Mmm. I never heard of KiwiForums before and can well believe it's full of nasty stuff, so took a look at reference 4, the first one. At first it seems cut and dried. Some emulator developer has a thread on KF making fun of him and he and doesn't like it, tells the owner he'll do anything to get it taken down, that his friends are being harassed because of KF and he will kill himself if the thread isn't deleted. Which it appears he then did.

But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut.

The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies.

The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven).

So:

- The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF.

- The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets.

- The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum.

It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know.

More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do you draw the line? It has to be drawn somewhere or else half the internet would be deleted.