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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.
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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