Near stated they would commit suicide, a major news outlet and people close to the victim stated they committed suicide, and they haven't been heard from since then. They are almost certainly dead.
It’s a bit more complicated, as I’ve tried to understand and explain. This is a case of the worst people on the Internet fighting. Trans streamers who send sketchy hormones to underage kids behind parents’ backs vs. versus the very worst trolls from 4chan and 8chan. Doxing and SWATing has been practiced by both sides. The owner of KF and his mom have been doxed; two mentally unwell trans women with weapons showed up on his doorstep. Severe mental illness has contributed to suicides which one side wants to blame on the other, rightly or wrongly. I don’t fully understand the history, but what I’ve seen of the Keffals story has been alarming.
The point I’ve been trying to make is that KF as a platform at least has strong policies against offline harassment, and Keffals (their current nemesis) has an extensive documented history of child-endangering behavior, such as hooking minors up with life-altering drugs without involving parents or doctors. If KF users were really behind these SWATings in an organized way, I’m not sad to see the site gone. I am however worried that the point about Keffals will be lost, and that this was in some sense the purpose of the exercise. What this person was up to on their drug distribution website and Discord full of sexualized minors is monstrous.
All the data that was dug up on Keffals has been archived. I guess it’s up to real journalists to take that ball from here, if any will.
Kiwifarms has a strict "do not interact with the people being discussed" policy. Anyone who does is immediately scorned for it and often banned. It's not uncommon for people outside of the forum to swat others and blame it on the forums, though.
To be clear, "Drug Distribution Website" is a common resources list for sourcing HRT when you do not have supporting medical access to it. This is a far reach from "Distributing Drugs".
Telling underaged children to buy hormones made in a sketchy lab in Brazil that say “Hide from parents” on the anime loli-themed box art, all without medical evaluation or oversight, is reckless and monstrous. Children cannot consent to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
This is explicitly and exactly what Keffals and co-owner Bobposting do on the DIY HRT Directory. See “Homebrew Sourcing,” first vendor:
Isolated and confused children are sexually lobotomizing themselves to the encouragement of their favorite Twitch streamer. This is without even mentioning the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, now scrubbed, where a nearly 30-year-old Keffals charged sexually and shared photos privately with minors.
None of this has been include in NBC or anyone else’s reports, except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog. Now that Keffals can illegally DDoS KF, the archive links will be harder to find.
You can visit the archive links and live site yourself, the blog I mentioned adds nothing new. I mentioned them to illustrate the lack of attention paid to this point by the media; only such an obscure, relatively partisan blog has picked it up (so far).
Once again, these are all social media claims by people who, in many cases, weren't even connected to the dead person. And in most of the cases KF wasn't even mentioned by the victim at all. In fact one of them explicitly lists the mental health system and the fact that they were just made homeless as their reasons.. That didn't stop social media "allies" from ignoring their final comments and using their deaths to attack KFs.
Kiwifarms is a site that is implicated in several deaths, several swattings, and had knowingly hosted videos of, for example, the Christchurch shooting.
It is a hotbed for stochastic terrorism. It should be welcome to exist online, but Cloudflare providing it protection undermines Cloudflare's own reputation.
Yes, KF hosted videos of the Christchurch shooting, as well as many others. That's unrelated to your assertion the site, which is of many thousands of people, are "implicated in several deaths". It is not. Nor is it a participant in swattings.
If there were a shred of credible evidence of those things, then you should be communicating with the FBI or any law enforcement agency you're able to engage with.
I hope KF's owner sues the absolute crap out of the media outlets and any personal not hiding behind a nym for defamation, as I think this level of speech has risen to it.
London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting. Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her. I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
> London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting.
Xcel energy in Colorado turned off people's thermostats recently. There was an article about it on KF. Are they related?
> Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her.
KF republished information he posted online. Aggregating public content isn't doxxing as it's typically defined, which is people who are actually trying to maintain privacy.
>I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
And yet, "anyone" would need to, to actually be implicated.
I don't suppose facts, like actually interacting with any of the zoo-fauna being documented on the Farm, was incontrovertibly prohibited and would result in an instant ban?
It's easy to connect "dots in your head" when there's already a conclusion you've reached.
well the shooter was wearing a shirt that said "kiwifarms sent me". He also left a sworn testimony at the scene of the crime that said "i'm doing this because of kiwifarms"
I've heard people claim this, but I've never seen any evidence which supports it. I've read threads on the forums there, and have never seen anyone trying to get anyone else to commit suicide. In fact, interacting or even promoting interacting with people whose actions are catalogued and talked about on the site, is heavily dissuaded.
Do you actually have any evidence to the contrary?
cloudflare’s servers were hosting and redistributing abusive material and private information non-consensually leading to suicides?
KF is still on the internet, they’re free to handle their own traffic and find a cdn willing to take their (apparently blatantly neonazi named) operating company’s money
It's a forum dedicated pretty much entirely to doxxing, swatting, stalking and harrassment. It's also where the Christchurch New Zealand mass shooter's live stream and manifesto were hosted.
It's obviously not the only place they was hosted, or the place they were originally posted (I think the manifesto originated from 4chan and the stream would have been Twitch or YT or some other live-streaming platform - no idea which).
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
Cloudflare doesn't just offer DDoS protection, though.
Websites like Kiwifarms play a cat and mouse game with hosting providers, who typically don't want to host them. Cloudflare's other services make it easier to conceal which hosting provider is involved, making it harder to (legally!) pressure them. DDoS isn't the only way to take a site down.
"Here's the personal info on this person that we all hate and constantly talk shit about. It includes their address and contact information. We're totally putting this out here for innocent reasons. We trust you guys won't go harass these people now because that's against our rules!"
This is nonsense. No man is an island. You are effectively saying that fame and peer pressure don't exist.
There's obvious motivations to take things "just one step further" with a community that eggs such behaviors on.
And that's true from a legal perspective as well. Tons of law deals with people who were not the individual to did the criminal deed, but instead offered the opportunity to do it or encouraged it.
We don't live in some libertarian fantasy where every individual operates wholly separate from one another. It's just not how we as a species are wired.
So just making sure I understand you correctly here.. You think that nobody is entitled to privacy or their own opinions unless certain other people approve?
swatting, stalking and harassment are banned on the site and always have been (look, don't touch) and there is not a single bit of evidence that the mass shooter you speak of even knew KF existed. You're thinking about mainstream social media.. That's where he streamed the shooting from.
you are a 8 hour old account making comments that add absolutely nothing to the conversation other than snark, it would be weird to not be flagged by everyone.
In this case cloudflare was the ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from directly hosting the website. No backend servers in this case were ever hosted on clodflare's network.
You are still talking about proxies. You misunderstand what Cloudflare was providing, and you are instead talking about "backend servers hosted on clodflare's network" as if that was ever their offer.
I'm confused by your comment. The issue here is people were mad that cloudflare was providing ddos protection (via reverse proxy). What are you talking about?
A CDN caches (= stores) the bits they provide. In other words, they are hosting contents on others behalf. I can't speak to a legal distinction, but if you torrent child pornography, I'm pretty sure you aren't going far with a claim that you were "just a CDN".
My understanding was they were able to configure a simple page that was hosted by Cloudflare that was shown whenever the origin servers were not accessible. They put a joke about trans suicides on it.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
That is a very easy case to make in the US. ISPs have incredibility broad safe harbor laws (even more so when just providing transit instead of actually hosting like this case). They have very broad protection from the consequences of their users' actions.
They are not just providing transit. They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response. Transit is someone like AT&T or Sprint.
>They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response.
When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
> Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
In this case cloudflare isn't the host though. They have hosting services but kiwifarms only makes use of their ddos protection (which is a reverse proxy). That means they aren't the actual host.
I doubt anything would happen. At the end of the day it is a web forum it doesn't exactly cost many resources to host it (from archive.org most posts seems to just be text and outside links). I'd bet the benefit they get from using cloudflare has nothing to do with caching but only with ddos protection. Without cloudflare (or some other ddos protection) their servers are going to be offline from ddos attacks anyways.
>Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online, as the Daily Stormer and 8chan did themselves after we terminated them. And, even if they don't, the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.
Yeah no shit, of course this is going to happen. It's clearly just a way to save face from Cloudflare - though they definitely needed to do it as this problem was never going to go away for them if they didn't. The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable, and that's not going to change with them dropping KiwiFarms. As terrible of a website as it is, it's just going to come back up with a provider that has even lower moral standards than Cloudflare.
Hardly. They are both designed to evoke an ultimate position of unassailable moral superiority. No discourse, dissent, or discussion is permitted with such obvious moral correctness.
I'm new here, and I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged. Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment and the few obvious supporting comments from actual women and Europeans in question were flagged, despite that safety from assault is the basic existential underpinning of being naked and women's key fear.
If hackernews won't allow cultural topics at all, great. But when it does, it's morally repulsive to flag and target and mute the voices from the key subjects.
Direct "lived experience" by actual women on any topic takes second fiddle to the neoliberal narratives of nerdy men running these echo chambers?
Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as the r/twoxchromosomes clown world, where women's voices on their political and social interests get moderated by those without two x chromosomes?
Guess we're back to the false feminism of "only nice girls allowed" where nice girls only do and think what men let them.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here
HN as a website allows many unpopular opinions to be expressed, but a minority of users will flag just about any unpopular opinion. If two (three?) people flag the same comment, it disappears for most users and is marked [flagged] [dead]. Some small population of HN users browse with "showdead: yes" (apparently you've already done this?). If you have enough "karma" (500?) you can "vouch" to revive a topic that has been flagged. Some users regularly do this, and over time, most (but not all) polite and constructive comments end up revived.
As a new user, there's not a lot you can do about this, other than posting your own polite and constructive comments, even if they go against the dominent narrative. If you come across a particularly good comment you think was unfairly flagged that isn't revived soon after, you can quote it and repost to call attention to it. Or you can email Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and point it out to him. He can be slow to respond, and won't always do what you want, but he'll usually give you an honest answer if he doesn't.
> I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged
Which comment is that? I tried but couldn't find it.
> Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32672721, users flagged that comment—correctly, because it broke the rules of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We're trying to have a particular type of internet forum here—one oriented around intellectual curiosity, not snarky flamewar or ideological battle. Since the latter end-states are what the internet seems to default to, it takes energy and work to try to avoid them. We do what we can as mods, but above all we need commenters to participate in the intended spirit.
Direct lived experience is certainly compatible with curiosity, and therefore highly welcome here. It needs to come without snarky attacks, ideological talking points and the like, because those things destroy curiosity and set a thread into flamewar mode. They're also the opposite of direct lived experience.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as
I can give you the defactos wink-free! The answer is definitely not, and there is no enforced narrative. What we want is a space where people have respectful, curious conversation across differences, and above all learn from each other. Trying to enforce any one narrative would destroy that possibility, so we need multiple narratives, multiple voices, multiple views. The trick is to have them without bursting into flames. On divisive topics, that is not so easy.
I vouched for quite a number of comments yesterday that I felt were constructive and respectful, but were nonetheless flagged. I didn't keep track of the comments and don't know if they got flagged again; I don't know if you can see what I "vouched" for in some sort of admin UI? From what I recall this wasn't isolated to one particular viewpoint or "side" by the way, there are, ehm, strong emotions all around.
Yes, we can track vouches in admin software. I took a quick look. Most of the comments you vouched for seem not to have ended up in a flagged state; a few did. I'd probably have left a few more of them [flagged], but I didn't see anything too egregious, other than one comment were a user pointedly included someone's personal details.
> other than one comment were a user pointedly included someone's personal details
I must've missed that, sorry. I was a tad annoyed and maybe I got a bit carried away. At any rate, at least some people, IMHO, misused the [flag] feature. I've seen it on a few other occasions too (and happened to a story from my blog, which was entirely unflagworthy but got flagged due to sour grapes) which is why I have showdead on in the first place.
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
I find this interesting, is this the point of the internet, Or is this a personal value or feature people overlay on the internet? At a history/protocol level I’d be pressed to say the internet was designed to be uncensorsble, fault tolerant perhaps at best
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
That isn't the point, the internet protocol is designed as a distributed networking system that was adopted by corporations; if you want censorship resistance or privacy that isn't part of that specific protocol. (For example check alternatives such a CJDNS, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc; or application-layer protocols such as I2P/IPFS/TOR)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
There was more time between Cloudflare dropping 8chan and KF than between Cloudflare dropping Stormfront and 8chan. By the (very dubious and limited, but) only metric we have, the rate of Cloudflare's "bad site" removals is slowing, and its a factor of 20 or 30x from monthly like you're claiming.
The sky isn't falling, and the slippery slope is demonstrably not there in this case.
Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one hand, yes, this specific site is terrible. But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible, and I respect them for that.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
> Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
It’s unsavory to me insofar that it completely ignores the comment being replied to which doesn’t mention revolutions at all, doesn’t refute or even acknowledge any of the points, and the lack of anything other than the quote comes across as very smarmy with a touch of “destroying X with facts and logic”/“lol gottem!”.
