Until then, it doesn't seem likely.
It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people.
Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media.
Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
This describes every political movement that has ever existed ever
If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact.
There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?).
If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
> If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic.
Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
> Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.
This is getting off topic but I disagree with this. Trump's comments and right wing news incited an insurrection. I think "fighting at the margins" is probably moot and really we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone. Isn't that how most policy and social phenomena are dealt with?
Can you cite an example of what you mean? There's nothing being espoused that affects "everyone" unless you're excluding all persons who don't meet your criteria for personhood. Opposed viewpoints are relative extremes to each other, so measuring by majorities is how this typically get addressed in society. Legislation isn't a benevolent, objective, or unbiased action.
KF is a fringe platform of marginal(ized) views. So was the Daily Stormr. Will no one rid us of these turbulent priests?[1] (It got some disagree-votes, but thanks for getting the point.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
For example, the lack of moderation on Facebook has probably been a factor in thousands or tens of thousands of suicides. Just from the fact there are a billion+ Facebook users and people are horrible to each other.
There's a case at the moment in the UK of a 14 year old girl who killed herself over abuse over social media (mainly Facebook).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
On social suicides, is moderation more or less a factor than the dehumanization caused by over-broad content policies on large social forums (ie- the attrition of personal communities like early tumblr and livejournal after being consumed by large companies who might try to balance the societal cost of some people dying against opex for moderation, for instance). It seems related to what happens to prisons and with zero tolerance in schools- the costs of litigation and liability driving perverse outcomes in populations due to intolerance of real difference or diversity.
This is probably a bad example in this context though as the people being talked about on Kiwiforums are not "customers" of the Kiwifarms "company" so GDPR probably doesn't cover them.
GDPR doesn't mean you have to scrub someone from your database, it means you can only keep information if you have a legitimate need. I'm sure credit bureaus can come up with enough bureaucracy that there is a legitimate need.
Was this information omitted because it was false or libelous, perhaps? How did you verify it was actually true?
Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people.
I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings.
Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments.
> How did you verify it was actually true?
The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations.
By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?
I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.
That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet.
Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it.
Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
They'd do that anyway.
Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.
Freedom of Expression, and to a larger extent, social media, allows icky people to identify themselves for you.
Who wants to turn that off...and why?
The original claim was that it posed a direct actionable threat to someone's personal safety. This claim was not substantiated. Now you're shifting it to, "unflattering words are a form of violence."
The world would be a nicer place if these people preferred the former activity but that's neither here nor there.
Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
Twitter reviewed the content and said NO.
They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time.
The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.
It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights.
If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.