Any speech could be attributed to the N-number of suicides we unfortunately see happening. This is not a good argument for censorship or punitive actions against individuals or entities whose speech was followed by a suicide with dubious / unproven connections to that speech.

If any speech is to be considered targeted harassment, then let the courts decide that in a defamation (or otherwise) case to determine damages and reconciliation of those damages.

Private entities should not be allowed to limit their business services to customers they suspect are behaving in a way they disapprove of, especially since these customers are not asking for tailored services such as cakes and custom websites. Payment providers are the backbone of a functioning economy, and problematic speech should never be the reason why they deny service.

One of those "confirmed" suicides occurred in Japan and the individual was also a US citizen. The US State Department doesn't list any suicides when it was said to have happened (June 2021 - there was one prior to that in May and another in February 2022). Reporting the death of a foreign national to their respective embassy is mandatory in Japan.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...

The nexus between KF harassment and the suicides in two of the three cases is extremely tenuous ("KF had a thread X disliked" -> "X committed suicide" -> "KF induced X's suicide") and in the third the evidence that a suicide occurred to begin with is lacking.

I'm sure many, many more suicides could be linked more strongly to any of the major social media platforms.

In any case, the reasons for deplatforming have always been more diverse. CloudFlare dropped KF for representing some sort of imminent and ongoing threat to human life which you'd think a good-faith review of would indicate was misguided (and thus their service should be restored.) KF has not been able to establish relationships with other hosts not because literally everyone finds them repugnant, but because entering into a public relationship with any company immediately makes that company a target for a hate campaign, and even "free speech" hosts and such have found the cost-benefit math unfavorable.

You're right in this scenario, and people need to understand the First Amendment doesn't protect "criminal" speech.

OTOH, plenty of sites have been canceled simply due to their fucked-up viewpoints that are protected speech.

Then prosecute them for it? Our society probably shouldn’t depend on credit card processors to maintain law and order.

> They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.

and how many has reddit lead to?

Just admit that they were deplatformed because a very powerful person pulled their strings at our frigging backbones of the internet for personal favors, and got the site banned there.

Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds.

However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.

That story only holds water on social media or clickbait news.

Last I heard, at least one of those "confirmed suicides" failed to appear in government databases, which casts doubt on its legitimacy (I assume it is one of those counted as "confirmed"), and another was associated with outside harassment and falsely attributed to KF. I don't know what the third one is.

I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.

This is a bullshit take. Kiwifarms always remind users to stay away from gossip subjects. The fact that some people disregard that is the equivalent of someone reading a tabloid or "Elon Musk jet tracker" and harasses celebrities mentioned there.

Also if you do what's likely to cause a KF article documenting your antics, you can be sure 4chan/8chan/countless discord channels will have a go at you as well, and those are typically not so restrained.

But sure pin it where you want.

Sticks and stones

This is misinformation.

KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied.

*There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively.

**See the other child comment to your post.*