Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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The EFF's response is not a good one, either. The previous sentence is:

"We fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others."

That's not sufficient. These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. The harassed individual can suffer for years, and the EFF isn't rushing out to aid them. As their post says, "law enforcement and legislators have failed".

The Internet is different from the physical world. It's much easier for people to cross legal jurisdictions and hide from law enforcement. Law enforcement and legislators haven't merely failed. They will continue to fail for a long time, during which there are real consequences to human beings.

The Internet is going to have to develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others. The EFF could help lead that. But they haven't yet, and so others are going to take action when they feel it's appropriate. They'll take the EFF's injunction to "resist the temptation to step in" as being worth the paper it's written on.

The EFF can defend its mission in multiple ways. One, as you point out, is offering an alternative solution all agree is better. This is fantastic if you can find a feasible solution everyone actually agrees is better but there is no guarantee such a solution is going to be found until after you've managed to find it. Another way for the EFF to defend its mission, as this article aims for, is to make an argument the loss of what the mission is trying to protect is not worth the gains made by tossing it to the side. You can be unpersuaded and disagree with the balance but the lack of alternative solution alone isn't proof of a bad response.

> develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others

So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

>So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

Has it?

Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?

It is not that the forum going down in and of itself is the harm.

Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support.

Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline.

Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around the 1st amendment, to take out groups that you support just as much as it can be used against things that you want taken down.

Are you OK with sacrificing those groups for your cause? What would you tell them? That they are just worthwhile collateral damage?

Authoritarian groups are already targeting groups "you support", states and countries are telling tech services to take down lesbian and gay support groups, and states in the US have effectively forced abortion services offline.

Those things have and are happening, and kiwifarms is not the reason any of that occur.

> Those things have and are happening

Yes they are, and when other websites get taken down this gives leverage to authoritarian groups to target them even more.

It directly increases the amount of requires and pressure that is put on them, even though, yes, pressure is already on these groups.

The pressure increases every time a provider caves to demands.

I am 100% okay with deplatforming fascist genocidal maniacs spreading hate

Are you ok with gay and lesbian support groups, and abortion services being taken down because other websites being taken down made these service providers more vulnerable?

One thing does not logically lead to another. What an unreasonable argument. I could say the same thing about the thousands of malware and phish websites that are taken down every day.

> I could say the same thing about the thousands of malware and phish websites that are taken down every day.

Malware and phishing are illegal.

So is harassment and stalking.

Gay people just want to live their lives.

Fascist genocidal maniacs want to kill everyone that disagrees with them, including the gays.

Neat slippery slope you’ve crafted, but it doesn’t logically follow.

You also can’t walk in to a crowded space and yell “FIRE”, I guess that means the gubment is coming for your houses heating?

Great job at very conveniently making this about social and political issues instead of answering his question.

Kiwifarms isn't the first website ever to be taken down. Taking it down won't cause one bit of harm to legitimate websites. It's not that important. Don't worry.

>Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide.

This is repeated often but there's no proof for these claims. There's more evidence that Reddit has a greater kill count than KF.

At least Reddit actually bans doxing. Can your beloved kiwifarms say the same?

> Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide.

Who?

The faster you make a mechanism, the more likely it is to be abused. We've already seen several times where bad actors have coopted movements like metoo and taken advantage of the speed of the response to ruin an innocent person and then get off relatively unscathed because almost no one cares once the initial outrage has passed.

> These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all.

This perfectly describes Democracy as well, however.

Are you anti-democratic?

Even if you are not a believer in liberalism as a philosophy, you should at least understand that the instant we agree let infrastructure businesses start pruning speech they don't like without any accountability is also the instant that the wealthy and powerful start thinking about how to gain influence over or outright control those businesses. One would have to be absolutely bonkers to think that's going to have a good outcome in the long run.

"The system is broken, we need vigilantes"

The system is broken, we need the EFF to do more than just clutch their pearls about somebody trying to do something.

If they want to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they can take inspiration from the self-organization that occurs on other frontiers. When there are no rules, you get vigilantes. Well managed, the vigilantes establish the rules, by popular consent. Poorly managed, the most violent ones impose their own rules.

The EFF is well positioned to help establish rules. So merely saying "There shouldn't be any rules", they'll simply be brushed aside one way or the other.

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