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?
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.
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?'
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.
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
More options
Context Copy link