You've picked a very specific time period here (1933-1945). I presume this is because that is the period where the Nazis were in control of Germany.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
It is so disappointing seeing you be downvoted for sentiments like this. The neurodivergent and unempathetic nature of this forum really rears its head from time to time.
There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise.
Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
“the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
"Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed.
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
So that's not cool, I don't see anyone saying "go to their home" in those screenshots but I get the implication. So my question is, when will there be criminal charges? If this is directed incitement it's criminal, has anyone been charged or convicted for it from kiwi farms?
Even if KF was cooperating with law enforcement(I think they were, or said they would comply): how long should some company choose to help KF continue though? Is it when criminal charges get filed? After someone is hurt? After someone is arrested? How many people being hurt or arrested is enough?
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
The difference between fraud and a bad investment or a foolish purchase consists entirely in the worlds spoken/text written.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
Stupid thing to say, your countries Supreme Court constantly have thousands of lawyers arguing over the distinctions, definitions and interpretation of the 1A.
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier.
I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
> They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
My reading of that blog post and this one is that they now think that cutting off service to the Daily Stormer and 8chan was the wrong call.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I mostly agree that is the claim that they are making. I already quoted the relevant part of the earlier blog, so here's the part from today's:
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
If they think those earlier decisions were the wrong call, then why haven't they rescinded them? There's no law that says that after you kick someone off your service, you can never invite them back on.
If rapists and terrorists used their water or electrical service as a primary means to rape and terrorize, then those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct, and to cut off the rapists and terrorists who violated those terms.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many sites that violate FOSTA. They only cared when Switter made the press.
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
Perhaps “making the press” is one limit that legal council use to decide whether CloudFlare is knowingly (according to internal legal theory) breaking the FOSTA laws: i.e. that the legal liability exceeds their appetite for risk. Their exact internal rules for deciding to terminate a sex-worker site are unlikely to be published by CloudFlare, and it could depend on non-public correspondence sent to CloudFlare. “Knowingly” is very legally vague as per this article: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-politics-of-section-2...
Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?
I think what you’re saying is true for water and electricity, but if you were to talk about phone lines I’m not sure that argument holds anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of phone numbers being disconnected for abusive behaviour.
I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence.
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
I read comments like this and it reminds me just how much critical thinking has been stripped away from people via their social media over consumption.
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1]
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server?
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
"Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.
> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
Correct. There is a status quo bias that infects people's thinking, as if deciding not to deplatform somebody isn't itself a decision. Similar fallacy that people bring to the Trolley Problem which can maximize the number of dead people.
How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please. They are drawing the line at imminent threats to human life. The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...
Somehow it's Freedom when a company refuses to make a cake for a gay couple, but Tyranny if a company providing hosting and DDOS protection services decide not to work with a company who explicitly violates their terms of service.
I'm not saying they are equivalent. I'm saying that all the people screaming that this is tyranny hold very different views on denying other people services based on a protected class. I'm pointing out how silly it is to be okay with a baker refusing gay customers but thinking this is the end of freedom on the internet.
The subject of both is a business denying service. The difference is the motivation for denying the service. The folks who complain the most about denying services to bigots and trolls who violate terms of service are completely okay about denying service based off of innate characteristics. I'm not suggesting that if you support one you need to support the other, rather that it's very curious which things these people most vocally support and which things are unacceptable to them. Just like you'll literally never find them defending leftists who get kicked off of these services either.
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
>How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please.
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
Is it really so hard to understand that it is still censorship even if it is legal?
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
Kiwifarms deserve no love, but this argument doesn't add up the slightest. Instagram was founded to make money from its users, so why would I allow it to operate if people kill themselves because of the peer pressure displayed in such social networks?
Drone strikes and domestic spying have always had huge literal and figurative blast radiuses. Ask someone who is on the no fly list because they have the exceedingly common name of Mohammad.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd put money on that. Your wager is "by September 2027, Cloudflare will remove sites critical of the imperial powers using hate speech as a cover for removing said critical content"?
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
> Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
That’s an idiotic saying which justifies criminalizing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people for something they have no control over. In none of the cases that I mentioned are these ideologies anything but an extremely fringe and non-influential minority.
Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.
They’ve lost numerous hosts already. Very few companies want to be associated with this kind of thing. So as they were discovered they tend to get dropped.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
There's a logical fallacy called the slippery slope. It's not an effective thinking strategy. Cloudflare simply chose not to protect a site full of bullies. As is their right. They hardly silenced anyone.
More importantly: they're not protected by a reverse proxy anymore. Behold, people can attack freely. Uptime will turn to shit, people will grow bored of trying to access it.
No single company has "the ability to exercise total control" on the internet, otherwise Kiwifarms / DailyStormer / 8chan would all be offline. This is not censorship, it's cause and effect or consequences or the free market depending on your slant.
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
i too enjoy supporting fascist and right wing groups whose only goal is to spread hatred anarchy and violence.
CF is not the internet, nor is it a government. you can always found or find a provider for your hate speech, just like KF did with an .RU domain.
your viewpoint is the terrifying one, and quite frankly one that has been used over the decades to allow hateful bullshit in the name of "tolerance" and has caused undue harm and death.
your philosophical pure idea of freedom of speech is just that-- it does not work in the real world.
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
"Surely, we will see many more websites go down"
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.
I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
What the hell is this travesty. Now any old nobody can kill a site by larping drama on fucking twitter.
You should all think about the people dying in dictatorships before you give up a free and open Internet over some paedophile using twitter clout to ban a gossip forum
You’re deflecting and at the same time declaring yourself on the side of KiwiFarms. Fair enough, but I don’t think you realise how laws around discrimination work in the USA, you may want to look that up (hint just put “protected class” into Google, that’ll get ya started)
I understand law enforcement which is not on the side of anyone inherently other than ideally justice. You, apparently, are not. I suggest you look up "due process" to get a jump start on some crucial points.
It’s a basic matter of human decency. They’re hurting people every day. Cut off their fucking access. There is no business or humane reason Cloudflare _should_ be a morally neutral arbiter; it’s a weird fetish of their CEO.
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem.
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
Yeah regardless of your stance on KF, you have to support cloudflare as an independent business to decide who they want as a customer. KF has many other options to serve their site. It’s really their own fault for using a product like Cloudflare that can be easily coerced into dropping a client through a Twitter mob.
> Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL gate acts is not free speech
“Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
I think it’s easier than that, hate speech just isn’t speech, it’s an act of violence that happens to use your mouth, pen, or keyboard — 1A as it’s currently interpreted is way too broad, the court seems to find other forms of violence, even those done for political expression, as not protected, but gives exception here for some naive “sticks and stones” argument.
Spreading rumors about them and interacting with friends, family, and known associates is fair game. Also posting their public contact information is also fair game.
I presume users on kiwifarms (KF) use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction techniques to publish private information elsewhere (such as private addresses) so that the information can then legally be reposted on KF. Coordination-of-information has an accomplice role in some of the illegal activities "reported" by KF.
I see that policy works extremely well in cases like <https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885>. As long as you give all the information necessary for someone interested to interact in a harmful way, it's fine, but you have to frame it in a way that doesn't suggest harassment. Just speculate about all the locations they could possibly be having lunch, and trust that nobody will harass them.
I do think, if there was competent legal governance in this space, that's the conclusion they would have reached. I think you understand my larger point, regardless.
>Hate speech in the United States cannot be directly regulated by the government due to the fundamental right to freedom of speech protected by the Constitution. While "hate speech" is not a legal term in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.
The economy of Germany is a highly developed social market economy.[24] It has the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world, and fifth by GDP (PPP). In 2017, the country accounted for 28% of the euro area economy according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[25]
The EU has a similar population size, wide censorship laws for this kinda of conduct, and a similar economy size. China has a similar economy and much stricter speech laws. The US isn't economically special because of free speech
The lack of free speech laws means its impossible to accurately determine whether the reported figures are accurate, since the government can just censor what they don't like. So no, I (and I imagine most conservatives) don't accept that conclusion.
oh ok, well if were in the conspiracy zone then you just have to accept that actually they have a 1 million times greater economy, because no figures can be trusted.
Facetiousness aside, the censorship laws in the EU are around hate speech like flying Nazi symbology, not laws that let them silence people reporting economic numbers.
Which is how we end up here with a thread full of people morally outraged that a group decided to not tolerate hate speech, harassment, stalking, and driving people to suicide. I think you’re right that a majority doesn’t agree with the content but a majority certainly tolerates it.
There is no government involved here though. If Cloudflare has a hate speech company policy, then as a company they can choose who they serve.
Kiwifarms is free to get another company that aligns with their goals.
I'm having trouble understanding how 1) everyone thinks Cloudflare is the singular hole through which the internet flows and 2) how a private company does not have the freedom to do what they want.
If you don't like what Cloudflare is doing, then speak with your wallet and don't use them, there are numerous other providers of ddos protection
See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.
Hate speech is often about saying other people ought not be able to express their ideas and opinions, and that the most effective way to bring about this result is for them to not be not alive any more.
Eliminationist rhetoric is a subset of hate speech overall, but it certainly exists and is trivially easy to discover. It's odd to me that none of the self-professed 'free speech absolutists' ever seems to engage with this point.
All of this is irrelevant and besides the point, 'hate speech' is not a magical word you say when mean people on the internet say things you don't like.
If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
Most eliminationist rhetoric is still protected in the States under current precedent. It advocates unlawful action but without "imminency". It could have been forbidden under the old "clear and present danger" standard.
Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.
Hate speech always leads to further extremist behavior and death threats. Now, the US is very tolerant of hate speech in itself. The problem is haters are completely incapable of avoiding the next step wherein they call for the call for the deaths of those they hate. The very moment they do that I am perfectly fine with all of our existing laws on things like terroristic threats being wielded against those making the threats.
You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to repercussions, in specific when those actions are a call to harm.
To be fair, there is the entire concept of cancel culture which basically is all about organizing to harass people and is basically supported by every large platform.
It is in America, for the most part. You can absolutely organize to harass people if the harassment is in the form of verbal abuse, for instance. Cloudflare is saying that something happened in the last few days on KF that was a genuine "emergency". I don't think this is just an excuse, actually – Prince seems unusually committed to honesty about this sort of thing. I presume people were organizing specific violent acts on KF, which is not "free speech" even in America.
Your second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA, it’s the loser equivalent of saying “mine is 12 inches”. It’s not true, never happened, and nobody believed them.
> second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA
They said they called people to "plant bombs" where the woman was going and had posted "armed men...waiting" for her. That sounds an awful lot like "the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [1].
If hate speech is not free speech, then they who define what is hate speech, define what you can or cannot say.
If there's defamation, harassment, or incitement to violence, we should deal with that in an open court with juries of our peers, not in some dark board room.
That's easy. Are they calling for illegal actions against people?
That's a pretty easy litmus test.
As a colloary, it's akin to comparing "I don't like the president" vs "Let's go kill the president" (this is a comparison of allowed vs unallowed speech in the USA, not a call to).
Advocating voting against is 100% legal. Advocation of killing is 100% ILLEGAL.
Kiwifarms was doing the latter, up to and including actions threatening violence, "assisted" suicide, and murder.
Same, there’s no contradiction here. The same political group that is pressuring the companies that currently hold the real power to take down this hate is also pushing for a national hate speech law.
Where I’m sure the disagreement lies is whether or not you find it morally okay to protect the current victims by less than ideal means.
The problem isn't that nobody understands that free speech is not limitless, the problem is that literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech and how to enforce it; there is no perfect answer. Cloudflare was taking the position that it's not their job, and they're not alone as far as internet services go. There are, in fact, other hosts that do basically the same thing, see Nearlyfreespeech for example.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.
I don't understand trying to hide behind an argument other than "my tribe is in power here so you submit to our rules". The post you linked falls apart with how you define various concepts (how you define the terms of peace, etc.). The argument is eventually settled (like nearly all of them these days) by who is in power. They'll define the terms of peace and in a way that paints their causes as good and their enemies as evil.
If this is how you view someone using their weight to protect people from literally being stalked, harassed, and driven to suicide for fun then gods help us all if that ever stops being the case and the next tribe decides that it’s fine.
This act is evil and morally wrong in all political reference frames. Anyone who’s arguing that it’s partisan or woke is focusing too hard on the victims, trans women, and not hard enough on the perpetrators.
> literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
Are you suggesting that large services like Cloudflare shouldn't exist, and instead there should be an ecosystem of DDoS-filtering reverse proxies? I do agree to that, though I think the problem remains that most of them do not want to be in the business of trying to decipher law and morality. So at the end of the day, the buck does stop somewhere.
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
> free speech as a philosophy is about allowing all speech, cause other it's just mostly free speech
Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
> Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
correct. most people don't hold a free speech philosophy. people just like taking a high moral ground they don't actually have.
> Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech
us govt can't prosecute death threats unless they can prove intent beyond you just saying it, they can't also arbitrarily prosecute for lying
> If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
if you said the same thing at a much lower volume, no one would care. the problem there is noise pollution, not the content of the speech said.
