Josh Moon (Null), the owner and administrator of Kiwi Farms, responds to their removal from CloudFlare.
Their core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started.
Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members.
EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?
Yeah, even though or even if the post was removed the outrage mob on Twitter won’t care and it is always one-sided. They got what they wanted even though it won’t solve the problem. It is now the internet’s problem.
They will just flag this post and rejoice that they got a billon dollar internet company to bend the knee only for them to scream a false victory, despite KF still being up and running on another domain with Tor and DDoS protection with another provider. Nothing has changed.
When it comes to a Twitter mob, there is no “Sorry” or “Please I can explain”, or “It’s not what you think it is” or “But the post was removed”. With the Twitter mob, there is just no redemption.
Two days ago when CloudFlare still publically supported them, a lot of the posters who usually comment on censorship stories with "it's a private company, it's their choice" were not so happy about this private company's choice.
Let's say you're afraid that someone might punch you in the face. So that person gets on a soapbox and gives an eloquent speech to a crowd about how they're not going to punch you in the face, in fact, they're quite against face-punching and regret the times in the past they've punched people, and you're able to relax a little. And then three days later they punch you in the face anyway. Don't you think that punch might hurt a bit more, on an emotional level, than if that person just clocked you when you thought they would?
> They got what they wanted even though it won’t solve the problem.
There's actually quite a bit of follow up action chasing up both the new providers and hosters. The deplatforming has been shown to work before. Just adding the speedbump of requiring the tor access will kill a lot of interest in continuing the abuse.
Even if you look at the hashtags and the website, you'll see cf wasn't the only target. It's a pretty well planned action, but it's very clearly against kf and not stopping.
If you think this was a win then you don’t know much about this kind of content. I bet you think the banning of r/The_Donald and parler were great too. Mission accomplished right? You haven’t put out those fires, you’ve just scattered the embers and now there are hundreds of little fires cropping up all over. Some of them are starting to get quite big so they’ll probably start popping up in your Twitter feed soon but this time they’re unreachable. It’s just creating more hyper divisiveness, you’ve made your little space nice and blue but in doing so you’ve made other places pure red and a house divided cannot stand.
The primary goal is to increase the left's institutional power.
They know that KF will still exist and will move on from Cloudflare. The point isn't to hurt KF, but to hurt Cloudflare for daring to nominally support free speech. That's why they're botting hashtags, putting pressure on the stock price, and encouraging tech decision-makers to move their startups away from Cloudflare. The point is to say: if you do not pander to us, we will come for you.
It's an effective way to cement power over institutions from the bottom-up, without actually controlling those institutions.
It's a similar kind of social movement to the film censorship movement in early 20th century America, which was largely grassroots and yet ended up controlling the US's entire cultural output for most of a century.
In the 90s, this was called boycotting, and I don't remember anyone having a problem with it. It's now been rebranded as cancel culture, and is somehow seen as petulant.
In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
> In the 90s, this was called boycotting, and I don't remember anyone having a problem with it. It's now been rebranded as cancel culture, and is somehow seen as petulant.
Every boycott has detractors; if those detractors are too numerous, the boycott fails. Boycotts are marketing campaigns like everything else in the world.
> In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
The point is to observe which direction this pressures companies to lean towards, and what this says about who holds grassroots or institutional power at any given time.
Personally, I think companies lean whichever way public sentiment directs them. That said, if leftists are better at organizing boycotts, that says more about the relative skill and dedication of their membership than anything else.
Boycotting and cancel culture are quite different. At its core, cancel culture involves the isolation of a person or company by forcing their immediate network of friends or other connections. The cancellers force these connections to choose (under duress) between the cancelee and everyone else. If this doesn't work, they attack a connection's connections the same way.
For instance, if they don't like you, they report you to your employer. If your employer defends you, they attack your employer's relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees.
Basically, cancel culture exploits social networks to force the submission of an opponent.
If you're espousing shitty views, you get what you deserve. shrug
I think there's a line that most reasonable people can determine between "I disagree with $CURRENT_VIEW" and "I am against $PERSON_OF_CATEGORY existing." For example, frequently someone on Twitter will say things like, "calling for more bike lanes is ableist." I think - and am not afraid to have my name attached to this sentiment - that this is an absurd take. Every aspect of society cannot possibly serve everyone, but that doesn't mean we should fail to do something because a minority of that society can't participate. If the action actively harms that minority, then yes, close examination of it is warranted.
However, if your publicly stated opinion is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be teachers, you deserve to be pilloried, because that opinion is harmful and without merit.
If someone disagrees with me on, say, whether or not the USG should subsidize EV manufacturers, I wouldn't expect a 3rd party to call either side of that debate deserving of, well, anything. However, when someone holds an opinion that $GROUP is less deserving of x _due solely to their existence, not their choices,_ I expect that opinion to be questioned.
Also, it's very possible to be wrong on the internet, be corrected, and become a better person without having your life ruined. I used to be somewhat of a troll. Not 4chan level, but I was definitely a crueler person than I was in real life. Someone once had the patience to engage me in questions, I realized what I was doing was harmful or at least not helpful, and I stopped the behavior.
It's still a matter of perspective, though. To use the Keffals issue as an example, the same way you see stopping people from criticizing and doxxing trans activists like Keffals as saving lives, many people, including many on KF, see stopping people from promoting normalization of transsexualism and encouraging minors to seek out HRT and surgery as saving lives. It's not okay for these people to stoop to illegal activity in their activism, but it's also not okay for your side to do it. Any justification you can make on your side is a justification they can make on their side. If you feel strongly emotional about this issue, I understand how that can be hard to accept, but it doesn't make it less true.
Disclaimer: I am in no way a philosopher, nor have I taken any classes on it.
Obviously there is always a "but my beliefs" aspect, but I believe that these arguments can be ethically reduced to "do not harm others, unless in the defense of others."
For example, murder is arguably ethically wrong. However, at least in most states in the U.S., you are allowed to murder someone if they are themselves attempting to murder you, or someone else. Taken further, if I was on a jury, and the defendant had murdered someone who had severely harmed their child - for instance, rape - I would have no qualms about finding them not guilty, even if the murder had occurred days or weeks after the first crime. I'm fully aware that this is illegal, but I don't consider it ethically wrong. If you're curious, I do consider the death penalty to be wrong, because I don't believe the state has the right to take life. Whether or not these two views are incongruous I don't know; it makes sense in my head.
On a more relevant level, I believe that teenagers are able to determine things like "I am gay," or "I have gender dysphoria." I also understand that I am not a doctor, and defer to the American Medical Association, who has stated[0] that:
> It is imperative that transgender minors be given the opportunity to explore their gender identity under the safe and supportive care of a physician.
Given that, I assert that the beliefs KF members have espoused are the ones that are harmful, should not be encouraged, and should be actively discouraged.
You're sort of circling around Kant's Categorical Imperative, which is articulated as, act only in such a way that one would be willing to see enacted as a universal moral law.
When you let that percolate for a bit, you get to, "Treat others only in such a way as you yourself are alright with being treated.
Your self-defense example resonates with this way of life, as the person seeking to do you harm has telegraphed they are fine with you reacting in kind.
You cannot just murder anyone, as if no one is engaging in you, the idea is that one best should reciprocate only in kind. Most moral systems pre Kantian Categorical Imperative, are crippled by not being able to justify being moral as an end in and of itself just from the tenets within the system itself.
I would not, under the categorical imperative, censure either group in this case, as I am not willing to accept mob justice as something I am comfortable being applicable to me. Both parties, however, have have demonstrated that they are willing to accept being treated in that manner through their actions, though Transwomen moreso at this point than the users of KF. KF has merely existed.
Therefore, at this point, any follower of the Categorical Imperative can engage in mob/vigilante justice against either Transwomen/KF with clear conscience, as it has veen clearly evinced, that is how they wish to be dealt with, and this doesn't taint not engaging in mob justice/vigilantism against anyone else, as it is always the first mover that sets the level on which the interaction takes place.
It's where the Golden Rule "Treat others as you would have them do unto you" stems from.
Getting back to cancel culture, you can see the tactic here. The host is privately owned. The data center is OK with them as a tenant. Now they're putting Twitter pressure on the upstreams to cut off the data center. These people aren't willing to accept anything but victory.
A realization that you have to share an internet with people who hate your guts so long as they don't break any laws. This includes all sorts of bigots. Rather than harassing internet backbones, file lawsuits.
And here a glaring issue with this approach is apparent. Even _if_ the harassers meet the criteria for law-breaking, anonymity and civil suits having the burden of proof be on the plaintiff make this extremely difficult. I can think of any number of defenses, starting with "Someone guessed my WiFi password / took over my forum account."
It is far easier to pressure companies to de-platform hate than to individually find and file suit against the harassers.
It's clear that they're trying to take down the site by any means necessary, and that's why I ultimately find them far more dangerous than the people on that site.
Deplatforming using Twitter pressure is a terrifying tactic that tosses out the rulebook and replaces it with a popularity contest.
Not really. This is just the modern myth of that in the good old days, everyone just politely protested by showing up in the street dressed in a formal suit, voiced their displeasure like a gentleman, didn't impede anything going on, didn't raise their voice, and that somehow got things done.
It's bullshit.
"Boycott" comes from the last name of Charles Boycott. Protesters threatened and beat up people that worked with him, threatened shops not to sell to him, and ramped up to such a point that it cost more for the police to defend his harvest than the harvest was worth. His blacksmith was threatened with murder, and a 12 year old carrying his mail was threatened not to keep doing it. It was definitely not a polite "Oh, we don't buy from this particular guy" stand.
Now I'm not saying that threatening people is a good thing. What I am saying is that this narrative of that once upon a time people were civilized and suddenly this new "cancel culture" thing get everything out of whack is fiction. If anything, the past was a scarier and a rougher place, because if somebody stopped you in the middle of a rural road and threatened you, there were no cameras and no recording devices.
Which again, if that's what people want, then fine. Do that. Except when the question is put to people what they want to have be the case with what someone rlse can get away with, everyone seems uncomfortable with the prospect of lack of due process. Everyone wants a procedural. Nobody wants the procedural to get in the way with something they care about though. You can't have both.
In several places there's a differentiation between a "primary boycott" and a "secondary boycott".
Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either.
Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you
In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business.
I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.
Secondary boycott idn't a thing. You're thinking secondary strike, and no legally recognized Union can orchestrate one as a consequence of the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States.
This is, if I recall, the same legislation that normally outlawed "unfair" practices in Capital/Labor relations, which included making illegal blacklisting, wildcat strikes, secondary striking, retaliation, etc...
> The primary goal is to increase the left's institutional power
Is it that hard to believe that the primary goal of a group of people who were being harassed, at times to the point of suicide, is to try to shut down the forum that is harassing them?
Mmm. I never heard of KiwiForums before and can well believe it's full of nasty stuff, so took a look at reference 4, the first one. At first it seems cut and dried. Some emulator developer has a thread on KF making fun of him and he and doesn't like it, tells the owner he'll do anything to get it taken down, that his friends are being harassed because of KF and he will kill himself if the thread isn't deleted. Which it appears he then did.
But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut.
The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies.
The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven).
So:
- The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF.
- The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets.
- The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum.
It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know.
More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do...
My aim isn't to discredit anything or anyone. To redundantly reiterate, I never heard of any of these sites/characters before this thread and don't care about them at all. If you think my characterization based on all of 10 minutes reading is wrong or garbled then hey, you're probably right; please do follow up with your own take. I do care (a bit) about whether CloudFlare is a company with stable leadership whose blog posts about policy have any meaning, and I do care (somewhat more) about the general philosophical issues surrounding free speech, the internet and the role of service providers.
What bothers me here and why I wrote up the summary is the clear role of what Matt Taibbi calls the "transitive property of whatever". When one sees a claim of "person/group X is harassing person Y so badly they killed themselves", that's a very strong accusation and the evidence needs to be crystal clear as a consequence. Yet here we have a long chain of causal reasoning that somewhat resembles Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, and appears to stop at the first place in the chain where someone has a stable email address and might actually reply.
It's deeply unclear why this dev's demands or plea or extortion or whatever word you use for this, wouldn't also immediately apply to archive.org. The "harassment" he names is actually people in random chatrooms referring to things he himself had said online, which KF was documenting (or caching). This Keffals incident seems very similar. In fact it clearly would apply to archive.org if you read the full chain of emails and his answer to why that's not a problem is basically "i just hope it won't be cached or reuploaded anywhere".
It's also not clear why the same tactics couldn't be used against Hacker News - plenty of comments can be found on here criticizing 'personalities' of various kinds for their online antics. Just look at any thread on Elon Musk. If Musk emailed dang tomorrow and said "your users are harassing me <links to some post on another website> delete all the criticisms of me and my tweets or I'll kill myself" we wouldn't expect HN to suddenly purge thousands of posts, right? It'd be a horrible situation but a good reply might be, "please get help from a professional" or something along those lines. And we definitely would NOT want HN or every HN user to be classed as internet pond scum who need to be permanently booted off the internet.
Yes yes, you will say that's clearly different, HN posts and users are "nicer", there's more moderation etc. But it's not clearly different because nothing in this KF/byuu incident depends on any of those things. If we accept this claim at face value - that KF is a terrible place because it drives people to suicide - then this is only plausible if we rely entirely on his own perceptions/telling of the story, and he wasn't mentally stable, so theoretically he could have concluded more or less anything regardless of merit.
