This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Kiwifarms is probably done for. Null is unable to get legal representation because his lawyers dropped him after five years of business for "ties to russia" and his mailing address has been terminated for unspecified reasons. Tor is inaccessible because of DDOS attacks. The site has had a security breach and user data has possibly been leaked. This is probably the most complete deplatforming anyone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet has ever experienced.
I believe that KF has significant value in the culture war for the red team and it seems strange to me that not a single person with any financial power has stepped in to help. For most people, KF is seen as a evil nazi website and at best a shitty gossip forum, but it did contain a lot of useful information and opposition research on highly prominent people that will be memoryholed forever if the site goes down (Even internet archives are being purged). Keeping it alive on the clearnet would require a substantial investment, but it wouldn't be impossible to do.
Where is the red/grey team version of George Soros? Peter Thiel?
Are there any options for a completely legal (in the United States) site like KF to stay online? What will themotte do if they ever make an enemy that understands how easy it is to wipe them off the net?
Statements like this usually aren't true. I guess if you take 'deplatforming' to mean only this very specific context, but consider how 'freedom of speech' was a much less-held value anwyhere in something like the 18th or 19th centuries than it was either today or in the 20th, and consider the regular 'censorship' (and the sort of censorship might vary a lot) of newspapers back then, worse has likely happened. Josh could just be put in jail!
KF focuses on the most degenerate, spergy, and loud creatures on the internet, though. While what's wrong with kathryn gibes or chris-chan is related to what's wrong with 'the left' in some senses i guess, there's a lot of difference - and learning more about the bizzare and retarded exploits of the recurring characters is genuinely useful, by characterizing the ways human action can go wrong and can be surprising (which is arguably why it's funny), seeing 'crazy ugly trans person threatens suicide, posts newest medical mishap' doesn't do that much to characterize progressives or trans as a whole. So ... what does KF actually do for the red team, exactly? That people are willing to directly make fun of individual weak, stupid, degenerate people directly, and can see examples of others doing so, is valuable in a sense - but how does this translate directly to a 'red win', whether that means more R votes or neoreaction, and how is it different than past magazines or communities doing something similar (which did not translate to wins)?
Even in the 18th century, there was somewhere with people who held the freedom to speak among the most important values they could list.
Top of the list, in fact. Number one of 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States
notably there are a lot of things much worse than what's happened to kiwifarms, which is my point
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For all the weird stuff that KF has done, what actually got them taken offline was posting true information about trans people.
KF did a lot besides that, but this is what I call "steelman Kiwi Farms." That is the site that deserves to exist but cannot.
More options
Context Copy link
KF isn't so much Red as a holdout of the old, irreverent internet culture. While I don't actually LIKE KF, I was glad that things like it exist. I didn't hate Tumblr, I thought it was funny until I saw the same stuff in my Facebook feed from real people I knew in real life.
If we're going to talk about Red vs Blue, In a sense the entire Blue Checkmark Cancellation Machine is just KF, but distributed among a mob that gets to feel On The Right Side Of History, and that actually does make an effort to hurt people in real life.
More options
Context Copy link
But then he would have committed a crime. That's my point. There's nothing in the US Law that says you can't use the internet to laugh at the things weird people do.
Well then we're working with an idiosyncratic definition of 'deplatforming', where if the emperor biden instated a 'conservative censorship committee', that'd be US law and therefore not deplatforming, and similar past instances where newspapers were shuttered for breaking contrived or broad laws also aren't deplatforming, which is the point
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When Gawker outed Thiel he did a damn good job of deplatforming them. I do not think Thiel & Co have any interest in supporting KF. And KF has too much of a tendency to go after Autistic people for the Gray tribe to really feel comfortable with them.
While strictly speaking 'legal' they encouraged and enabled illegal acts. Also, again while not a matter of US law, doxing is the closest thing the anglophone internet has to a prohibition by law. Since TheMotte isn't... about that life, I doubt we have anything to worry about.
A version of KF that scrubbed information that could be used to track down the individuals would probably still be online. Also, private harassment and doxing IRC channels will continue to exist. KF was a unique combination of both, trading private information for internet clout. Devil's bargain and all that.
Neither the administration or users encouraged illegal acts. The admins of the site were quicker to react to rule breaking posts faster than the Facebook team could take down mass shooting livestreams. Null has cooperated with US law enforcement on every occasion and replied to takedown requests.
Doxxing is not illegal. Law enforcement has never pressed charges agaisnt KF. KF has won every single lawsuit it has been involved in.
The two incidents that cloudflare cites as a reason to take KF down were:
Obvious low effort false flag bomb threat email against US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
A screencap of a post threatening violence from a user that has never posted before (taken down in 20 minutes)
It would be trivially easy for anyone to do the same to themotte or any independent forum. How can you have faith that people will critically examine the evidence if themotte is accused when nobody bothered to do so for KF? This community already gets smeared as a nazi website.
Yes, it's just a scary sounding word for "looking someone up on the internet."
There is a motte and bailey about doxxing.
I think a rule against publishing
someone's home address with enough specificity that a crackhead can go knock, or
someone's phone number, or
someone's social security number (edit or license plate number, or other really specific things that are not part of a public database)
are perfectly fine and coherent rules.
