Fixed that: "That should not [need to] be a criminal offence."
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.
Should it be a criminal offense to call someone a useless layabout who will never amount to anything and should have been aborted?
I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.
Worth noting that kiwifarms only negatively harms people who don't read it via the statoshistic terrorism mechanism.
Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.
What is the 'community' in this case? The entire globe, all Internet users?
On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists anywhere in the world have the power to get a person fired, take away various online accounts or services, or maybe even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process.
The community of network operators exchanging routes over BGP. Get yourself an ASN and some IP space and join us! At the end of the day, the Internet is a collection of independent networks, interconnected voluntarily when there is mutual benefit to doing so.
And I think I agree that is the right level for this sort of thing to take place, even if I might disagree with both the specific decision and whether this sort of entity (monopoly level ISPs) should be able to make that decision.
Community standards cannot exist in a diverse multicultural society because there no longer is a broad agreement on what those standards should be. Even things as basic as prohibitions on murder have various different "well, in this particular situation" exclusions that differ by culture. So anything that used to be community enforced now has to be elevated to legal enforcement, with some cultures disadvantaged and others favored by the choice of what the government will enforce on all regardless of individual cultural standards.
Or we can let different communities and cultures keep their different social norms and accept a bit of friction/"injustice" when people from one culture interact with another.
I think it depends on where (or even if) you draw the line on free speech when it comes to verbal harassment.
Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.
Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.
If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
John's behavior already is illegal in most Western jurisdictions. Your example does not demonstrate why deadnaming in particular needs to be a criminal offense.
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.