocide until the genocide has been done.

Free speech does not cover defamation.

Sounds like something for the courts to handle and not cloudflare.

https://casetext.com/case/scott-v-moon-1

You could say that about a lot of things that are normally covered by abuse policies. For example, we expect hosts to remove content that violate copyright, why is copyright more worthy of protection at the corporate level than defamation?

Because society created laws in that way?

The DMCA specifically requires hosts to remove content upon an allegation of copyright infringement. There is no law requiring hosts to remove defamatory content (without a specific court order). Congress has deemed copyright protection more worthy of protection at the corporate level than defamation. If you are unhappy with that situation then you should contact your members of Congress.

Interesting. I typed up a comment that mentioned the name of the person co-ordonating the DDoS campaign, and I got instantly flagged. Test.

If KF are guilty of defamation or other crimes, go after them in court. Don't try to bully cloudflare into acting as executioner of your demands.

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