Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it.
I've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone.
It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people.
Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media.
Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group.
Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"?
If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact.
There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?).
If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
> I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
> If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic.
Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
> Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.
> But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
This is getting off topic but I disagree with this. Trump's comments and right wing news incited an insurrection. I think "fighting at the margins" is probably moot and really we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone. Isn't that how most policy and social phenomena are dealt with?
> we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone.
Can you cite an example of what you mean? There's nothing being espoused that affects "everyone" unless you're excluding all persons who don't meet your criteria for personhood. Opposed viewpoints are relative extremes to each other, so measuring by majorities is how this typically get addressed in society. Legislation isn't a benevolent, objective, or unbiased action.
KF is a fringe platform of marginal(ized) views. So was the Daily Stormr. Will no one rid us of these turbulent priests?[1] (It got some disagree-votes, but thanks for getting the point.)
I probably should have said broadly affects people* rather than "everyone".
For example, the lack of moderation on Facebook has probably been a factor in thousands or tens of thousands of suicides. Just from the fact there are a billion+ Facebook users and people are horrible to each other.
There's a case at the moment in the UK of a 14 year old girl who killed herself over abuse over social media (mainly Facebook).
Since I can't edit, here's a source for Moderates in US politics "(1) being a large proportion of the public, (2) having views that are not simply random or incoherent, and (3) appearing to be central to electoral change, as they are highly responsive to candidate ideology, voting against extreme candidates." Seems to support "the fight is in the margins" rather than change being organic, rational, or benevolent.
On social suicides, is moderation more or less a factor than the dehumanization caused by over-broad content policies on large social forums (ie- the attrition of personal communities like early tumblr and livejournal after being consumed by large companies who might try to balance the societal cost of some people dying against opex for moderation, for instance). It seems related to what happens to prisons and with zero tolerance in schools- the costs of litigation and liability driving perverse outcomes in populations due to intolerance of real difference or diversity.
It’s unlikely the GDPR applies to a US company. And in the US it’s hard to get “facts” removed (otherwise people could remove their bad credit scores by claiming it as PII against the credit bureaus themselves).
GDPR applies to any European citizen's data, anywhere in the world. It will apply to a US company too. The fines will be on worldwide revenue.
This is probably a bad example in this context though as the people being talked about on Kiwiforums are not "customers" of the Kiwifarms "company" so GDPR probably doesn't cover them.
GDPR doesn't mean you have to scrub someone from your database, it means you can only keep information if you have a legitimate need. I'm sure credit bureaus can come up with enough bureaucracy that there is a legitimate need.
I don't believe so. I think it was omitted because if it was published in the press (TV and newspapers) there would have been a public outcry of indecency.
Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people.
I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings.
Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments.
> How did you verify it was actually true?
The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
I don't think that's coherent. Twitter for example has been the host of many many harassment campaigns which are propped up by its algorithms, it also hosts videos of murder, decapitations and other gruesome crimes. There are also regular death threats, doxxings and hate speech on twitter which are tolerated.
Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations.
By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?
Do you believe that KiwiFarms is making a good faith effort to remove objectionable content to the same extent that mainstream social media platforms are? I think it's pretty clear that they're not, simply based on the prevalence of that content on KiwiFarms, and the relative lack of it elsewhere.
I don't think Twitter makes much of an effort; some of my reports on clear-cut cases like "shame if his face would be smashed in with a brick wink-emojiwink-emoji" have been rejected as they are, apparently, not promoting violence.
I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.
Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.
> Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.
That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet.
Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it.
Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
> Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
They'd do that anyway.
Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.
The original claim was that it posed a direct actionable threat to someone's personal safety. This claim was not substantiated. Now you're shifting it to, "unflattering words are a form of violence."
But he’s right that this is happening. Just because it’s obscure and subtle doesn’t mean it’s wrong. You’re not an idiot, you know that the point of these forums is to generate effects in the world with plausible deniability, the exact kind of deniability you’re supporting here.
I doubt that's the point of these forums. Some people just like to get together with like-minded folk and bond over a shared experience, whether that's watching football or saying nasty things about trans activists.
The world would be a nicer place if these people preferred the former activity but that's neither here nor there.
Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
You're using the "stochastic terrorism" argument, and what that does is create liability for anyone who might recklessly increase the probability of something bad happening (even if there's absolutely no clear causation). If "stochastic terrorism" were unprotected speech, then it would create immense chilling effects. People would be terrified to say anything controversial. Thank goodness it's not part of American law.
Yes, I've looked at the site quite a few times over the past few years. Even if you can't find people explicitly organizing there, you do see their effects across the internet in the form of off-site harrassment campaigns, generally of internet personalities, that seemingly come out of nowhere.
I've never been to kiwifarms, but I'll take your word that you find them morally reprehensible. Isn't it more morally reprehensible (and just counterproductive) to take away people's rights?
It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights.
If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.
No one has a right to use Cloudflare DDOS protection services. No one has a right to a twitter account. No one has a right to force companies to host their bigotry. This isn't how rights work.
Until then, it doesn't seem likely.