A lot of the philosophical issues here seem related to the EU's right to be forgotten. However I don't think the EU RTBF applies to pseudonyms. The obvious fix of just using a new pseudonym was rejected because, he claimed, he had no life whatsoever outside of that nym.
Seeing how the group got one of the largest internet companies to bend their knee that sure seems like they have institutional power. Just because they also get harassed doesn't mean they don't have power.
Gab CEO made the same claim when gab was banned everywhere. He said there was a suspicious increase in really bad content a few days before.
Obviously it’s completely unverifiable, but in the timeframes we are talking, if 30 minutes is too long to remove bad content, it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet.
Gab got business relationships terminated because a mass murderer became radicalized via interactions with Gab users (and people had the receipts). This was after a pattern of buildup of political rhetoric culminating in violence on their site that had repeated for years.
This is the third time CF banned a site and it won’t be the last. It gets easier to justify every time and Cloudflare just motivated every deplatforming mob on Twitter. They showed pressure tactics work, just help create an ‘extraordinary’ situation.
This is the kind of stuff spies are experts at. It can be learned by motivated online communities to target their enemies.
Just days ago they said they regretted doing it before and wouldn't do it again. How on earth can anything Cloudflare say be trusted now - the CEO literally inverted his stated position within, what, a few days?
> it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet.
No it isn't. There's a bigger context to the decision. If you find a Justin Bieber fan club forum and post incitement to violence, I guarantee that nobody will want to take down the site, because everyone understands that the forum itself had nothing to do with the post.
I think that really depends. What is the other forum content? If it is benign stuff, and the post is completely out of left field, then the forum is probably safe. But if a lot of the content is toeing the line of illegal activity (but still legal), and then some illegal stuff gets posted, there probably isn't going to be any sympathy for the forum.
"On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat.
The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face."
This post should be replaced with an archive link; for one because the availability of KF isn't particularly great and for another because funneling people to a doxing website with Referrer and IP intact is a bit dangerous.
The whole "Refer header and IP intact" thing seems a bit too "boogeyman" to me. You are one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of IPs that are visiting this site. I feel like the audience here generally understands what kind of info an IP address gives up (like broad geo info) and that it can't really be attributed to an identity -- I guess unless you're NSA? or the ISP? Do you think the site operator is monitoring all the IPs visiting the site and picking "targets"?
I still support an archive link for availability reasons; I just wouldn't worry about being attacked or something just because you visited the site.
KF users love their correlation attacks. I'd just recommend giving them as little information as possible if you have any reason to believe they might be targeting you.
> However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, 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 unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Seriously? I helped moderate a small community at one point and we would see stuff like this on a weekly basis. Or just look at a YouTube or Facebook comment section on a controversial topic. This looks like an excuse to cave to the Twitter mob.
You are a company if you get death threats against your own workers you have to act. These threats are not anonymous. There are legal implications if you do nothing and something happens.
Matthew Prince did not provide any information on the nature of the threats he claimed, but the two that were widely discussed on Twitter are addressed in the submitted post. Neither of them involve Cloudflare employees, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
Let's be clear, there is no level of evidence that would be acceptable to KF supporters. Asking for it is pointless because the response would be to discredit it regardless of what it was. So far we see, "it's a joke," "that's a bad apple," "you cant prove there is a connection," "you don't understand look but not touch," ad nauseum. We're just skipping the dialog tree to the part where CF had the power and KF didn't. Kind of a nothingburger if you ask me. KF lost the game - end of story.
KF is still around and if it wasn’t I’m sure it will be replaced within a month. These are some of the most technically sophisticated users on the internet who are obsessive about internet culture. They aren’t going away via wack-a-mole censorship and apparently their website traffic grew significantly thanks to all of the press they’ve received.
It’s a good test to see how censorship resistant the internet can be.
If you get 5000 from a twitter mob, from people living all around the world, you can still report, but there's pretty much zero chance that anything will happen to any of those 5000 people, because the threats are considered as "not real" and nobody wants to deal with 5000 cases (paperwork, warrants, judical process after, etc.)
I'm not talking about not-reporting, i'm talking about the uselessness of reporting... you report, the police does nothing. Who are they going to sue? You did what you had to do, the police will do nothing, and suing the police for not investigating 5000 different people from all around the world... well.. good luck with that.
Yeah, that’s still not how the real world works. Liability is there even if you really think it’s all bullshit. No sane corp will ignore it especially not in the US.
It really depends on the country your business is in.
For example in Australia, employers have a duty under workplace health and safety legislation to provide a safe workplace. And similar legislation exists in most countries.
If you have an employee who is receiving death threats, you do nothing about it and then they are killed (or they even just sue you) then you would absolutely be liable.
I'm not talking about not-reporting, i'm talking about the uselessness of reporting... you report, the police does nothing. Who are they going to sue? You did what you had to do, the police will do nothing, and suing the police for not investigating 5000 different people from all around the world... well.. good luck with that.
It should be noted for the record that Kiwi Farms has had a longstanding 'no touch' rule, usually displayed prominently at the top of every page. (It appears to be currently replaced by the admin notifications whilst the site deals with the current state of events.)
Much like the old site Portal of Evil, another best-of-the-worst aggregator from the early internet, making on-site trolling/harassment plans is a great way to get your account banned very quickly ... or becoming a thread topic yourself.
Then don't whine when other people read between the lines regarding your authoritarian proclivities, and consequently do everything they can to frustrate your aims.
Because touching or "I'm not touching you" generates content and engagement. It's basic social media stuff any 10yrold can understand. Playing the I'm not touching you game is content creation - they are the same. It's part of the social media incentive loop.
Once you realize that there is no bar to acceptance for some people, things become.more clear. Fully expect responses like, "this would require an rct to prove," in order to avoid all responsibity. The inside words these folks have is, "this is an acceptable loss of life for the position I'm willing to take."
The article I linked has as many citations of primary sources as you could ever want.
The parent comment seeks to poison the well by casting doubt on the claims that KF is a hate site and pushed people to suicide. It is well-documented and there is no disputing it. Instead of "begging the question", just perform a quick Google search. That way you can:
1. Inform yourself.
2. Not cast a shadow of doubt on easily provable claims.
Many people who have looked into the matter have disagreed with that take. It's fine to disagree, but slamming anyone down as ignorant is not constructive.
Furthermore, RationalWiki is hardly a neutral site, especially on matters like this. Specifically, some members have a long-running irrational beef with KiwiFarms (I used to edit there fairly frequently back in the day). That it includes information on the site owner's mom – who has no proven relationship with the site beyond that there's an account with her real name, which proves nothing – and that it links to an extortionist "mugshot site" for her proves that the article is not as "rational" as one might hope.
There are plenty of primary sources linked from that page.
> slamming anyone down as ignorant is not constructive.
It is when they are reducing it to a he said/she said instead of, I don't know, providing evidence? Begging the question is a way to reduce the credibility of an argument with zero evidence. It's far less constructive than my reply to it, but yet people have taken more issue with my reply.
On the one hand, it probably is at least partly an excuse, given that Kiwifarms is baaasically set up to create exactly those conditions, and I'm skeptical that the most recent incidents are genuinely worse than anything they've done before.
On the other hand, about bloody time they got rid of the site, and if they need to post a public excuse to feel justified in it, sure, whatever.
He (Moon) doesn't actually know that though, it's very easy to disprove an argument when you set that argument up yourself - I took Matthew's statement to be a more general observation on the state of dozens, if not hundreds of problematic posts on the forum that were overwhelming Cloudflare, but that's just me
Isn’t the whole point of Cloudflare to stop DDoS, though?
Cloudflare may be able to handle a botnet that can generate 250GBps of traffic, but a few hundred problematic forum posts coupled with some Twitter outrage totally jams them up. (Purposely leaving aside the qualitative details here.)
This shows that Cloudflare is completely defenseless against a certain variety of meatspace attacks.
Correct. If you can get enough of a mob together, you can get any company to drop any client or fire any employee irrespective of the merits. I don't know of any workarounds so long as Twitter exists in its current form.
Would that business relationship be covered by sanctions against russia? (honest question, I don't know how the sanctions relate to internet businesses)
There is no government mandated "sanction all of Russia" law. Most Western companies voluntarily left Russia. But there is nothing stopping you from starting a company and trading with Russian entities.
Weird, why are they so shy about mentioning they're Russian on their website?
Anyways that Scottish entity will soon have some bad things happening to it. The UK authorities will come down hard on anyone who supports the shitty "Bully LGBT people into suicide" forum.
>
Weird, why are they so shy about mentioning they're Russian on their website?
There are currently sanctions against Russia. They're not comprehensive, but many companies won't want to use a Russian company just because they don't want the risk that more stuff will be banned later (never mind the hassle of figuring out whether what you need to do is banned already)
Because in the west Russia has long had a negative association with computer misuse, in general the response has always been "Russia bad, don't do business, block everything" so a Russian company doing ddos protection garners the same jokes as av companies writing malware, unfounded but you know, them dirty Russians - this isn't really the case any more and hasn't been for a long time since Russia has not been a "safe haven" for at least a decade or so, despite the misinformation others keep posting.
Anyway this association means they miss out on business not only from legitimate clients, but also shadier sites who don't really want that association either. Also significant tax advantages.
> Our website makes no money. All of our moderators are volunteers. It took Facebook (with a 24/7 staff of paid moderators) 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch shooting from Facebook Live.
You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here.
'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
That's false equivalence on your part. Downgrading a violent threat to compare it to shit-posting is logically incorrect. The website points out that it took Facebook 29 minutes to ban a live-stream of an active terrorist attack, a social media platform who has enough money to do better. A forum with volunteers monitoring taking down a threat in around 1 hour is incredibly quick.
The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users.
Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions.
Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
Being an edgelord or even a Nazi is totally legal in the USA. So is hosting violent imagery. These things might be against the TOS of major social media sites, but they're absolutely legal. That said, most people won't want to be around people who do this.
Death threats are generally not legal, but ones that are obvious hyperbole might be. Natural language processing algorithms might be able to identify death threats automatically, but they struggle with hyperbole and sarcasm. But so do humans.
Yes, and people keep saying "amoral" like it's a bad thing. For instance, I want my power company to be amoral in customer selection. I want certainty that my power won't be cut because enough people demand it. And I don't want power cuts to be used as a form of social control [1]. Basically, society works best when people stay in their lanes or are at least allowed to stay in their lanes.
More false equivalency. Facebook allowed the stream to be broadcast directly from the terrorist for 29 minutes. KiwiFarms simply hosted an archive to avoid it being memory holed.
Context matters and attempts to avoid acknowledging context to create false equivalency is a big reason why most Twitter and Reddit arguments are so-toxic.
Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting and would find the Nazi's rightfully abhorrent.
> Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting
Many people don’t have the luxury of assuming that people brandishing Nazi symbolism are shit-posting. For quite a few that symbolism represents an existential threat.
Free speech is free speech and must be protected at all costs, even if 99% of people think an idea is reprehensible. These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else. The cycle will repeat.
If folks aren't exposed to radical ideologies regularly - if everything they read on a screen is True and Safe - what happens when they stumble across a dark corner of the internet and are exposed for the first time? Censorship erodes our ability to critically evaluate, without actually stamping out the censored topic.
I’m not pro censorship but you’re making a huge leap saying we need to be regularly exposed to radical ideologies in order to identify radical ideologies? Why would that be true?
Frequent exposure to something normalizes that thing, it doesn’t make it stick out and be more identifiable.
The best, recent example I have is Nick Fuentes. I'd only read from journo pieces making vague accusations (referencing other journo pieces) that he's a white nationalist, or seen clips of him trolling CPAC, so I've always been curious what he's actually about.
Seeing a mainstream interview with Louis Theroux and debate livestream with Destiny quickly outs him as a white nationalist with an incoherent worldview.
If the only way to hear his ideas, directly from his mouth, are on his platform in a dark corner of the internet you're only going to get his one-sided propaganda.
I love that your conclusion is the only way to determine if someone is a nazi is if you've personally see that nazi platformed. Can't figure it out from the numerous things they've been quoted as saying, they gotta get in front of 5k people first.
So how do you know historical events happened? Things you can't observe anymore? Are there any major atrocities in the past you'd like to deny real quick?
I go to the Smithsonian archives and read the source material in Latin
Anyway, back to the point. I whole heartedly believe that exposing someone like Nick Fuentes on a livestream is a net positive that turns more people away from him than gains him followers.
It's a cynical person who thinks platforming bad ideas will make them spread. Sunlight.. disinfectant...
I'd love to tell you, but the number of times I may post per day on this site is rate-limited. ;)
One definition of free speech is the freedom of a people to speak their minds openly that power may be held to account. In that regard, it's an extremely useful tool for a free democracy to remain free; it minimizes the risk of the systems of power becoming unquestionable, which tends to create bad feedback loops that ultimately detach such power from its utility in serving the people.
Another definition is saying whatever one wants on any topic without consequences. This is not the same as the first, and has questionable utility in a free society.
The criticism of these sites is also "free speech". Refusing to associate with bigots is "free speech". It's funny how free speech absolutists only seem to care about offensive and harmful speech, and not the rights of everyone else involved.
