Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
I'm still confused. As I understand it, the Reason columnist didn't publish the alleged racist's address or employer, and only posted his name insofar as he was publicly posting under his name. If that's the case, does that mean that there's no way to criticise him that doesn't involve doxing, just because he posted under his real name? So it's fine to criticise pseudonymous people, but not people posting under their real names? Or is the problem that you have a large audience? What's the threshold at which you can't reply to people without (being considered to be) inducing harassment towards them because it's signal boosting and signal boosting is doxing? Is it 100,000 followers? 50,000 followers? 10,000? Should the media be prohibited from including people's names in their articles because doing that means they're going to be doxed, and subsequently, harassed?
I can't think of any way to consistently follow this principle that doesn't result in a huge prohibition on innocuous speech.
Markass
Not the worst
2d ago
I only agree with Scott's example because the signal booster basically said "let's ruin his chances at employment indefinitely." Again, that's a-logging behaviour. If she had just said "this man is racist," I wouldn't find that objectionable (besides that I disagree on the object level of racism being an issue). Obviously, if someone with a huge following tells her audience to contact his employer, they will probably go and contact his employer and harass them.
I don't agree that criticising someone, regardless of the way you frame it, especially when you have explicit disclaimers against harassment as we do on the Kiwi Farms, is somehow enabling or promoting harassment. That principle seems to imply that no one is allowed to criticise anyone for any reason, lest the criticism become a coordination point for harassment.
Markass
Not the worst
3d ago
The FBI discovered Dread Pirate Roberts via a years-old public forum post under is pseudonym (or used alternate construction, but still, it was possible).
If you're going to run a multibillion dollar drug empire, then you should take the appropriate opsec measures. In this regard, the feds have the ability to subpoena/EDR, effectively making all "private" data on the site accessible to them, but I don't think we should suspect alternate construction when his opsec was that bad.
On the Kiwi Farms, we take appropriate opsec measures to not get doxed, including using an alternate email address and not revealing personal details. We do want the ability to speak freely, but we also recognize that it's not really possible to do that under your real name in a world where saying "that" in your native language can earn the ire of the cancel mob. As Scott Alexander said, society is fixed, biology opsec is mutable.
And even then, limit the range so justice is reasonable (e.g. if someone mildly betrayed their friend, probably tell their friend but don’t ruin their life).
This isn't a useful or achievable maxim in practice. Once you tell someone, you can't really control what they do with that information. If the friend wants to ruin their life, you can say you don't want that, but you can't stop them from doing it. People are terrible at keeping secrets.
It's probably better for you to only tell the friend, because if the friend ruins their life in response, that's their responsibility and not yours. But the consequences are likely to be the same. Whether that means you're less morally culpable for what happens afterward depends on your moral philosophy.
Markass
Not the worst
3d ago
Making things easier to do facilitates it and, in practice, can drastically increase its prevalence, even if it is not impossible to do without your help. This is a common rationalist fallacy: "They could have done it ANYWAY". Things don't work that way.
But surely then you would direct your ire at the ones who actually make doxing possible, i.e. the data brokers who hoover up everyone's data without even the slightest resistance. A lot of American doxes happen because it's possible to type someone's name into a people finder site (like TruePeopleSearch) and get their address in seconds. I myself have done this many times when writing threads, it's shockingly easy. Furthermore, they make deleting this data impossible. You can send in removal requests, but this only happens temporarily and they will republish your data a few months later when they update their database with new dox. There are several paid services dedicated to regularly sending takedown requests so you don't have to do it yourself.
I can understand why people take issue with doxing, but whenever I confront people about this, they seem to not understand where doxes actually come from and it comes across as an isolated demand for rigor to complain about Kiwi Farms and spare not even a crumb of attention on data brokers. It promotes a false sense of security to paint this picture where the only problem is having a thread on the site, and if it was just gone, everything would be fine. Not so. The reality is that if you're an American (and you own a house, or have a job, or drive a car), you're one leak of your legal name away from having your address known to malicious actors. If you post under your legal name, then you should consider yourself already doxed.
I really cannot understate how uniquely an American problem this is, and how most of the problem is from data brokers. Most other countries have laws against data collection which at least attempt to mitigate people buying and selling people's data. Most of the people I've doxed are Americans and most of them were doxed using people finder sites. Sure, other countries have people finder sites, but they are limited in completeness or searchability. If data brokers disappeared overnight, 90% of the doxes posted on KF would not be possible anymore, and we would have to rely on good old-fashioned detective work (e.g. geolocation of images posted by the subject). The sooner people dispense with this fiction that doxing is some magic wand waved by dark wizards, the sooner people can direct their attention to the actual doxers, the data brokers who make doxing possible.
And who knows, if I'm being optimistic, maybe we can also have a conversation about how we ought to not collect people's data in the first place. I've said it before and I'll say it again, data leaks are inevitable. The only solution to data leaks is to not collect data. It's bad enough that KYC laws force companies to force customers to dox themselves to access money, that's just a vector to leak their identities. It's even worse when sites like Discord freely give in to age verification regimes and force people to take ID selfies. The gold standard should be services like Mullvad, which collect as little identifying information as possible. They don't even require an email address.
Also see Scott's article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting-as-doxxing/
The central example in this post was obviously done with the intention of ruining his chances at employment. I don't like that, and I don't think that's in the spirit of the farms (that leans closer to a-logging territory), but surely I'm still allowed to discuss someone's posts without going full a-log like this. Obviously, nobody on the farms would care if someone made a racist joke, but I otherwise can't think of a principle that wouldn't preclude discussion of anyone on the Internet at all.
Observation of how human beings behave in similar contexts.
That's not evidence, that's just speculation. Granted, I suppose it's not as baseless, but I'm not impressed by this answer.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
they're facilitating harm by other people.
