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Comment by Nahtnah | Hacker News Reader

I suppose you're right, and a bunch of them seem to be throwaways, or perhaps people who only made an account to defend their site (I'm basically on a throwaway too). Sad they fell into the same persecution complex thing people seem to get trapped in... like you're really defending the site where they welcomed the Christchurch shooter's manifesto? You really think you're doing something? That's what you want to fight for?

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I've never understood the attitude that there should be zero nuance to free speech. That somehow we can't collectively look at the Christchurch manifesto and say, "that's over the line".

Yes, I believe there are laws that are unjustly applied, but this is a) not a law and b) so obviously different from any sort of edge case. The only people who think kiwifarms should exist are sociopaths.

It's a modern day witch-hunt. I grew up in an environment where thinking that deviates from what's commonly acceptable is deemed not worthy and such person should suffer the consequences. It takes time, maturity and probably most important seeing a lot of world to get it changed. I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life, so they end up focusing on extremely negative things as a way to justify their actions or escape their reality.

FYI people are interpreting this as saying the witch hunt is the KF users being targeted, and not what they did to other people (who FWIW might be bad people and do bad things, but this weird disconnected cyber-vigilantism teeming with "far-right" overtones is just not the way to deal with that...).

I read it that way too at first but it makes no sense in light of your OP.

By writing witch hunt, I've meant that KF users hunt down certain individuals they may not agree with, for whatever the reason. I definitely didn't mean that KF users are being hunted.

> I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life

Which makes them a prime target for extremist thinking/alt-right groups.

The alt-right playbook series goes into this rather well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g (video has content warning, ironically).

> It's a modern day witch-hunt.

The problem with real witch hunts was that witches don't exist. By definition, any "witches" found and punished was an injustice.

That's not the case here. Kiwifarms users have committed acts that have drawn public attention, criticism, and consequences like today's.

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