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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

I'm not here to define hate speech, and I think that you'd agree that HN was not designed to encourage and promote hate speech.

You absolutely can not say the same thing of Kiwifarms. Let's not be deliberately obtuse here.

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Depends on what you mean by "hate speech". It's a literally Orwellian term designed to be bad but not specific.

In this case, the entire forum was created to target and harass a specific person. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people / communities.

As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.

Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.

Do you agree that Daily Stormer should not have been banned? They were created to opine about white ethno-nationalism, etc. and not to target or doxx or harass specific people. Is your line moving now?

Given that they also engage in targeting, harassing, and doxxing specific people, yes, they should have been banned. My line has not moved.

There are mechanisms in law for courts to order removal of illegal content. ISPs don't ever have to define "hate speech". Sounds to me want to censor speech you hate.

Are you any different? If I graffiti'd a slogan you hated on your garage, would you cover it up? Would you censor speech you hate?

Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is. The obvious example is child exploitation, are pedophiles rights to swap images of kids currently being "censored as speech YOU hate"?.

Harassment forums like the one in discussion here have no place in civilized society and I am happy for them to be censored. The people that frequent these sites can get together in person and chat about hating all they want, but the method of their harassment (the global platform of the internet) should removed -- insofar as that is possible.

As I was discussing in the previous thread, I disagree with this.

> Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is.

Ideally, many smaller elements make their decisions about what speech to promote or convey, and "society" or the "government" is the actor of last resort-- stepping in for the most not-OK stuff when the market has been shown to fail.

Concentrated power is dangerous-- whether it's in the hands of a government or a single overly-powerful commercial actor-- and needs to be restrained one way or another.

Again, we all have a line here. Would you, for example, be supportive of banning websites which knowingly promote and distribute child pornography?

We may disagree on where that line should be, but most people absolutely have this line.

What’s your opinion on sites not targeting specific individuals? Like, “people with Property X have no place in civilized society” where readers of this site occasionally went on killing sprees of people in the category?

The big mistake here is trying to come up with a single code by which to codify speech. I mean, a government (even one supporting free speech) has to do this, because they're the enforcer of last resort, and it's really necessary that such a code promulgated by the government err on the side of being "too permissive".

But-- we should have big markets of many participants who all make their own decisions about what they condone. Then, the individual decisions are not so toxic. And if you are doing something egregious where almost all of them say no, well, you got what you deserved.

My personal thoughts: exposing peoples' personal information for the explicit purpose of severe and illegal harassment is on the "definitely not OK" side of things. Ordinary hate speech that occasionally leads to spree violence is much murkier.

Honestly, it depends on what that property is and if the person went on a killing spree based on their views on property X or for other reasons.

If Property X is something like the color of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, etc, then I would support cloudflare banning them.

I am certainly not the master of what should and should not be on the internet, and neither should cloudflare. As a society, though, there are some things that most can agree on.

They never said their only line was doxxing or harassing.

> As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.

Okay, please, if you dont mind, specify how that line is drawn up

Sure thing, boss, although I'll be repeating myself. Actively encouraging others to harass and doxx specific individuals or groups crosses that line.

okay, would this include CNN that threatened to doxx someone for creating the trump cnn boxxing meme photo? (which he actually did not create)

For a one-time thing? No. That's something which can be repaired, reprimanded, or something upon which future policies could be set.

They're also not encouraging their viewers to harass, contact, and troll specific individuals.

I don't support doxxing, and this is a false equivalency at best.

I don't watch CNN, so I had to read up on the boxing meme thing first.

There are different degrees, sure. And this place has moderation. But what is the line? Be precise and avoid arbitrary definitions.

There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?

That is still not the primary purpose of HN. Those comments should be flagged, of course, but they in no way align with the specific purpose of HN.

Kiwifarms was founded to troll and harass a specific webcomic author. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people or communities.

Surely you see the difference here.

> There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?