How is it facilitating harm to post publicly available information? If someone wanted to use the information for harm, they wouldn't be stopped just because Kiwi Farms deleted it. It's public information, so they can find it anyway.
In fact, it's security theater to think that information, once published, can somehow be unpublished. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and it's better to accept that it's out there and deal with it accordingly. To do otherwise would be to delude yourself and operate under false beliefs.
it's easy to lie about that without being detected, and they probably are lying about it
Do you have any evidence for this or is this just baseless speculation? I can find countless examples where people who used the information to cause harm (a/k/a cowtipping) were summarily banned from the site. How is it possible to lie about that?
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
Thanks for the AAQC! Sometimes I write posts and I think it will be AAQC'd, but worry that it's in a subthread from 3 days ago and no one will read it. So this is still a pleasant surprise.
I don't believe you. Not for a second.
Just look at the Kiwi Farms. One of the first attacks came from Jonathan Yaniv, a surprisingly powerful Canadian man who used transgender ideology to harass women into waxing his balls. When all criticism of his actions was censored from every corner of the Internet, you might have said:
"Build your own website!"
Ok, most documentation of Yaniv's activities got largely concentrated on the Kiwi Farms. But then Yaniv directly targeted its data center in Buffalo, NY and got them to physically unplug its devices by sending in false complaints.
"Build your own data center/ISP!"
Sure, whatever. It looks like Josh managed to get a dedicated ASN for KF and have found other ISPs that are fine peering with it. But now some random video game emulator developer committed suicide, therefore the domain name for the site must be terminated.
"Build your own domain registrar!"
It actually costs thousands of dollars a year to become your own domain registrar, so after getting dropped from DreamHost the domain was simply moved over to Cloudflare, but for the sake of argument, I'm ignoring that.
The next volley comes from a motivated group of trans activists, led by one particular trans activist (Keffals) gloating about deplatforming Destiny for wrongthink opinions. This group manages to get Cloudflare to #DropKiwifarms. Without Cloudflare, the Kiwi Farms is limited on options for DDoS mitigation.
"Build your own DDoS mitigation!"
Ok, sure. Josh managed to vibe-code Tartarus. It was that easy!
I'm just going to gloss over that after Cloudflare dropped, the site floundered around several DDoS mitigation solutions before Josh decided to roll his own, and Tartarus was actually only installed this year as the successor to several attempts.
I'm also going to super-gloss over the fact that DDoS mitigation is a lot more complicated than just "install X" and requires actual thousands of dollars in infrastructure to handle attacks! (If it was that easy, half the Internet wouldn't be gated behind Cloudflare right now.)
I think you see where this is going. I haven't even talked about:
"Build your own payment processors!" because they can just ban you and you have no appeal, you don't even get to know why you were banned. Building your own Internet cost thousands of dollars? Tough luck. Eat shit and do it without being able to raise funds from 99% of the population.
"Build your own forum software!" because yes, they can and will just revoke your license off of the word of an insane British man. (Josh is in fact trying to build his own forum software.)
"Build your own... legal firm?" Did you know that no one is going to stop you from filing frivolous lawsuits, forever, and you don't have to pay a dime for it, and the forum has been withstanding asinine litigation for years at this point, to the tune of several thousands of dollars in legal fees? And I haven't even talked about the threat actor who does have money to spend on lawfare? No? Well, now you do.
I think you get my point. Not a single time has the "start your own" argument ever been stated in good faith. Not a single proponent of such an argument actually wishes for their interlocutor to start their own website/ISP/data center/DDoS mitigation/payment processor/forum software/everything. This interpretation assumes that the problem of the censor (in this case, the trans activist) is merely that dissenting opinions are expressed on a platform they share with them, and that everything would be fine if those opinions were expressed elsewhere. The "we're just showing you the door!" school of censorship, in other words. This assumption is false.
No, what the "start your own" argument is actually saying is this: "I don't want your thoughts to be expressed, so I am going to censor you. However, I still want to have even the smallest of fig leafs that I somehow support free expression. To that end, I am going to point out that it is possible for you to start your own website/ISP/data center/yada yada. Nevermind the huge costs of doing this with few benefits in return, I do this to imply that because this option is theoretically available to you, you don't have anything to complain about. Now I don't have to concede that what I am doing is in fact censorship." And even this nanometer-sized fig leaf is proven false, when time after time, you build your own X and they do everything in their power to censor your X anyway.
So I am going to say no, @Jiro can't just start his own Wikipedia, and moreover, he shouldn't have to. When Wikipedia is still a frequently cited source seen as credible in the popular imagination, it ought to accurately reflect reality. That it doesn't and actively resists attempts to correct it is a travesty. And "just start your own Wikipedia bro" is not a credible counterargument to any criticism of Wikipedia not accurately reflecting reality, when it's highly likely to be targeted by trans activists and censored in the same way as the original.
Markass
Not the worst
9d ago
I saw that pattern of arguments a lot more in "free speech" debates, where one side would highlight something that suppressed viewpoints, stifled debate, and prevented the free flow of information, while the other side would dismiss it because the American government did not violate their First Amendment.
Once the government-only frame is accepted, it's really hard to get the debate out of it.
XKCD 1357 argues that free speech is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to express a viewpoint. To this day, I'm still wondering why Randall Munroe didn't also apply this argument to censorship itself: Censorship is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to get people fired for expressing thoughts you don't like.
I'm largely in the same boat, at least depending on how much detail and depth is necessary in a topic. My philosophy is that simpler and shorter is better. If a post is long but each sentence is packed with detail, that's better than being a long post that could have been rewritten to be shorter. I've gotten used to skimming long posts that fall in the latter.
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