> Free speech is free speech and must be protected at all costs, even if 99% of people think an idea is reprehensible.
Opinion. But also, no one's First Amendment rights was violated here. No one has a right to post on a website.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to compare the idea of a physical building for discussion (privately owned, to make the comparison fair) to a website like Twitter. I've come to the conclusion that if I ran a physical building where anyone could rent it out, and it came to light that neo-Nazis or other horrible people were using it, there would probably be protests. People would gather outside, or forcibly enter the building to disrupt it, or make my life difficult. While you can argue that this is mob rule, this is how society functions. If you're doing something a lot of people find reprehensible, they're going to let you know about it, and they're going to encourage others to join them.
> These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else.
That might seem to be the case at first glance.
[0], 6.3:
>By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior (as measured via our hate lexicons).
[0], 6.6:
> Recent work has shown that some banned subreddit users migrated to other social media sites like Voat, Snapzu, and Empeopled.
However, the numbers were smaller than expected:
[1], 7:
> Despite the hysteria concerning a mass exodus from Reddit, our behavior trend analysis shows that no such exodus occurred, though a small user migration was apparent.
Furthermore, of the sites listed, the one that was most notorious for free speech absolutism (Voat) was shut down due to lack of funding. The others appear to all be up, albeit Empeopled is apparently being rebuilt on the blockchain - I'm sure that will go well.
Does anyone know, incidentally, whether kiwifarms permits posting child porn, or whether their commitment to free speech does, in fact, have some limits?
Isn't their point about the moderation response time when it comes to illegal material? It took Facebook 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch video, while this whole controversy appears to be focused on a post that was up for 14 minutes.
User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
Here’s how: Don’t allow user generated content unless you can effectively moderate it. That should go for FB as well. We don’t need to start from the assumption that these services must or even should exist. If you can’t moderate, don’t build something that allows strangers to put information in front of millions of other strangers!
Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
Really? Which parts are those? Almost every service I enjoy is pretty effectively moderated, usually organically by the community. This is a consequence of service-level decisions. Things like ease of account creation, reputation, voting, some exogenous moderation, discovery dynamics, etc. are all levers a service has available.
Which best parts are you referring to?
One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
The one you are commenting on is a good start for considering what is at stake.
The comments posted on HN are not moderated prior to appearing in a thread. Keep in mind that the bar that has been set here is that an account's second post (the first being made a long time ago, and the account since sitting idle) contained a bomb threat that users reported and mods reviewed before it was taken down within 20 minutes.
Go ahead and try it. Make a new account on HN and do the same. If said comment lasts more than 20 minutes, HN would fall afoul of this new unofficial guideline.
HN ostensibly exist for discussion about tech and that’s reflected by the vast majority of the content, a significant portion of content of KF is unsavory or worse.
There are plenty of examples of reddit doing the same to subreddits they didn't agree with. Take /r/the_donald for example. They cheered for "their guy" non-stop for years, but were not doing anything illegal or morally unsavory. Low and behold, out of the blue a few accounts posted threats against police officers (the sub overwhelmingly espousing "Blue Lives Matter" at the time amongst the backdrop of other subs espousing "Black Lives Matter") and that was enough to close the sub down.
If you set the bar low enough, it doesn't matter what the platform's content is oriented towards, and while HackerNews may not be in the firing line right now, who's to say that it will forever remain off the radar? If we are fine setting the bar towards a platform being responsible for all user generated content in real-time, just know that this puts niche communities like HN at-risk.
Your interpretation of events regarding /r/the_donald and it’s content are quite a mischaracterization from what I recall. Bigotry, racial slurs and calls for violence were thinly veiled with euphemisms to avoid breaking sub and Reddit rules. Threats against police I don’t recall being part of it at all.
I simplified the timeline of events as the point of the comment was to show that platforms can be targetted for being distasteful, even if their content is not centered around breaking laws, doxing, etc.
Racism and calls for violence were never allowed on t_d and were removed on report / were downvoted heavily. T_d was allowed to persist for as long as it did precisely because it didn't violate any site rules, even though the reddit leadership really hated it.
I didn’t argue that content needs to be checked prior to being posted? Right, HN doesn’t do that but actually ends up with very effective moderation. HN’s moderation, I’ll add, would probably be considered heavy-handed by the HN crowd if it were applied anywhere else except their favorite country club (that is, HN). Threads are regularly nuked for just having the wrong tone, and this is a good thing! HN is a great place to be due to the combination of levers HN the service and HN the community deploy.
KF: None of this is true.
My understanding is that KF has had this problem for years and has directly (as in, named specifically by victims) been involved with several suicides due to massive online and real-life harassment campaigns.
>I didn’t argue that content needs to be checked prior to being posted?
That is what you are arguing for. The GP said the best parts of the internet are at stake and you dismissed that off-hand by implying that the communities you participate in can either exceed the timeliness of KF's moderation, or less charitibly, there are no parts of the internet worth saving.
Dang runs a tight ship, but make no mistake that Dang and team relies just as much on user reports as other sites do. And it is impossible to moderate new users / posts within minutes of creation.
On KF, harassment in meatspace was not only against the rules (threads removed, perpetrators banned), but against the site culture. Instigators were called out and made fun of. Doxing and making mean threads about people is certainly distasteful, but until legislation catches up, this activity is unfortunately not illegal and not isolated to KF.
Your understand of KF is either biased by people with a vested stake in taking down KF, or mis-informed. Others in these threads have gone through KF's "side of the story", which makes the entire situation complicated and not a clear black-and-white case.
From what I understand, there has only been one alleged suicide tied to KF. I use the word alleged because said suicide has not to date been confirmed by authorities (Japanese or American), and the supposed victim has gone radio silent in the past. If a platform (even a supposed hateful one), can only be tied to a single suicide, how is that even comparable to the unimaginable number of suicides tied to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, etc.?
Make no mistake, I think KF is a vile place and don't support them in the least... but we must be cognisant of what exactly is at stake if we set impossible bars for moderation.
We also do not know exactly what incident in particular caused CloudFlare to about-face walk back the policy they communicated just days before later blocking KF. We can only guess that it was related to the bomb threat made by a user that was immediately taken down (sub 20min), but was still weaponised by the crowd attempting to cancel CloudFlare over their inaction.
This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities.
Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side).
But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments.
Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch.
And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question.
The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies.
So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website.
Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
Well, for what it's worth this conversation has nothing to do with state mandated moderation. I think it's completely defensible to have a strong stance against state moderation (given the various other forms of obscene power the state has) and have a fairly free-market view of service providers choosing to moderate what flows through their own servers.
right, let's replace (and/or expand) "state mandated" with "mob mandated", the result is still the same, we still have the meta problem of very different treatment of the same content based on a sudden attention surge leads to very sub-optimal moderation overall. (because it incentivizes stakeholders to dig in to either extremes if there's no way to smoothly transition between them. ie. Cloudflare can only drop someone once. similarly reputation of big companies/providers can only bear so much stand for principles, so they eventually just opt to filter out everything that's not super-safe, that's why YT is removing actual ITsec educational videos, etc.)
> how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
By moderating early and often.
KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.
> yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money
None of this is illegal. None of this warrants censorship. Twitter is not real. You can block traffic you don‘t like or log out. None of the above actively influences your life until you make the choice to let it.
I am no fan of kiwifarms, I have my own reasons to hate that site but I also strongly support free speech so I simply don't visit. That's changed for the past month because keffals decided to open another pandora's box.
Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after.
Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.
"At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets."
A lengthy article about the ban supposedly written on the day of the ban by Taylor Lorenz? Taylor Lorenz who doxxed people[1], lied about companies and people, was actively involved in several deplatformings and is currently being sued for defamation[2]? If anything, this makes me even more suspicious of the narrative about Kiwi Farms.
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
It generally means freedom from government consequences. It also generally means that third parties won't actively prevent you from speaking to people who choose to listen to you.
Unless people decide to pressure the third party into de-platforming someone, which is their freedom of expression. I don't understand why the free speech absolutists on HN are incapable of understanding that private citizens pressuring a company to take action against a hate site is equally as much free speech as the hate site itself. By your own standards, nothing objectionable is occurring here. They just want to be contrarian.
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."
First sentence of the definition on Wikipedia. What do you believe retaliation means in this context? If your consequence is a rebuttal or criticism, I have said nothing. Otherwise you are just wrong.
Retaliation by the government. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with private citizens censoring each other.
Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.
A reporter respects a subject's desire to be anonymous. The fact that she runs an influential and news making Twitter account means her doxing is worse. Taylor Lorenz has 337k Twitter followers, an algorithm that can broadcast her message beyond the eyes of those followers, and further reach through her column in The Washington Post. Publishing someone's identity to that many people will result in them getting harassed. Lorenz has no moral high ground to stand on, she is no better than any other doxer.
The person she doxxed was a doxxer themselves. They gave up their privilege of anonymity when they started directing harassment to other people as a hobby. Can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
Context and intent matter. Pretending like all cases are equal only enables bullies. Doxxing an innocent person minding their own business because you don't like their race, gender orientation, or sexuality, is entirely different from doxxing someone in retaliation for their bad actions.
Do you really think that doxxing and harassing schoolteachers is the same as doxxing someone who goads others into suicide?
>Doxxing an innocent person minding their own business because you don't like their race, gender orientation, or sexuality, is entirely different from doxxing someone in retaliation for their bad actions.
So we've just gone mask off to "doxxing is good when we do it."
It's ok to arrest someone in the act of attacking another person. It's not ok to arrest someone standing on the side of the street looking at their phone.
If you can understand the distinction above, you should be able to understand the difference with Taylor Lorenz vs Libs of Tiktok. Unless you're operating in bad faith or just trying to be a contrarian in which case, more power to you.
>It's ok to arrest someone in the act of attacking another person.
Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing? Because this doesn't pass the laugh test unless you're relying on the usual vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
She was a celebrity on talk shows who runs an extremely popular Twitter account that makes extremely disingenuous posts to bring furry on the people she didn’t agree with.
Releasing who she is was fine.
If a Ku Klux clan member had a very popular anonymous YouTube channel making fun of black people and bragging about it on Tucker Carlson, is it journalism to investigate and share where they work and who they are?
It's not based on partisan affiliation, I never said anything of the sort. I said bad actions/bad actors.
The fact that you assumed I was talking about targeting conservatives just goes to show that they happen to be the ones rocking the boat with violent rhetoric, which occasionally gets backed up by actions.
>It's not based on partisan affiliation, I never said anything of the sort. I said bad actions/bad actors.
This is just shifting the partisan question-begging to the notion of "bad actions/bad actors." Why not just embrace the "doxxing is good when we do it" point that I originally made?
It's not about partisanry, it's about people facing consequences for doing bad things. Why are you ascribing partisanship? You can hold right-wing values and not harass trans people. Conversely you can be a left-wing terrorist. You ascribed partisan affiliation in your head, it was never an argument I was making.
> Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing?
Yes.
> vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
The arguments aren't vague when mass killers have mentioned right-wing talking heads in their manifestos and suicide notes. Maybe conservatives (people of all political affiliations actually) should watch what they say instead of crying when they face consequences for their speech, no?
Plenty of mass killers have cited left-wing sources as well. Demanding that people of all political affiliations self-censor based on vague and unprovable stochastic terrorism claims is an obvious nonstarter and I believe its apparent support is simply due to a (perhaps justified) tribalistic belief that such censorship will be demanded of one's enemies to a disproportionate extent than it's demanded of one's self.
Yes, if a left wing agitator is rallying their followers to violence, they should face some sort of consequences, and they often have throughout the 20th century. It's not hard to find examples of American three-letter agencies targeting radical leftists. This isn't a hard concept to grasp.
This is a very naïve position on the matter. This is not about lifestyle choices but about coordinated harassment. Free speech stops the latest when you endanger other lives.
What does the internet have to do with free speech? I understand that the internet lets you dramatically amplify speech; but, at least in the US, the "internet" is a regulated private space — not a public space. The companies that own that space can (up to regulatory rules) moderate their spaces any way they choose. If KF wants proper, constitutional free speech they can do so in any of the public spaces they want. Hell, they could rent downtown Santa Fe, Texas — like the KKK did in the early 00's — and have a parade.
EDIT: I can see some people may not like what I'm saying; but I actively help organize real marches in Texas for orgs like NAACP, AAIA, PPC, etc. We have a stable of lawyers (TCRP, SCSJ, ...); and, I can assure you this is how free speech works in reality.
Early internet builders and users had a strong libertarian streak running through them. The early internet was awash with the optimism that increasing access to communication and routing around censorship is unequivocally good. The culture that existed then when internet users themselves where a social subgroup echos in the digital debate today.
Is there anything metaphysically inherit to the internet as free speech? That's up for debate. Would the early internet had been successful if this type had not been the ones to build it, I'm on the fence.
> Early internet builders and users had a strong libertarian streak running through them. The early internet was awash with the optimism that increasing access to communication and routing around censorship is unequivocally good. The culture that existed then when internet users themselves where a social subgroup echos in the digital debate today.
The early internet was full of university staff, large company staff and military. They were mostly professionals and colleagues, and weren't assholes part because you had to be pretty smart and well educated, part because they were watched by their organizations, and part because they had colleagues that could take them to account. If you were an ass, chances were great your victim would easily figure out who to complain to.
