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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?'
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.
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