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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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