There was "censorship", it was just more implicit. The model just started to fail once things got big enough that this model of accountability no longer worked. Systems had to be grafted with various patches to survive the new chaos, such as email, or died off by being spammed and trolled into oblivion like Usenet.
I wish the internet was a free speech zone. In practice, legally speaking, the internet has all the downsides (legally) of written communication, and none of the upsides of physical free speech.
The internet simultaneously amplifies speech (this is not new: the printing press did so even more); but, it also concentrates speech. I'm not sure anyone thought about what that latter part would mean.
I wish we had psycho-social institutions that would allow for vigorous free speech without materially worsening people's lives. We seem to be in the part of the cycle where commtech advances have outpaced soctech.
Like you said, we saw commtech leapfrogging over soctech in the early days of the printing press. But soctech caught up and we got over it. The same exists today - I'm sure we'll develop new soctech to handle it, but I have a desire to hasten that development rather than give up and relying on crumbling/outdated soctech infra in the meantime.
No, but peoples definition of what is considered harassment varies wildly. As can be seen in this very thread: Keffals doxing people is not harassment, Keffals calling for their Ukrainian supporters to spread that KF's admin is pro-Putin is not harassment, "pressuring" KF's admins mother is not harassment, journalists doxing and lying about LibsOfTiktok is not harassment; but KF archiving Keffals tweets where they admit to illegal activities is, KF posting the dox of someone sharing DDoS tools is, KF laughing at someone being silly is.
Do you think you provided a reasonable and objective analysis of events and viewpoints? It doesn't seem so to me, an outsider who had never heard of keffals or kf
You still are paraphrasing events and viewpoints, which provides an opportunity to spin them.
In any case, even if harassment is purely subjective, isn't it in within anyone's personal purview to take personal action if they feel something is harassment?
Moderation is not Censorship. Moderation is Free Speech. Hate Speech is not Free Speech. Criticizing the termination of services against kiwifarms isn't an endorsement of free speech its an endorsement of universal toleration. Universal toleration is the idea that I'm not allowed to determine who I provide goods and services to despite the message of the those to whom I am providing services too, if I host a website that is a forum for lego builds, am I not allowed to kick Nazis spreading hate from my forum? My platform, my rules, entitles me to determine what messages I want to convey because the message that is provided on my platform is my right to free speech therefore moderation is free speech. Remember the Colorado Wedding Cake? So which is it? Do you support Free Speech or don't you? mic drop
Organizing harassment campaigns and planning acts of violence, the bread and butter of Kiwi Farms, is not free speech. This website is accountable for the deaths of at least three people. They should have been de-platformed sooner.
We cannot simply accept "free speech" as a value without question: it has to serve an underlying purpose as a tool with which our values are enacted. The purpose of free speech is to serve the best interests of society against bad actors, i.e. governments, who would use censorship to centralize power. Defending hate speech and organized violence contradicts the underlying purpose of free speech as a value in the first place.
Free speech absolutists fail to see through the tool to the values beneath, to the detriment of society.
The entire point here, though, is that the Farms vigorously dispute having done any such thing. How are you to determine who's right?
To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.
There are a lot of questions lurking beneath the surface of your argument, many of which invoke difficult questions like the allocation of power and responsibility between the public and private sectors. I definitely think that we need stronger laws about hate speech and organized violence, and most definitely better enforcement. It's telling that the government will spare no cost to shut down a dark net drug market, but won't lift a finger to save trans lives from websites like this. So, we might find a solution to this problem in law, but we could probably write several books worth of material fully expanding on the implementation and implications. In any case, we cannot expect this solution to be implemented by breakfast tomorrow. What we might find tomorrow morning is that Kiwi Farms is responsible for another murder.
Naturally, they will vigorously reject claims that it's a hate site: it's in their interests to portray themselves as such, and hate groups are not known for placing a high value on the truth. It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence. We do not need a court's opinion to make this judgement, though I would welcome such an opinion nevertheless -- these people should be held accountable in a court of law.
As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values. In terms of values, I expect them (1) to have values compatible with peaceful society, and (2) to act in accordance with those values. Should they fail to do so, it reflects poorly on the people responsible for making those decisions.
> It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence.
I don't think it's obvious. It sounds possible, sure, but they vigorously deny it, and when it comes to actual, falsifiable claims, I don't think the evidence is terribly strong. (For instance, the alleged "Kiwi Farms death list" contains people who did not even have an active thread on the forum). When you make a serious claim like this, it does seem like some more evidence is in order than "everyone knows it".
> As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values.
Then where does the limit go? Do you, as a general rule, support large monopoly corporations having veto rights over all public speech?
It should be trivial to produce that in a court of law, with substantive actionsble intelligrnce that saying something means it's going to happen.
Except... In reality, horrible people say horrible things on the Internet, all the time, and if we have the Police running around constantly trying to protect one odious group from another, then perhaps it's better to wait until one group substantively commits a prosecutable offense, then deal with them, then.
None of that happened. We went straight to mob justice. Again.
> This website is accountable for the deaths of at least three people. They should have been de-platformed sooner.
Oh, did the Twitter Jury return with a verdict already? I didn’t see Judge Musk tweet that the case had completed.
Imagine if private companies started acting like this. You’d suddenly find your power shut off because they read one of your tweets and decided that you’d committed a hate crime for complaining about the rising energy prices…
There is nothing even remotely related to criminal charges or the legal system involved in this case. The CEO of one company decided to censor a forum because he felt like it, without any due process, without even notifying the site.
Private companies are not, and have never been, required to observe due process. They are not required to enact free speech -- the government is. They can, and do, choose who they do business with, and are responsible for the choices they make. The right to choose to deny service to Kiwi Farms is part of a broader set of rights of association which are as highly prized by western society as free speech itself is. And, equipped with this freedom, the choices that they make are meaningful and they are subject to criticism for them.
Your generalization is false -- utilities such as electricity are regulated by the government and provide a life-critical service. No one has suggested that we should shut off the heat for alleged bigots in the middle of winter.
Private companies are, in some countries, required to do just that. For instance, in Germany, banks have a legal obligation to provide people with basic accounts, even if they would not like it.
I can't take seriously the idea that corporations have any human rights at all. Corporations are distinctly non-human, so the idea that CloudFlare has "freedom of association" seems nonsensical. If I run a newspaper and print bold-faced lies, that's (rarely) illegal, but if you run false advertising that's not permitted.
I think this is a very large and unstated assumption. If you stick with it, where do you end up?
For example, landlords are private corporations and not utilities. Should they be free to kick out alleged bigots, too? Should their banks? If all the private corporations band together to decide to deny you service, rendering you homeless, unemployed, etc., in what meaningful sense do you enjoy free speech?
Everything you've put forth is an exception to the norm because those industries are regulated by specific laws. Banks, landlords, utilities -- all of these are regulated industries whose behavior is governed by rules which are the exception to the default, which is free association.
Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
Again, you're exaggerating to ridiculous extremes. No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless. Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on, though I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job. Certain industries are regulated, and those freedoms limited by this regulation, such as banks, to serve the interest of the public. But again, the essential freedoms are present by default, and important.
> Everything you've put forth is an exception to the norm because those [...] are regulated industries whose behavior is governed by rules which are the exception to the default, which is free association.
My specific argument is that large, monopoly providers (e.g. CloudFlare) should be regulated industries, because to do otherwise would undermine the authority of the government.
> Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
This is more common than you'd think. In Italy, there was a case where a (registered, legal) quasi-fascist party sued Facebook for being banned - and won. Facebook got a court order to reinstate their access. The reason for this was simply that the Italians had decided that they should be allowed to have a platform, and so Facebook wasn't in a position to say otherwise.
> I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people.
Agreed.
> No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless.
I'm not sure. The common line of reasoning that I hear goes something like this: "While the government can't shut them down (owing to legal technicalities), they still should be, and so anything that is done to them is ipso facto morally justified.". Grant that this may be a strawman, but it doesn't seem far off from the paradox of tolerance, under which depriving them of things more precious than their homes would seem justified.
> Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Where does the limit go?
Firstly, if private corporations can deny people the (de-facto) ability to spread their views, why couldn't they also deny them of their (de-facto) ability to, say, eat? The basic issue at play doesn't seem to be that speech rights are ontologically different from other rights, just that private corporations are not bound by these rights.
On the contrary, denying them of both would obviously be more efficient at preventing "bad" speech - if people had their bank accounts closed as soon as their phone heard them saying a racial slur, this would trivially result in people saying less racial slurs.
Secondly, if people are deprived of all their abilities to, say, host websites, then by what metric do they still enjoy free speech? If I'm running a newspaper, and all the printing presses decide to stop doing business with me, then how am I to get anything published? Doesn't this have the direct and obvious result of moving power over from the (democratic) government to corporations?
> Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job.
This is a very interesting point. But what do you mean by people?
Do you mean the employees? That's fair, but, though I hate to belabor the point, it's not really the employees on the ground making this kind of decision. Maybe we should have more workplace democracy, but the way it empirically works in practice is that the guys at the top tells them what they have to do, and then they do it.
But if you mean the owners, then I will have to most vehemently disagree. "Property rights should be unlimited" is not a natural corollary of freedom of association, and a tiny clique of property-owners deciding who gets to speak is not a desirable social result.
It's true that the existence of DDoS-Guard, VanwaTech, and a few others technically makes it an oligopoly, but you're still at the mercy of large corporations.
DDoS-Guard and VanwaTech are both tiny companies and represent less than 1% of the market. There are hundreds of providers that offer decent DDoS protection.
DDoS-Guard and VanwaTech are just specialist providers that offer hosting to websites that very few companies would willing to work with.
Cloudflare being a monopoly, or DDoS protection market being an oligopoly is absolute bullshit.
>It's not like you could start up your own.
You can. Vanwatech you just mentioned was run by a little kid who was bundling testcookie-as-a-service with filtering services from a bunch of other small providers like BuyVM.
You can get something like this started for much less than $1k/mo.
>Who else is big within the DDoS protection market?
Just off the top of my head: OVH, Voxility, Level3, Akamai, Neustar, Path.net, Stackpath, Hyperfilter, Javapipe, Sharktech, Blazingfast...
Up until yesterday, the site used a .net TLD and an American company provided DDOS mitigation. The actions of a Twitter mob which largely has Ukrainian flags in their profiles drove them further into business entanglements with Russian companies.
As I didn't really follow the controversy around Kiwi Farms: there have been made quite plausible accusations that the Kiwi Farms are a forum of people for quite some time organizing online hate and harrassment which has lead to swattings, and at least one death. Can anyone dispute those accusations?
> a forum of people for quite some time organizing online hate and harrassment which has lead to swattings, and at least one death. Can anyone dispute those accusations?
Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
> Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
>Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
This is goalpost-shifting. Kiwifarms does moderate threats and such. It does not moderate mere "hateful and harassing content" (whatever that means, I assume a lot of "harassing" content does overlap with illegality), but if the clear no-no actions are swatting and such then clearly KF actively tries to prevent that.
I fear that the implicit argument here is that in order for these efforts to be treated as "good faith", then forum owners need to not only remove clear legal threats but all sorts of speech (particularly "hate speech") that can be stochastically linked with the generation of those threats. That having sufficient moderation entails that moderators address not only actual threats but in removing a wide range of speech.
These companies are widely criticized for enabling harassment, hate, and violence. But these aren't the primary content on these websites. Forums largely dedicated to hating women and trans people are in a meaningfully different category.
Ah, so now the goalposts have shifted to "the primary content is something I find objectionable". Why not just take down every site with that kind of content, if the "deaths linked to the site" isn't actually why you want to ban it?
Yes I'll dispute them: there's no evidence for it.
Swatting is not organized on KF. It's illegal, any planning of such an attack would be deleted and the users banned, and if necessary their details would be shared US law enforcement. It's not only against the rules, it's against the site culture. You're not meant to go out and do stupid offsite or IRL shit (gayops). People who do (or suggest it) are mocked and shunned. KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them, not proactively harassing them.
Someone swatted a congresswoman; in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username. But there is no evidence of any planning on the site itself, and anyone who did so would be incredibly stupid given the admin has repeatedly warned that doing so would result in contacting law enforcement with the details of the perpetrator. Given that a great many people want the site gone, it seems likely this was a low-effort frame job.
Like ... swatting is easy. Saying you're someone you're not is easy. Blaming it on someone you don't like is easy. You just have to call 911 and say a bunch of unhinged bullshit. Anyone, anywhere, can do it.
Other claims like "KF bullies people to suicide": there is a point-by-point rebuttal to this at the top of the Keffals thread. I'd link to it, but the site is yet again down ...
EDIT: here it is:
>1. Near / Byuu
>Byuu had a 13 page inactive thread on the forum at the time he e-mailed Null offering him money in exchange for deleting his thread. He told Null if he does not accept this offer he would commit suicide, this is extortion. Null told him he can not accept money in exchange for deleting threads and he will not be extorted. The next day a twitter user claiming to be Byuu's co-worker says that Byuu went through with the suicide. His only proof was that he claimed to have called the Japanese police and they confirmed it to him, something that the police would never do since he is not a relative of Byuu. He also posted a picture of an urn that supposedly had Byuus ashes in them as "evidence" of his death. The US government puts out a report every 6 months that includes all American citizen that have died abroad. Byuu's death was never on this list. No American citizens have died overseas within the time-frame that Byuu's death supposedly happened. The japanese government is meticulous when it comes to bureaucracy so this is unlikely to be an oversight. Byuu being dead is extremely unlikely. Something Kiwifarms users have pointed out is that Byuu has gotten in legal trouble with the Japanese police because his emulators broke their copyright law, something that is a very serious offense in Japan.
