Comment by softcactus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softcactus | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people in here are saying things like:

"Kiwifarms was taken down by the Twitter mob"

or

"Kiwifarms was just freedom of speech"

Those people either have clearly never visited the site, or are operating in bad faith. I would visit Kiwifarms occasionally to catch up on obscure drama, get updates on Chris Chan, or just look at the deranged posts from users on the site.

Kiwifarms had always been instrumental in coordinating attacks on people, not just "mean words" but swatting, doxxing, getting people fired, mass well-poisonings (aka "cancel culture"). It was not only a cesspool, but a source of what would probably be called "active measures" in the 20th century.

As for Joshua Moon, he has never been the voice of reason beyond damage control for the site. When eyes are on the site you best believe he's trying his best to control optics. But even then, he's such a deranged psycho that his letter to the press on why Keffal's was "targeting him" used the "Jewish parentheses" and multiple slurs. Taking his arguments in good faith isn't playing centrist, it's extending an olive branch to a holocaust-denying antisemite, whose hobby is running a site that bullies trans people into suicide.

I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms. If you haven't visited the site before, I implore you to listen to the people who have for years. What KF engaged in was not protected speech.

>I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms.

As you sit here trying to convince people that no, really, that's not free speech. Pragmatists ruin everything, and I've been around long enough to understand "boiling the frog", "not one inch", and that love of liberty creates at times very strange bedfellows.

If you want to make progress dealing with horrible people, stop trying to turn me/everyone else against them, and deal with them. Like an adult. Either avoid, or work with authorities, within the rails of due process, to resolve the issue. If there is no unsavoryness to the non-KF side, there should be no reluctance with regards to letting the authorities deal with it. If there is, then that suggests someone is seeking to leverage the justice system who wants to avoid the inevitable consequences of doing so when one doesn't have clean hands, which I see no reason to offer myself as a conduit to deliver. Investigation and truth cuts both ways.

I will not tell you that taking the easy way out is okay. I will not let you convince me through equivocation to give up a value I cherish deeply, that everyone is entitled to be heard, and to be free to pursue the ends of what they believe in short of actually engaging in violence. In time, it may be my own undoing, but I accept that. Too much has been sacrificed on the altar of the hypothetical in my life Clean hands and evidence, or it's just more "tit-for-tat" playing out at large.

> Either avoid

A corporation choosing to cease to do business with another corporation is avoidance. So CloudFlare is following your prescription here.

>If you want to make progress dealing with horrible people, stop trying to turn me/everyone else against them, and deal with them. Like an adult. Either avoid, or work with authorities, within the rails of due process, to resolve the issue.

That's exactly what these people did by getting Cloudflare to take action. Kiwifarms still has the "liberty" to host their hate site elsewhere, which just so happens to be the freedom-loving nation of Russia.

Was just talking to my wife about this not in the context of Kiwifarms, but of Yandex and "covid misinformation" as well as Edward Snowden.

Russia is always happy to be a friendly port in a storm when the subject is speech that American powers that be wish to silence, and as uncomfortable as that relationship is, I'm glad that our nation's geopolitical enemies will back unpopular speech, even if it's only to spite their own enemies of state.

I see value in it too. Russia was a safe haven for US leftists and civil rights advocates during the 20th century. But they see no actual value in the speech they are protecting outside of 'trolling the US' for lack of a better term (at least after the fall of the USSR).

I see value in all three cases:

1) Snowden's reveal of PRISM and more generally the reveal that the government could access almost any text message sent to or from America took the idea of the surveillance state out of the land of theory and made people aware just how widely the state was into practice.

2) Yandex providing search engines not filtered through the bubble of this is misinformation, do not attempt to research this was useful enough to actually find the heart of the claims about things like, say ivermectin. Did the ivermectin pushers meet their burden of proof? No. Is it useful to drown out the original claims with half paragraph blurbs from a state presser, and lazy, toothless rebuttals from cnn.com that are so poorly framed that they do a better job shilling the drug than the actual shills? Also no.

3) Archiving and making public content that powerful entities don't want public is an extremely valuable, if risky service. It's unfortunate that we are in the position of a single person like Josh Moon being the bulwark between New Zealand and its citizens, but I certainly think he provided value. I personally can't afford to take that risk any more, so I feel the need to support those who can.

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