Comment by initplus
4 years ago
Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides.
When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.
> and is responsible for multiple suicides.
I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.
That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.
With all due respect, that may be true in most cases and a good message to receive for most people in therapy, but it's not true in all cases. As has been shown time and time again, humans are very receptive to propaganda and brain washing, and there's only so much harassment a person can take. A "regular" person might need to hear that the world doesn't have an agenda against you, that you're responsible for your actions, and if there's something about your life that you don't like you can take action to change it. But if there's an actual campaign against you, that advice no longer holds, and eventually that kind of harassment can definitively drive somebody to suicide. The only time I've heard of Kiwi Farms before today was when Near committed suicide. There's plenty written about the tragic event, but you can start with their goodby thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640?s...
If a US national dies in Japan, the Japanese authorities report that information to the US authorities. The state department publishes a list of all deaths of US expats living abroad, and there are no deaths anywhere close to the date when Near/Byuu allegedly committed suicide:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.
1 reply →
Near is almost certainly not dead. There is no evidence of his death, he’s been seen alive by fellow foreign devs active in SE Asia and interacting with Hector’s Asahi Linux streams and Hector’s VTuber accounts, and he did not appear on any canonical government (Japanese or US) death lists.
3 replies →
Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.
The standard shouldn't be whether someone is struggling with mental health.
It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence
As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.
Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.
So first of all, "violence" has a definition. We can't keep expanding the definition in order to justify actual violence in retaliation.
You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.
We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.
15 replies →
There is some recent precedent for criminal responsibility for someone else's suicide: the (in)famous case of Conrad Roy and Michelle Carter. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging him to commit suicide over texts and phone calls.
> is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.
Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.
> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
> I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry
-Byuu
So you admit you had support. What about the people who don't?
The site and the person who host it (there is no legal entity involved here - just a person) have not done anything other than facilitating speech, which is heavily legally protected. The users of the site have done a lot, though.
The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.
He's been taken to court around 7 times. It's almost as if he didn't break the law, and people just think he must of because it be so nasty!
This is the same argument made by anti-free speech people defending companies that censor/deplatform.
Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.
I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.
Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
2 replies →
Perhaps the reason that they haven't been taken down by the US legal system is because none of what they do is illegal by US law.
Yes, that is the problem that I was describing.
Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.
Contact your congresscreatures.
> The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides
> Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.
https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...
The fact that Kiwifarms have won every suit against them is an example of the legal systems failings. Organizing mass harassment should be illegal.
It shouldn't be up to harassed individuals to seek justice, prosecutors should be able to go after them. If the issue is with the law itself, the government needs to effectively legislate.
>The fact that Kiwifarms have won every suit against them is an example of the legal systems failings.
Is this "I don't like the rulings of the court." or "The rulings of the court fly in utter defiance of legal evidence presented."?
Because if it is the former, you are the actual part of the real problem.
Winning in court every single time is a pretty strong argument that they aren't breaking the law even if they are disagreeable.
4 replies →
> The fact that they were found not guilty of crimes is proof that they're guilty of crimes as well as that the legal system is complicit.
[flagged]
5 replies →
Do you have sources for Byuu/Near spotted alive? First I’ve heard of it.
That’s from two personal friends who are both extremely active in the emulation scene. Feel free to discount it - when the site’s back up, I’ll grab the screens of users in Hector’s streams that use the same exact eccentric writing style Byuu/Near did. (Archive.ph is too stale to have it.)
He should be on this list: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra... But there’s nothing.
https://jp.usembassy.gov/services/death-of-a-u-s-citizen/ Nobody was ever able to get any of the documentation listed on this page from the Japanese side, even family, and the Japanese continually report they have no record of the death. There are also no “blotter” style documents in Japan or the USA documenting his death.
I’m willing to be proven wrong - and accept others will not believe what is hearsay to them - but as someone who has been involved in emulation for years my Bayesian prior is extremely, strongly on the side of him being alive.
4 replies →
You are oddly well-informed on the subject of trans people who are victims of organized doxxing and harassment.
Why is that, [redacted]?
You can't bring in someone's personal details like that in an HN thread, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. I've redacted them now.
You did this repeatedly, which is a serious abuse. I'm not going to ban you for it because this entire thread was so hellish, but please don't do anything like this again.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You've been breaking the rules badly, unfortunately—not just in this thread. We've had to ask you this several times.