"At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets."
A lengthy article about the ban supposedly written on the day of the ban by Taylor Lorenz? Taylor Lorenz who doxxed people[1], lied about companies and people, was actively involved in several deplatformings and is currently being sued for defamation[2]? If anything, this makes me even more suspicious of the narrative about Kiwi Farms.
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
A reporter respects a subject's desire to be anonymous. The fact that she runs an influential and news making Twitter account means her doxing is worse. Taylor Lorenz has 337k Twitter followers, an algorithm that can broadcast her message beyond the eyes of those followers, and further reach through her column in The Washington Post. Publishing someone's identity to that many people will result in them getting harassed. Lorenz has no moral high ground to stand on, she is no better than any other doxer.
The person she doxxed was a doxxer themselves. They gave up their privilege of anonymity when they started directing harassment to other people as a hobby. Can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
Context and intent matter. Pretending like all cases are equal only enables bullies. Doxxing an innocent person minding their own business because you don't like their race, gender orientation, or sexuality, is entirely different from doxxing someone in retaliation for their bad actions.
Do you really think that doxxing and harassing schoolteachers is the same as doxxing someone who goads others into suicide?
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."
First sentence of the definition on Wikipedia. What do you believe retaliation means in this context? If your consequence is a rebuttal or criticism, I have said nothing. Otherwise you are just wrong.
Retaliation by the government. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with private citizens censoring each other.
Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.
It generally means freedom from government consequences. It also generally means that third parties won't actively prevent you from speaking to people who choose to listen to you.
Unless people decide to pressure the third party into de-platforming someone, which is their freedom of expression. I don't understand why the free speech absolutists on HN are incapable of understanding that private citizens pressuring a company to take action against a hate site is equally as much free speech as the hate site itself. By your own standards, nothing objectionable is occurring here. They just want to be contrarian.
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...
[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...
[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...
[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...