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Comment by atdrummond | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

The site exists to document the lives of and poke fun at some of the most vulnerable people in society. Even if explicit calls for illegal actions are banned, being featured on Kiwifarms is like having a target painted on your back. Their efforts to violate these individuals privacy and pry into every aspect of their lives is just incredibly immoral.

If Kiwifarms users can't see that what they are doing already is unethical, why should anyone believe that they truly think these other illegal actions are wrong? They just know not to talk about it out loud because then you will actually get in trouble with the law.

The only reason the site has been able to get away with it for so long is because they are targeting vulnerable people who are least well equipped to legally defend themselves.

As I already explained, those more extreme individuals plan these actions in more covert locations - smaller forums, subreddits, image boards, discord, telegram groups, etc. There are no rules banning such behaviour in these places. The owner and mods of KF actively not only delete such content but repeatedly remind people of the prohibition. They also actively report users who violate US law and fully cooperated with any legal demands brought by State and Federal law enforcement. Josh has even banned mods who disagreed or facilitated such behaviour outside the forums.

So kf is a target finding service. The nasty work is done "elsewhere", just like a good terrorists organization - keep the wetwork in small cells while the political arm directs them in plausibly deniable ways.

Not sure how you think this makes it ethical.

You and others keep citing "deleted within hours" as evidence of the site admins doing something to address the problem, when the horse has already left the barn. People who participate in those activities almost certainly have email or mobile alerts set up and have long since copied the victim's information.

I'd say it's evidence of conspiring to delete evidence before victims and law enforcement can act, particularly if the threads are completely deleted, as opposed to being locked and moved to a mod-only area so the posts are preserved for law enforcement action.

Are there any automated filters that detect personal information, filters that are trivial to employ?

Are the users who post doxxing/violence threads banned?

What is the purpose of the forum in the first place? Answer: to harass and doxx trans people.

I wonder how [redacted] would feel if people knew he was defending a site that exists solely to harass trans people.

You can't bring in someone's personal details like that in an HN thread, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. I've redacted them now.

It's pretty shocking that you'd have done this in a comment right after asking whether users who post doxxing threads are banned. The answer on HN, btw, is yes—although if an account has a lot of history on the site, as yours does, we tend not to ban on first offence.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32729939 for more about this.

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