>2. Chloe Sagal
>Sagal's thread had been inactive for 8 months before his death. Sagal suffered from BPD and extreme mental health issues. He antagonized his room-mates to the point where they kicked him out and he became homeless. He started a GoFundMe to get help from the trans community to get back on his feet, nobody donated to this GoFundMe due to how unpopular he was in the community. Before Sagal set himself on fire in a public park he held a long speech about mental health and homelessness amongst trans people and how difficult it was for him to get help for his situation and how he was abandoned by his own community. He never mentioned Kiwifarms.
>3. Julie Terryberry
>Julie was a mentally ill young woman in a relationship with a man 10 years older than her that started when she was 17 and he was 27. She came from a broken home and extreme poverty. Her boyfriend was abusive and regularly beat and cut her. Kiwifarms repeatedly tried to get her help to escape the abusive situation she was in. Her boyfriend regularly threaded to leave her and she told him in return she would kill herself if he did. He left her and she killed herself. The only person who has ever blamed Kiwifarms for this death was the abusive boyfriend who has an account on the s...
> in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username
Assuming this is how it happened – you'll have to excuse me for not trusting MTG on her word considering she has demonstrated to have only a passing familiarity with reality in the past – it strikes me as a ridiculous thing to do by an actual KF member, and certainly isn't the kind of action from someone with the best interest of the site in mind.
I read up on the spat that lead to CF's ban a bit, and Keffals claimed to be responsible for the site's owners mom to lose her job, in spite of not being involved in her son's activities at all. Seems pretty mean-spirited, to say the least, and among other things evidence of a "the goal justify the means"-kind of mentality that I'm not a huge fan of.
No one is looking good here; KiwiFarms doesn't have a good look, but this Keffals person also doesn't come off well. She seems like an unpleasant person and while she is right to complain about KF IMHO, that doesn't mean she's the "the good guy" (or gal) in this story, or that everything she says can be trusted at face value.
The recoding from the MTG SWATing is available on the internet. The caller used TTS, and called back to the police after the SWATing-attempt to explain their motivation and claim to be a moderator on KF. It is as ridiculous as it sounds.
> KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them
My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
> not proactively harassing them.
That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
>My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
it's like one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I am bringing accountability, you are a journalist, he is a bully.
>That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
this is self-evidently ridiculous. it would justify any kind and degree of censorship anything of remotely controversial, and there's no way to disprove the accusation. someone, somewhere, becomes "radicalized" and commit some crime, and months ago you said something vaguely related to it: that means you're a "stochastic terrorist". it's an absurd thought-terminating cliche.
and note that this is never applied with any kind of consistency or good faith, and never to people comfortably inside the Overton window even when they do objectively evil shit. e.g. will the neocon pundits who lied for months about Iraqi WMDs ever be prosecuted as "stochastic terrorists" because they made it more likely that the US went overboard and launched an illegal war? will BLM organizers get done for "stochastic terrorism" because their rhetoric made race riots more likely?
"stochastic terrorism" is just a fancier and more sinister way of saying "stirring up trouble", a catchall excuse/euphemism for authority to clamp down on speech they don't like.
if you actually bothered to look into the matter, you'd see that it's more than just "posting about transwomen they don't like"; the transwoman in question is demonstrably a paedophile and there's ample proof via screenshots and chatlogs in the KF thread. this is why keffals doesn't want you to see the site.
there is more diligence and fact-checking on KF than in many "professional" news organizations.
Sure are a lot more slurs against black people, jewish people, and trans people in the contents of this "journalism" than I find even in outlets like the NY Post. Odd.
Which, again, is one persons word vs. the JP and US governments. Not that the governments never lie, but I somehow doubt there's an international conspiracy to shield KF from criticism.
I haven't gone down the rabbit hole on each specific claim on this—it seems complicated enough that if I'm being Bayesian about it, I'm assigning a non-zero probability to each of the possibilities.
The basic data point for claims for near/byuu faking it are:
* He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though.
* He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published.
* There's been no independent confirmation of his death
otherwise
* The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time.
That doesn't mean the death is impossible.
The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth!
Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.
there's never any proof of anything, tweets can be faked and even if they were real, are often deleted/removed. people could claim it used to say anything they want.
Guilty until proven innocent. And naturally we’ll take away your freedom of speech since your guilty, and also generally disregard anything you have to say to defend yourself, we don’t listen to someone guilty of a crime.
I am not a judge, I am not asking for a guilty verdict. Perhaps badly phrased, I was asking for a comment, a contrary viewpoint, because all that I had so far heard makes it sound as if cloudflare rather acted to late. But that might be because my source of information might not be very balanced. That is why I am asking for input.
Look at my other comment in this thread on the "drove someone to suicide" aspect. I'm totally neutral, never heard of KF before today. It does look like that's true on some level - the person in question did say to KF "remove a thread about me or I'll kill myself" and appears to have done so, but it's a more complicated story than that. The person in question was clearly a major suicide risk for a long time independent of KF. It's quite possible they'd have done so whether KF ever existed or not, as by their own telling they were totally socially isolated, had no friends, regretted how they'd spent their life, their entire existence was tied up in their internet identity, they were diagnosed with several mental disorders for which they had been taking many different drugs, and was doing a "DIY" gender transition using HRT against their own doctor's advice. The KF thread in question was mostly a record of this person's own online postings (which were all pseudonymous!).
The underlying issue here seems like a really complicated and socially tricky one - how should someone respond to a demand of the form "remove evidence of my past online activity or else I'll kill myself". It's probably not specific to KF. Theoretically archive.org could face the exact same situation.
Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome. This false dichotomy allows them to cling to their ideology.
Well I happen to think they should be off the internet, so you're preaching to the choir. But supposing I wasn't someone who thought that, what you're saying is disanalogous, given the ratio of healthy use cases to unhealthy ones is drastically different, and given that these larger platforms actually ban (albeit imperfectly enforced) a lot of the suicide-causing behavior that Kiwifarms allows.
Kids have been bullied into suicide at school. Do you think we should ban schools? Or forbid cafeterias? Some kids feel trauma over being picked last for sports teams -- should we ban sports?
We act against kids and teachers, yeah, but we don't act against the place where they gather (i.e. the school, the playground, whatever). Similarly, we should act against the people who spread hate on Instagram, not the platform -- not advocate for kids to have fewer ways to socialize.
I think if something directly causes substantial increases to suicide rates, then it should be changed so as to not do that. If such change means that the thing no longer exists, then c’est la vie.
Cyberbullying is tricky. A New York law intending to criminalize it was struck down as overly broad and an infringement on 1A. It is categorically different from "incitement to imminent lawless action".
They are categorically the same when it comes to the moral question, because they're both spoken words that cause someone's wrongful death.
They are categorically different when it comes to the practical question of law regarding how we can come up with a system that doesn't pose undue unintended risks to free expression.
In arguing the latter, free speech purists are often incapable of communicating an understanding of the former.
law is usually more specific and has rules about exactly what is a "cause". In the loose sense you've used here such a rule could be invoked for many things. "Cause" and "Effect" typically need more precise language or rules on what context they apply to.
Real life bullying is complicated because you can hardly avoid it. Work or a school are real places you have to visit.
The same is not true for anything internet. When I was growing up as a teen the internet was just about to grow into the first e-commerce bubble around y2k. Not linking your real identity to online accounts was common sense and thought to people everywhere.
People seem to have forgotten this. The internet is not a real place. You enable yourself to be cyberbullied by sharing your identity. It can be entirely avoided, easily.
The internet is a real place, and the smallest amount of information can identify you here. It is a silly proposition to try to force all internet users into total anonymity because they may be doxed by a forum like KF.
>Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome
Are you sure that you actually want a world where mens rea plays no role in criminal determination? You're not just making a free speech critique here.
Let's just be honest about CloudFlare. They write these hand-wringing posts occasionally to try to justify their 'policies', but their policy is quite literally 'block someone if enough people demand it on twitter'.
So they are lying when they say "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"?
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
I am not a Kiwifarms user, but since it's now available at the new domain (and according to CF, KF is not cooperating) the threats should still be there. I cannot find them. Can you please link those threats? Otherwise this lends me to believe that the basis of Matthew Prince's sudden reversal on his "free speech" ideals was something else, not the KF content.
Interestingly, that thread gives no indication (other than the date it was written) whether the user is mad at CloudFlare for enacting censorship or for the lack of censorship.
Unlawful content gets posted to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. all the time. We don't deplatform all of them just because there was a window of time in which it was posted but not yet removed.
"With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion"
Correct. To square the circle, consider that while they're being fined heavily for their involvement in a massive legally-sanctioned opioid epidemic, the major drug companies aren't even being dissolved.
At this scale, for corporations, total value to society is part of the calculus society does. And KF has no value to demonstrate to offset the harm.
Out of curiosity, what caused targeted threats to escalate over the last 48 hours? I'm not familiar with the site, but from what I understand they've been around for over a decade doing basically the same thing, so what caused this escalation?
Keffals posted that she was going to Belfast, which caused the escalation of targeted threats, this time reported through a different more effective police service. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712196
I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
> Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
This is all disanalogous. With Kiwifarms, the incitement to violence was the straw that broke the camel's back. It presumably wasn't just the incitement per se. The incitement didn't happen in a vacuum. Gmail and Yahoo don't have social mechanics that encourage this behavior. Twitter and Facebook actively ban many of the things that Kiwifarms doesn't ban, and presumably your forum does too.
> Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue.
Don't look at it as an asbtracted issue. Study the details, otherwise you will confuse yourself by trying to draw analogies between a hate forum with targeted harassment on the one hand, and an email provider on the other, which share nothing in common aside from them both being websites.
Fine then. Here we go. I now suggest a medium by which others may pseudonymously incite each other to violence by creating accounts on various services, and hosting credentials in a regular manner such that one can compose a system using arbitrary providers to host the same type of speech.
By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.
I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.
If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.
If communities are formed with the sole purpose of being a haven for horrible people to further radicalise each other, it's perfectly reasonable for society's antibodies to destroy those communities.
Tech companies are not society's immune system, and if that's how you see yourself, please stop. Nor is it the case we should aspire to put ourselves into the capacity of being the instrumentality over and above what the jurisdictions we operate in demand, and even then, there's a mandate to push back some in the interests of the public.
Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P
"By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""
That's not my logic. You're assuming I'm an ideologue like the free speech purists. But I am a pragmatist that draws lines based on best guesses and cost benefit trade offs whenever one person's freedom infringes on another person's freedom.
I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.
As a society, the USA has decided that mere pragmatism is insufficient for restricting speech or the closing down of platforms. It would be much simpler if we could make case-by-case decisions based on cost-benefit or risk-reward, but we don't.
I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.
Well, I don't live in the USA. Free speech purism is a US-specific sociocultural product that most people don't subscribe to.
Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.
Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation. Isn't it valid, for the same reasons, to argue that their "moderation" in that particular case was insincere and driven by external outrage?
Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.
In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation.
Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.
Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.
Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.
The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).
Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.
So KiwiFarms was just a site dispassionately interested in the "natural behavior" of "people on social media", and the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harrassment campaigns based almost exclusively on content and information collected on that site by the dispassionate observers is... what, just a crazy coincidence?
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.
You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.
> the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harassment campaigns
Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.
Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.
That's about it.
Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.
I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.
Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.
Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.
Is there any evidence that it is true other than the word of one person? The Cloudflare post didn’t provide any examples, and it seemed to be news to the Kiwi Farms people as well.
Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
There was 2 specific threats. One bomb threat posted to KF proper, and one threat posted to 4chan from outside her apartment that referenced the KF forum on a piece of paper that was photographed.
Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.
The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes, and the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.
The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?
> the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.
It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.
> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes
So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
> It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.
Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?
Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.
> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.
If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.
First, there have been campaigns against the larger companies to improve their moderation. And they've been doing that. Second, I've elsewhere addressed how disanalogous such comparisons are. These other sites actively try to ban the harassment that KF freely allows, and the purpose of their sites and majority of their content isn't hate. Trying to draw analogies between very different examples is terrible thinking and violates the prescription to evaluate each case from first principles.
Also, it is not a small percentage of users. The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.
"It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site."
You're confusing proximate reason with main reason. The incitement was the proximate reason, and the harassment formed the backdrop context that gives meaning to that proximate reason. Please don't tell me you expect them to spell out the basic context that is staring you in the face. You don't have the mind of a child. You very well know that if the identical bomb threat was posted on a Justin Bieber fan club forum, Cloudfare would not be disabling anything. And you know this because you implicitly understand that context is an actual thing.
"If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”."
Because a literal bomb threat was issued after that previous post. I'll repeat again. There is such a thing as a metaphorical dam that breaks after sufficient pressure. You don't go "A-ha! That was just one extra drop of water! I wonder why the dam broke?" No, this is beyond childish.
Incitement is a term with legal weight. If my legitimate criticism of someone online leads a third party to engage in a bomb threat against that person, then these mere facts will not lead to me being found guilty of incitement of violence or terroristic threats or whatever.
Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet, then mass censorship is not only possible but inevitable. Anyone can throw away a burner account making a terroristic threat on any number of websites. The fact that these threats will only be taken seriously when they confirm the narratives of those in power is a major problem. Cloudflare was right to point to due process being the mechanism to prevent this sort of biased treatment, but then immediately opened up a giant loophole that allows for people to avoid it!
> Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet
It's not. The speaker also must (in general) have a history of tolerance of / implicit support of / explicit support of / creation of vile content, and (history suggests) the corporation making the call to pull the plug has to be feeling the pressure to either act or to be seen as also implicitly supporting such vile content, which will have financial ramifications down the road as they're seen as "Those KiwiFarms guys" and people of their own free will choose to do business with Instart instead.
The laws that force association in a corporate setting are extremely narrowly-tailored (at least in the US), and "harassers" isn't a protected class. For everything else, there's the First Amendment... The one that guarantees freedom of association. And the Internet is, at the end of the day, actually made of corporations and institutions that voluntarily associate with each other... Or don't.
Sure, I was mostly speaking hypothetically. The reality right now is that for this sort of false flag attack to work the speaker must be deeply unpopular, especially with media figures. This is why due process is important to prevent inequitable treatment, but woke ideology is ironically demanding that companies abandon due process if this would be harmful to shareholder value. The idea that left-wing activists would be flirting with Friedmanite shareholder primary would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. So much for corporate social responsibility!
So you would support laws that make fascist content and cyberbullying illegal, in order to take the burden of enforcement away from private corporations and into the hands of the government? Or are you advancing this rule of law angle in bad faith because your real motivation is to keep a nexus of cyberbullying and hate like KF up and running?
> The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.
By definition, you cannot harass someone by talking about them.
This is splitting hairs too much. If I'm negatively gossiping about someone and they're within earshot, that can be considered bullying which is considered a type of verbal abuse. Let's call it cyberbullying rather than harassment, just to be precise.
In the world at large (not just a schoolroom or workplace situation), everyone is subject to being criticized for their public behavior. That's not bullying. That's holding them to task.
Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.
Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.
Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.
It is not conflating it. One of the people who committed suicide wrote in their suicide note that it was because of the cyberbullying on KF. And there's multi thousand thread pages with bodyshaming and Photoshopped images and so on. This is not just criticism. Open your eyes.
Who, Elizabeth Waite? She never had a Kiwi Farms thread. She was briefly mentioned in a megathread about silly public trans behavior.
Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.
But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.
Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.
The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.
Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.
Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.
Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.
You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.
The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.
Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.
Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.
> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".
> Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".
(1) Bullying and cyberbullying can both occur without direct interaction. If you're negatively gossiping about someone in the real world and the target is within earshot, that's bullying. If you bully someone enough to the point they kill themselves, that's morally equivalent to murder, even though our legal system hasn't yet caught up to this reality. What KF was doing was analogous.
(2) The legal boilerplate they put up to shield themselves from liability is irrelevant. It's not about their mere words, it's about the inevitable causal consequence of their policies and content that they tolerate and foster on their platform.
Bullying is the realm of children, or maybe adults in a workplace scenario. Certainly not an argument to raise when being criticized for one's public behavior. That's wholly inappropriate and seeing people weaponize it to censor that criticism is disturbing. It's very Orwellian.
> inevitable casual consequence
What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.
That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.
KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.
The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.
Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?
I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?
"criticizing public behavior" is a dishonest euphemism.
You can criticize someone's ideas all you want, but dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity in the way that KF did is not that. It is cyberbullying and it's lethal and the people involved should be fined or locked up in prison for engaging in behavior that had a non-trivial probability of causing another person's suicide.
I would say the same about people dogpiling someone online about their physical appearance or ethnicity. It should be moderated out of existence, and if that doesn't work it should be illegal.
If you throw bricks off a building, I similarly want you locked up for the same reason. You probably won't kill someone, but the causal connection is such and the probability is sufficiently high that we lock people like you up, because you're a menace and direct threat to your fellow humans.
Of course, I'd want the punishment for throwing the brick to be larger, I am not throwing proportionality out the window.
> dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity
Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.
The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.
Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.
With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)
Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.
Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.
And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.
Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.
>This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.
Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.
Yet you probably support that defamation and incitement should be illegal. Curious that the exact current set of laws that outlaws some speech and doesn't outlaw other speech is perfectly optimal despite the world having radically changed since those laws were written.
I can demonstrate that KF is acting in bad faith: To this day Kiwifarms still hosts the Christchurch video, the same video discussed in Moon’s rebuttal here.
In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
Well it is a US company... In the US, you are allowed to possess or distribute photos from concentration camps, 9/11 footage, and yes, the Christchurch video. You don't need a special journalism license or a law enforcement badge. Many sites understandably choose not to host content like that, but it's important for some places to be willing to host primary source material. Otherwise the event will just fade from our collective consciousness, or will end up getting distorted or twisted into a conspiracy theory (eg. Holocaust denial, 9/11 truthers, crisis actors, etc).
Explain how refusing to censor content or turn over PII on a government's behalf, something which many companies due, relates to "acting in bad faith".
"Extraordinary claims" are things like "God exists", not "some imbeciles on the internet are sending death threats that don't appear to be just bluster."
People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.
That is a fair point. Perhaps that was the wrong classification, but “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” is a pretty extreme portrayal of events without any additional evidence/context.
If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.
The Cloudflare posting was by Matthew Prince, who's an officer of a public company. Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.
The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.
Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.
IANAL, but the law you are talking about is "no fraud", and it's not Delaware code it's the SEC. When a public company officer lies about issues that could impact the price - and these interactions with law enforcement and regulation def qualify - they could cause people to misvalue the company.
>Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.
Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.
I have it on good legal authority that if lies are to be told, something factual and disprovable like those references to police, then one arranges to have them be told by someone in a suitable department rather than by an accountable officer. Press, marketing, something.
Because in this case, accountable really means it.
> "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"
>So they are lying when they say "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"?
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
> discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack
There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.
He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.
With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.
Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.
>Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech
stop using this dumb analogy. it was invented to justify prosecuting people for speaking out against the draft, and it was later denounced by the very person who coined it.
in this case it's more like: a random person who never went to the theatre before shouted fire in the theatre, the person was summarily booted from the premises and banned by the theatre staff. then later on the police come by and shut down the theatre because they hosted fire-shouters.
It absolutely is. It would and should get you banned from HN. In particular, people phoning in bomb threats and fake calls to the police is harrasment.
Bomb threats, real world harassment and fake calls to the police are strictly banned on Kiwi Farms. Making fun of transsexuals is not. Nor is the latter illegal, as much as some in this case and in this comment section wish it were.
I don’t know how we’re still retreating to “private companies can do what they want” in the free speech debate on HN. It’s clear that those who want Kiwi Farms gone are resorting to illegal means such as DDoSing to get what they want. A very small number of companies like Cloudflare can effectively defend against this. In this position they act as utilities, a category of private businesses that is held to strict standards of free speech. Sadly the law has not caught up to this reality.
In their market position, Cloudflare has the power of a small government. In American capitalist society in particular, there’s increasingly no daylight between large corporations and the government. If the big companies say you can’t speak, what good is the right?
What Cloudflare appears to have done is cave to a Twitter mob in violation of their own stated principles and common sense. This has irreparably harmed not only Cloudflare’s reputation, but the prospects for free and open speech on the Internet.
Because it's not permitted by the HN guidelines and rules.
But free speech means being able to insult and make fun of anyone, where it's accepted, of course. (I'm only talking about speech here, I'm not talking about bomb threats or any intolerant "action". These should have immediate and extreme consequences. )
I am against racism or making fun of someone's gender, but I completely support their right to free speech. Those for whom free speech is conditional, including many "progressive thinkers", I would rather not associate with.
Free speech is and always has been conditional in the United States and other nations.
The US specifically has a panoply of exceptions to free speech law, some modern (EDIT: not hate speech, but yes creation of a hostile work environment via rhetoric, divulging classified information, the extraordinary legal injunction of prior restraint of speech if the speech can cause injury and its legality will be resolved in an imminent legal case) and some dating back to the founding of the nation (sedition, treason, espionage).
The interpretation of the First Amendment protection is extremely broad (as it should be) but not unlimited.
Hate speech (both punching up and punching down) is protected speech in the USA. So is "injurious" speech that is not defamation or fraud. It's a common mistake.
True threats and a specific form of incitement are NOT protected. Section 230 offers a site protection from some of the liability (otherwise Twitter would have been shut down years ago). But a person posting unprotected speech is fully liable.
"Making fun of transsexuals" is a rather euphemistic way to portray 2,000 page threads dedicated to harassing and bullying single individuals primarily about their gender identity.
"SWATing" is not just harassment, I think it should qualify as attempted murder. I think there should be mandatory prison sentences for SWATing, and I think juveniles should be put through some kind of juvenile-prison if they do it.
It’s co-ordinated bullying and harassment of a minority group to deny them the same rights to free expression that those doing the bullying enjoy. Free speech without consequences doesn’t work. See also gamergate.
>Come on. Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech and no company in their right mind should support that
Actually, shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater IS explicitly free speech in America, and in fact, the idea that it's not is a layman's mistake (or a wives tale if you prefer) that is corrected in basically freshman legal classes.
In modern legal discussion, the idea of "fire in a theater!" is basically an immediate identifier that you are not educated in this part of the law at all and your opinion is low quality.
Not trying to insult you here, I too have used this very analogy on the internet in the past, just laying out what exactly others see when they see what you wrote.
To be fair to CloudFlare, their entire business model is dependent on the US regulatory environment and section 230 protections. If there's a credible threat from Congress along the lines of "if the internet won't self-regulate, we'll have to do it for them", it's existential to their business.
How do you differentiate between "if enough people demand it on Twitter" and "if our consciences demand that we act"? I agree that they don't seem to be adhering to the policy that they published just last week, but a company that didn't care passionately about free speech wouldn't have published what they did. It was clearly going to offend a lot of people on Twitter.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want their company to be used to kill anyone. Even if they are wrong that there is an "emergency", it seems likely they believe that there is one. Isn't a more plausible explanation that they truly believe free speech is important, but that it's not the only deciding factor?
Bottom line is that somebody (foreign governments, weev) will always take whatever a site's ToS are and repeatedly ram up right against the edges of the policy until they have extracted as many lulz as possible. This is tough to deal with if you have a conscience, or need money.
What they tried at first, which is very "90s internet", is to become a bit of a troll yourself:
"We are deeply committed to the principles of free speech and will never deny a customer service to our critical infrastructure based on the content of their messages. You are banned. Now, go away, lolcow."
Reddit did something similar -- not with the /r/thefappening, but later on with /r/the_donald. Recall when /u/spez randomly edited comments left by contributors there, sending a clear message "we have no rules, and we will break you if we feel like it". The public apology ( https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/ ) conveys the subtext that it will happen again, there are no firm rules, and you are not welcome here.
I dunno quite what the plan is here going forward. weev and null are kind of an amazing force for chaos and if you can get them defensive and off kilter, that's certainly interesting.
Overall though I have found kiwifarms a helpful resource for understanding online harassment. I appreciate that members do their coordination in the open; by reading forum activity you can understanding roughly where the next massacre will happen. The community targets lulz as weakness and many of their most persistent attackers have gotten sucked in and doxxed themselves, notably in the Chris-Chan maelstrom.
The community has successfully killed people and the fact that they have a centralized repository with documentation will be helpful for the next Michelle Carter style prosecution.
Ironically, it's SomethingAwful that is credited* with rousing the press attention required for Reddit to rescind its free speech ideal (making SA chaotically the progenitor of both 4chan and r/ShitRedditSays). There too was suspicion of raiding with questionable activity from those who wanted the ban.
> We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. (from Reddit's statement, https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_cha...)
yea...
As for generalization, a 2012 writeup on Reddit's situation cites LiveJournal's incident in 2007 and further LambdaMOO's, from 1992: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997
This is an interesting perspective. I was just thinking about the SA community's relationship with lowtax -- did they know what he was like for longer than the public?
If I wanted to understand this world further I'd probably call Drew Curtis. Of all the people in this space he seems to be the most levelheaded and usually seems to get what's really going on.
I feel sorry for Cloudflare's management team in having to deal with all this nonsense.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
I don't get it. Do trans people and women and all the alleged victims "are a part of that community" that they endured years of torture and talking down leading to suicide as is being alleged or do these KF people do doxing on sorts on other sites and use KF as a central place to coordinate attacks?
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
...That's always going to exist. It's gone by different names. It's why you aren't supposed to share personal info on the Web, btw, because anyone can get to it, now without even leaving the comfort of home.
you know when the whole foursquare started gamification of locations, i did go into it pretty early on but some "time" later i was like "why am i doing this? for achievements?"
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
> between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.
Whether foo and bar will get married is, in my opinion, considerably different from organizations that collect and magnify hatred against members of various disempowered groups.
Seems to me Transwomen didn't get deplatformed. Quite the opposite.
Seems to me that Transwomen just took the only scrutiny contrary to their own agenda temporarily off the net, putting one of the most technically competent hosting providers on the list of people who won't associate with them (people acting in opposition to Transwomen).
No comment on the hating on black people, as I learned long ago, platforms are not users of platforms, and horrible people can be found everywhere.
