[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.

[turkeysandwich]

> dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity

Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.

The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.

Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.

With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)

Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.

Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.

And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.

Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.

This should disturb any right thinking person.