(And I think KF did avoid doing the last two. But one time Br!anna Wυ proudly posted a document with her own SSN to her Twitter. And KF archives all the pictures she posts to Twitter as a matter of course. So 🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷)
But people also want a rule against publishing
the real name of someone posting under an alias
the prior legal names of someone
the restraining orders and criminal records of someone
Those last can certainly be considered rude but if no one can ever post that information, there are certain things in society that just break down.
(Too often KF's defenders insist KF only archived the published things one of their subjects did. For some subjects this was all they did because the people involved in the threads were lazy and had a "if it does not exist on the web it does not exist any place" attitude.)
I do not even know my definition is right, and I am probably not self-consistent. Part of posting this is to figure that out.
But I do want a coherent rule.
Can you elaborate on what things in society would just break down if
Were published?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Debatable. I would categorize the act of doxing someone as aiding and encouraging harassment or worse. KF knew what it was doing. Telling their readership not to use the information for illegal purposes might have been sure footing the first time, but they apparently didn't learn their lesson. Eventually if you keep doing a thing and it causes another thing to happen, regardless of your strenuous verbal discouragement you own those consequences. To Wit, if you rig up a bridge with explosives and leave a big old 'destroy bridge, do not press' button in public, people are gonna start blaming you for the exploded bridges after morons have knocked down the first few.
In the US, no. On the internet... like I said, it's the closest thing to illegal. It makes you a pariah. An outlaw. I'd expect someone doing the equivalent in real life to be assaulted on a regular basis. They chased clout by doing the forbidden thing, had a pretty good run, produced some good and many not so good externalities and finally got run out of town on a rail.
I don't think CF examined the specific accusation (which was an obvious op) but I think they got an overall sense of what KF was about and decided it wasn't the hill to die on.
KF's nuance behavior attracts hostile ops like the one that ultimately got them. Eventually one was going to succeed.
Consider also that for CF to explain why they dropped KF would require them to explain a decade or so of internet lore to an audience that didn't give a damn. Much easier to just point at a bomb threat and go 'there, you happy?'
Should KF have been allowed to report on the criminal records of reddit powermods?
I want to know what the line is on doxxing, because right now, whoever says it, it seems to be "someone on your side posted true information about someone on my side that they did not want publicized."
Maybe the definition is literally posting a home address. That is one that works and would still allow for posting the criminal records of trans people.
I'll draw out my definitions, since I've been staking this ground on Scott Alexander and on people I don't like and more general spaces for over a decade:
Publicly linking an anonymous or psuedoanonymous account to a meatspace name, whether legal name or one used for mainstream contexts such as employment, which the anon did not publicly and clearly already link.
Providing personally identifying information for the owner of an anonymous or psuedoanonymous account: central examples are addresses or phone numbers, but license records, past real estate transactions, some air travel records... these are basically type one, but with more steps.
Publicly linking a meatspace name to an anonymous or psuedoanonymous account.
((Note that just because something falls out of this space, doesn't make it good or even legal.))
This does interact with how KF worked! For the case of the reddit powermod, this means you could say a specific powermod was convicted of a domestic violence assault, or you could link to the conviction records in a talk not specifically focused on individual powermods and say that the person was a powermod, or you could talk about how reddit allowed powermods with past criminal convictions including this one, but trumpeting that a specific powermod was the person from that specific conviction record would be doxxing.
But my criticism is that this was about the least productive uses of the underlying weaponized autism available. About the only thing connecting a police department report to an account name does is make it more believable that they're the same person, except since that's not actually part of the police report it's really just checking how much you trust the poster to not be making up the claim... and make it easier for (let's say third parties!) to bug the person or to go after their workplace.
Like, take the zoosadism rings: there's space to quibble about taking them down was KF versus other spheres, since even zoophiles don't like zoosadists (although it's possible some of those other spheres had overlap with KF!), but animal abuse to that extent is pretty clearly awful and illegal behavior which deserves both social shunning and police response.
Which aren't really things you get via doxxing. Police aren't going to care about someone's Twitch account, for anything that doesn't have Twitch calling the FBI directly. Furries aren't going to care about someone's personal address, compared to literally killing a dog. Conventions can kinda use real names, but that's in part because the convention network can get real names on its own, and they're better off starting (or noticing!) with the psuedonym.
The best steelman I've seen offered is that it simplified investigation of other potential meatspace bad acts... but in addition to the more general concerns with "We got them, reddit!" problem, the actual implementation ends up with a giant mess of speculation, contradictory gut feelings treated as fact, and unrelated private details turned into grist for a pinboard wall.
And that's for an ideal case, where really strong evidence of specific illegally bad acts was dropped in investigator's laps as a giant leak. In other cases I'm gonna be a lot more concerned about how you can separate investigation from harassment to start with, and it's not like KF is picking its targets or what it considers worth reporting and recording with some weighty care for justice.
There probably is some edge cases that this costs you, where there's some dire crime that you can't talk local (or federal) police into investigating without public outcry, can't get mainstream media coverage on without public outcry, and can't get public attention without bringing up some trait specific to the online identity. Not sure if it's ever come up, or ever will come up, but it's definitely imaginable.
But I don't think it's worth the costs of doxxing, or its neighbor behaviors.
This is a tool that's exceptionally dangerous, even when used with the best of interests, just because there are too many nuts around. It doesn't even have to be something the doxxers considered or even were aware was a problem that could be an option! This sorta near-schizophrenic nutjob is an extreme variant, but mostly in scale and breadth rather than technique. And while she focused on the aftermath of a real-world dispute, it's not uncommon to see the same over online ones, even at exceptionally small scales, and for most people, psuedoanon approaches are the only defense.
