I completely agree with you on this. It's wild how many posts go grey on here that call kiwifarms exactly what they are, a site whose purpose is harassment. Coordinated harassment. Off site harassment. They have people who aren't completely stupid who coordinate things less directly on the site but off the site just for situations like this where they could be like look nothing bad's happening on our website why are you mad at our website... But the freaking nerds here in hacker News are like oh no free speech! What the! I don't know who to trust here anymore I don't know who to take seriously and I don't know who is acting in bad faith or who actually can't read in between the lines... It's wild.
You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media...
They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.
Most comments here seem to lean a lot into the lawfulness aspect and that the individuals should be prosecuted, but the platform should be left to its own devices.
But the fat is that organizing criminal activities is a criminal activity! Having a whole platform where there is rampant, blessed-by-the-mods organized crime is not something acceptable. Even if you give credence to the idea that this activity is not representative of the platform as a whole, it is responsibility of the platform to prevent crime being harbored there, just like in any other business.
Morals and ethics are a complex thing, impossible to "solve" in a perfect way, and both restriction and freedom have their costs and benefits for everyone. Maybe instead of understanding this events as the demise of freedom, we could understand them better as a way to learn --as a society-- how to manage this balance properly.
You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media...
They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.