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Comment by convery | Hacker News Reader

> It’s for this reason I see this as a failing of the legal system. If a website is so abhorrent as to be illegal, then you should be able to open an investigation, and investigators should be able to get warrants to seize the site hosting structure and take it down.

They have been investigated a lot over the years, the operator works with law-enforcement to provide the information they request, and the moderators are pretty quick at removing any illegal content. One can argue that the police concluding that there's nothing illegal going on is because of their incompetence, but it's more likely that the US holds the 1A sacred and has no legal reason to take it down.

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Whether the content was strictly illegal or quickly taken down is irrelevant. It isn’t a good sign that supporters of Kiwi Farms repeatedly conflate the law with ethics.

Regardless of the law, Kiwi Farms is a place where a significant portion of the content, even when not veering into illegality, is based on harassment. There’s a history. Given the history and recent threats on people’s physical well being, Cloudflare decided they had enough. The same concept of freedom of speech that allows Kiwi Farms to exist is also what allows Cloudflare to decide to not do business with them.

I didn’t say I was a supporter of Kiwi Farms.

Wikipedia says the operator refused to voluntarily work with law enforcement to give info on the Christchurch shooter.

Is that incorrect? Or are you just saying the operator responds only to warrants and subpoenas? I wouldn't call that "working with" law enforcement, I would call that staying within the bounds of the law in that particular matter.

Maybe should have specified 'US' law-enforcement as it's a US site ran by a US citizen.

The citations on Wikipedia are interesting though (from the perspective of what's considered a reliable source when it comes to controversial pages). e.g. [19] says that the operator was "allegedly removed for promoting paedophilia". The same guy that wanted to ban discussions about 'VTubers' because some of their 2D models looked too young and might attract pedos to his site. So take that with a grain of salt.

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