Is it censoring free speech when the goal of the speech is to actively harm people? I’m not sure of any nation that has no caveats to their idea of free speech
Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Hate speech is outside of that scope, otherwise we wouldn’t have another term for that (all calls for violence could be hate speech, but not all hate speech is calls for violence)
Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important.
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
> true threats and "incitement to imminent lawless action" are separate doctrines
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
> Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
>Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
Which websites are you referring to, in what numbers are you talking about, and how are you determining that those calls for violence are imminent? Wouldn't that suggest that a lot of violence has already occurred stemming from those websites? (presumably not stopped by a slow legal system like Cloudflare implies would have happened in this case)
There are plenty of laws that prohibit speech used that is a call for violence.
>Under Texas law, any threat of violence to either person or property can be the basis of a terroristic threat charge. However, that threat of violence must be accompanied with criminal intent to either follow through with the threat or terrify another into believing you may do so. There are six specific types of intent covered by Texas law, and the prosecutor only needs to prove you had one of them to obtain a conviction.
cause a reaction of any type to his threat by an official or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies;
place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, room, place of assembly, place to which the public has access, place of employment or occupation, aircraft, automobile, or other forms of conveyance, or other public places;
cause impairment or interruption of public communications, public transportation, public water, gas, or power supply or other public services;
place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury; or
influence the conduct or activities of a branch or agency of the federal government, the state, or a political subdivision of the state.
> unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action
So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
That makes so much sense, it seems like it would go without saying. If the violent act itself was legal (like a war, or an organized boxing match), why wouldn’t it be legal to solicit or petition for it?
>So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
No. It's fine to call for violence as long as your call is not designed to provoke and cause imminent lawless action. Brandenburg advocated for "revengeance" against the government if their demands were not met, and that was protected speech. Hess v. Indiana also affirms that advocating for lawless action is protected speech.
The point is more - you can legally say "kill Joe Biden" on the internet, but it becomes illegal if you're saying it to someone holding a gun to Joe Biden's head, who then fires it.
Is it really though? If so, then more than half the rappers would of been locked up for this by now.
I suppose who ever put such a law in US court system is holding their breath for the guy who got on International TV / web streaming / a huge crowd of people in Ferguson (?) and said 'burn this bitch down' - burn this mutherfucker down.. [1]
I dunno, maybe he was arrested for this and it is a real thing, if so I missed the news about it.
Or maybe it's technically possible to have to go to court for such a thing, but maybe only a few ever have, and the outcome of such a thing is anyone's guess, even those really into speech law [2]
>While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk.
I wonder if their evaluation of the "escalating risk" had anything to do with the legal standard of imminent action is. Probably not.
My interpretation of hate speech is that it attempts to "dehumanize" a category of people with malice.
Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.
Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.
I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
Is declining to participate by re-transmitting such speech even censorship? You can't force a company to take you as a customer, being a shit head isn't a protected class.
That's only a few providers and too expensive for anyone but someone using Google ads to fund their operations, because Cloudflare created that cost by its illegal actions.
Regardless of the behavior of the people at kiwifarms, I still find it odd that we have protected classes of people that are more equal than others. Everyone should receive the same rights.
I think the internet is just irrecoverably broken in a way such that technical problems like DDoS or NN escalate to social problems. We should not even be having these discussions in the first place: It should be infeasible for attackers to conduct DDoS. It should be infeasible for ISPs to surveil their users. The internet as we know it was designed to facilitate communications between non-antagonistic peers, that design is no longer suitable for use by democratic society at large.
It’s a fundamental issue though — there’s no “figuring it out” that a government can do that won’t either censor or facilitate. 25 years has been long enough to find tactical policy changes that make it easier, but there aren’t any, which is why nothing has happened. The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Practical dichotomy — that’s why this thread exists. You either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
The middle ground that already exists - the right of free speech doesn't guarantee an audience, and the right to assembly doesn't guarantee a platform. Censorship is permitted within the marketplace of ideas as an inevitable consequence of the fact that coerced speech cannot be considered free, but the government is far more limited.
If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
It's odd how situational people are about when free speech requires someone to be given a platform and when it doesn't. There's an almost impressive 180 on free speech rolled up in this philosophy, and it's a philosophy that I'm unfortunately seeing online more and more nowadays.
The idea is that the government has the power to censor private institutions and public schools as it sees fit, but private companies have no right to censor or exercise their own freedom of association. Actively harassing people online is free speech that people should just ignore, but trans people merely existing publicly and openly in public spaces is dangerous propaganda that the government needs to put a stop to -- merely being open about their own existence is crossing the line. It's a philosophy that's happy to censor identity, and loathe to censor actions. It's a philosophy that sees government involvement in speech as fine, and private/social involvement in speech as an existential threat to the 1st Amendment.
Free speech is used as the justification for these policies and arguments, but it's only a justification. The actual goal is the reinforcement of existing social norms and hierarchies, and free speech is applied situationally in order to further that goal.
In general, be suspicious of anyone who claims to be a free speech advocate who has this kind of backwards view of the 1st Amendment. The point of the 1st Amendment isn't to make it easier for the government to censor, and it isn't to make it harder for private institutions to moderate their own spaces. That's not to say that we can't talk about the free speech implications of moderation decisions -- but if you're excusing government censorship while criticizing companies, I immediately get real suspicious.
> either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
Nobody has been legislated to do anything here. Cloudflare is dumping Kiwifarms. There are other hosts. That's one middle ground: a diversity of opinions on what constitutes unacceptable speech. Here's another: the government has no right shutting down Kiwifarms in the absence of a true threat [1], but Cloudflare is free to.
If you look at the history of communication technologies, particularly public ones (e.g. the printing press and television), this pattern recapitulates. An idealistic explosion of creativity. Weaponisation. Scrambling alongside states over-reacting. Then a middle ground.
We don't have anything close to consensus on the Internet, save perhaps for X-rated content. So private actors are figuring things out. We'll probably see a government response carving out protections for both speech and platforms, though hopefully nothing as onerous as what was done with TV [2]. And then over decades an equilibrium will arise. An equilibrium between "de-shrining free speech" and "entrench[ing]hatred."
> The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Most of us never enshrined free speech above all else. It was never controversial that free speech had limits, that sites had the right to moderate content and ban accounts, or that businesses could refuse service to anyone. Prior to 2016, something like this would not have even been newsworthy.
Painting this issue as black and white is just wrong. Both sides have immense ramifications for the world. Accountability for censoring bodies and people on these platforms is not easily solved.
Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc).
But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself.
The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong?
And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?
The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.
Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
> But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.
The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
On the one hand, I would have supported Cloudflare in continuing to provide service to Kiwifarms as someone not employed there if that was their conviction.
On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
Not just immoral and reprehensible, the campaigns of targeted harassment they undertake limit the victims' speech. If you care about people being able to freely express themselves, today is a good day. I don't know why the free speech defenders miss this (I do know).
And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
That doesn't seem like something tech companies should be making judgements on. They are because the government is totally failing here. But if these sites are so dangerous that they need to be immediately shut down, the government should be giving a directive to do it.
Thank you. I'm so fucking amazed that the people saying this is the right move don't have any first hand knowledge of what the farm is actually like. These people are blindly ushering in a wave of censorship unlike anything we've seen before because they only care to listen to one side. The lack of knowledge here is astounding. This is how societies collapse, and I'm not exaggerating. No one ever MEANT to implode a civilization.
Yes to all of the above. And I stand by my statement. All of those things can be true and I can still find the site reprehensible and wish to provide exactly 0 resources to assist them in way.
>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
> figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet.
I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech.
What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals.
How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
> they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line
No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
> What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
A lack of moderation to remove hate. Hate breeds hate, and drives good people away. In a similar way that bullshit breeds more bullshit unless removed.
Let me try an analogy for technical people.
Say you're a person deeply knowledgeable about computers and technology, and you're posting in an audio related forum.
Somebody posts a glowing review of an expensive device that claims that shaving the edge of a CD and painting the border with a marker will give you a bigger soundstage, more clarity and make the audio sound crisper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-QxLAxwxkM
You can try to explain why it's bullshit, but it's hard. You have to go into details about how a CD actually works, why this BS about reflections has no effect on a CD mechanism, how error correction works... you'll have to write several pages of deeply technical information that you have to boil down to something understandable to mere humans. It's a tough job. Not only you need technical understanding, but you also need to be good with words, and good at explaining complex concepts simply. And you have to have the time and dedication to spend an hour or two writing about it for free. That's a lot of unusual characteristics for a single person to have.
Then somebody goes "shut up nerd, it sounds better!" in response. And they proceed to post more reviews of volume knobs that somehow improve the sound because the wood is special, gold plated optical cables, and other such junk.
It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit. So eventually the smart people will get fed up and leave. Especially because they can find places where they're appreciated -- they'll find a home on a more specialized home where their expertise is actually valued. Meanwhile the original forum will get even more BS.
Same happens with social topics. It's easy to spread conspiracy theories and hate. It's hard to explain complex social issues. Without moderation the first will trivially overwhelm the second.
Well, so far you've almost proven my point. You've responded with a trivial insult and no actual counter-argument, which was far easier to write than my comment and contributed nothing to the discussion.
I think Cloudlfare’s choice to block them is fine and CF was probably fine allowing their use of the service before, given the damage to their reputation they apparently considered acceptable.
Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
The problem is who defines what is hate - don't trust a govt to make that - they are the last people I would trust.
We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
I am honestly dumbfounded about the government hate on HN. It's elected by you and your peers. You can influence it and you can even be part of it yourself. If you want change do it and stop spreading FUD.
Our city council recently replaced all the street lights with new LED lights - one of our neighbors is convinced it is 5G - this is the same person who votes as well.
Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time.
Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
Right. Centralization of morals and ethics simply causes mass polarization and, eventually and inevitably, war over "which side wins." Those in favor of the rational gray area will be trampled on by both sides.
100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.
The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].
>100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes)
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here).
I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)
Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.
There were no good choices because they didn't think through their ethics in advance -- even given their history with other sites like Daily Stormer... They decided they were "just" an economic entity, not a moral one. Unethical use of the services was something that tainted the buyer, but not the seller, and besides, should they really take on the obligation to think about such difficult non-technical things when that could be pawned off on lawyers or politicians or something?
The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.
I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.
This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.
The notion that government should be in charge of effectively eliminating speech we don't like so that private companies don't have to is _far worse_ than the current state of things.
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
>Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting.
Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.
If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
>If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law.
>However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting.
Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied.
>If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
That's not what happened here. They made an appropriate decision.
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
To be even clearer, in this case it’s not even really quite clear that this was legal content at all! Coordinated stalking of people!
Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy!
And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
Is that a rhetorical question or a sincere one? Legal liability. American law has lots of direct liability for Cloudflare under SESTA/FOSTA for being involved in sex work websites. There's not equivalent liability for hate websites.
It is rhetorical. CF admits that they have contacted law enforcement several times about contact in kiwi farm. They clearly get the hosting of the “problematic” content. They understand how that site is used. That seems like an admission of guilt to me!
Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
As far as I'm aware, KF didn't come with the kind of direct liability under US law that sex work content does. I welcome the chance to learn that I'm wrong here!
This seems like the correct thing. They realise the content is dodgy.
Report to law enforcement repeatedly hoping that they look at it and give them a legal reason to shut them down.
If they shut things down as a private company, so long as the customer is not in breach of the service contract and the content is not illegal, couldn’t they mount a defence?
This sounds like a reasonable strategy. I don’t understand this need for private justice.
> And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
Because we’re a U.S.-based company subject to SESTA and the one site in question we took down affirmatively told us they were violating SESTA. SESTA is a very bad law. But, if you’re violating it, don’t wave that fact in the face of your infrastructure providers who are liable under the law for providing service to you. We continue to work to overturn or repeal SESTA.
I was thinking “if I was your lawyer” and didn’t type it. Then hit enter and saw my message, and edited it. The problems of getting in flamewars while making breakfast!
I would recommend to anyone to follow the advice of their lawyers regarding posting to hacker news! But it’s mainly a joke
EDIT: and to the original post, I was being way too glib. I do kinda believe what I say but there are less agressive ways of saying it. Again, breakfast posting, but legitimately touchy subject for obvious reasons and I should keep my cool.
> to be under oath and claim nobody at your company was like “maybe this site is coordinating illegal activity” and you said “nah” and continued to provide services for them?
I think Cloudflare did the right thing. But I'd fight for a CEO's right to make calls about user-generated content without worrying about liability because someone suspected something.
I suppose the contention here is that at one point you’re looking at a website, are told its modus operandi, see a lot of the content it hosts… and at one point 230 starts being less relevant.
Like if you have multiple incidents with the same site at one point you need to actually acknowledge that these incidents are here! You might still declare “it’s ok though” but honestly that arguments way easier with something like Reddit compared to something “single-use” like KF.
Obviously not a lawyer, but it feels possible to argue this in a securities fraud case
Cloudflare will ignore reports of DDOS-for-Hire websites that are illegal almost everywhere in the world, including the US. So, you see yourself as free to ignore laws when you feel like it?
I do understand that Cloudlfare can't just violate SESTA/FOSTA.
That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.
This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.
