Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
This is goalpost-shifting. Kiwifarms does moderate threats and such. It does not moderate mere "hateful and harassing content" (whatever that means, I assume a lot of "harassing" content does overlap with illegality), but if the clear no-no actions are swatting and such then clearly KF actively tries to prevent that.
I fear that the implicit argument here is that in order for these efforts to be treated as "good faith", then forum owners need to not only remove clear legal threats but all sorts of speech (particularly "hate speech") that can be stochastically linked with the generation of those threats. That having sufficient moderation entails that moderators address not only actual threats but in removing a wide range of speech.
Guilty until proven innocent. And naturally we’ll take away your freedom of speech since your guilty, and also generally disregard anything you have to say to defend yourself, we don’t listen to someone guilty of a crime.
The underlying issue here seems like a really complicated and socially tricky one - how should someone respond to a demand of the form "remove evidence of my past online activity or else I'll kill myself". It's probably not specific to KF. Theoretically archive.org could face the exact same situation.
Swatting is not organized on KF. It's illegal, any planning of such an attack would be deleted and the users banned, and if necessary their details would be shared US law enforcement. It's not only against the rules, it's against the site culture. You're not meant to go out and do stupid offsite or IRL shit (gayops). People who do (or suggest it) are mocked and shunned. KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them, not proactively harassing them.
Someone swatted a congresswoman; in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username. But there is no evidence of any planning on the site itself, and anyone who did so would be incredibly stupid given the admin has repeatedly warned that doing so would result in contacting law enforcement with the details of the perpetrator. Given that a great many people want the site gone, it seems likely this was a low-effort frame job.
Like ... swatting is easy. Saying you're someone you're not is easy. Blaming it on someone you don't like is easy. You just have to call 911 and say a bunch of unhinged bullshit. Anyone, anywhere, can do it.
Other claims like "KF bullies people to suicide": there is a point-by-point rebuttal to this at the top of the Keffals thread. I'd link to it, but the site is yet again down ...
EDIT: here it is:
>1. Near / Byuu
>Byuu had a 13 page inactive thread on the forum at the time he e-mailed Null offering him money in exchange for deleting his thread. He told Null if he does not accept this offer he would commit suicide, this is extortion. Null told him he can not accept money in exchange for deleting threads and he will not be extorted. The next day a twitter user claiming to be Byuu's co-worker says that Byuu went through with the suicide. His only proof was that he claimed to have called the Japanese police and they confirmed it to him, something that the police would never do since he is not a relative of Byuu. He also posted a picture of an urn that supposedly had Byuus ashes in them as "evidence" of his death. The US government puts out a report every 6 months that includes all American citizen that have died abroad. Byuu's death was never on this list. No American citizens have died overseas within the time-frame that Byuu's death supposedly happened. The japanese government is meticulous when it comes to bureaucracy so this is unlikely to be an oversight. Byuu being dead is extremely unlikely. Something Kiwifarms users have pointed out is that Byuu has gotten in legal trouble with the Japanese police because his emulators broke their copyright law, something that is a very serious offense in Japan.
>2. Chloe Sagal
>Sagal's thread had been inactive for 8 months before his death. Sagal suffered from BPD and extreme mental health issues. He antagonized his room-mates to the point where they kicked him out and he became homeless. He started a GoFundMe to get help from the trans community to get back on his feet, nobody donated to this GoFundMe due to how unpopular he was in the community. Before Sagal set himself on fire in a public park he held a long speech about mental health and homelessness amongst trans people and how difficult it was for him to get help for his situation and how he was abandoned by his own community. He never mentioned Kiwifarms.
>3. Julie Terryberry
>Julie was a mentally ill young woman in a relationship with a man 10 years older than her that started when she was 17 and he was 27. She came from a broken home and extreme poverty. Her boyfriend was abusive and regularly beat and cut her. Kiwifarms repeatedly tried to get her help to escape the abusive situation she was in. Her boyfriend regularly threaded to leave her and she told him in return she would kill herself if he did. He left her and she killed herself. The only person who has ever blamed Kiwifarms for this death was the abusive boyfriend who has an account on the site and was an active participant in her thread
Assuming this is how it happened – you'll have to excuse me for not trusting MTG on her word considering she has demonstrated to have only a passing familiarity with reality in the past – it strikes me as a ridiculous thing to do by an actual KF member, and certainly isn't the kind of action from someone with the best interest of the site in mind.
I read up on the spat that lead to CF's ban a bit, and Keffals claimed to be responsible for the site's owners mom to lose her job, in spite of not being involved in her son's activities at all. Seems pretty mean-spirited, to say the least, and among other things evidence of a "the goal justify the means"-kind of mentality that I'm not a huge fan of.
No one is looking good here; KiwiFarms doesn't have a good look, but this Keffals person also doesn't come off well. She seems like an unpleasant person and while she is right to complain about KF IMHO, that doesn't mean she's the "the good guy" (or gal) in this story, or that everything she says can be trusted at face value.
You don't know the half of it:
https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/keffals-clara-sorrenti-lucas-jo...
Streisand affect?
My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
> not proactively harassing them.
That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
it's like one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I am bringing accountability, you are a journalist, he is a bully.
>That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
this is self-evidently ridiculous. it would justify any kind and degree of censorship anything of remotely controversial, and there's no way to disprove the accusation. someone, somewhere, becomes "radicalized" and commit some crime, and months ago you said something vaguely related to it: that means you're a "stochastic terrorist". it's an absurd thought-terminating cliche.
and note that this is never applied with any kind of consistency or good faith, and never to people comfortably inside the Overton window even when they do objectively evil shit. e.g. will the neocon pundits who lied for months about Iraqi WMDs ever be prosecuted as "stochastic terrorists" because they made it more likely that the US went overboard and launched an illegal war? will BLM organizers get done for "stochastic terrorism" because their rhetoric made race riots more likely?
"stochastic terrorism" is just a fancier and more sinister way of saying "stirring up trouble", a catchall excuse/euphemism for authority to clamp down on speech they don't like.
Journalism is a profession with backing organizations and an ethical code. Random idiots posting about transwomen they don't like isn't that.
there is more diligence and fact-checking on KF than in many "professional" news organizations.
* He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though.
* He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published.
* There's been no independent confirmation of his death otherwise
* The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time.
That doesn't mean the death is impossible.
The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth!
Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.