Even tiny scales aren't. James Garfield got booted from Drupal when a coworker doxxed his fetish website (fetlife?) account, and then someone offended by that turned it into a crusade, and if you're not more into PHP than is healthy, the most identifiable part of that sentence is going to be Fetlife. And it's pretty far from unique, or even the lower end of the scale.
((The flip side is, yes, FCFromSSC's position -- note that Garfield was doxxed by fellow project workers, and while KF doxxed Scott Alexander and some other ratsphere people, the KFers were in the shallow end of the pool compared to some more aggressive stalkers. I think the definitions for doxxing are pretty well-understood, but even if that's true, it's very clear that doing it for the Right Team is absolutely considered both acceptable and praiseworthy, even when intentionally and clearly meant to direct harassment.))
Thank you for the incredibly detailed reply! I do not think I will get a chance to completely digest it in one go.
Everyone does a Russel Conjugation on doxxing. "I am exposing bad actors, you are threatening people's lives." It is a quagmire trying to figure all this out. And my own position is probably inconsistent.
You know, I think this might work.
"Reddit has a powermod running over 200+ subreddits. * This powermod has restraining orders against them. Here is the text of the restraining order, with the names of the perp and the victim irreversibly blurred out."
And there is also a Streisand effect defense here. If I post the above and its gets deleted, that is evidence that I am actually hitting close to home, and evidence my accusations are right.
((* There should be ambiguity here, where you do not pretend to not identify the user while doing a "L Simpson, no, no, Lisa S" trick.))
Would this still allow people to expose Aimee Challenor **? Raise an alarm about a specific person about to get a position of power?
(( ** I forgot Aimee's name and looked it up as "aimmee chandler" on Google and Bing, and Google only directed me to a thread that specifically had the same misspelling I did. But Bing -- fucking Bing, otherwise incredibly bad at finding stuff -- knew what I wanted and directed me to the Wikipedia page. Someone at Google has to be turning these results off specifically.))
I am not fully understanding your point and it is my fault. Do you mean KF was often inefficient or did a lot of crap distinct from this pure mission? I agree and I talk about how a "steelman Kiwi Farms" deserves to exist, which is different than the actual Kiwi Farms.
I do not think the only value is in getting police attention. A big point of #MeToo, for all its problems, was that people could raise concerns about not-illegal-but-annoying sex pests. (This whole discussion is drowning in irony and here is some more: the KF position in the Weeb Wars was that if Vic really did something the cops should be called, and since there was no police report, that proved his accusers were lying and therefore should not dare discuss their alleged experiences at all. No wonder Josh put the Weeb Wars into its own ghetto-within-the-ghetto on KF.)
And even though #MeToo often was just a mob, I cannot figure out a way to say "you are not allowed to post your (alleged) personal experiences."
I agree with this part. People seem perfectly happy to say "oh, it just other people using my true information to phone bomb that person's employers, not my problem" and/or "chickens are coming home to roost" or "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" when it is one side, but suddenly remember "stochastic terrorism" when it is the other side.
How much should the behavior of third parties restrict my actions? My default was "not at all" but the internet has proven extremely good at manufacturing schizophrenics and has consistently and deliberately refused to develop antibodies against "wait should we really destroy Justine Sacco's life just because it is fun to do that?" So I am prepared to move off this ground. I just need to figure out what the new ground is.
I read through that whole thing. (It really reminds me of Vordrak's campaign against Josh Moon and Josh's mom. I am not trying to say either is okay or not okay, just acknowledging this is all a giant spiral of meta-issues.) It takes very few people ganging up to destroy someone online. In this case, just one person! I would like to say we should adapt in other ways, like people not believing internet bullshit, but we seem to have refused to do that.
Thanks for the in-depth comment, and your old one on the subreddit.
Yeah, there's a lot that can be done, even against fairly well-coordinated actors, often because of that coordination.
Depends on your goal. I would not consider posting about Challenor's meatspace activities or politicing, using her meatspace name, to be doxxing, nor would I consider mentioning that she was a reddit administrator. So the claim that reddit was removing posts for merely mentioning her political career would be easily on the table, and in many ways was the more central problem.
Unless she'd self-doxxed already, linking a specific moderator or administrator account to her name would be unacceptable. ((Really specific 'an admin who was hired on X day, who had previous moderation experience in, was also this meatspace name' is more marginal, but close enough that I'd at least discourage it)). I don't know if that was ever alleged that she was the admin who deleted posts or suspended posters (or if reddit would have made it possible to tell if she had), but in a situation where she was, this rule could make discussion and proof of the matter harder.
And I'm... pretty okay with that as a tradeoff. Both for that specific case (I think it mattered more than Reddit hired someone like that, and that Reddit removed posts criticizing a (weakly) public figure, than who actually pressed the button) and in the more general one (behaviors as-organizations are a lot more effective to criticize).
That, and even more that many if not most posters could not or did not want to tell the difference between between the random distractions and a fact-focused disclosure of bad acts, while making tools for very aggressive investigation acceptable and commonplace regardless.
As a result, you didn't just get a KF that was prone to doing dumb things, or even focusing on those dumb things, but left open a lot of tools and opportunities to spend a ton of energy and time on people over dumb things. That was a problem even outside of where this could turn into meatspace harassment, but the widespread tolerance for doxxing and doxxing-adjacent behaviors made it significantly more severe as a failure mode.