Are they targeting specific rich people in a dedicated and persistent fashion to the point that said rich persons kill themselves? No, that's not happening. I've seen posts of the type you've described. They're almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned. They're much less frequent than any one of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-jew, or anti-trans comments... which are almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned as well. This site does not remotely compare to KF.

You're falling for the heap paradox: If you remove a grain of sand from a heap, tell precisely at which grain of sand it stops being a heap. You can't? Therefore it's impossible to tell if something is a heap of sand! QED

That just says "don't use the word 'heap' for anything normative", surely not "let's hope what we think is a heap is universal consensus"? I support the current thing though

> Be precise and avoid arbitrary definitions.

Why should we?

Society has been doing pretty fine with some fuzziness until now. Sometimes something really goes to far and they end up not hosted anymore. That’s the system working, not it failing to work. Well, that came a bit slowly for kiwifarms sadly but I’m glade sanity prevailed in the end.

So you want to enforce restrictions on hate speech, but you have no clear boundary as to what "hate speech" really is?

Keep reading, but here's the crux of the matter:

HN was made to discuss tech topics. KF was made to harass and doxx a specific target.

I'm not here to explicitly define "hate speech", but I think that we can agree that KF has crossed that line into hate speech.

Unless you're cool with encouraging harassment and doxxing, that is.

If you cannot define a term, you should not use it. I'm surprised that you're so honest about your irrationality, though. Normally, you would "define" hate speech as follows: "Weasel term, weasel term, weasel term" and that would be that.

I would define hate speech as speech that directs hatred at a particular group. For instance, Joe Biden recently gave a state speech (The "Gates of Hell" speech) that was completely choked with hatred for a group. Shrug. I have no interest in banning this, whether from the "president" or from anon. My understanding of Kiwifarms is that they basically just make fun of idiot liberals--a sport on endless grounds.

If you gave your honest definition of hate speech it would likely be "People who disagree with me and make me look bad showing how stupid or wrong I am."

Look, man, if you can't agree that people shouldn't target, harass and doxx people then we have no common ground to continue this conversation.

I don't think we should target, harass and doxx people, therefore I do not do those things. That doesn't mean that I think we should censor entire websites because they are sometimes used as platforms to do those kinds of things.

Kiwi Farms was not "sometimes" used to target, harass, and doxx.

It was the entire purpose of the site.

When I visited it, some time ago, it mostly seemed like a lot of angsty teens shitposting.

My thoroughly unscientific analysis of the situation seemed like it was about 98% bullshit posts and maybe 2% of the posts I found truly objectionable (mostly jew/black hate) but not illegal.

I'm not doubting that there is some illegal stuff there, nor that there is some truly vile content, but, I don't even think it's in the majority on a post-level basis.

I see a lot of vile speech directed toward me on Hacker News.

Can you give examples?

People calling for my people and my nation to be wiped off the map. (And I don't try to get Hacker News blocked by their ISP or cache provider. I understand that an open forum will have speech like this.)

I mean actual links so we can see what you're talking about

One of many, many comments saying that the country I hold a citizenship in should be eliminated; the land it exists on is "occupied"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701383

Threats that what happened in Germany in the 30s will happen again, and it's deserved:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701442

People blaming Jews/Jewish conspiracies for various actions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692308

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32691199

I'd like to point out that I understand what's "vile" to one person isn't to another. I've had my posts reported as "hate speech" on reddit for saying that "the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous" and that "Obesity is wrong."

Banned speech should have a very high bar -- direct, specific threats of physical harm.

Notice as soon as you bring this up, they stop replying.

Those comments are really awful and wtf upvoted....

For the first link at least, they seem to be talking specifically about parts of Palestine occupied in defiance of international law and agreements being returned to them, not Israel broadly being eliminated. Israel/Palestine border disputes are massively controversial, so I don’t dispute people do say things like your summary of the comment, I just don’t believe the comment you posted is that. In fact I think your summary is a bad faith reading of the comment.

Some of those other links are vile though.

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