> and is responsible for multiple suicides.

I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.

That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.

The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.

With all due respect, that may be true in most cases and a good message to receive for most people in therapy, but it's not true in all cases. As has been shown time and time again, humans are very receptive to propaganda and brain washing, and there's only so much harassment a person can take. A "regular" person might need to hear that the world doesn't have an agenda against you, that you're responsible for your actions, and if there's something about your life that you don't like you can take action to change it. But if there's an actual campaign against you, that advice no longer holds, and eventually that kind of harassment can definitively drive somebody to suicide. The only time I've heard of Kiwi Farms before today was when Near committed suicide. There's plenty written about the tragic event, but you can start with their goodby thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640?s...

If a US national dies in Japan, the Japanese authorities report that information to the US authorities. The state department publishes a list of all deaths of US expats living abroad, and there are no deaths anywhere close to the date when Near/Byuu allegedly committed suicide:

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

Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.

The numbers provided by both countries are inconsistent with each other, and half of 2021 has no reported suicide in the State Department data. Please stop spreading this conspiracy theory based on statistics not being entirely consistent with the story, if they aren't even consistent with themselves.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1565311737553100800

Near is almost certainly not dead. There is no evidence of his death, he’s been seen alive by fellow foreign devs active in SE Asia and interacting with Hector’s Asahi Linux streams and Hector’s VTuber accounts, and he did not appear on any canonical government (Japanese or US) death lists.

I'm not sure that "this person only faked their suicide to escape harassment" really absolves Kiwifarms of much...

Near was dealing with way more than KF. He wanted his thread deleted because it documented him absconding with thousands of dollars of donor money and dozens of rare games he was supposed to return or donate after archiving. He further engaged in rather aggressive behavior with other developers in the emulation community. His thread had actually been dead for nearly a year when he suddenly emailed Josh asking for it to be deleted (which he offered six figures). He threatened suicide when Josh gave the email to his lawyer and asked whether or not said approach by Byuu/Near was legal. Funnily enough the email and the resulting spike in activity on his thread was actually precipitated by a few posts on here about him.

Again, my stance is as follows: KF is filled with despicable behavior and people. However we absolutely must be accurate and precise when it comes to what happens there and why certain people would rather the site not exist.

> he’s been seen alive by fellow foreign devs active in SE Asia and interacting with Hector’s Asahi Linux streams and Hector’s VTuber accounts

Source please?

Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.

The standard shouldn't be whether someone is struggling with mental health.

It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence

As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.

Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.

So first of all, "violence" has a definition. We can't keep expanding the definition in order to justify actual violence in retaliation.

You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.

We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.

> if you've encouraged or groomed someone

This is literally what they do though. They harass them with the message that they will never stop until they do it. It's not just random bullying that then pushes people over the edge. It's commands that you need to commit suicide. It's calling your family and workplace and telling them you've committed suicide. The "joke" there being that not only do you initially shock the family, but when your target does commit suicide, the family doesn't believe the real call.

Really? Users of the site have actually done this? Do you have any info on instances of this happening? I've always thought it was online "harassment" which is easy to avoid.

I think the definition of violence is a fair discussion. I think it has shifted a bit. To me words that cause physical harm is violence.

Words can't cause physical harm though. Only actions can.

Yes they can. People harm themselves all the time because of words.

People harm themselves. that's the action. thats the violence.

I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.

People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.

You have to admit there is a very significant difference between going online and saying manga sucks and participating in an organized and targeted harassment of a particular person.

I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.

It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.

It's not a stretch at all. They want to punish words as if they were violence, i.e. put people in prison, send armed men to arrest them forcibly, etc. That's at the very least. This is openly stated, "some words should be illegal" is 1000% a sanction on violence against people for the words they speak.

In your examples, you get it right at the end: we seek to contextualize actions and use peoples words as evidence of context. It is the context of the acts that matter, not the words said.

Right, and zoomers would probably broadly agree with that, but almost everyone else doesn't, so it's very contentious. "Sticks and stones" liberals still basically control the world, at least until we start dying off in 30 years or so.

It's a lie. Saying words are violence is an attempt to make it so, not an observation.

People who say that are trying to use their words to force you to not have the right to use your words.

I'm not a zoomer.

I don't think it's as lopsided as you think. I think HN has a very strong, and fairly rigid, view on free speech.

And I think a much larger % than you imply see a grey area that is causing real, physical IRL harm.

It's hard to write down what I'm talking about. But it's pretty easy to see it.

Bullying has always caused physical harm. Both the kinetic type of pushing and this transitive type we are talking about.

There is some recent precedent for criminal responsibility for someone else's suicide: the (in)famous case of Conrad Roy and Michelle Carter. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging him to commit suicide over texts and phone calls.

> is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.

It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.

Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.

> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.

> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible

> I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry

-Byuu

So you admit you had support. What about the people who don't?

The site and the person who host it (there is no legal entity involved here - just a person) have not done anything other than facilitating speech, which is heavily legally protected. The users of the site have done a lot, though.

The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.

He's been taken to court around 7 times. It's almost as if he didn't break the law, and people just think he must of because it be so nasty!

This is the same argument made by anti-free speech people defending companies that censor/deplatform.

Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.

I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.

Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.

Privacy protections should apply regardless of whether it's a megacorporation or a disorganized group of independent actors.

Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.

Still really unclear what law is being broken in that case. Unless you're proposing new speech-curtailing legislation. They're Intenet-famous. They're of interest to forever-onlines. This one in particular is of interest to women and parents who've so far resisted brainwashing.

Perhaps the reason that they haven't been taken down by the US legal system is because none of what they do is illegal by US law.

Yes, that is the problem that I was describing.

Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.

Contact your congresscreatures.

> The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides

> Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.

https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...