I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech.
However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at that point I think the "it's a private company!" defense would actually apply to the credit card companies.
This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
Any speech could be attributed to the N-number of suicides we unfortunately see happening. This is not a good argument for censorship or punitive actions against individuals or entities whose speech was followed by a suicide with dubious / unproven connections to that speech.
If any speech is to be considered targeted harassment, then let the courts decide that in a defamation (or otherwise) case to determine damages and reconciliation of those damages.
Private entities should not be allowed to limit their business services to customers they suspect are behaving in a way they disapprove of, especially since these customers are not asking for tailored services such as cakes and custom websites. Payment providers are the backbone of a functioning economy, and problematic speech should never be the reason why they deny service.
One of those "confirmed" suicides occurred in Japan and the individual was also a US citizen. The US State Department doesn't list any suicides when it was said to have happened (June 2021 - there was one prior to that in May and another in February 2022). Reporting the death of a foreign national to their respective embassy is mandatory in Japan.
Do you have an original source for this and is there a breakdown by cause? US State Department data only accounts for non-natural causes - namely suicides and accidents.
I assume you're talking about near (fka byuu)? Heartbreaking...such an unbelievably intelligent and insightful person.
I had the pleasure of getting a couple direct replies from them once on an obscure subreddit under my own realname account. That turned into a few DMs, and despite the fact that I was publicly working on tech completely antithetical to their technical views, they were so gracious and thoughtful and engaged...it was truly humbling.
I have my own thoughts on KF too...I wish the individuals responsible for their targeted and direct harassment had been held accountable. But I'll try to preserve some tact in their memory and leave it at that.
The nexus between KF harassment and the suicides in two of the three cases is extremely tenuous ("KF had a thread X disliked" -> "X committed suicide" -> "KF induced X's suicide") and in the third the evidence that a suicide occurred to begin with is lacking.
I'm sure many, many more suicides could be linked more strongly to any of the major social media platforms.
In any case, the reasons for deplatforming have always been more diverse. CloudFlare dropped KF for representing some sort of imminent and ongoing threat to human life which you'd think a good-faith review of would indicate was misguided (and thus their service should be restored.) KF has not been able to establish relationships with other hosts not because literally everyone finds them repugnant, but because entering into a public relationship with any company immediately makes that company a target for a hate campaign, and even "free speech" hosts and such have found the cost-benefit math unfavorable.
If KiwiFarms hosted/was responsible for illegal activities, then it is up to law enforcement to deal with it, not payment processors.
It is not desirable that private infrastructure companies such as Visa or MasterCard are effectively playing as judge, jury and executioner in modern society, even if (sometimes) they are happening to do the right thing.
A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
The parent is claiming a serious harassment campaign which seems functionally equivalent to violence. Both are harmful, illegal activities. Also, no one is advocating violent government intervention.
>A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
Good point, maybe the private financial institutions (or more!) of the country should lean into this and offer a shadow legal system whereby anyone can bring suit for any allowable reason with the ultimate threat being a sort of (nonviolent!) exile from digital society. That could surely not go wrong.
> They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
and how many has reddit lead to?
Just admit that they were deplatformed because a very powerful person pulled their strings at our frigging backbones of the internet for personal favors, and got the site banned there.
Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds.
However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
Well wait, maybe they gave up the deplatforming effort largely because it’s not as easy to deplatform an onion site as it is to harass web hosts on Twitter.
Also, wasn’t a big complaint with KF their doxxing? Even if I didn’t do any bad or illegal things, I don’t really want a bunch of trolls knowing my address.
But if you HAD done bad things and they WERE documented on KF, you might try even harder to get it shut down. And if you had plenty money and influential contacts, and no moral qualms, you might succeed. Only temporarily though.
Last I heard, at least one of those "confirmed suicides" failed to appear in government databases, which casts doubt on its legitimacy (I assume it is one of those counted as "confirmed"), and another was associated with outside harassment and falsely attributed to KF. I don't know what the third one is.
I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.
This is a bullshit take.
Kiwifarms always remind users to stay away from gossip subjects.
The fact that some people disregard that is the equivalent of someone reading a tabloid or "Elon Musk jet tracker" and harasses celebrities mentioned there.
Also if you do what's likely to cause a KF article documenting your antics, you can be sure 4chan/8chan/countless discord channels will have a go at you as well, and those are typically not so restrained.
KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied.
*There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively.
Because they commit a crime of... what exactly again?
They never crossed even a civil liability threshold, it's strictly a gossip site with multiple reminders never to contact gossip targets.
However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at that point I think the "it's a private company!" defense would actually apply to the credit card companies.