Despite all of this horribleness that apparently goes on with KiwiFarms, it still seems Transwomen is able to go on doing whatever it is it does.
Strictly speaking, your yardstick for empowerment measurement has a rather funny operating principle, as intuitively speaking, I'd expect the opposite result.
Horrible people appear to be found at significantly above background density among posters on Kiwi Farms.
My comment about transwomen being disempowered is in the broader social sphere, where trans people in general are under social and legislative threat against their access to basic decency, public visibility, and medical care.
Are transwomen creators really disempowered online these days? The internet's a very different place from how it was in 2007.
Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.
> If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
I don't get it. Why does Prince require a legal team to explain to him the rule of law? Everything he has done in this matter has been within the letter of the law.
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
The statements made by any company representative responding to PR crisis shouldn't be taken as the unvarnished truth. The purpose is reputation management, dampening negative publicity before it overwhelms, while hopefully minimising long-term reputational damage.
If you are walking down the street, and see one person kicking the shit out of another, dial 911 to report it, and are told that the police will be there in 5 minutes, is it vigilantism to step in and break the fight up, or try to physically restrain the attacker? Given that the victim might sustain a severe or life-threatening injury in that 5 minutes?
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
Was that person getting physically kicked the shit out of?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
The problem is that if you give in once, or are perceived to give in, then not only will both sides hate you for it, but you will be under even more pressure to give in next time.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
They did it because of the cesspit environment inside every American corporation. If the CEO doesn't cave in under sufficient pressure, his internal political rivals will extend the guilt of association to him personally, and he will lose his position.
This is a modern-day equivalent of lynch mobs that has nothing to do with reason, good intentions or due process.
Kiwi Farms and several other Western far-right websites consider Russia to be a safe haven. They're correct in this assumption if they limit themselves to hate speech against LGBT people and non-white minorities.
However these websites are also blatantly anti-semitic and there is a lot of Holocaust denial going on. Russia has laws against both anti-Jewish hate speech and Holocaust denial.
It will be interesting to witness what happens when the Western far-right collides with their Russian buddy's laws against anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
Want to provide any examples? Seems like the comments are mostly about CF going back on their policies, laughing at Twitter celebrating them being down for 30 minutes, and calling the account that posted the 'threat' an idiot.
This is incredibly dishonest. It took me less than 1 minute to find anti-semetism+transphobia (the t slur cries out as they strike you), and the n word (hard r) was one of the first comments.
> This is incredibly dishonest. It took me less than 1 minute to find anti-semetism
Eh, a few users using naughty words on the internet doesn't really say much about what a site "is all about". Unless you're equating "naughty words" with "horrible person" and extrapolate a narrative about what such a person could possibly post. Which is a pretty Twitter-level view of the world..
Because the story covers a dispute about precisely what should be allowed on the internet and what the proper process is for removing something. A lot of people have decided that KF is morally bad and used that to justify any tactic to remove them. But an ordered society requires stable and well-drafted rules.
This is very non-content to be honest. The main claim here is:
> This seems to be based off one of two things (lists two cases)
But it's just guesswork, we don't know if and what cf saw and what was reported to any law enforcement.
Random possible alternative: Cloudflare got a considerable increase in their "kf complaints" pile and because of the outside pressure legal actually looked at them for the first time and said "we can't take this risk". There's just so many ways this could've played out, null's "it wasn't even us, promise" is just meaningless.
Neither kf nor cf is great at being truthful and open at the moment. We can wait for the arrests or court documents if any will happen.
Exactly, this is the weak link in the chain that's inviting all manner of speculative comments, inviting all manner of preemptive conclusions about who has or hasn't lied, whether the threats were real, etc.
Keffals did something extremely brave in using herself as a live-fire target. She knew she was being doxxed, so she went to Northern Ireland and mentioned looking for a particular kind of restaurant. This inevitably resulted in bomb threats and fake calls to the police.
Bomb threats are taken seriously in Northern Ireland. It seems that this time the threat was given enough credibility for Cloudflare to take it seriously and cut them off.
(As a Brit, there's a deep irony in the idea of someone fleeing to Northern Ireland for their personal safety!)
What is the possibility of someone wanting to have the site taken down posting these threats? The post was apparently deleted by mods within 14 minutes.
Actually, a mod checked the logs to find that the post was deleted by the poster 2-3 minutes after Keffals screenshot and Tweeted it. So it was up just long enough to serve its purpose.
The reason originally given was that they "misgendered" them. The chief released a statement saying that he had personally reviewed all recordings and found no evidence of this. Also made a statement that they knocked on Keffals door, and took them into custody without any issues, in direct contradiction to Keffals statement about waking up with an assault rifle in their face from the 'SWATing'.
Worth noting that as part of the police detaining them, they also confiscated their phone and hard-drives. Which might explain why they are 'fleeing' all over the world except to Canada..
We may never know as they've deleted their tweets, if only there was some kind of forum archiving these kinds of people constantly incriminating themselves while grifting..
Unfortunately, most people now seem to be absolutely unwilling to expose themselves to information coming from a doubleplusungood hate site. Better to trust journalists and Wikipedia, which always use reliable sources[1], and are never wrong or biased.
It is approaching something like a religious taboo or literal OCD, as if they would be irrevocably damned by reading some bad words. While at the same time pathologizing everything outside their own narrow spectrum of permitted opinions as some kind of "-phobia".
Really everything about this group is contradictory:
* self-professed socialists / communists / anarchists who eagerly support megacorporations
* gloat about how they've basically won already, while justifying their actions with being existentially threatened (didn't Umberto Eco write something about that once?)
* academic background and vocabulary, try to shut down any nuanced discussion
* ironic statements like #killallmen are fine, while even mild criticism of them is proof of genocidal intent
Yes, there are vile comments on KF, and a large number of users do seem to be edgy trolls (the bad kind, i.e. those who go after targets other than cis/white/hetero men, see last point above), if not outright neo-Nazis. That does not mean that the factual information they post isn't accurate.
Deplatforming will radicalize them further, while hiding the problem from view. Conspiracy theory: perhaps that is the actual intent of such actions, to destabilize democracy and prepare it for Russian / Chinese / Western authoritarian takeover?
Sure doesn't make the "oh we are just concerned with child abuse" narrative seem a lot more thin when the entire community also is just wildly bigoted against trans people.
Absolutely. And at the end of the page, you will see the exact DM's I am referencing between null and near. What exactly do you think I'm leaving out? How null insensitively and defensively perpetuated the idea that the suicide was faked?
Furthermore the KYM page is convenient for other uninformed readers, but it is obviously incomplete and not a primary source of information for me because I watched this entire episode unfold in real time.
This situation is highly nuanced. However, the KYM page gives fair treatment to the issue.
Truly, I don't think you left anything out. It seems like every controversy involving KF is incredibly complicated and nuanced. I was not there in real time, and from the KYM page, it looks like Null lacked pretty much any compassion during this saga and was more concerned about his user's ability to have "free speech". The KF response, including the link to the entire e-mail exchange, really highlights that lack of compassion.
I can see now how the "both sides to every story" implied KF had a moral leg to stand on. Not my intention. I think people almost intentionally avoid visiting the KF site out of some sort of fear, but people shouldn't be afraid to see what's going on over there.
You're right, and everyone should definitely go right to the primary source when evaluating null and this situation.
I know some will say that is too much work for some internet drama, and while that's a valid opinion, any further opinion on the issue itself by those people would be entirely invalid due to lack of proper research.
Moon was concerned about people being able to demand takedowns of content based on mere suicide threats. Is this lacking in compassion? I believe this is a pretty standard practice, I don't think on IG/Facebook/whatever a mere suicide threat could lead to a takedown of content. A scatching CNN article on a politician would not be retracted based on a suicide threat, etc.
And honestly, what's the strongest rebuttal to the claim that the suicide was faked? I guess I've seen claims that some journalists independently confirmed it, but I don't know where these stories are nor what sort of confirmation they received? It shouldn't be particularly unthinkable to consider that Near just was going to abandon their current pseudonymous internet presence and wanted to damage Kiwifarms as a free add-on to this.
CloudFlare is definitely not acting in good faith.
Given that a friend of mine had to jump thru many hoops to report to CF a website that was very clearly and obviously abusive with hard evidence for it. It was a blackmail type website that was preying on women in the cam industry.
542 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadTheir core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started. Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members.
EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?
They will just flag this post and rejoice that they got a billon dollar internet company to bend the knee only for them to scream a false victory, despite KF still being up and running on another domain with Tor and DDoS protection with another provider. Nothing has changed.
When it comes to a Twitter mob, there is no “Sorry” or “Please I can explain”, or “It’s not what you think it is” or “But the post was removed”. With the Twitter mob, there is just no redemption.
So on to the next villain of the month.
Exactly. Proving that this isn't really a problem at all.
Cloudflare has exercised their right to drop this user. And KiwiFarms has moved to someone else.
Makes you think.
Let's say you're afraid that someone might punch you in the face. So that person gets on a soapbox and gives an eloquent speech to a crowd about how they're not going to punch you in the face, in fact, they're quite against face-punching and regret the times in the past they've punched people, and you're able to relax a little. And then three days later they punch you in the face anyway. Don't you think that punch might hurt a bit more, on an emotional level, than if that person just clocked you when you thought they would?
There's actually quite a bit of follow up action chasing up both the new providers and hosters. The deplatforming has been shown to work before. Just adding the speedbump of requiring the tor access will kill a lot of interest in continuing the abuse.
Even if you look at the hashtags and the website, you'll see cf wasn't the only target. It's a pretty well planned action, but it's very clearly against kf and not stopping.
When Lincoln said that, we went to war, and the side that didn't want to enslave people won.
Polite society has no room in it for people who think that calling for the death of LGBT people (AKA people) is acceptable.
Yes
They know that KF will still exist and will move on from Cloudflare. The point isn't to hurt KF, but to hurt Cloudflare for daring to nominally support free speech. That's why they're botting hashtags, putting pressure on the stock price, and encouraging tech decision-makers to move their startups away from Cloudflare. The point is to say: if you do not pander to us, we will come for you.
It's an effective way to cement power over institutions from the bottom-up, without actually controlling those institutions.
It's a similar kind of social movement to the film censorship movement in early 20th century America, which was largely grassroots and yet ended up controlling the US's entire cultural output for most of a century.
In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
Every boycott has detractors; if those detractors are too numerous, the boycott fails. Boycotts are marketing campaigns like everything else in the world.
> In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
The point is to observe which direction this pressures companies to lean towards, and what this says about who holds grassroots or institutional power at any given time.
For instance, if they don't like you, they report you to your employer. If your employer defends you, they attack your employer's relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees.
Basically, cancel culture exploits social networks to force the submission of an opponent.
I think there's a line that most reasonable people can determine between "I disagree with $CURRENT_VIEW" and "I am against $PERSON_OF_CATEGORY existing." For example, frequently someone on Twitter will say things like, "calling for more bike lanes is ableist." I think - and am not afraid to have my name attached to this sentiment - that this is an absurd take. Every aspect of society cannot possibly serve everyone, but that doesn't mean we should fail to do something because a minority of that society can't participate. If the action actively harms that minority, then yes, close examination of it is warranted.
However, if your publicly stated opinion is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be teachers, you deserve to be pilloried, because that opinion is harmful and without merit.
And who gets to decide what views are sufficiently shitty to deserve life ruination?
Please remember this post if someone ever decides that something you said now means that you qualify for it.
If someone disagrees with me on, say, whether or not the USG should subsidize EV manufacturers, I wouldn't expect a 3rd party to call either side of that debate deserving of, well, anything. However, when someone holds an opinion that $GROUP is less deserving of x _due solely to their existence, not their choices,_ I expect that opinion to be questioned.
Also, it's very possible to be wrong on the internet, be corrected, and become a better person without having your life ruined. I used to be somewhat of a troll. Not 4chan level, but I was definitely a crueler person than I was in real life. Someone once had the patience to engage me in questions, I realized what I was doing was harmful or at least not helpful, and I stopped the behavior.
Obviously there is always a "but my beliefs" aspect, but I believe that these arguments can be ethically reduced to "do not harm others, unless in the defense of others."
For example, murder is arguably ethically wrong. However, at least in most states in the U.S., you are allowed to murder someone if they are themselves attempting to murder you, or someone else. Taken further, if I was on a jury, and the defendant had murdered someone who had severely harmed their child - for instance, rape - I would have no qualms about finding them not guilty, even if the murder had occurred days or weeks after the first crime. I'm fully aware that this is illegal, but I don't consider it ethically wrong. If you're curious, I do consider the death penalty to be wrong, because I don't believe the state has the right to take life. Whether or not these two views are incongruous I don't know; it makes sense in my head.
On a more relevant level, I believe that teenagers are able to determine things like "I am gay," or "I have gender dysphoria." I also understand that I am not a doctor, and defer to the American Medical Association, who has stated[0] that:
> It is imperative that transgender minors be given the opportunity to explore their gender identity under the safe and supportive care of a physician.
Given that, I assert that the beliefs KF members have espoused are the ones that are harmful, should not be encouraged, and should be actively discouraged.
[0] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sta...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
When you let that percolate for a bit, you get to, "Treat others only in such a way as you yourself are alright with being treated.
