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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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