> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
Maybe link some of her tweets? I see this point being made repeatedly as essentially an argument of faith, but in fact Keffals simply does not engage in the kind of targetted harrassment that KiwiFarms does. There is, I think, exactly one tweet someone found where she said "I hope they get doxxed" or whatever.
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
> But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes.
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
> One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
You know... I was typing up a reply to this, but I don't think we're gonna agree.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
> And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
>> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
Proving the negative is impossible. The internet is too vast. Proving that it exists is effectively impossible, because there's always bar-moving on
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
> Proving that it exists is effectively impossible
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?