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Comment by deepcyanide | Hacker News Reader

I am no fan of kiwifarms, I have my own reasons to hate that site but I also strongly support free speech so I simply don't visit. That's changed for the past month because keffals decided to open another pandora's box.

Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after.

Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.

View on HN

"At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudfl...

A lengthy article about the ban supposedly written on the day of the ban by Taylor Lorenz? Taylor Lorenz who doxxed people[1], lied about companies and people, was actively involved in several deplatformings and is currently being sued for defamation[2]? If anything, this makes me even more suspicious of the narrative about Kiwi Farms.

This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].

By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.

[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...

[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...

[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...

[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...

[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...

Mentioning the name of the person who runs an influential and news making Twitter account that brings harassment to people is reporting, not doxing.

Exactly. Free speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of your speech. How do people not understand that?

It generally means freedom from government consequences. It also generally means that third parties won't actively prevent you from speaking to people who choose to listen to you.

Unless people decide to pressure the third party into de-platforming someone, which is their freedom of expression. I don't understand why the free speech absolutists on HN are incapable of understanding that private citizens pressuring a company to take action against a hate site is equally as much free speech as the hate site itself. By your own standards, nothing objectionable is occurring here. They just want to be contrarian.

There's pressure, but at some point, it can cross the line into extortion (which is not protected).

Let me know when it crosses that line then.

"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."

First sentence of the definition on Wikipedia. What do you believe retaliation means in this context? If your consequence is a rebuttal or criticism, I have said nothing. Otherwise you are just wrong.

Retaliation by the government. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with private citizens censoring each other.

Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.

A reporter respects a subject's desire to be anonymous. The fact that she runs an influential and news making Twitter account means her doxing is worse. Taylor Lorenz has 337k Twitter followers, an algorithm that can broadcast her message beyond the eyes of those followers, and further reach through her column in The Washington Post. Publishing someone's identity to that many people will result in them getting harassed. Lorenz has no moral high ground to stand on, she is no better than any other doxer.

The person she doxxed was a doxxer themselves. They gave up their privilege of anonymity when they started directing harassment to other people as a hobby. Can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.

> The person she doxxed was a doxxer themselves.

This analogy is interesting because it also applies to Keffals.

Context and intent matter. Pretending like all cases are equal only enables bullies. Doxxing an innocent person minding their own business because you don't like their race, gender orientation, or sexuality, is entirely different from doxxing someone in retaliation for their bad actions.

Do you really think that doxxing and harassing schoolteachers is the same as doxxing someone who goads others into suicide?

  > minding their own business

>Doxxing an innocent person minding their own business because you don't like their race, gender orientation, or sexuality, is entirely different from doxxing someone in retaliation for their bad actions.

So we've just gone mask off to "doxxing is good when we do it."

It's ok to arrest someone in the act of attacking another person. It's not ok to arrest someone standing on the side of the street looking at their phone.

If you can understand the distinction above, you should be able to understand the difference with Taylor Lorenz vs Libs of Tiktok. Unless you're operating in bad faith or just trying to be a contrarian in which case, more power to you.

>It's ok to arrest someone in the act of attacking another person.

Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing? Because this doesn't pass the laugh test unless you're relying on the usual vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.

She was a celebrity on talk shows who runs an extremely popular Twitter account that makes extremely disingenuous posts to bring furry on the people she didn’t agree with.

Releasing who she is was fine.

If a Ku Klux clan member had a very popular anonymous YouTube channel making fun of black people and bragging about it on Tucker Carlson, is it journalism to investigate and share where they work and who they are?

Maybe, but I wouldn't modulate whether or not it's journalism based on the partisan affiliation of the doxxing target.

It's not based on partisan affiliation, I never said anything of the sort. I said bad actions/bad actors.

The fact that you assumed I was talking about targeting conservatives just goes to show that they happen to be the ones rocking the boat with violent rhetoric, which occasionally gets backed up by actions.

>It's not based on partisan affiliation, I never said anything of the sort. I said bad actions/bad actors.

This is just shifting the partisan question-begging to the notion of "bad actions/bad actors." Why not just embrace the "doxxing is good when we do it" point that I originally made?

It's not about partisanry, it's about people facing consequences for doing bad things. Why are you ascribing partisanship? You can hold right-wing values and not harass trans people. Conversely you can be a left-wing terrorist. You ascribed partisan affiliation in your head, it was never an argument I was making.

> Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing?

Yes.

> vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.

The arguments aren't vague when mass killers have mentioned right-wing talking heads in their manifestos and suicide notes. Maybe conservatives (people of all political affiliations actually) should watch what they say instead of crying when they face consequences for their speech, no?

Plenty of mass killers have cited left-wing sources as well. Demanding that people of all political affiliations self-censor based on vague and unprovable stochastic terrorism claims is an obvious nonstarter and I believe its apparent support is simply due to a (perhaps justified) tribalistic belief that such censorship will be demanded of one's enemies to a disproportionate extent than it's demanded of one's self.