That's fair, but there's a question of how that concern's actually getting solved by doxxing.
If someone's an annoying sex pest online, yelling that they're an annoying sex pest and here's their real name doesn't actually protect the online spaces they've been preying on -- in many communities, it doesn't necessarily even help a lot of the people recognize who they're supposed to watch out for! If someone's being an annoying sex pest in meatspace, giving their online identities has pretty much the same problem.
If you're trying to warn across those boundaries, this seems like it would be more useful to start with... but then, if the person hasn't self-doxxed to start with, the only thing you can present is some seemingly-unrelated rando. If the listener trusts you enough to associate the account and the person, it's not clear why they won't trust the specific claims with a userID or real-name scribbled out.
I'm sure there's some cases where doxxing would have an impact -- the serial predator going from one community to the next, or moving from solely-online to meatspace aggression certainly does exist. But I think even those cases, the strength of it as a tool for prevention isn't the end-all be-all that many advocates hope for, and the costs are too severe for those benefits. At best, the 'warn local community about a predator' is going to have marginal benefits when authorities don't take it seriously; more often, it's nothing more than cancel culture or harassment and those don't care whether you're in the 'right'.
That part is definitely an issue, but I find it easier to model the doxxing entirely separately from the cancel culture entirely separately from the harassment itself. An individual instance of doxxing isn't bad in relationship to how many crazies use the dox; it's bad because it undermines an important and hard-to-rebuild defense. Anonymity isn't the most important personal right or free speech right, but it's a pretty significant one, and in many spheres doxxing can destroy that right, or destroy years of psuedoanon reputation. The schizophrenics are just a symptom of that broader underlying problem: they make clear why it's so important, but they're just one of many reasons.
((This also helps separate why doxxing shouldn't be illegal, even if it's worse than cancel culture and should be shunned, where SWATing and some types of harassment are probably good things to ban with the force of law.))
As a metaphor, compare breaking the lock to someone's front door. On its own, the damages aren't that severe. And there are communities or individual people where nothing else would happen. There are other people for whom the risks would be weird or even incomprehensible to us, either for their own fault or for uncontrollable causes.
But ultimately, breaking a lock is still taking physical control over another person's property, for your own purposes, where the stakes are great
Yeah, I definitely don't mean to suggest KF was the only place to do this, or even that KF couldn't be a targeted place. I agree with a lot of FCFromSSC's concerns, and I remain frustrated that a lot of the deplatforming efforts here came from twitter and had absolutely zero introspection.
Yeah. I'd kinda had hopes, at one point, for the whole radical transparency bit defanging bullshit artists, but the last couple years have made clear that's not going to be a viable option to try. Some people have advocated CDA230 reform, and I could see that being relevant in some few cases, but the downsides of a well-designed law would be very high, most proposals haven't been well-designed, and the costs of interstate or international lawfare mean it would only really be a protection for the richest and only against the moderately-well-off.
There is an approach to alleged abusers that is nuanced but might be the right thing to do: they are removed from positions of power, but just that; you do not need to unjob them or take away their phone number or anything else.
Say there are adults modding subreddits for teenagers that have a record of violating sexual boundaries and thinking that kids ought to be able to consent to sex. Them having a position of power is the issue.
I think you are right that there need to be separate, but related, discussions
when you can/cannot break anonymity (many times you can, maybe times you cannot)
when you can/cannot reveal specific personal information (this probably never a reason to post someone's street address, SSN, phone number, or anything about their family members, unless the subject is trying to say that they are not the same John Smith)
when you can/cannot reveal less private but still sensitive information (in this case I specifically think "their employer" and this would only be relevant if their specific job is a problem that puts them in a position of power over vulnerable people -- and "oh I just saw their linked in page" is not a sufficient reason to post it)
maybe distinct from the above, or maybe not: when you can actually contact their employer (and this is really easily abused with the bullshit of "hey I am just letting you know." If your reasoning would enable you to just letting the boss know that an employee of theirs was gay in the 1980s, your reasoning is probably wrong) or any business partners or family members
"Irreversibly breaking the lock on someone's front door" is a good analogy and I am going to start using it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Home address is a fine definition. So if it's in the police report, blur it out. Would that have been so difficult for them?
Sure, they could have done it.
CloudFlare could have said "you can stay on our service as long as you do not post a home address." That is a rule that could have been followed! It is easily understood and enforced! If you read what he writes, Josh really did want to keep the forum online.
(Josh would upfront ask service providers what was and was not allowed, and no specific lines were ever given. Just vague handwaving at the ToS. Like reddit admins refusing to give answers on what we could have done to avoid AEO attention.)
If we can agree on the rule of "doxxing is posting the home address and if you do that you get kicked off the internet, but if you do not do that (or otherwise cross the grounds of criminality that get the police involved) you stay on the internet" that is great.
Now we need to get most other people to agree to it.
Do you think we can get people on board with our rule? Keep in mind that with this rule in place, someone could set up the successor to KF that posts all the same soft of things, short of someone's home address, and people could not take it down.
EDIT I will also say phone number should be considered dox, based on your comment in the other thread.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree.
If I decide to make a new account called Evinceo'sGreatestFan4243452 and post gigantic walls of text praising your immense intelligence under every single post you make, to the point that my gigantic posts render the forum unusable for anyone else, and I continue to do this despite your strenuous verbal discouragement, would you accept that you own those consequences? Would you, in this hypothetical, be willing to admit that you are responsible for the forum being rendered unusable?
