[hackerlight]

It is not conflating it. One of the people who committed suicide wrote in their suicide note that it was because of the cyberbullying on KF. And there's multi thousand thread pages with bodyshaming and Photoshopped images and so on. This is not just criticism. Open your eyes.

[turkeysandwich]

Who, Elizabeth Waite? She never had a Kiwi Farms thread. She was briefly mentioned in a megathread about silly public trans behavior.

Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.

But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.

Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.

The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.

Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.

Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.

Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.

You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.

The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.

Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.

[hackerlight]

I'm talking about Near. This is her suicide note, where she puts the blame onto bullying on KF:

https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640

> Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet

Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.

[turkeysandwich]

There's no reason to believe Near is dead.

Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.

> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.

Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".

[hackerlight]

> Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".

(1) Bullying and cyberbullying can both occur without direct interaction. If you're negatively gossiping about someone in the real world and the target is within earshot, that's bullying. If you bully someone enough to the point they kill themselves, that's morally equivalent to murder, even though our legal system hasn't yet caught up to this reality. What KF was doing was analogous.

(2) The legal boilerplate they put up to shield themselves from liability is irrelevant. It's not about their mere words, it's about the inevitable causal consequence of their policies and content that they tolerate and foster on their platform.

[turkeysandwich]

Bullying is the realm of children, or maybe adults in a workplace scenario. Certainly not an argument to raise when being criticized for one's public behavior. That's wholly inappropriate and seeing people weaponize it to censor that criticism is disturbing. It's very Orwellian.

> inevitable casual consequence

What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.

That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.

KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.

The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.

Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?

I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?

[hackerlight]

"criticizing public behavior" is a dishonest euphemism.

You can criticize someone's ideas all you want, but dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity in the way that KF did is not that. It is cyberbullying and it's lethal and the people involved should be fined or locked up in prison for engaging in behavior that had a non-trivial probability of causing another person's suicide.

I would say the same about people dogpiling someone online about their physical appearance or ethnicity. It should be moderated out of existence, and if that doesn't work it should be illegal.

If you throw bricks off a building, I similarly want you locked up for the same reason. You probably won't kill someone, but the causal connection is such and the probability is sufficiently high that we lock people like you up, because you're a menace and direct threat to your fellow humans.

Of course, I'd want the punishment for throwing the brick to be larger, I am not throwing proportionality out the window.