But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.
And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.
I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
We never told you we were violating SESTA. We never waved it in your face. You could have given us some warning, but you didn't.
Until you show evidence on your work to overturn/repeal SESTA, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many other sites that are clearly violating SESTA, so obviously you don't think it's that big of a liability as you claim to be.
Not to mention your Head of Sales reached out to us offering Cloudflare services a year after kicking Switter off when we mentioned we were dealing with DDOS attacks as an escort directory.
> It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
They can't directly remove your physical freedom but corporations especially when acting in unison can remove most of your economic freedom. If enough precedents are set where large service providers deny service to groups and individuals at the behest of the mob, eventually it will become politically and financially expedient for these providers to pre-emptively deny service to a whole basket of people.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.
It's not difficult to say, but it can be difficult to live at any meaningful scale. That invites endless pressure campaigns and similarly endless accusations of acting arbitrarily, capriciously, or with insert-bias-or-agenda-here. None of those are free to handle in any responsible or timely fashion. Never mind what happens should a genuine mistake be made.
It puts the company in the same position as Facebook in regards to moderation. It's endless, expensive, and your work is never good enough. Not a desirable position for most.
i think this is the sort of thing that exposes a general failure of capitalism.
the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce.
FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
Well this particular example is a US website. The relevant (inadequate) legal framework for handling the situation is US Federal law, which ideally Cloudflare would have had to reference to determine whichever outcome should have happened here. So, while I'm far from an expert on policy, I imagine that'd be the place to start?
Is it? I thought that it was hosted outside of the US, and that while the admin was an American citizen he didn't live on US soil. That's from vague memories from years ago though, so maybe not accurate or up to date.
Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters.
The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists.
The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so.
Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
Let's not obscure things by calling it an issue of "hate speech." That is an impermissible broadening. As they said, "hard cases make bad law." The only way to mitigate the badness is to make the decision as narrow as possible.
It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
>It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here?
edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it.
the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right?
The big counter celebrating the number of people they've harassed into committing suicide? People have gone to jail for it. CF should be the least of their concerns right now.
This is such a bad faith comparison and in no way related. Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
> Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
Pretend for the sake of argument that Facebook did use Cloudflare, or that my example were about some other platform that does.
> A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Exactly my point. When someone does something banworthy on Facebook, we let Facebook ban just that one person, rather than banning all of Facebook.
That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation.
Hosting content, more moderation.
I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction about why providing a CDN is fundamentally and completely different from hosting. Still coming off your servers eierher way.
It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too.
“It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle.
And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.
They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
Why shouldn't we prefer private parties administer the free speech which is most fitting for their platform, as opposed to overly broad legislation at the national level by a government which doesn't appear like they'll catch up on tech within 5 years?
Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation.
In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people.
And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here ...
I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention.
Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them.
This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue.
If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say."
So where was that on the website? Honestly you should be applauding that they actually switched from final solutions (obvious edgy joke) to a normal name in what seems to be like a reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”.
It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset.
Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
> Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something.
It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service.
The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.
The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.
It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
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> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
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> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, bu...
> I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
Yes, of course it would be. The end result of litigating free speech in the court system, is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time.
The courts have extremely strong protections for speech. They are way way stronger than what private companies do.
Just adding the word "government" doesn't make something more scary. In this case, adding "government" to the enforcement mechanism for speech would mean that basically nothing gets banned.
> is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time
This is kind of a run-around. Cloudflare's blogpost argues that it wants to get this content offline, it just wants courts to be in charge of that process. It acted because it believed the courts were too slow.
If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur. The actual argument in that case is whether you want this moderation to happen at all.
I take Cloudflare at their word that they actually wanted a court to tell them to deplatform this content. And because of that I take them at their word that they believe the government could feasibly pass laws that would censor the content people are asking them to deplatform.
> If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
Cloudflare has a really clear and seemingly mandatory option which is to just assert what we all know to be true: They can boot clients whenever they threaten their business. Everybody does this. There are near constant stories of users getting business-critical Google or Apple accounts suspended without warning or explanation. Those companies are ruthless about protecting themselves from liability and will err on the side of losing customers even when the violations aren't proven. Cloudflare wants to be seen as being above the fray and they just absolutely aren't. Anyone who thinks "it's just politics" is delusional. These are real people doing real things with real consequences.
I'm basically happy right now with private companies being the de facto moderator of speech because your alternative of government censorship is unacceptably risky to people's freedoms, and private companies are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
I see a pattern that everything requiring international collaboration is very very slow to fix. From tax havens to climate change. Because you can hide out in another country or blame another country and so on.
> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech"
Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.
>The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy.
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
A person, claiming to be a moderator on Kiwifarms, swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene (but unfortunately misspelled it as "Kiwifarm" in the note claiming responsibility). I have no doubt that this person did it with the express intent of getting Cloudfare to withdraw their services. Up until then Marjorie Taylor Greene had been quite popular on Kiwifarms.
Correction: someone who claimed to be associated with KF swatted a member of Congress. The username mentioned (which I will not quote here) denied all responsibility on the site. Surely we're not taking artificially voiced 911 calls from VoIP numbers at face value here are we?
I think Cloudflare did think it was a dangerous site, but they would really prefer not having the responsibility of being the arbiter of what can and cannot be hosted, as well as all of the negative publicity that comes with being so. At the same time, I believe they believe that current legal process surrounding how things like this are handles are so woefully underdeveloped that turning a blind eye is not being neutral, it's being irresponsible.
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
> As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Cloudflare. Their core product is security done the wrong way. They have the potential to do evil things at an enormous scale with little to no recourse.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I haven't seen any evidence that they are significantly more dangerous than Facebook or Twitter. The "human lives in danger" is transparent bullshit. They are actually doing this due to a pressure campaign being carried out by a small number of activists looking to drive any speech they don't like out of existence. Thankfully it hasn't completely worked yet and they are still able to respond in their own defense, so we have something other than the unchallenged claims of Cloudfare etc to determine whether they've actually done something wrong.
> Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold.
If CF is going to police the internet then they had better do it fairly and justly. I do not believe CF is equip to do that, and neither does Prince. That is the issue here as evidenced by the parent and GP being unclear on the rules. It’s very hard not to see this decision to terminate KF as a corporate knee jerk.
Cloudfare really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. Their Wednesday post was fantastic, and for once I had an ounce of hope they’d do the right thing.
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
I don’t think companies just get to decide to be a utility company anyway. It is clearly a play to disregard responsibility. If governments started treating them like a utility and started requiring things like free services to people who don’t make a certain amount of money or price caps you bet your ass they would fight it tooth and nail.
> They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday
How so?
On Wednesday they said they will block content "that ... incites ... violence against people".
Then now they're saying "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
I’m depressingly amused by that. If you’re a free speech absolutist to the point where you’re unwilling to draw a line between Kiwifarms attacks and the real world consequences, surely you shouldn’t blame the anti-KF campaign for the way KF reacted?
The problem here is that Cloudflare didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that the words on Kiwifarms might be stifling to the free speech of their targets. Which, of course, they were, just as the anti-KF campaign made KF unhappier and more aggressive. Words have real physical consequences. Often they’re predictable.
They muffed it. They were proving to the world how reliable they could be and repairing the damage from the Stormfront debacle, and again they just showed how prone to caving to pressure they can be. What a joke.
I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.
I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman (albeit a controversial one) was probably the straw the broke the camel's back. Hard to lobby congress (Which Cloudflare does) when you protect a forum actively swats its members.
Prove your accusation, please. That the person that made that call not only said they were KF, but a certain user from KF and gave their account name, should be evidence to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds that that was almost certainly a false flag.
Neither KF nor its members swatted MTG. It was absolutely done to place blame on KF and doesn’t even comport with the image those who dislike the site paint - that KF is a radical, right wing forum designed to harass minorities and political opponents.
>I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman
This never happened. It was just blamed on KF by the people currently criminally DDoSing it.
I'm amazed by the credulity and lack of critical thinking in this whole discussion. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in hearing from KF's point of view ... which is now at any rate impossible because they've been banished from the internet. There are two sides to this conflict and you aren't allowed to hear from one side, so the other side can just relentlessly make shit up, exaggerate, take things out of context, and it will be taken as gospel.
So many comments like "I've never heard of KF before but I looked at this hysterical out of context twitter thread and wow I guess it does need to be censored-via-DDOS".
I agree that MTG almost certainly wasn’t swatted by KF.
I have, however, spent time reading Kiwifarms well before this controversy. I have zero interest in arguing about the conclusions I reached: I just want to put down a marker and say that you’re wrong. Many people who disagree with you have taken the time to read the site.
Both times, people organized a social media campaign to try to get CF to drop services for a site they disliked, and both times CF first refused in the interest of free speech, safe harbor, let law enforcement handle it, etc, then flipped like a switch and dropped their services when the mob didn't go away fast enough.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
And it's a huge strawman to imply I said people just wanted SF gone for aesthetic reasons.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It is not possible for violence to occur via the internet. And if you believe that posts on the site somehow constitutes harassment to an illegal degree, contact law enforcement.
Now that KF is back up (good job, CF), please find me one post on KF that involves the planning of violence which wasn't either deleted or ridiculed into oblivion by the other posters there. If it's so common, this should be an easy task, right?
Exactly. You can go on Reddit right now and find calls for violence, extermination of various groups, etc etc etc, but you’ll never see cloudfare take action then.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
>”wow, if they could do that to nazis they could do that to me (not a nazi)!”
Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.
So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.
”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”
personally, i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.
Your perspective leads to radical polarization between two alternate extremes--what we're seeing happening to political discourse across the entire Western world--and, eventually, war and death.
>”i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.”
“Anyone who isn’t performatively anti things-I-disagree with is thing-I-disagree-with”
I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.
Correct, if you aren't vocally against hate speech, homophobia, transphobia, etc, you may as well be on the side of it. "the only thing it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" blah blah blah, you get it nazi.
So would you argue then anyone against mass surveillance supports terrorism? That if you don’t support NSA hardware back doors you might as well fly the planes into the towers yourself?
I’m starting to think this person we are responding to is either a troll or such a one dimensional thinker that they are, in the literal definition of the word, a bigot.
“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”
Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.
Would I argue the same way in a completely different scenario that has nothing to do with what I said about standing against racism and transphobia? No, i wouldn't
Can I ever have time to do something else, though? Like, can I ever get some work done, or go for a walk outside, or have a conversation with friends or strangers about some non-political topic without constantly have to perform a "I'm against bigotry" dance?
It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.
Do you not understand just how dystopian this is? This refrain to be enthusiastically anti-X reminds me of 1984 and the two minutes hate.
I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.
I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?
This is a serious suggestion: if you are concerned about blanket accusations, it’s helpful to avoid blanket statements like “Activists hurl around the Nazi label…”
Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.
I think this might be a case of language being interpreted in an unintended way.
I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.
In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.
Generally in agreement with you here, but are you aware the specifics around why CF dropped services for Stormfront?
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
I guess what makes it difficult in this case is that the amount of power CF has is so great that any use of that power is immediately troubling.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
But there are alternatives, cloudflare isn’t the government, they don’t even have a monopoly.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
I was referring to Stormfront there and how you called that situation "the Stormfront debacle", as if the bad thing about the situation was CF stopping working with them.
Actually, somewhat related: it turns out that the owner of KF was also hosting a literal neonazi website in addition to KF. (https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566335693663731712) If I did seem to call KF or its owner neonazi, I don't think it would be completely in the wrong to do so.
It makes sense if you're worried about the US becoming nazi itself. If a company will bow to the prevailing narrative, and naziism becomes popular in the US, won't cloudflare bow to that group also? Or, let's imagine a world where 90% of Americans are anti-abortion. Will Cloudflare host pro-choice sites, or will it bow to pressure from religious group and shut those down also? Having a backbone is kind of the Cloudflare business model. Of course there are limits to that, and banning nazis is one that most people can agree with. But I think if you're trying to stand up to, say, the CCP, Cloudflare isn't going to be very appealing.
Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it.
The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.
The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
When the topic under discussion are the contents of a publicly available website, unless you think that Cloudflare has some kind of tooling scanning for specific terms on the CDN origin (why?), no, I am pretty confident in saying they do not have any additional information. This is not some arcane matter of network management, this is the public contents of a public website that anyone can verify.
I don’t know where posts are coming from when I see them online. We can only guess at the specifics (which will hopefully be released when there’s time for an after-action report) but presumably cloudflare may be able to see ip addresses and have some idea of location. If someone posts “I’m coming to kill you” a dozen times but the ip is in Europe and doesn’t appear to be a VPN then that’s less cause for concern than the same posts made by someone with a residential ISP ip that’s half an hour away from the target.
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
You should, as a general rule, never take a charitable view of the actions of businesses. If you start with the most machiavellian interpretation possible you will be more right than wrong. Not that you will be always right, but absent special information it is the presumptive default.
To be clear, nothing I say is any sort of endorsement of Kiwifarms. Cloudflare is a business so it’s Machiavellian. Kiwifarms is… I don’t even know what Kiwifarms is. Something worse.
