When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.
I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.
That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.
It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence
As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.
Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.
You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.
We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.
I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.
People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.
I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.
It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.
In your examples, you get it right at the end: we seek to contextualize actions and use peoples words as evidence of context. It is the context of the acts that matter, not the words said.
People who say that are trying to use their words to force you to not have the right to use your words.
I don't think it's as lopsided as you think. I think HN has a very strong, and fairly rigid, view on free speech.
And I think a much larger % than you imply see a grey area that is causing real, physical IRL harm.
It's hard to write down what I'm talking about. But it's pretty easy to see it.
Bullying has always caused physical harm. Both the kinetic type of pushing and this transitive type we are talking about.
This is literally what they do though. They harass them with the message that they will never stop until they do it. It's not just random bullying that then pushes people over the edge. It's commands that you need to commit suicide. It's calling your family and workplace and telling them you've committed suicide. The "joke" there being that not only do you initially shock the family, but when your target does commit suicide, the family doesn't believe the real call.
Again, my stance is as follows: KF is filled with despicable behavior and people. However we absolutely must be accurate and precise when it comes to what happens there and why certain people would rather the site not exist.
Source please?
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.
It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.
Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.
> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
> I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry
-Byuu
The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.
Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.
Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.
Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.
> Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.
https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...