That's not the only problem with this argument however. You could just as easily flip it around - are the people who get their personal information posted on sites like Kiwifarms responsible for it, despite their strenuous verbal discouragement, because they continue to act in ways that motivate others to post and share their personal information?
More options
Context Copy link
Meanwhile, Progressive doxxing and harassment ops do their business openly and without even the fig leaf, and consequences stubbornly refuse to be owned.
I've seen mainstream journalists praise the practice without consequence. CNN did it to a kid for making a gif. Remember the Covington kids?
Who, whom. Every day in every way.
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
More options
Context Copy link
So first off, I can see the argument that 'doxing can result in harassment, therefore it's bad'. However, that's not what you seem to have said. You seem to be saying that the doxes on their subjects, without fail, resulted in them being harassed, using an explosives-on-a-bridge analogy (correct me if I'm wrong). And if so, I dispute that.
The vast majority of the time, if someone gets doxed on KF, nothing happens to them. For example, Dream (the Minecraft YouTuber) was doxed and... well, he's still fine. I doubt he was even harassed online by them either (and it's hard to measure the signal from the background noise of harassment you inevitably get if you have 30 million subscribers). There's load of other examples I could find if the site was up, but it's far from "morons have knocked down the first few".
And that's besides the fact that doxing isn't illegal in the U.S., nor is it considered to be "aiding and encouraging harassment" (though I am not a lawyer, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this).
Well, that's still not the same thing as actually being illegal. It's fine if you qualify it with 'the closest thing to illegal', but just saying "illegal" unqualified (as you did in your earlier post) is a factual error at best and outright lie at worst.
I have no idea what equivalent you're referring to here. Either way, someone doing close-to-illegal-but-not-illegal-activity does not make it legal for someone to physically assault them, at least in the United States. You can call the cops on them, though, and potentially trespass them, or have other remediations implemented.
I don't see how you got to this conclusion? Their entire explanation should be "we were pressured into doing it by an internet harassment mob, sorry". Failing that, at least a better cover reason would be "we believe that criticism equals harassment" or "the site does not align with the values we uphold as a company" or anything much more grounded in reality than the reason they went with. Or, they could have simply not said anything at all, and dropped it quietly - making a special press release signals to the mob that this is a super special action that was taken as a result of the mob's efforts. Nothing requires them to explain "a decade or so of internet lore".
And, well, the fact that they were pressured into doing it by an internet harassment mob does not bode well for this site, since anyone who decides to target this site can do the same thing, as the person you replied to was pointing out.
How many times is KF's targeting a person causing bad things to happen to them is too many? Twice? A dozen times? I don't have the stats in front of me of how many people ultimately got harassed, but every high profile KF target I know of like Chris Chan has gotten harassed.
If I said doxing was illegal earlier, I was incorrect.
Consider a person being a nuisance. For example, aggressively begging on the train. They aren't violating any law, but eventually they're going to bother the wrong person. Consider the neighbor who leaves bug-infested furniture on the sidewalk in front of your house, or the 45 year old you find out is sleeping with your twenty year old daughter. These are KF; legal but the type of nuance that is still discouraged nonetheless. And the funny thing is, plenty of KF targets themselves were also nuances!
This would encourage future harassment mobs, so it's a terrible idea.
I see this leveled at KF critics a lot, but it's a huge strawman. KF's obsessive documentation of its targets lives up to and including information that could he used to harass them or worse was the problem, not its criticism. The criticism was fine. The criticism was sometimes a public god-damned service!
Consider this: KF was up for, what, 10 years ish? Ten years of highly motivated adversaries before one blow finally landed. If TheMotte lasts ten years I'll call that a big win. I don't think we're going to piss people off nearly as much as KF did because we're not going to engage in witch hunts, just effort posts on taboo subjects.
Well, I wish people would just be honest and say "yes, one instance of harassment is too many and justifies complete and total deplatforming of the accused". If they came right out and said it, there's not much I can say against that. I mean, personally I think it's a highly unreasonable cost for questionable benefit with many negative externalities, but if someone truly values a Vision-Zero-like mentality then I can't argue against people's value systems.
I'm not fully up to date on this topic as the main place with receipts is down right now (so bear with me for any inaccuracies). Chris was notable before KF and the majority of his harassment was before the site existed. It's hard to imagine that the harassment would have simply gone away if the site didn't exist because he was discussed on all sorts of places, from 4chan to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Especially since one of the things KF did was form "The Guard Dogs" to protect him. Now, it can be argued that attempting to protect someone and, well, "trolling" them by sending them money is actually harmful to them (if not society) on net, and I agree with that (Null did too; that's why he cut off communication and reported him to the police last year), but it's a far cry from harassment of the sort critics usually blame the forum for.
The impression I get from usual KF critics (on, say, Twitter) is that this kind of isn't a strawman. I notice that other sites dedicated to criticism, such as Mumset and Ovarit, prohibit doxing of the sort usually allowed on KF, yet every KF critic I've seen also abhors those sites too. This gives me the impression that their true rejection isn't doxing and harassment (indeed, they do not consider, say, Taylor Lorenz showing up to the house of the woman behind Libs of TikTok to be doxing nor harassment), but rather criticism of figures they would prefer to not have criticized. I have never seen them draw a principled line in the sand and say "Mumsnet and Ovarit are fine but KF isn't". Though, feel free to find a counterexample.
