Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Their freedom of speech isn't being denied is it? Their right to a peaceful life is being infridged but not their freedom of speech.

View on HN

By this logic, there is no way you can deny someone their freedom of speech. What is the difference between someone putting you on death row for speaking out against the government versus publishing your information so that angry randos can do the same? Is the only problem with government censorship that their violence is somehow "special" and worse than other forms of violence?

You seem to have misunderstood the logic.

I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.

Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.

These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.

It literally is since the harassment is often in response to speech with either the implicit or explicit goal to intimidate the speech into stopping

Harassing people (and their families and friends) off the internet is absolutely something that has chilling effects on freedom of speech.

Maybe we should ban criticism against politicians while we are at it. If we don't do that then politicians will be harassed off the internet which of course would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

Conflating criticism and harassment is disingenuous.

Politicians are harassed all the time and it is frequently organized. They are told they should die, they are bullied, etc. Their house address is frequently put on the internet. There is no difference between the harassment leveled towards people on KiwiFarms and what politicians experience on a daily basis.

In that case, as long as we're keeping "criticism" and "harassment" distinct, I'm all for Cloudflare yanking services from both groups of harassers.

I swear you have spent the last week doing nothing but making bad faith arguments and refusing to listen to or concede a single point. It’s QAnon level behaviour and for what?

I don't like people going after others while trying to censor them. You are doing the same thing as me. Honestly, it's authoritarian level behavior and for what?

Kiwifarms goal is to remove the freedom of speech of LGBTQ people online. Is it okay for them to this?

Honestly, is it their goal? Admittedly, I'm not an expert in Kiwifarms, however, I understand they've taken a dislike to many people for various reasons, not just LGBT folk.

This is an inflammatory, fact-free assertion.

How are they trying to remove freedom of speech for LGBTQ people? Being mean to people doesn't remove their freedom of speech ability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com