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Comment by danielmalmer | Hacker News Reader

"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...

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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.

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