That said, I'm glad you're explicitly not repeating their argument.
Just to be clear here, are you considering all documentation as information that could be used to harass them, or just their dox? Because I am struggling to think of how information in general can be used to harass people.
(barf emoji)
Who?
That's a very charitable reading of KF. My read has always been that the number one priority was comedy and the method was schadenfreude. Everything else they did seemed to be in service of that.
When they provided a public service by documenting the shenanigans of characters like Brianna Wu or Aimee Challenor it was always a side effect of their main agenda, it seemed. At least, those were the threads I read. And they could have provided that service without doxing the individuals.
There's clearly a niche to be had, terminally online bluetribers misbehave as much as anyone else, but if that was the main goal they'd sacrifice other goals (like chasing clout or repeating slurs like a tic) to pursue it.
Dox, but as other threads have made it obvious, people require a super specific legalistic definition of dox which I don't feel like spelling out repeatedly. I think 'home address' is a fair rough definition. Telephone Number also feels pretty intrusive.
Well, that seems to be the main place where people will criticize KF. Along with sites like Discord (but messages there are not easily accessible). Unless you know of another place containing KF critics.
Very gender-critical forums. Very TERFy. Basically, just a subsection of KF's userbase on sites that prohibit doxing.
That is definitely true. Though, it's hard to separate their comedy from criticism. I doubt that if you're laughing at someone doing something dumb that it's not also a criticism of them having done that dumb thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You pick a bad example by focusing on Chris. The letter and the spirit of the law on KF was that people interfering in Chris's life got ruthlessly mocked and doxxed themselves. And there are lots of people besides KF who document Chris.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
I'm genuinely interested in hearing the argument that people's salad preferences possibly have moral relevance, as I can't come up with any plausible-sounding ones on my own.
Well, at least I can appreciate that you are being consistent on this front.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't want to argue against your moral distaste for the whole sphere, but there are some mitigating factors, however weak:
"Doxing" usually just means collecting readily available information. Typically this information has been provided by the target himself. There often is no clear line between observing the person and acquiring information about their job, their place of residence, etc.
People who get noticed by places like KF are typically attention seekers with large online footprints and aspirations to be some sort of cultural influencer within their sphere. They want you to look at them. They document their lives in excruciating detail. They solicit donations for their "work". They only start complaining when people notice all the skeletons in their closets.
KF can't cancel anyone unless it produces undeniable evidence that person has done something truly horrible. People and institutions with the power to cancel hate the place. In certain circles, being "persecuted" by KF even seems to be a career booster.
Cancellation is usually driven by an agenda of speech suppression. KF has neither the power nor a discernible interest in suppressing people's speech. Doing so would just make their content dry up.
I feel like this is such a weak defense. Sure, there may be no effective barriers against this sort of stuff, but I think signal-boosting this kind of information is often only ever done with the intent of "reaching out and touching someone." Or at the very least, the effort required to protect one's self from the potential consequences of "readily-available information" is disproportionately higher than the effort needed to acquire said info in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just to be clear, this is referring to him saying:
So it seems like his company, Lolcow LLC, doesn't have an agent anymore? I'm not sure if this means he's completely devoid of legal representation. IIRC he hired a different attorney to fight several different frivolous lawsuits filed by Greer and Scott (can't confirm the name), so I'm not sure if his own attorney has terminated him.
Either way, this is extremely worrying and quite frankly, disgusting behavior. The right to have legal representation is quite literally a fundamental right, and it reflects poorly on those who attempt to take it away from others. These people are short-sighted and don't fully comprehend the consequences of enshrining the tactic of "go after people's lawyers" as a legitimate tactic that should be used. The only silver lining is that sooner or later, the harassment mob will probably run up against breaking an actual law in such a legible way as to fully suffer the consequences in court (I'm not a lawyer, but tortious interference probably fits the bill here).
Well, the way I see it, there is probably nothing that can be done unless fundamental internet services are regulated as common carriers. The only defense is that we're small, not notable, and talk in complete sentences. However we've already ended up on a "hate list" by association with TracingWoodgrains, and we've already been ousted off Reddit, so time will tell.
Literal terrorists get legal representation.
In a recent thread about illegal immigration, I got super-pissed at the idea that we should hold the illegal immigrants' lawyers responsible for their behavior. Because it is a direct strike at the heart of liberalism. Yeah, yeah, going after the other side's lawyers is effective. Obviously. Because without legal representation you are SOL.
Same thing here. If the redcoats who did the Boston Massacre get lawyers, so does a guy running a website.
More options
Context Copy link
One of the problems for everyone involved in this trash fire is that these sort of lawsuits are incredibly impractical. There is no federal small claims court, finding an actual bad actor to identify is a mess, and the wheels of justice grind slow and not particularly fine. CDA230 makes that worse because a lot of people the identifiable people can whitewash bad actions of third parties, but there's similar issues for print and paper that CDA230 doesn't cover.
No one's going to successfully bring a lawsuit, here, for the same reasons that the lawsuits aimed at KF were only going to drain coffers rather than actually bring down the site or even harm the actual bad actors rather than the guy hosting and encouraging them. No one's bringing state charges against SWATters on either side, or the people taking photos through rando's windows, and that's part of why this whole mess could get so amazingly bad.
