Focus on speech though. Can the Phone company cut you off because of the content of your communication? Assuming you aren't breaking any other law like harassment?
The deciding factor is if your business revolves around facilitating speech. The law has some way to go to catch up with the current state of affairs, but right now the government is enjoying the power of censoring that speech so it may not be an easy path.
Good, then it should be easy for the police to shutdown the website if that's the case. Tell the authorities and let the justice system to deal with it.
> That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so, and - in the face of their refusal to act - you can't expect people to just give up and not defend themselves, not when they can exert other forms of pressure.
>But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so
To me sounds like a conspiracy theory. If their crimes are so unquestionable and clear, it should be pretty easy and straightforward to prove it in a court of law. The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here, at least under the US law, and their actions, as tasteless and despicable as they might be, are covered under the american law and KF opponents are using corporations to censor legally protected speech.
I would like you to pay attention to the word "seem", which describe how their action - or lack thereof - appear to a third party, especially one which has been subject - and continues to be subject - to said "tasteless and despicable" actions, and to avoid jumping to conclusions.
> The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here [...]
That hardly sounds like the only other alternative. Even without assuming the malice of some hypothetical "conspiracy", it might be the case that
(1) the crime isn't happening here, on US soil, and thus the relevant authorities lack the power to pursue it (see also: spam call centers located in foreign countries);
(2) whoever is tasked with pursuing said crime has other, higher-priority crimes to deal with, and decided that the potential pay-off was not worth the cost of prosecution (see also: the whole US justice system);
(3) the prosecution is waiting to build a stronger case;
(4) it is not clear who should prosecute who (see also: diffusion of responsibility);
(5) the file was lost;
(6) the file got eaten by a grue;
(7) any other reason for why a large and complex machine might turn out to not be effective in dealing, in a timely manner, with a loose group of people who gather on servers hosted on foreign soil, which are not "KF opponents [...] using corporations to censor legally protected [sic] speech";
There is a reason why KiwiFarms is not hosted in my country. We have hate speech and data privacy laws that would prevent it from being hosted here. All that dox crap alone violates the GDPR.
There even was a thread on that forum where the admin asked for advice about alternate hosting locations and could not find any.
The USA is the only country with speech laws permissive enough and data privacy laws weak enough for that site to be legal there.
The deciding factor is if your business revolves around facilitating speech. The law has some way to go to catch up with the current state of affairs, but right now the government is enjoying the power of censoring that speech so it may not be an easy path.