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Comment by chonkerz | Hacker News Reader

You host death threats and leaked PII, and the forum owner explicitly encourages his followers to harass specific people he has a personal grudge against. He names entire sections of his forums after his victims and encourages people to post about his victims. You're lying. He's not running a neutral operation and neither are you.

The forum doxes employees of their hosting providers. Even Russian hosters terminated kiwifarms. Russians don't even terminate malware. You are dishonest to argue that this is about free speech.

Even the EFF acknowledges the activity on your forum is illegal and called on the cops to prosecute. it means the EFF won't protect kiwifarms when the cops come for you and Josh.

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Except, we don't host them? Didn't you hear, Hurricane Electric didn't allow us to host Kiwifarms.

I haven't followed up with our customer to see who their new hosting provider is.

If you believe we're hosting something illegal, I do encourage you to message our abuse department so we can review it and take appropriate action if deemed necessary. I understand you feel strongly about the issue but we run an honest business and have no hesitation to boot people from our network doing things that are unlawful.

How come no one ever posts any links to any of this (or at least archives of said links), whenever this site is discussed? Instead we get DailyDot and Vice articles, or a wikipedia entry quoting those articles, and little else. If the site is such a clear and present danger to public safety, why is the proof to that effect never provided?

Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).

I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.

I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed.

But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%

> Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).

I made the mistake of visiting the (archived) page linked to by the second Tweet from that (archived) feed announcing the conviction of someone of interest to them on several criminal counts, and what I read there was nightmare fuel potent enough that if these are the kind of people the site "stalks," I can't say I'm sympathetic. (Seriously, don't read it.)

They just bring up the unsympathetic ones as a defense for what they are doing.

A lot of their targets are more sympathetic. For instance, the moderators have said they are ok with doxxing children: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/DSt5K

Because it's linking to victims dox which would get your account banned on any reasonable website. The homepage is kiwifarms.st currently, and if you're on the fence I would encourage you to check it out for yourself and ask yourself if this is OK, and if a provider should be forced against their will to support this.

and you're not going to address the fact that you're making false accusations against someone for hosting content that they claim to not host? You're not making the best case for yourself here.

>You host death threats and leaked PII

These death threats are not true threats and hosting PII is not illegal. Nor is encouraging "harassment" because what's encouraged is not actual criminal harassment. Every victim of a social media mob claims harassment, including Joshua Moon. When the good guys do it, of course, they just call it "consequences culture".

>Even the EFF acknowledges the activity on your forum is illegal and called on the cops to prosecute.

Which is a cowardly attempt at playing both sides. By juxtaposing "KiwiFarms users do bad things" with "criminals should be punished", the implication is that those bad things are criminal but the EFF maintains plausible deniability, which is wise since to do otherwise would constitute defamation. The important thing is that criminal activity should be determined through judicial proceedings, not armchair lawyering from midwits who likely think that there are laws against hate speech.

Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).

I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user tracked down, and had sex with a "lolcow" and even posted photos of this. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%

>exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes

Edgy, not criminal.

In the posts you link, you can see Null obviously wants to allow basically anything but is still responsive to legal considerations. Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong about the law. He responds to legal notices that he considers valid, and this has kept him out of real trouble so far.

I think "borderline criminal" is a fair characterization, but I'd point out that lots of sites are "borderline criminal" in the sense that there are often public statements of "we would like to allow this but legally we cannot." It's not that scandalous.

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