This reflects a really bad understanding of common carrier rules. Shipping -- one of the classical common carriers -- has already banned firearms parts shipments; the USPS bans the shipment of handguns. For rails, Amtrak prohibits firearms in checked bags from 2001-2009, only accepting them again after congressional action.
Common carrier rules for the purposes of telecommunications are merely that :
If you heard the sound of a vast abyss of judicial interpretation with the words "unjust or unreasonable", you're not wrong. There are few reasonable definitions that couldn't fit KF!
Shipping companies banning firearms parts may be unjust (and I agree), but I think the frustration that Null has is that he keeps getting booted off places for reasons that don't match up with what he's actually done. It would be one thing if these companies would simply be honest and just say "Okay, you know what, we have a new policy that criticizing other people on your website is banned due to the many externalities, that's why we banned them." If they were common carriers, they wouldn't be able to come up with bullshit justifications for booting them off. To analogize this to shipping, it would be like if shipping companies secretly decided to ban firearms, but never published a formal policy stating it, and they enforced their policy by banning people known to sell firearms under vague pretenses like "they assaulted and harassed someone to death" despite there being no evidence for that. It's what Cloudflare said about needing to follow the rule of law, before of course they became dishonest, bent the knee to the harassment mob and rendered their own word worthless.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't legal representation, it's a registered agent. Basically, if you want to register an LLC in a state, you need to use a physical street address. For most businesses, this isn't an issue, as you either use your office address or the address of the mailbox store you're using (like the UPS store, though there are other copy shop type places that do this as well). An issue arises, though when you want to register your LLC in a state where you don't live and won't be receiving mail regularly. Registered agents provide this service for a low price. You will still receive some mail at this address, but it's not a regular business address, and the mail is forwarded to the address of your choosing. The main reason why a physical address is required is that if the LLC is the defendant in a lawsuit, the plaintiff can always opt to sue in the state in which the LLC is registered, even if that's the only connection to the state. So there has to be someone there whom you authorize to receive service on the LLC's behalf. So all this really means is that the LLC associated with Kiwifarms will either have to find another Wyoming address or reincorporate in another state, though I honestly don't know how much of an issue this is since the various departments of state don't seem to check up on this too regularly for small businesses.
As for a right of representation, I'm a lawyer, and there are various reasons why a lawyer would end representation, though this is unlikely to be one of them. First, if you want to withdraw from representation while there's ongoing litigation you need permission from the judge. If a client doesn't pay no judge is going to make the lawyer continue representing them for free. If the client's just a pain in the ass and not worth your time, then it depends on the judge, the stage of litigation, the consequences, etc. In a criminal case it's rarely allowed except under unusual circumstances. If there's no litigation pending then you can drop a client at any time, provided you return any unearned retainer. I've "dropped" plenty of "clients" who I had represented in the past but didn't want new business from because I was too busy, or didn't feel I was qualified to handle their matter, or the client was a bitch, or they were asking me to violate ethical canons, or any number of other reasons. I've never dropped a client because I didn't like the political stance of their issue, but I don't deal in issues that generally elicit strong political stances. And even if he is dropped, he'll find another lawyer. We represent all kinds of scumbags for all kinds of reasons, including plenty of people who have done a lot worse than he has. Even if his lawyers had dropped him for bullshit reasons, he'll find another lawyer. It might not be a very good lawyer, or he might have to pay more than he expected, but someone will represent him. Lawyers generally can't be cancelled like other businesses because a lot of us are solo or in small firms, and the big firms don't really give a fuck, so if one lawyer takes issue with something there will be 20 more ready to replace him. If it's really an issue, I'll represent him myself provided he has a 100k retainer and the understanding that I'm totally unqualified for whatever it is he needs. But it would still be better than representing himself.
Contra your point about large legal firms, wasn't there a whole thing about Kirkland & Ellis LLP splitting with Paul Clement and Erin Murphy over not wanting to handle 2A related cases?
It happens, but it's not common.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn't really matter how it reflects as long as it works.
They know it means as long as they are in power, it is absolute. And they expect to always remain in power.
And exactly where would they find a lawyer to take the case?
More options
Context Copy link
There was an article in the Atlantic the other day arguing against this, so I think the woke are coming for this next. You wouldn't represent a racist or a climate destroyer, would you, right?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, Null is doomposting as usual.
The most disturbing thing about all this to me is how easy it is to prop a blatant falsehood via "citogenesis". Multiple reputable sources have claimed that KF drove three people to suicide, therefore it's on Wikipedia as established truth. As far as I know, this is false.
As far as I know the only way to prove that it's false to someone is to ask them who those people were, at which point they discover themselves in a very sus tangle of people repeating rumors they heard from multiple people but with no actual sources, and either get enlightened or appeal to authority of a National Security Analyst for NBC and former Assistant Director of the FBI: twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1566438538765279232 and, yeah, the response can only be that things are really that bad, sorry.
Just a primer for those not in the know (since the primary source for these is, well, down right now):
Chloe Sagal self-immolated as an act of protest against the sorry state of mental healthcare. She repeatedly tried to go to other people in the LGBT community for help and housing, but for various reasons (it's a long story), they did not provide it to her. She was holding a manifesto but it flew away when she set herself on fire. Many people blame her death on the Farms despite there being no evidence for this (besides her having a thread), and doing this cheapens her death while letting systemic societal issues go by without scrutiny.
