Comment by badRNG
3 years ago
It feels deeply disingenuous to claim that all KF is doing is "cataloging someone's online life" while refusing to talk about constant SWAT-ing, the cheering of their victims committing suicide, and the constant IRL harassment they organize against their victims.
After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
> What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
Because law enforcement (at least in the US) is woefully bad at their jobs and don't care. I have first-hand experience with this when I had a close friend who was being harrassed by someone local (we knew who it was) and LEO refused to lift a finger. I've talked about it multiple times before on HN [0][1][2][3] but even with this guy graduating to physical actions (keying the friend's car, following/stalking them) the police did nothing.
So if our only options are "Have the police do nothing" or "Have a private corp decide to not do business with a company anymore" then I know which one I'm picking, which one will actually help reduce harm. Even if they spin up under a new name they will lose users along the way. Deplatforming works.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18925283
The problem is you’re not solving anything with these antics. KF still exists and will continue to exist. It’s just book burning for the sake of feeling better with absolutely nothing to show for it. In this case not even the satisfaction of seeing a burned book.
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
The idea that we must provide a platform for people to actively organize harassment campaigns designed to kill people in order to avoid "tyranny" is beyond absurd.
Nobody said that.
6 replies →
You’re missing the point I was trying to make. What you’re trying to achieve is literally impossible without tyranny. You will not ever eject KF from the internet as we know it today. You will not ever succeed in this goal.
But what you may ultimately accomplish is ushering in tyranny and government regulation of the internet in the name of censoring objectionable content.
Not only still online, but now their previous actions have been covered up for them! One could argue IA is pro-kf, why else would an archive intentionally destroy evidence?
Obviously no-one can predict the future, but a reasonable assumption (I think) is that a future AI will be able to de-anonymize supposedly anonymous posters to Kiwi Farms. If someone is posting terrible opinion to Kiwi Farms, why should they be protected by archive.org from reaping what they sow?
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Archive.org now provided more shade.
What I don't know is if Kiwi Farms _requested_ to be removed from Archive.org. As a publicity stunt, I could see a request for removal and then a wailing that they've been removed.
There was a minor kerfuffle with Snopes and a fact check of theirs which embarrased them. They later revised their fact check to no longer be embarassing. Problem was, archive.org still maintained the original. You can no longer find the original article from 2018 on archive.org. I'm sure that the only people who wanted the embarassing fact check removed were Snopes themselves. Archive.org was apparently happy to help them revise their history, by limiting how far back you can see anything in their library from Snopes.com.
A lot of these claims are contested though; that's the point; it's been discussed a million times already, but if you look at the actual thread on KF (which is now hard to do, it seems) there really wasn't all that much going on until they suddenly killed themselves with a statement "it was due to KiwiFarms".
Not only is there a suicide note, but their employer confirmed their passing. This defense is one that is parroted almost exclusively by the KF users responsible for Near's death to deflect blame. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that there is some conspiracy afoot to fake a suicide.
You mentioned that all Kiwi Farms does is "showcase the horrible activities of horrible people." Setting aside the absurdity of this statement, does this apply to Near in your opinion?