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
I was actually monitoring the Keffals threads to laugh at the salt on display. It was hilarious at times, then you'd run into stuff like people determining what restaurants she was likely to be at so they could detonate a bomb and kill her. It's such a brazen display that, even if it was a joke, I don't think the first amendment would be an acceptable defense if your door got busted down over it.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.
Isn't "swatting" just the practice of calling 911 and saying e.g. "I'm at [streamer's neighbour's address] and there were gunshots fired at my neighbour's house! Please send armed police!"?
I don't think there's a simple way to stop swatting, though if a streamer/someone else who is a likely swatting target phones ahead of time and asks to be put on a "likely to get swatted, please disregard suspicious calls" list then the police should honour that list (AFAIK there is something like this but it often doesn't help).
I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.
> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
That's exactly a problem with theses sites; they are horrible and yet can slowly recruit people because companies still provide them with services that allow them to stay public.
Such groups can splinter endlessly into unidentifiable new subgroups. How do you stop those? What is your imagined end-game here — making freedom of association default-deny?
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
>Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.
How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.
There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?
Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.
Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:
You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”
Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.
After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.
You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.
If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.
But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.
> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
> And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
Proving the negative is impossible. The internet is too vast. Proving that it exists is effectively impossible, because there's always bar-moving on
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
> Proving that it exists is effectively impossible
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
>> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
Maybe link some of her tweets? I see this point being made repeatedly as essentially an argument of faith, but in fact Keffals simply does not engage in the kind of targetted harrassment that KiwiFarms does. There is, I think, exactly one tweet someone found where she said "I hope they get doxxed" or whatever.
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
> But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes.
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
> One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
You know... I was typing up a reply to this, but I don't think we're gonna agree.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
>I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
Having never read Kiwifarms I don't know whether the threats are real or not.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.
>Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.
They didn't say that there was "dangerous escalation" in the past two weeks. They said that there was a pressure campaign over the last two weeks, and they also said that they didn't want to comply with this campaign.
They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?
Maybe, but people shitposting about blowing up half a city just to annoy a streamer doesn't really sound like the kind of threat that would make a company do a 180 on their position..
Cloudflare didn't say that they contacted law enforcement in the last 48 hours; they said that they've been in contact with law enforcement for weeks and law enforcement hasn't acted (i.e. to give them a court order to shut the thing down.)
100% they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. First you pretend you care about free speech for a week and gesticulate in public. Then you come up with some extraordinary circumstance so it doesn’t seem like it’s the new normal.
Just adding some light to the escalations; there were bomb and shoot threats over the last few days.
The userbase on the site upped the tone of their "jokes"/threats after the last blog post and thats what caused the final suspension.
I don't know what happened prior to today, but earlier today there was a bomb threat which was apparently removed by the site's moderators within minutes, but it hit Twitter anyway. The fact that this isn't mentioned anywhere by the people currently leading the "campaign" already proves there's an agenda.
There absolutely were not, and this is a gross exaggeration. One user made a clearly satirical comment about posting IRA soldiers with bombs at every cafe in the Ulster area. This was screenshotted by Keffals and posted to Twitter as a serious threat. Everyone else posting in the thread understand it was an extremely dumb joke. The post was removed by the KF owner within minutes. If that is why the site went down, I’ll be amazed and disappointed.
People have always posted (usually fake) threats in kiwifarms threads. They have always been removed promptly. The same is true of basically every large website on the internet. When cloudflare made their post saying they wouldn't remove kiwifarms, the site already had that reputation.
I think the point is that this isn't even KF's first go at the bomb threat thing. They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides... and CF was always OK with. Always.
Until now.
When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.
Until now.
I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
>They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides
all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).
the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.
remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
Oh shit maybe we're all wrong then! Can I ask, then, what is the purpose of the site, if it's not to co-ordinate the harrassment of individuals by sharing their personal information?
Ok have fun doing whatever it is you do that isn’t doxing on your forum when it’s back online (after the doxing and the threats took it offline) I guess.
I dont have an account there... My HN is also not some driveby throwaway. You are putting words in my mouth now because you are out of arguments. This is a discussion forum.
The purpose is to document the bizarre (and oftentimes outright creepy and/or illegal) behavior of the terminally online. You know, stuff like helping your friend sell his bathtub brewed hormones to minors without their parents finding out. Or running a Discord server called Catboy Ranch that has several minors on it, and you send them personalized collars that declare them your property. Just ordinary, innocent stuff that is no one else's business, clearly.
A hypothetical court. I was just using it as an example of how the argument wouldn't hold muster in situations where it would really need to.
> What lack of evidence?
You posted this:
> No one is answering you because it's obvious to even the most intermediate observer where this work is coming from.
Again, "well, it's just obvious, dude" is not evidence. It's similar to a "god of the gaps" argument. If there's evidence Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms did it, and if there's not evidence that Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms still did it. That makes no sense.
What about to people like me, who have only ever heard of kiwi farms in passing, who don't really know anything substantial about any of this stuff and want to know more? Is it obvious to us? I'd like to see what everyone's talking about when they talk about this site, and if they're right, without actually going there. Can you help me out with that?
> 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
The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].
One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.
Ok, the investigative journalist's thread shows literally no proof or even evidence that kiwi farms was involved in the swatting, and the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one. Neither of the other two links said anything about swatting.
I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.
Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.
And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?
No, her personal statement isn't enough, how could she know who did it? I'm sure in the heat of the moment someone going thru something like that would make assumptions and galvanize their position somewhat, it's completely understandable, but it's hardly evidence. Also the article doesn't say anything about the timeframe between her dox being posted and the incident.
The admin explicitly saying for people to stop "encouraging SWAT pranks" when speaking apparently(?) about two other elements is a bit closer but still quite weak, its an open forum from what I gathered so far surely there would be archives or some screenshot or something for said "pranks" towards the streamer being discussed right? especially if there is mention of him actually having to deal with the FBI in previous times.
I didn't overlook the tweets, I just couldn't find a single mention of swatting there.
Yes, the evidence for a causal link in swatting is weaker, but evidence exists: discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
>discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
what is this proximal link? and if that link is something like 3 days or a week or something, on an open forum, i'm not sure it's that relevant, literally anyone can watch the website without participating for what I understand.
>And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
I saw the bedsheet investigation, but what harrassment did they engage in? the situation where the orders happenned was in a second hotel, and after a big of digging it wasn't even kiwifarms that got the dox on that one, it was Vile on doxbin[0], and he also admitted to being the one making the orders.
> There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
what is the evidence for this unlawful harassment, and what is the moderate evidence for the swatting? if all you have is what was posted above for the swatting then we'll agree to disagree, which is fine, what is however the plenty of evidence for the former? And no, that twitter thread really doesn't cut it afaic.
> I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
Well, here's the thing, I know little about kiwifarms in particular and everyone is saying that there is extensive evidence of other crimes, articles are being written saying that they were the one responsible for swatting people and a thousand other things, and the citation/source rabbit hole just leads to a dead end, or ends up circular, so yes i'm going to have my doubts and at least want to see some of this extensive documented harassment trove, archiving things on the internet is but a couple clicks away.
I'll leave the thread for today for it is getting too late, have a good one.
- Moderators on KF felt the need to address the topic of swatting.
- People dox'd on KF were definitely swatted-- the missing evidence is to what degree the actual swatting was coordinated on KF. It's relatively indisputable that KF was in the causal chain.
- Harassment occurred, coordinated on KF to someone immediately after relocating from a swatting.
What are you talking about exactly? As far as I've been able to find, they don't even have a history of harassment, let alone something illegal, not as a forum/community. As we saw with this "threat" here.. it was reported and deleted as soon as the mods saw it and the user perma banned.. Just like every other attempt by a "member" to post something illegal or interact with someone off site.
these were obviously (stupidly poor taste) jokes, and they were removed as soon as the site admin was made aware. death threats are against the rules of the site. what exactly makes this so urgent that KF has to be blasted off the internet?
There are "bomb and shoot threats over the last few days" on FB, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, CoD/CS lobbies etc everyday. Like Kiwifarms the content is removed when reported. What is the issue?
Thank you for this comment. The only possible negative here is "Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online." Cloudflare supposedly being "concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency" is disingenuous at best.
> KF started doxxing and threatening CF employees, as well as their other customers.
First I’ve heard, and I’ve followed this story closely. Do you have a source?
Sounds about as likely as KF SWATing a Republican Congresswoman and calling the police to say “it was us, Kiwi Farms” in the middle of this conflict over hosting, which is exactly what was claimed in that case.
There is at least one CF customer who was doxxed by Kiwifarms after expressing displeasure with Cloudflare's initial decision. CF CEO (eastdakota) blocked this customer when he complained about it [1] So much for free speech + great customer service!
You got the name wrong. And the attack was against the GNAA "i'm a nazi" president and online shock-racist employed at Cloudflare at that time, nothing to do with their later death which is none of our business. It was also to remind that Weev claims there is a different GNAA-adjacent sympathizer employed at Cloudflare who is a personal ally to Stormfront.
Cochran is the person that both GossiTheDog and eastdakota were talking about. (I'm not sure about the Jaime vs Jamie spelling – my impression is "Jaime" is what she preferred at the time of her death, so I'm going to go with that – as to why eastdakota and the screen-shotted NBC News story spelled it "Jamie", I don't know – maybe just typos or autocorrect.)
My point was that the person I was replying to was either misinformed or disingenuous about eastdakota's reasons for blocking GossiTheDog. I don't see the relevance of the rest of what you are saying to my point.
I think if you used to work with someone, and now they are dead – being upset at people publicly attacking them, when they aren't around to defend themselves, is a very understandable human reaction. eastdakota's reaction here is very human.
They weren't attacked, Cf was attacked for employing them and their allies. Cf has a habit of financially supporting actual far-right activists such as Westboro Church, besides this. They are under watch.
> They weren't attacked, Cf was attacked for employing them
That sentence is illogical. Attacking X's employer for employing X is an attack on X – it is saying that X is unworthy of being employed
> Cf has a habit of financially supporting actual far-right activists such as Westboro Church
You make it sound like they donated money to WBC. From what I understand, at one point they accepted them as a paying customer. WBC is an atrocious organisation, but a business having them as a customer isn't "financial support" – do you apply the same standard to the many other businesses who undoubtedly have WBC and/or its leaders and members among their customers? Who is their cell carrier? What supermarket do they shop at? Which airline do they fly?
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
The post you are responding to is insinuating that if a group is willing to commit one crime (DDOS) they may be willing to do another crime / questionable act like make a bomb threat post to frame KF.
Am I missing something? The linked source contradicts that comment. The source only links one post by one user - a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading - and it was removed.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
Just say that you want Kiwifarms deleted from the internet. There is nothing tenuous or uncertain about that stance, if you own it openly. Hiding behind concern over a false and un-serious threat is a coward's strategy.
I honestly know nothing about the site, somehow before today I've missed the place existed. I can see in past history HN history it's been quite a contentious site.
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
No, I do think Kiwifarms should have been prosecuted and unhosted, for failing to curtail frequent mass harassment threads against ordinary and mentally ill individuals, which led to real-world harm. I'm just not going to defend deplatforming by quoting downvoted and deleted jests from a few users who could also be anti-KF astroturfers.
I know nothing here, but it sounds from other posts like it is being moderated very aggressively, and posts like these survive for mere minutes.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.
Interesting how that screenshot on Keffals' Twitter feed crops out the number of downvotes that post would have received, as well as the replies from other posters calling that poster a fed and a glowie.
Yeah, it's a meme as old as the forums themselves. It's hilarious that this one post that everyone immediately saw through was the one that made Cloudflare react.
After hearing about the drama and reading kf's pov, I can definitely understand why the people ddosing kf want it down. The stuff they do is illegal and absolutely vile but overlooked by the people in power because it suits their politics. It scares me as a prospective parent.
Some older studies from the 80s and 90s that are even higher (well into the 90%), but they may not be the best representation of the modern trans situation.
This happens because a lot of times trans people find themselves in the position where they realize they are trans but can’t do anything about it because they were born in a country that doesn’t offer the qualified help to them (at all or in timely fashion). Sometimes it has to do with their parents refusing to hear what’s on their mind. That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously. The thin line where this kind of behavior might turn into something less innocent might not be immediately obvious, especially when phrased in a way that is supposed to elicit emotional response.
"Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to DO NOTHING, THAN TO RISK CAUSING MORE HARM THAN GOOD." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit."
You seem to be of opinion that this is a simple situation with clear cut options one of which is always safe while the other can bring harm. That is not the case, as usual with problems that cause so much discussion on the internet. If the trans person is not able to get necessary treatment (which is well documented by medical professionals) it’s very likely they will experience depression and they may even suffer harm as a result. How can you evaluate that doing nothing in this situation may indeed bring less harm than another option? That is usually a decision that needs to be made by a medical professional, but what if that’s not possible? What if the doctors aren’t trained to deal with situations like this and would still bring harm by their choices?