Julie Terryberry was abused for years by her significant other. Notably, Julie was not trans, and anyone reporting her as trans is spreading misinformation and should not be trusted. As a result of the abuse, when her S.O. left her, she killed herself. This is tragic, but pinning her death on a website (just for having a thread) is a disgrace to those who are in abusive relationships and does nothing to combat the true cause of her death.
Byuu/Near emailed Null and threatened to commit suicide if his 13-page thread that had been dead for months wasn't taken down. He did not take it down (and anyone doing the tiniest of game theory should know that if he did, it would have set a precedent incentivizing more people to threaten suicide to take threads down). Shortly thereafter, he posted a suicide note, and then his death was "confirmed" by a claimed friend of his (who no one knew was his friend) who claimed to have direct contact with the Japanese police, despite Japan having strict privacy laws and that no police department in the developed world would ever willingly give out information to people who are not close family members of the deceased. There remains no proof of his death except for a statement by another third-party claiming to be his employer. And yet despite the outrage there hasn't been much evidence of him ever being harassed by the site (no, criticizing him on your own forum is not harassment). Every time people claim this, they speak in general terms and vague vibes, but never give any specific details as to what happened, and certainly don't provide enough substance to link the Farms to it.
The most infuriating part of all this is that it is trivial to point to actual instances of the site acting against the subjects of its threads, or in their terms, "poo-touching". All one needs to do is point to any of the many zoosadist threads on the site (zoosadist meaning a zoophile who has abused animals) who have ended up in jail. But that would paint the site in a good light, and they don't want to do that.
Null has taken down threads. The number one reason he does not is that the users will immediately notice and just put the information back up, and while he could of course ban the users for doing that, it just paints a big Streisand-mansion-sized target on it, completely backfiring any attempt to remove it.
Quietly delisting and then deleting a thread that has been dead for a while was likely to work and Null might have done it, especially because Near was offering a big pile of cash. But in the middle of talking Near said "fuck it I am killing myself" and then ghosted the world.
Agreed. One of the things that kind of baffles me about the incident was how Near negotiated with Null, or rather, didn't.
If I was him, I wouldn't have opened with a gambit like "take my $120,000 and delete the thread or I kill myself". That shows your cards too early, that makes it sound like you preplanned this and are hoping to be able to strong-arm him into doing it, and it provides a game-theoretic reason for him to say no (because you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists and you shouldn't negotiate with extreme demands like that).
Secondly, as Null would say on his podcast later, he kind of didn't get why a dead 13-page thread was so harmful to him. One of the things Near said was that a friend of ten years left him, and Null was like "so instead of being mad at them, you come to me for it?" Honestly, I'm still not sure why that thread was so bad to him even if he was actually dead. Other threads on the site allege that people have molested children, abused animals, done all sorts of horrible things (and none of them have attempted or faked suicide) and yet the worst that could be said in Near's thread was that he defended Christopher Handley (a man convicted of possession of drawn child pornography) 12 years ago before he recanted it and said it was a stupid thing of him to have done. There's various conspiracy theories that speculate he faked his death to avoid potential legal action from Nintendo for his emulator development or something, but there's really no evidence for them either and it would still be baffling for him to have done this.
And thirdly, he waited 12 hours after Null's last reply before citing some unknown time limit(?) and deciding to follow through with his plan while Null had (assumedly) gone to bed. To this day I still have no idea what that was about. He didn't even use the time limit as a negotiation chip because he never told him about it.
All of this is to say that if I was in this situation, I probably would have done my homework and figured out the best way to persuade him, and only offer money if things seemed to be going south. But not $120,000 all at once; I'd start with $5,000 at the most. And I wouldn't threaten suicide or institute an arbitrary time limit or anything. If the thread couldn't get taken down then, well, my BATNA is to just get off the internet (or at least social media) at that point.
Suicidal people tend to not be making good decisions. [citation needed] And that awful people don't kill themselves doesn't actually change how decent people consider the same allegations beyond the pale, or a very serious matter.
More broadly, there's still remaining archives of parts the byuu/near thread, and there's random allegations of shota stuff before you hit double digits. You or I may not particularly care about "Joe Biden's Left Testicle" making unfounded allegations, but combined with (alleged!) calls to friends and family, would not be the best way to work with someone that the posters already thought was crazy and hysterical.
More options
Context Copy link
I think Near was hoping for a narrative of "I even offered 100K and they still said it was not enough." When Josh started negotiating in earnest, Near panicked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh wow, the fact that Byuu/Near might actually just have committed "virtual" suicide of his handle makes me quite happy. That seemed like a really unnecessary, sad and weird way to die for someone who is so obviously talented and driven.
But it also shows to me how easy it is to get fooled by these kind of "internet truths" where nobody checks anything and everything is proven by citations of secondary sources of flimsy evidence. It's definitely something I should be a bit more wary about in the future.
Regarding KiwiFarms: I don't think I have any love for the site and even less for its users. The site and its users might sometimes do marginally positive things by accident, but on average they seem unnecessarily cruel and antagonistic towards ... mostly random autistic internet strangers.
So if the site dies, I will not shed a tear.
But of course, it's always the jerk who had it coming (other example is the daily stormer) who gets censored first. We have come a far way from the old internet where "censorship is not the answer" (this was a left-coded position not too long ago). However, the fact that you can't have a mildly hated site on the internet anymore without being at least tolerated by one big tech company is certainly discomforting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link