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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

Oh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.

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Then charge them with racketeering.

If that doesn't work make the part you don't like illegal. Enshrine something like the "right to be forgotten" stuff into law and make them take down threads if the people they refer to don't want them up.

I know it's hard to word something like a "right to be forgotten" without making it to broad and a tool for abuse of chilling speech but it seems worth the effort if the consequences are this dire.

I already live in an EU country - as do many of the people with threads on KF. I don't even have the minuscule amount of control voters in the US would have over this, and Cloudflare only cares about US legislation (as with the anti sex work legislation in the article).

If you would stop derailing the conversation with unfeasible solutions.

A "right to be forgotten" is probably fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment in the USA. While people have the right to their own identity, they do not have the right to absolute control over their reputations. The best they can do is sue when they are defamed.

Making defamation lawsuits less inaccessible to a significantly poorer party would be a start.

In America defamation lawsuits are hard because of the First Amendment, not just because lawsuits are expensive. Even if you make defamation lawsuits cheap and accessible, it will still be an uphill battle if you're trying to sue somebody telling unsavory truths about you.

One problem is that one can't bring a prosecution oneself; not only does the state maintain a general monopoly on the use of violence, but it typically maintains a monopoly on prosecution. If police or prosecutors dislike you (perhaps because you are a member of some socially disfavored out group) what recourse do you have?

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