You have trouble believing that trans people, whose problems are ignored by most population, choose to help people experiencing the same problem, that they know may lead to suicide if untreated, when nobody else does? How is it surprising? The only proper solution to this problem is to give all trans people equal and quick access to properly trained medical professionals who can treat them correct way, and that’s not happening.
Belief has nothing to do with it, gender dysphoria is an established medical diagnosis. The question is: why are these transgender people recommending and selling drugs to children? Do you seriously think this is okay?
Here's the published criteria for such a recommendation:
> Mental or medical underlying issues are in control
The gender dysphoria must be persistent. How is it possible to determine that without long term observation? The patient needs to consent after being informed of and understanding the risks. Can a child understand and consent to this?
It's absolutely insane that people think it's okay to just ignore all this and sell hormones to children. This is not help, this is drug dealing. Whoever is doing this is exposing children to significant risks.
Hormones are not specifically targeted to young people, and all the trans dyi resources I’ve seen have a ton of disclaimers and aren’t exactly easy to find and use. It is a last option for people who have no other choice, and it is regarded as such in community. To go this route you need to do actual math, do the blood work and read about this a lot. Do I think it should be available for children? In a perfect world - no, as children have access to medical professionals and puberty blockers. In this one, where an opinion of 17.999 year old may be completely discarded by parents who are 100% sure they know their child better then the child themselves? Where people can be told their appointment is in two years? Where the doctor can be a bigot and discard valid concerns? And not having this option at all may lead to many suicides? Yeah, I think this option may be justified. How many years would you consider to be permanent enough for you? Are you claiming that all parents are correct all the time?
That is absolutely insane. I don't care what the gender politics situation is. These hormones have significant risks associated with their use and are not things that can be sold to children.
You do know that there are plenty of faceless grey market hormone sellers that'll sell hormones to literally anyone who sends them cryptocurrency and maybe sometimes a bank transfer? "Trans activists" with large followings aren't the ones doing that.
Yes, that's illegal drug dealing. No way around that. However, that's not what was described to me in response to my original question.
What is this supposed to mean?
> That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously.
> trans people [...] choose to help people experiencing the same problem
Did I misinterpret this? Because it seriously sounds like there are trans people out there selling these "DIY trans" drugs. If they're knowingly selling to children in an attempt to help them as previously claimed, I'm sorry but that's extremely fucked up.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense
How do you know?
And to be specific, the claim was "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
Seems to me it would be better for Cloudflare to keep serving Kiwifarms, and cooperate with government requests for access logs / etc. Then at least our law enforcement would have data to help with finding threat actors.
they did, but law enforcement were simply too slow.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> Legal process
> While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
According to whom? Cloudflare? What would be an appropriate time for Cloudflare for law enforcement to respond? And to what threats?
You say "simply" but these are not simple questions.
Cloudflare can shut off service to anyone, sure, but in any other industry there would be some termination notice, right? Unless its something like terrorism, where LAW ENFORCEMENT sets the boundary, not the private company.
The obligation for a termination notice, time to cure any violations of terms, etc is something that would be in a contract you agree to. A service provider is able to have terms that allow them to cut you off instantly if they decide to put that in their terms - apparently, CloudFlare has terms like that.
Would I want my ISP or CDN to cut me off without notice? No. Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond. But also, I wouldn't operate a site like KiwiFarms, so I'm not terribly concerned about my CDN cutting me off for the same reason. If it became more of a widespread pattern with CF I would understand their customers getting nervous.
> Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond.
From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
The forum already deletes anything illegal (in the US) and hands out info to law-enforcement when asked.
The operator posted this on their Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Not going against your point, just that there is no need for Cloudflare to provide the government info on a site that already provides the government with info.
That hints at the biggest problem with the oligopoly on public discourse.
If you have the power to remove someone's speech, only your side gets heard so you can make them look as bad as you want and they have little to no recourse.
Boy, this sure would have been a lot easier if they just dropped Kiwi Farms with little fanfare the instant it was clear they were using CF. I bet they'd have been able to even keep the perception that they're a super neutral platform, too.
2,017 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 420 ms ] threadThat said, they should've done it a while ago.
The point I’ve been trying to make is that KF as a platform at least has strong policies against offline harassment, and Keffals (their current nemesis) has an extensive documented history of child-endangering behavior, such as hooking minors up with life-altering drugs without involving parents or doctors. If KF users were really behind these SWATings in an organized way, I’m not sad to see the site gone. I am however worried that the point about Keffals will be lost, and that this was in some sense the purpose of the exercise. What this person was up to on their drug distribution website and Discord full of sexualized minors is monstrous.
All the data that was dug up on Keffals has been archived. I guess it’s up to real journalists to take that ball from here, if any will.
It is also entirely possible that users coordinate harassment out-of-band. I am unable to tell if this is what’s happening.
This is explicitly and exactly what Keffals and co-owner Bobposting do on the DIY HRT Directory. See “Homebrew Sourcing,” first vendor:
https://archive.ph/hP6pT
Box art:
https://m.facebook.com/Spaghattas/photos/a.106898500685482/4...
Isolated and confused children are sexually lobotomizing themselves to the encouragement of their favorite Twitch streamer. This is without even mentioning the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, now scrubbed, where a nearly 30-year-old Keffals charged sexually and shared photos privately with minors.
None of this has been include in NBC or anyone else’s reports, except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog. Now that Keffals can illegally DDoS KF, the archive links will be harder to find.
Interesting sources, there.
You don't have to Archive those. I can link to them right here:
https://diyhrt.wiki/
If anyone out there is in need of HRT but does not have access to it - or can not get access to it - please check out that link.
Oh yeah I’ll believe anything I read on those. Real trustworthy sources!
Hey just FYI - Keffals is "she", so "to the extent she mentions".
edit: to downvoters - original comment was referring to Keffals as "he", it was later updated to pretend it was referring to the owner of KiwiFarms.
It is a hotbed for stochastic terrorism. It should be welcome to exist online, but Cloudflare providing it protection undermines Cloudflare's own reputation.
Yes, KF hosted videos of the Christchurch shooting, as well as many others. That's unrelated to your assertion the site, which is of many thousands of people, are "implicated in several deaths". It is not. Nor is it a participant in swattings.
If there were a shred of credible evidence of those things, then you should be communicating with the FBI or any law enforcement agency you're able to engage with.
I hope KF's owner sues the absolute crap out of the media outlets and any personal not hiding behind a nym for defamation, as I think this level of speech has risen to it.
> Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her. KF republished information he posted online. Aggregating public content isn't doxxing as it's typically defined, which is people who are actually trying to maintain privacy.
>I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
And yet, "anyone" would need to, to actually be implicated.
I don't suppose facts, like actually interacting with any of the zoo-fauna being documented on the Farm, was incontrovertibly prohibited and would result in an instant ban?
It's easy to connect "dots in your head" when there's already a conclusion you've reached.
The thread looked to be 90% Twitter screenshots and clips from Keffals stream... All public information. Compiled in a creepy way, sure.
>a site that is implicated in several deaths
Youtube
>several swattings
Twitch
Do you actually have any evidence to the contrary?
KF is still on the internet, they’re free to handle their own traffic and find a cdn willing to take their (apparently blatantly neonazi named) operating company’s money
How "hosting" someone posted makes them responsible considering section 230 and the 1st A?
Websites like Kiwifarms play a cat and mouse game with hosting providers, who typically don't want to host them. Cloudflare's other services make it easier to conceal which hosting provider is involved, making it harder to (legally!) pressure them. DDoS isn't the only way to take a site down.
There's obvious motivations to take things "just one step further" with a community that eggs such behaviors on.
And that's true from a legal perspective as well. Tons of law deals with people who were not the individual to did the criminal deed, but instead offered the opportunity to do it or encouraged it.
We don't live in some libertarian fantasy where every individual operates wholly separate from one another. It's just not how we as a species are wired.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...
That is simply not how it works. The bits came from Cloudflare.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
Should everything with "anti-trans jokes" be taken down? Better take down every forum, every game chat, Twitter, Whatsapp etc .
Why add this?
Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
And a CDN is a hosting service if you push content there and don’t set it to expire.
Yeah no shit, of course this is going to happen. It's clearly just a way to save face from Cloudflare - though they definitely needed to do it as this problem was never going to go away for them if they didn't. The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable, and that's not going to change with them dropping KiwiFarms. As terrible of a website as it is, it's just going to come back up with a provider that has even lower moral standards than Cloudflare.
If hackernews won't allow cultural topics at all, great. But when it does, it's morally repulsive to flag and target and mute the voices from the key subjects.
Direct "lived experience" by actual women on any topic takes second fiddle to the neoliberal narratives of nerdy men running these echo chambers?
Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as the r/twoxchromosomes clown world, where women's voices on their political and social interests get moderated by those without two x chromosomes?
Guess we're back to the false feminism of "only nice girls allowed" where nice girls only do and think what men let them.
HN as a website allows many unpopular opinions to be expressed, but a minority of users will flag just about any unpopular opinion. If two (three?) people flag the same comment, it disappears for most users and is marked [flagged] [dead]. Some small population of HN users browse with "showdead: yes" (apparently you've already done this?). If you have enough "karma" (500?) you can "vouch" to revive a topic that has been flagged. Some users regularly do this, and over time, most (but not all) polite and constructive comments end up revived.
As a new user, there's not a lot you can do about this, other than posting your own polite and constructive comments, even if they go against the dominent narrative. If you come across a particularly good comment you think was unfairly flagged that isn't revived soon after, you can quote it and repost to call attention to it. Or you can email Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and point it out to him. He can be slow to respond, and won't always do what you want, but he'll usually give you an honest answer if he doesn't.
Which comment is that? I tried but couldn't find it.
> Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32672721, users flagged that comment—correctly, because it broke the rules of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We're trying to have a particular type of internet forum here—one oriented around intellectual curiosity, not snarky flamewar or ideological battle. Since the latter end-states are what the internet seems to default to, it takes energy and work to try to avoid them. We do what we can as mods, but above all we need commenters to participate in the intended spirit.
Direct lived experience is certainly compatible with curiosity, and therefore highly welcome here. It needs to come without snarky attacks, ideological talking points and the like, because those things destroy curiosity and set a thread into flamewar mode. They're also the opposite of direct lived experience.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as
I can give you the defactos wink-free! The answer is definitely not, and there is no enforced narrative. What we want is a space where people have respectful, curious conversation across differences, and above all learn from each other. Trying to enforce any one narrative would destroy that possibility, so we need multiple narratives, multiple voices, multiple views. The trick is to have them without bursting into flames. On divisive topics, that is not so easy.
I must've missed that, sorry. I was a tad annoyed and maybe I got a bit carried away. At any rate, at least some people, IMHO, misused the [flag] feature. I've seen it on a few other occasions too (and happened to a story from my blog, which was entirely unflagworthy but got flagged due to sour grapes) which is why I have showdead on in the first place.
Your emotional "lives are on the line" in dramatic italics makes you look very dramatic.
I find this interesting, is this the point of the internet, Or is this a personal value or feature people overlay on the internet? At a history/protocol level I’d be pressed to say the internet was designed to be uncensorsble, fault tolerant perhaps at best
That isn't the point, the internet protocol is designed as a distributed networking system that was adopted by corporations; if you want censorship resistance or privacy that isn't part of that specific protocol. (For example check alternatives such a CJDNS, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc; or application-layer protocols such as I2P/IPFS/TOR)
Additionally the Internet Protocol is not resistant to intermediation. (Or in the words of the P2P Foundiation: it is not counter-anti-desintermediation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
Sure it was. Another week or two and the angry people would have got bored and moved on to some other outrage.
Instead they have been shown that the infrastructure of the internet will bend to their will if they make enough noise.
Good job, CF.
The sky isn't falling, and the slippery slope is demonstrably not there in this case.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
Nazis need to be fought everywhere, otherwise their cancerous ideology just grows.
Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
- Engels, On Authority 1872
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
>>"communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
Sci-Hub link about the right thriving during economic recessions/depressions: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.03.006
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
This is literally the opposite of neutral.
I don't get this constant need for mental gymnastics. Just say you believe in censorship.
It's not black and white.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
Elaborate, please?
"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Law enforcement needs to intervene, period.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
They’re also private infrastructure unlike water/power, which is the position that cloudflare is in.
These services are not typically used in the act of raping or terrorising someone.
No, but it is (or was) used by kiwifarms which seems to be a platform dedicated to terrorising trans people.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
And even then, the concept of “origin server” is pretty vague.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
And if they ban me and I decide to use smoke signals to have this discussion is the sky hosting it?
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
Sure but is it dangerous? A threat to life?
Do these sites need to be offline too? https://www.lifewire.com/free-people-search-sites-the-best-o...
Because they don't like that otherwise it is a balance, and are afraid of what happens to that balance and who does it.
Meanwhile, all things that make societies successful are a balance (as are most things that succeed in nature).
June 27th, 2021, in Japan
———
One is denying service based on a protected class , the other is denying service based on a risk of violence.
How can you consider them equivalent?
How is that not holding them as equivalent for the purposes of your argument?
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
So has Instagram (by far!), FB, Discord, Twitter and site or program where people can type.