Yes, if a left wing agitator is rallying their followers to violence, they should face some sort of consequences, and they often have throughout the 20th century. It's not hard to find examples of American three-letter agencies targeting radical leftists. This isn't a hard concept to grasp.

What's your motivation for supporting a community that engages in organized harassment campaigns?

Every word of that is an outright lie.

This is a very naïve position on the matter. This is not about lifestyle choices but about coordinated harassment. Free speech stops the latest when you endanger other lives.

Moderation is not Censorship. Moderation is Free Speech. Hate Speech is not Free Speech. Criticizing the termination of services against kiwifarms isn't an endorsement of free speech its an endorsement of universal toleration. Universal toleration is the idea that I'm not allowed to determine who I provide goods and services to despite the message of the those to whom I am providing services too, if I host a website that is a forum for lego builds, am I not allowed to kick Nazis spreading hate from my forum? My platform, my rules, entitles me to determine what messages I want to convey because the message that is provided on my platform is my right to free speech therefore moderation is free speech. Remember the Colorado Wedding Cake? So which is it? Do you support Free Speech or don't you? mic drop

Where do you draw the line on free speech vs harassment? Is harassment free speech?

No, but peoples definition of what is considered harassment varies wildly. As can be seen in this very thread: Keffals doxing people is not harassment, Keffals calling for their Ukrainian supporters to spread that KF's admin is pro-Putin is not harassment, "pressuring" KF's admins mother is not harassment, journalists doxing and lying about LibsOfTiktok is not harassment; but KF archiving Keffals tweets where they admit to illegal activities is, KF posting the dox of someone sharing DDoS tools is, KF laughing at someone being silly is.

May I guess that you hang out on KF?

Do you think you provided a reasonable and objective analysis of events and viewpoints? It doesn't seem so to me, an outsider who had never heard of keffals or kf

> Do you think you provided a reasonable and objective analysis of events and viewpoints?

No, I provided a selection of examples from the two HN threads on the happenings to demonstrate the subjectivity of what people consider harassment.

You still are paraphrasing events and viewpoints, which provides an opportunity to spin them.

In any case, even if harassment is purely subjective, isn't it in within anyone's personal purview to take personal action if they feel something is harassment?

What does the internet have to do with free speech? I understand that the internet lets you dramatically amplify speech; but, at least in the US, the "internet" is a regulated private space — not a public space. The companies that own that space can (up to regulatory rules) moderate their spaces any way they choose. If KF wants proper, constitutional free speech they can do so in any of the public spaces they want. Hell, they could rent downtown Santa Fe, Texas — like the KKK did in the early 00's — and have a parade.

EDIT: I can see some people may not like what I'm saying; but I actively help organize real marches in Texas for orgs like NAACP, AAIA, PPC, etc. We have a stable of lawyers (TCRP, SCSJ, ...); and, I can assure you this is how free speech works in reality.

Early internet builders and users had a strong libertarian streak running through them. The early internet was awash with the optimism that increasing access to communication and routing around censorship is unequivocally good. The culture that existed then when internet users themselves where a social subgroup echos in the digital debate today.

Is there anything metaphysically inherit to the internet as free speech? That's up for debate. Would the early internet had been successful if this type had not been the ones to build it, I'm on the fence.

> Early internet builders and users had a strong libertarian streak running through them. The early internet was awash with the optimism that increasing access to communication and routing around censorship is unequivocally good. The culture that existed then when internet users themselves where a social subgroup echos in the digital debate today.

The early internet was full of university staff, large company staff and military. They were mostly professionals and colleagues, and weren't assholes part because you had to be pretty smart and well educated, part because they were watched by their organizations, and part because they had colleagues that could take them to account. If you were an ass, chances were great your victim would easily figure out who to complain to.

There was "censorship", it was just more implicit. The model just started to fail once things got big enough that this model of accountability no longer worked. Systems had to be grafted with various patches to survive the new chaos, such as email, or died off by being spammed and trolled into oblivion like Usenet.

I wish the internet was a free speech zone. In practice, legally speaking, the internet has all the downsides (legally) of written communication, and none of the upsides of physical free speech.

The internet simultaneously amplifies speech (this is not new: the printing press did so even more); but, it also concentrates speech. I'm not sure anyone thought about what that latter part would mean.

I wish we had psycho-social institutions that would allow for vigorous free speech without materially worsening people's lives. We seem to be in the part of the cycle where commtech advances have outpaced soctech.

Like you said, we saw commtech leapfrogging over soctech in the early days of the printing press. But soctech caught up and we got over it. The same exists today - I'm sure we'll develop new soctech to handle it, but I have a desire to hasten that development rather than give up and relying on crumbling/outdated soctech infra in the meantime.

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