Doxxing and harassment are the stated goals of KF.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
But no one is REQUIRED to help them.
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
CF is not the internet, nor is it a government. you can always found or find a provider for your hate speech, just like KF did with an .RU domain.
your viewpoint is the terrifying one, and quite frankly one that has been used over the decades to allow hateful bullshit in the name of "tolerance" and has caused undue harm and death.
your philosophical pure idea of freedom of speech is just that-- it does not work in the real world.
- Cloudflare provides a service
- some "unsavory" people buy this service
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
That is not censorship.
You should all think about the people dying in dictatorships before you give up a free and open Internet over some paedophile using twitter clout to ban a gossip forum
Having it both ways is absurdly easy.
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
The question therefore becomes at root, are they lying? Is the company actually impartial infrastructure, or are they dishonest.
The past has shown that they are a little unstable in their impartiality.
Personally I'd like to see them making much more decisions to clean up the net but I'd need to see them being honest about it.
“Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
Addresses aren't private information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
https://www.statista.com/chart/9358/us-gdp-by-state-and-regi...
https://www.jta.org/2022/06/02/united-states/a-california-ha...
Looks OK
Edit: fixed a typo, changed a “must” to “much”
Facetiousness aside, the censorship laws in the EU are around hate speech like flying Nazi symbology, not laws that let them silence people reporting economic numbers.
Kiwifarms is free to get another company that aligns with their goals.
I'm having trouble understanding how 1) everyone thinks Cloudflare is the singular hole through which the internet flows and 2) how a private company does not have the freedom to do what they want.
If you don't like what Cloudflare is doing, then speak with your wallet and don't use them, there are numerous other providers of ddos protection
See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.
Obviously no country has absolute freedom of speech, but for example the First Amendment has no hate speech exemptions.
Eliminationist rhetoric is a subset of hate speech overall, but it certainly exists and is trivially easy to discover. It's odd to me that none of the self-professed 'free speech absolutists' ever seems to engage with this point.
If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.
You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to repercussions, in specific when those actions are a call to harm.
They said they called people to "plant bombs" where the woman was going and had posted "armed men...waiting" for her. That sounds an awful lot like "the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [1].
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/
If there's defamation, harassment, or incitement to violence, we should deal with that in an open court with juries of our peers, not in some dark board room.
That's a pretty easy litmus test.
As a colloary, it's akin to comparing "I don't like the president" vs "Let's go kill the president" (this is a comparison of allowed vs unallowed speech in the USA, not a call to).
Advocating voting against is 100% legal. Advocation of killing is 100% ILLEGAL.
Kiwifarms was doing the latter, up to and including actions threatening violence, "assisted" suicide, and murder.
Those were never 1fa protected actions.
Then a proceeding in open court will be simple and fast.
A proceeding where the accused has the right to cross examine and present evidence in their defense.
I prefer that to a corporate decision done in secrecy in response to bad PR.
Where I’m sure the disagreement lies is whether or not you find it morally okay to protect the current victims by less than ideal means.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
This act is evil and morally wrong in all political reference frames. Anyone who’s arguing that it’s partisan or woke is focusing too hard on the victims, trans women, and not hard enough on the perpetrators.
Most people would say the legal system is the correct avenue for this.
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
you're just using the words to act like you have a moral high ground you don't actually have.
Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
correct. most people don't hold a free speech philosophy. people just like taking a high moral ground they don't actually have.
> Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech
us govt can't prosecute death threats unless they can prove intent beyond you just saying it, they can't also arbitrarily prosecute for lying
> If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
if you said the same thing at a much lower volume, no one would care. the problem there is noise pollution, not the content of the speech said.
Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
Pretty sure calls for acts of violence is legal in the United States unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action.
Not entirely sure you’re correct on this one?
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1459/198236/202...
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
[1] https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885
[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/case.pdf
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
Which websites are you referring to, in what numbers are you talking about, and how are you determining that those calls for violence are imminent? Wouldn't that suggest that a lot of violence has already occurred stemming from those websites? (presumably not stopped by a slow legal system like Cloudflare implies would have happened in this case)
>Under Texas law, any threat of violence to either person or property can be the basis of a terroristic threat charge. However, that threat of violence must be accompanied with criminal intent to either follow through with the threat or terrify another into believing you may do so. There are six specific types of intent covered by Texas law, and the prosecutor only needs to prove you had one of them to obtain a conviction.
cause a reaction of any type to his threat by an official or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies;
place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, room, place of assembly, place to which the public has access, place of employment or occupation, aircraft, automobile, or other forms of conveyance, or other public places;
cause impairment or interruption of public communications, public transportation, public water, gas, or power supply or other public services;
place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury; or influence the conduct or activities of a branch or agency of the federal government, the state, or a political subdivision of the state.
So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
That makes so much sense, it seems like it would go without saying. If the violent act itself was legal (like a war, or an organized boxing match), why wouldn’t it be legal to solicit or petition for it?
No. It's fine to call for violence as long as your call is not designed to provoke and cause imminent lawless action. Brandenburg advocated for "revengeance" against the government if their demands were not met, and that was protected speech. Hess v. Indiana also affirms that advocating for lawless action is protected speech.
I suppose who ever put such a law in US court system is holding their breath for the guy who got on International TV / web streaming / a huge crowd of people in Ferguson (?) and said 'burn this bitch down' - burn this mutherfucker down.. [1]
I dunno, maybe he was arrested for this and it is a real thing, if so I missed the news about it.
Or maybe it's technically possible to have to go to court for such a thing, but maybe only a few ever have, and the outcome of such a thing is anyone's guess, even those really into speech law [2]
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/us/michael-brown-stepfather-v... [2] - Imminent lawless action test still being fleshed out - https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-...
I wonder if their evaluation of the "escalating risk" had anything to do with the legal standard of imminent action is. Probably not.
Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.
Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.
I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
Agreed!
https://secushare.org/broken-internet
False dichotomy. We have always punished some speech (e.g. fraud) while sanctifying others (political speech).
If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
Or host themselves. ISPs are common carriers. Their freedom of assembly is abridged in a way others' is not.
This puerile hyperbole aside, free speech doesn't guarantee an audience.
It's odd how situational people are about when free speech requires someone to be given a platform and when it doesn't. There's an almost impressive 180 on free speech rolled up in this philosophy, and it's a philosophy that I'm unfortunately seeing online more and more nowadays.
The idea is that the government has the power to censor private institutions and public schools as it sees fit, but private companies have no right to censor or exercise their own freedom of association. Actively harassing people online is free speech that people should just ignore, but trans people merely existing publicly and openly in public spaces is dangerous propaganda that the government needs to put a stop to -- merely being open about their own existence is crossing the line. It's a philosophy that's happy to censor identity, and loathe to censor actions. It's a philosophy that sees government involvement in speech as fine, and private/social involvement in speech as an existential threat to the 1st Amendment.
Free speech is used as the justification for these policies and arguments, but it's only a justification. The actual goal is the reinforcement of existing social norms and hierarchies, and free speech is applied situationally in order to further that goal.
In general, be suspicious of anyone who claims to be a free speech advocate who has this kind of backwards view of the 1st Amendment. The point of the 1st Amendment isn't to make it easier for the government to censor, and it isn't to make it harder for private institutions to moderate their own spaces. That's not to say that we can't talk about the free speech implications of moderation decisions -- but if you're excusing government censorship while criticizing companies, I immediately get real suspicious.
Nobody has been legislated to do anything here. Cloudflare is dumping Kiwifarms. There are other hosts. That's one middle ground: a diversity of opinions on what constitutes unacceptable speech. Here's another: the government has no right shutting down Kiwifarms in the absence of a true threat [1], but Cloudflare is free to.
If you look at the history of communication technologies, particularly public ones (e.g. the printing press and television), this pattern recapitulates. An idealistic explosion of creativity. Weaponisation. Scrambling alongside states over-reacting. Then a middle ground.
We don't have anything close to consensus on the Internet, save perhaps for X-rated content. So private actors are figuring things out. We'll probably see a government response carving out protections for both speech and platforms, though hopefully nothing as onerous as what was done with TV [2]. And then over decades an equilibrium will arise. An equilibrium between "de-shrining free speech" and "entrench[ing]hatred."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Most of us never enshrined free speech above all else. It was never controversial that free speech had limits, that sites had the right to moderate content and ban accounts, or that businesses could refuse service to anyone. Prior to 2016, something like this would not have even been newsworthy.
Painting this issue as black and white is just wrong. Both sides have immense ramifications for the world. Accountability for censoring bodies and people on these platforms is not easily solved.
But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?
The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.
Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.
The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
But CloudFlare doesn’t. That’s why they position themselves as a common carrier.
I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech.
What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals.
How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
They were showing up at peoples’ houses and SWATting them. This isn’t a problem technology can solve.
No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
A lack of moderation to remove hate. Hate breeds hate, and drives good people away. In a similar way that bullshit breeds more bullshit unless removed.
Let me try an analogy for technical people.
Say you're a person deeply knowledgeable about computers and technology, and you're posting in an audio related forum.
Somebody posts a glowing review of an expensive device that claims that shaving the edge of a CD and painting the border with a marker will give you a bigger soundstage, more clarity and make the audio sound crisper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-QxLAxwxkM
You can try to explain why it's bullshit, but it's hard. You have to go into details about how a CD actually works, why this BS about reflections has no effect on a CD mechanism, how error correction works... you'll have to write several pages of deeply technical information that you have to boil down to something understandable to mere humans. It's a tough job. Not only you need technical understanding, but you also need to be good with words, and good at explaining complex concepts simply. And you have to have the time and dedication to spend an hour or two writing about it for free. That's a lot of unusual characteristics for a single person to have.
Then somebody goes "shut up nerd, it sounds better!" in response. And they proceed to post more reviews of volume knobs that somehow improve the sound because the wood is special, gold plated optical cables, and other such junk.
It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit. So eventually the smart people will get fed up and leave. Especially because they can find places where they're appreciated -- they'll find a home on a more specialized home where their expertise is actually valued. Meanwhile the original forum will get even more BS.
Same happens with social topics. It's easy to spread conspiracy theories and hate. It's hard to explain complex social issues. Without moderation the first will trivially overwhelm the second.
"A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on."
Misattributed to Twain, Churchill, and others, but very accurate.
Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time.
Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.
The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-say...
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817
I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)
Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.
The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.
I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.
This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.
If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law.
>However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting.
Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied.
>If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare
It's accessible through TOR, IIRC.
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy!
And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
Report to law enforcement repeatedly hoping that they look at it and give them a legal reason to shut them down.
If they shut things down as a private company, so long as the customer is not in breach of the service contract and the content is not illegal, couldn’t they mount a defence?
This sounds like a reasonable strategy. I don’t understand this need for private justice.
It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
Can we not turn HN a place where we shit on CEOs for actually being openly communicative and cutting through the bullshit?
The fact Matt is here talking about stuff you yourself think "his lawyers would disapprove of" is a great quality of this site.
I would recommend to anyone to follow the advice of their lawyers regarding posting to hacker news! But it’s mainly a joke
EDIT: and to the original post, I was being way too glib. I do kinda believe what I say but there are less agressive ways of saying it. Again, breakfast posting, but legitimately touchy subject for obvious reasons and I should keep my cool.
I think Cloudflare did the right thing. But I'd fight for a CEO's right to make calls about user-generated content without worrying about liability because someone suspected something.
Like if you have multiple incidents with the same site at one point you need to actually acknowledge that these incidents are here! You might still declare “it’s ok though” but honestly that arguments way easier with something like Reddit compared to something “single-use” like KF.
Obviously not a lawyer, but it feels possible to argue this in a securities fraud case
That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.
This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.
But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.
And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.
I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
How, exactly?
You have made no public efforts, made no submissions to equally bad laws such as the Online Safety Bill in the UK and achieved nothing.
If you had put anywhere near as much effort in to critiquing SESTA as you have this your statement might be plausible. It is not.
Until you show evidence on your work to overturn/repeal SESTA, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many other sites that are clearly violating SESTA, so obviously you don't think it's that big of a liability as you claim to be.
Not to mention your Head of Sales reached out to us offering Cloudflare services a year after kicking Switter off when we mentioned we were dealing with DDOS attacks as an escort directory.
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.
It puts the company in the same position as Facebook in regards to moderation. It's endless, expensive, and your work is never good enough. Not a desirable position for most.
the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce.
FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists.
The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so.
Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
Can we collectively re-learn how to argue specific situations without comparing them to entirely different situations?
It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
If the illegal threats of violence aren’t being handled properly by law enforcement, that is not CF’s failure.
They feel forced to act because the FBI is incompetent.
the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here?
edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it.
the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right?
KF does not promote terrorism or violence.
Obviously they posed enough of a threat to human lives that a publicly traded company would distance them immediately.
Doesn't take much to figure this out. This is not some censorship or content moderation.
It appears people have trouble distinguishing between platforms that promote terrorism/violence vs free speech.
This weird extreme idealistic version of freedom of speech doesn't include harming humans or threatening peace.
A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Pretend for the sake of argument that Facebook did use Cloudflare, or that my example were about some other platform that does.
> A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Exactly my point. When someone does something banworthy on Facebook, we let Facebook ban just that one person, rather than banning all of Facebook.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-im...
That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation.
Hosting content, more moderation.
I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too.
“It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle.
And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
I do know if I would come up with the exact list they have.
I do generally agree with the approach of scaling moderation.
They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.
They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
There is already illegal speech, not all speech is protected.
If they broke the law, charge them with crimes.
If they didn’t, ignore them.
Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation.
In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people.
And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention.
Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them.
This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue.
If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
Moral repugnance is not synonymous with Nazism.
… you do know the holding company for kiwifarms is literally named “final solutions, LLC”, right?
https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/156374856392608973...
Josh doesn't anonymously run the site. The site is fully legal in the US so he isn't afraid of being associated with it.
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”.
It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset.
Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something.
It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
Should be done by whom? If you mean "done by the government," then in the US at least the answer is clear.
Nothing. It's words on the internet.
The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.
The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.
It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
----
> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
----
> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, bu...
Yes, of course it would be. The end result of litigating free speech in the court system, is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time.
The courts have extremely strong protections for speech. They are way way stronger than what private companies do.
Just adding the word "government" doesn't make something more scary. In this case, adding "government" to the enforcement mechanism for speech would mean that basically nothing gets banned.
This is kind of a run-around. Cloudflare's blogpost argues that it wants to get this content offline, it just wants courts to be in charge of that process. It acted because it believed the courts were too slow.
If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur. The actual argument in that case is whether you want this moderation to happen at all.
I take Cloudflare at their word that they actually wanted a court to tell them to deplatform this content. And because of that I take them at their word that they believe the government could feasibly pass laws that would censor the content people are asking them to deplatform.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
Yes. In direct response to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706780
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
What does that mean? What content was "dangerous" that the site admins of Kiwifarms could not be notified of and have removed instead?
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I haven't seen any evidence that they are significantly more dangerous than Facebook or Twitter. The "human lives in danger" is transparent bullshit. They are actually doing this due to a pressure campaign being carried out by a small number of activists looking to drive any speech they don't like out of existence. Thankfully it hasn't completely worked yet and they are still able to respond in their own defense, so we have something other than the unchallenged claims of Cloudfare etc to determine whether they've actually done something wrong.
Also:
> Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold.
Which government on Earth is going to enforce a principle of neutrality instead of its own particular censorship agenda?
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
How so?
On Wednesday they said they will block content "that ... incites ... violence against people".
Then now they're saying "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
Seems perfectly consistent.
Oh, guess it's those one of those Cloudflare Coincidences (tm).
The problem here is that Cloudflare didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that the words on Kiwifarms might be stifling to the free speech of their targets. Which, of course, they were, just as the anti-KF campaign made KF unhappier and more aggressive. Words have real physical consequences. Often they’re predictable.
I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.
This never happened. It was just blamed on KF by the people currently criminally DDoSing it.
I'm amazed by the credulity and lack of critical thinking in this whole discussion. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in hearing from KF's point of view ... which is now at any rate impossible because they've been banished from the internet. There are two sides to this conflict and you aren't allowed to hear from one side, so the other side can just relentlessly make shit up, exaggerate, take things out of context, and it will be taken as gospel.
So many comments like "I've never heard of KF before but I looked at this hysterical out of context twitter thread and wow I guess it does need to be censored-via-DDOS".
I have, however, spent time reading Kiwifarms well before this controversy. I have zero interest in arguing about the conclusions I reached: I just want to put down a marker and say that you’re wrong. Many people who disagree with you have taken the time to read the site.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It's not just a message or speech. It involves IRL stocking, harassment, and violence against people they target based on hate and discrimination.
What you actually mean is that as long as its against people you personally dislike, then you're ok with that.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.
So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.
”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”
Case in point, right here.
I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.
“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”
Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.
It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.
I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.
I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?
Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.
I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.
In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
There's a dril tweet for everything.
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
Stormfront was hosted using Cloudflare, and Cloudflare gave them the boot.
If you are not familiar with Stormfront, they actively promote violent white supremacy and Nazi ideologies.
Given the absolute state of modern American politics, I'm afraid it's the latter, but who knows.
Do you plan to build something like kiwifarms? Don't and grow up, focus on building useful projects.
The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.
The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
Yes he does - the activity of KF posters is public.
The amount of bullshitting going on here is insane. People are just making things up wholesale.
This doesn't take a lot of intuition to think that they have a better idea than a random person on the internet.
>realtime tools what is being done on their network.
That inspects every post? That sees some hidden forums for ultra doxxing and crime?
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.
I don't think there's a simple way to stop swatting, though if a streamer/someone else who is a likely swatting target phones ahead of time and asks to be put on a "likely to get swatted, please disregard suspicious calls" list then the police should honour that list (AFAIK there is something like this but it often doesn't help).
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
Not without an invite to the private Discord / Google doc / telegram group / whatever.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.
There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?
Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.
Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:
You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”
Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.
After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.
You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.
If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.
But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
I have personally seen more left wing calls for violence against their politcal opponents than right wing ones. By a factor of about four.
As far as I can tell your assertion is baseless.
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
CloudFlare says so too. Wikipedia has a whole "harassment" section in their page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.
That's not the internet I signed up for, and I don't agree with or support it. Very sad state of affairs.
They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?
Several hit-pieces in the media? Saw nothing out of the ordinary in the thread about Keffals a couple hours ago.
https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885
I understand that it's since been deleted.
Until now.
When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.
Until now.
I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).
the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.
remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
It is a forum.
Should sites have to have a "purpose" and does this need to be vetted by some authority or the hosting provider?
What is the "purpose" of Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Signal, 4chan or Discord?
>by sharing their personal information
I mostly saw public Twitter screenshots being reposted. I swear some people dont seem to understand that Twitter is public and not all DMs.
The only reason anyone would give KF the benefit of the doubt is because they willfully are ignoring the activity going on in KF.
A hypothetical court. I was just using it as an example of how the argument wouldn't hold muster in situations where it would really need to.
> What lack of evidence?
You posted this:
> No one is answering you because it's obvious to even the most intermediate observer where this work is coming from.
Again, "well, it's just obvious, dude" is not evidence. It's similar to a "god of the gaps" argument. If there's evidence Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms did it, and if there's not evidence that Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms still did it. That makes no sense.
I love when non-lawyers think they have any idea on what holds muster in the court of law.
This isn't recent either, the same reporter wrote on the site back in 2016: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman... (linked to from his Twitter thread).
I personally witnessed Near's live-tweeted descent into despair, culminating in their suicide (https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1409230358977998851?lang=en, https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986839743037448), all driven by KF.
As Near described it:
> 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
The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].
One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/zero-trust/email-securit...
I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.
Also, KF's admin directly mentioned that those on the site are using it for swatting (see https://www.sinseer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/FaveAhKVE..., taken from a page posted by a different victim of KF-sourced harassment).
> the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one
You mean the note literally saying "KiwiFarms all Troons"?? https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369...
Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.
And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?
The admin explicitly saying for people to stop "encouraging SWAT pranks" when speaking apparently(?) about two other elements is a bit closer but still quite weak, its an open forum from what I gathered so far surely there would be archives or some screenshot or something for said "pranks" towards the streamer being discussed right? especially if there is mention of him actually having to deal with the FBI in previous times.
I didn't overlook the tweets, I just couldn't find a single mention of swatting there.
And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
>discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
what is this proximal link? and if that link is something like 3 days or a week or something, on an open forum, i'm not sure it's that relevant, literally anyone can watch the website without participating for what I understand.
>And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
I saw the bedsheet investigation, but what harrassment did they engage in? the situation where the orders happenned was in a second hotel, and after a big of digging it wasn't even kiwifarms that got the dox on that one, it was Vile on doxbin[0], and he also admitted to being the one making the orders.
> There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
what is the evidence for this unlawful harassment, and what is the moderate evidence for the swatting? if all you have is what was posted above for the swatting then we'll agree to disagree, which is fine, what is however the plenty of evidence for the former? And no, that twitter thread really doesn't cut it afaic.
> I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
Well, here's the thing, I know little about kiwifarms in particular and everyone is saying that there is extensive evidence of other crimes, articles are being written saying that they were the one responsible for swatting people and a thousand other things, and the citation/source rabbit hole just leads to a dead end, or ends up circular, so yes i'm going to have my doubts and at least want to see some of this extensive documented harassment trove, archiving things on the internet is but a couple clicks away.
I'll leave the thread for today for it is getting too late, have a good one.
[0]: https://doxbin.org/upload/Keffals
- Moderators on KF felt the need to address the topic of swatting.
- People dox'd on KF were definitely swatted-- the missing evidence is to what degree the actual swatting was coordinated on KF. It's relatively indisputable that KF was in the causal chain.
- Harassment occurred, coordinated on KF to someone immediately after relocating from a swatting.
First I’ve heard, and I’ve followed this story closely. Do you have a source?
Sounds about as likely as KF SWATing a Republican Congresswoman and calling the police to say “it was us, Kiwi Farms” in the middle of this conflict over hosting, which is exactly what was claimed in that case.
Source: It came to me in a dream
[1] https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1565629001862873088
GossiTheDog was publicly attacking a deceased former employee of Cloudflare (Jaime Cochran), and eastdakota was offended: https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1565575185159204864
I'm pretty sure that's the reason why eastdakota blocked GossiTheDog – not because he was complaining about being doxxed by Kiwifarms
My point was that the person I was replying to was either misinformed or disingenuous about eastdakota's reasons for blocking GossiTheDog. I don't see the relevance of the rest of what you are saying to my point.
more context on the employee at the time - https://twitter.com/Slendy5127/status/1565764927498903552
edit because reply is broken: they donated money to Westboro aka GODHATESFAGS[.]COM
That sentence is illogical. Attacking X's employer for employing X is an attack on X – it is saying that X is unworthy of being employed
> Cf has a habit of financially supporting actual far-right activists such as Westboro Church
You make it sound like they donated money to WBC. From what I understand, at one point they accepted them as a paying customer. WBC is an atrocious organisation, but a business having them as a customer isn't "financial support" – do you apply the same standard to the many other businesses who undoubtedly have WBC and/or its leaders and members among their customers? Who is their cell carrier? What supermarket do they shop at? Which airline do they fly?
Do you have any proof of this?
I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
(copied from https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/x56mot/cloudfla...)
the post was deleted within a few mins, so extremely sus. violent threats are posted on all major websites, idk why this one is so exceptional.
doesn't even look real, smells entirely like bait. or someone trying to get KF taken down.
That this user has compromised the backend of HN via some exploit in order to make a couple of posts?
or
They are the type of person who regularly deletes their old posts?
Because I see the latter on reddit, twitter, etc, all the time, while the former has serious security implications for every user on HN.
Is there more?
No. Just no.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.
The content on the Kiwi Farms is legal.
Edit: Disregard this as I misinterpreted what I quoted.
What is this? Who is doing this and why?
Selling homemade hormones to underaged children
>who is doing it?
Mentally ill people
>and why?
Mental illness
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18981931/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/
Some older studies from the 80s and 90s that are even higher (well into the 90%), but they may not be the best representation of the modern trans situation.
"Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to DO NOTHING, THAN TO RISK CAUSING MORE HARM THAN GOOD." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit."
Here's the published criteria for such a recommendation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532313/
> Persistent and well-documented gender dysphoria
> Capacity to consent for the treatment
> Mental or medical underlying issues are in control
The gender dysphoria must be persistent. How is it possible to determine that without long term observation? The patient needs to consent after being informed of and understanding the risks. Can a child understand and consent to this?
It's absolutely insane that people think it's okay to just ignore all this and sell hormones to children. This is not help, this is drug dealing. Whoever is doing this is exposing children to significant risks.
Yes it's real and if you think making and distributing homemade hormones to children is vile and dangerous, you're apparently a transphobe nowadays.
What is this supposed to mean?
> That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously.
> trans people [...] choose to help people experiencing the same problem
Did I misinterpret this? Because it seriously sounds like there are trans people out there selling these "DIY trans" drugs. If they're knowingly selling to children in an attempt to help them as previously claimed, I'm sorry but that's extremely fucked up.
How do you know?
And to be specific, the claim was "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> Legal process > While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
"too slow"
According to whom? Cloudflare? What would be an appropriate time for Cloudflare for law enforcement to respond? And to what threats?
You say "simply" but these are not simple questions.
Cloudflare can shut off service to anyone, sure, but in any other industry there would be some termination notice, right? Unless its something like terrorism, where LAW ENFORCEMENT sets the boundary, not the private company.
Would I want my ISP or CDN to cut me off without notice? No. Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond. But also, I wouldn't operate a site like KiwiFarms, so I'm not terribly concerned about my CDN cutting me off for the same reason. If it became more of a widespread pattern with CF I would understand their customers getting nervous.
From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
The operator posted this on their Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
If you have the power to remove someone's speech, only your side gets heard so you can make them look as bad as you want and they have little to no recourse.
Don't they care about reputational damage? Who cares about some obscure forums for weirdos.