Your self-defense example resonates with this way of life, as the person seeking to do you harm has telegraphed they are fine with you reacting in kind.
You cannot just murder anyone, as if no one is engaging in you, the idea is that one best should reciprocate only in kind. Most moral systems pre Kantian Categorical Imperative, are crippled by not being able to justify being moral as an end in and of itself just from the tenets within the system itself.
I would not, under the categorical imperative, censure either group in this case, as I am not willing to accept mob justice as something I am comfortable being applicable to me. Both parties, however, have have demonstrated that they are willing to accept being treated in that manner through their actions, though Transwomen moreso at this point than the users of KF. KF has merely existed.
Therefore, at this point, any follower of the Categorical Imperative can engage in mob/vigilante justice against either Transwomen/KF with clear conscience, as it has veen clearly evinced, that is how they wish to be dealt with, and this doesn't taint not engaging in mob justice/vigilantism against anyone else, as it is always the first mover that sets the level on which the interaction takes place.
It's where the Golden Rule "Treat others as you would have them do unto you" stems from.
https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1566301416917856256?t=...
"Those people," and myself, view KF and their ilk as harmful to society. What exactly do you suggest should be accepted if not victory?
> file lawsuits
And here a glaring issue with this approach is apparent. Even _if_ the harassers meet the criteria for law-breaking, anonymity and civil suits having the burden of proof be on the plaintiff make this extremely difficult. I can think of any number of defenses, starting with "Someone guessed my WiFi password / took over my forum account."
It is far easier to pressure companies to de-platform hate than to individually find and file suit against the harassers.
Deplatforming using Twitter pressure is a terrifying tactic that tosses out the rulebook and replaces it with a popularity contest.
It's bullshit.
"Boycott" comes from the last name of Charles Boycott. Protesters threatened and beat up people that worked with him, threatened shops not to sell to him, and ramped up to such a point that it cost more for the police to defend his harvest than the harvest was worth. His blacksmith was threatened with murder, and a 12 year old carrying his mail was threatened not to keep doing it. It was definitely not a polite "Oh, we don't buy from this particular guy" stand.
Now I'm not saying that threatening people is a good thing. What I am saying is that this narrative of that once upon a time people were civilized and suddenly this new "cancel culture" thing get everything out of whack is fiction. If anything, the past was a scarier and a rougher place, because if somebody stopped you in the middle of a rural road and threatened you, there were no cameras and no recording devices.
Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either.
Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you
In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business.
I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.
This is, if I recall, the same legislation that normally outlawed "unfair" practices in Capital/Labor relations, which included making illegal blacklisting, wildcat strikes, secondary striking, retaliation, etc...
Is it that hard to believe that the primary goal of a group of people who were being harassed, at times to the point of suicide, is to try to shut down the forum that is harassing them?
proof?
But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut.
The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies.
The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven).
So:
- The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF.
- The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets.
- The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum.
It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know.
More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do...
What bothers me here and why I wrote up the summary is the clear role of what Matt Taibbi calls the "transitive property of whatever". When one sees a claim of "person/group X is harassing person Y so badly they killed themselves", that's a very strong accusation and the evidence needs to be crystal clear as a consequence. Yet here we have a long chain of causal reasoning that somewhat resembles Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, and appears to stop at the first place in the chain where someone has a stable email address and might actually reply.
It's deeply unclear why this dev's demands or plea or extortion or whatever word you use for this, wouldn't also immediately apply to archive.org. The "harassment" he names is actually people in random chatrooms referring to things he himself had said online, which KF was documenting (or caching). This Keffals incident seems very similar. In fact it clearly would apply to archive.org if you read the full chain of emails and his answer to why that's not a problem is basically "i just hope it won't be cached or reuploaded anywhere".
It's also not clear why the same tactics couldn't be used against Hacker News - plenty of comments can be found on here criticizing 'personalities' of various kinds for their online antics. Just look at any thread on Elon Musk. If Musk emailed dang tomorrow and said "your users are harassing me <links to some post on another website> delete all the criticisms of me and my tweets or I'll kill myself" we wouldn't expect HN to suddenly purge thousands of posts, right? It'd be a horrible situation but a good reply might be, "please get help from a professional" or something along those lines. And we definitely would NOT want HN or every HN user to be classed as internet pond scum who need to be permanently booted off the internet.
Yes yes, you will say that's clearly different, HN posts and users are "nicer", there's more moderation etc. But it's not clearly different because nothing in this KF/byuu incident depends on any of those things. If we accept this claim at face value - that KF is a terrible place because it drives people to suicide - then this is only plausible if we rely entirely on his own perceptions/telling of the story, and he wasn't mentally stable, so theoretically he could have concluded more or less anything regardless of merit.
A lot of the philosophical issues here seem related to the EU's right to be forgotten. However I don't think the EU RTBF applies to pseudonyms. The obvious fix of just using a new pseudonym was rejected because, he claimed, he had no life whatsoever outside of that nym.
Obviously it’s completely unverifiable, but in the timeframes we are talking, if 30 minutes is too long to remove bad content, it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet.
The precedents set here are terrible.
This is the kind of stuff spies are experts at. It can be learned by motivated online communities to target their enemies.
They have removed multiple sites after a mob asked them to. How is it not turning into a precedent?
No it isn't. There's a bigger context to the decision. If you find a Justin Bieber fan club forum and post incitement to violence, I guarantee that nobody will want to take down the site, because everyone understands that the forum itself had nothing to do with the post.
This is a subjective call and one that is easy to get wrong since the person making the call is unfamiliar with the site.
I think it could help if there were actual discussions with a site's administers instead of just kicking them off the service.
"On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat.
The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face."
What would be the attack vector?
They now have my IP and the fact I came from https://news.ycombinator.com/
Even if I'm logged in on Kiwifarms so they know who I am they have no idea if I have a login on HN or even what thread I was reading.
I still support an archive link for availability reasons; I just wouldn't worry about being attacked or something just because you visited the site.
> However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, 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 unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Seriously? I helped moderate a small community at one point and we would see stuff like this on a weekly basis. Or just look at a YouTube or Facebook comment section on a controversial topic. This looks like an excuse to cave to the Twitter mob.
It’s a good test to see how censorship resistant the internet can be.
If you get 5000 from a twitter mob, from people living all around the world, you can still report, but there's pretty much zero chance that anything will happen to any of those 5000 people, because the threats are considered as "not real" and nobody wants to deal with 5000 cases (paperwork, warrants, judical process after, etc.)
For example in Australia, employers have a duty under workplace health and safety legislation to provide a safe workplace. And similar legislation exists in most countries.
If you have an employee who is receiving death threats, you do nothing about it and then they are killed (or they even just sue you) then you would absolutely be liable.
If you're running a business you have duty of care obligations as a Director.
You seem to be completely ignorant of the seriousness of situations like this.
Much like the old site Portal of Evil, another best-of-the-worst aggregator from the early internet, making on-site trolling/harassment plans is a great way to get your account banned very quickly ... or becoming a thread topic yourself.
We (and cloudflare) are morally allowed to read between the lines.
a random person on the Internet said. Meanwhile, another random person on the Internet[1] said KF has a ToS that bans anything illegal from the site.
I was unable to independently verify either side of the report.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712037
The article I linked has as many citations of primary sources as you could ever want.
The parent comment seeks to poison the well by casting doubt on the claims that KF is a hate site and pushed people to suicide. It is well-documented and there is no disputing it. Instead of "begging the question", just perform a quick Google search. That way you can:
1. Inform yourself. 2. Not cast a shadow of doubt on easily provable claims.
Furthermore, RationalWiki is hardly a neutral site, especially on matters like this. Specifically, some members have a long-running irrational beef with KiwiFarms (I used to edit there fairly frequently back in the day). That it includes information on the site owner's mom – who has no proven relationship with the site beyond that there's an account with her real name, which proves nothing – and that it links to an extortionist "mugshot site" for her proves that the article is not as "rational" as one might hope.
> slamming anyone down as ignorant is not constructive.
It is when they are reducing it to a he said/she said instead of, I don't know, providing evidence? Begging the question is a way to reduce the credibility of an argument with zero evidence. It's far less constructive than my reply to it, but yet people have taken more issue with my reply.
On the other hand, about bloody time they got rid of the site, and if they need to post a public excuse to feel justified in it, sure, whatever.
He (Moon) doesn't actually know that though, it's very easy to disprove an argument when you set that argument up yourself - I took Matthew's statement to be a more general observation on the state of dozens, if not hundreds of problematic posts on the forum that were overwhelming Cloudflare, but that's just me
Cloudflare may be able to handle a botnet that can generate 250GBps of traffic, but a few hundred problematic forum posts coupled with some Twitter outrage totally jams them up. (Purposely leaving aside the qualitative details here.)
This shows that Cloudflare is completely defenseless against a certain variety of meatspace attacks.
The contact information for DDoS-Guard show it's based in Edinburg, Scotland.
I think they will have to look for another DDoS protection provider very soon.
Anyways that Scottish entity will soon have some bad things happening to it. The UK authorities will come down hard on anyone who supports the shitty "Bully LGBT people into suicide" forum.
There are currently sanctions against Russia. They're not comprehensive, but many companies won't want to use a Russian company just because they don't want the risk that more stuff will be banned later (never mind the hassle of figuring out whether what you need to do is banned already)
Anyway this association means they miss out on business not only from legitimate clients, but also shadier sites who don't really want that association either. Also significant tax advantages.
You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here.
'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users.
Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions.
Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
Death threats are generally not legal, but ones that are obvious hyperbole might be. Natural language processing algorithms might be able to identify death threats automatically, but they struggle with hyperbole and sarcasm. But so do humans.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control
Context matters and attempts to avoid acknowledging context to create false equivalency is a big reason why most Twitter and Reddit arguments are so-toxic.
Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting and would find the Nazi's rightfully abhorrent.
Many people don’t have the luxury of assuming that people brandishing Nazi symbolism are shit-posting. For quite a few that symbolism represents an existential threat.
What Cloudflare did was legal too.
If folks aren't exposed to radical ideologies regularly - if everything they read on a screen is True and Safe - what happens when they stumble across a dark corner of the internet and are exposed for the first time? Censorship erodes our ability to critically evaluate, without actually stamping out the censored topic.
Frequent exposure to something normalizes that thing, it doesn’t make it stick out and be more identifiable.
Seeing a mainstream interview with Louis Theroux and debate livestream with Destiny quickly outs him as a white nationalist with an incoherent worldview.
If the only way to hear his ideas, directly from his mouth, are on his platform in a dark corner of the internet you're only going to get his one-sided propaganda.
Do I just take journos word for it? Hell no.
I go to the Smithsonian archives and read the source material in Latin
Anyway, back to the point. I whole heartedly believe that exposing someone like Nick Fuentes on a livestream is a net positive that turns more people away from him than gains him followers.
It's a cynical person who thinks platforming bad ideas will make them spread. Sunlight.. disinfectant...
pft you take those people at their word? hell no
> Sunlight.. disinfectant...
Go ahead, name a case where this happened.
[citation needed]. Even IRL law in extremely pro-free-speech nations is rife with "imminent threat of danger" exceptions to their laws.
One definition of free speech is the freedom of a people to speak their minds openly that power may be held to account. In that regard, it's an extremely useful tool for a free democracy to remain free; it minimizes the risk of the systems of power becoming unquestionable, which tends to create bad feedback loops that ultimately detach such power from its utility in serving the people.
Another definition is saying whatever one wants on any topic without consequences. This is not the same as the first, and has questionable utility in a free society.
Opinion. But also, no one's First Amendment rights was violated here. No one has a right to post on a website.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to compare the idea of a physical building for discussion (privately owned, to make the comparison fair) to a website like Twitter. I've come to the conclusion that if I ran a physical building where anyone could rent it out, and it came to light that neo-Nazis or other horrible people were using it, there would probably be protests. People would gather outside, or forcibly enter the building to disrupt it, or make my life difficult. While you can argue that this is mob rule, this is how society functions. If you're doing something a lot of people find reprehensible, they're going to let you know about it, and they're going to encourage others to join them.
> These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else.
That might seem to be the case at first glance.
[0], 6.3:
>By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior (as measured via our hate lexicons).
[0], 6.6:
> Recent work has shown that some banned subreddit users migrated to other social media sites like Voat, Snapzu, and Empeopled.
However, the numbers were smaller than expected:
[1], 7:
> Despite the hysteria concerning a mass exodus from Reddit, our behavior trend analysis shows that no such exodus occurred, though a small user migration was apparent.
Furthermore, of the sites listed, the one that was most notorious for free speech absolutism (Voat) was shut down due to lack of funding. The others appear to all be up, albeit Empeopled is apparently being rebuilt on the blockchain - I'm sure that will go well.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3134666
[1] https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14750/1459...
Facebook has billions of users. Kiwi farms, presumably, has several orders of magnitude less.
User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
Which best parts are you referring to?
One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
The comments posted on HN are not moderated prior to appearing in a thread. Keep in mind that the bar that has been set here is that an account's second post (the first being made a long time ago, and the account since sitting idle) contained a bomb threat that users reported and mods reviewed before it was taken down within 20 minutes.
Go ahead and try it. Make a new account on HN and do the same. If said comment lasts more than 20 minutes, HN would fall afoul of this new unofficial guideline.
HN ostensibly exist for discussion about tech and that’s reflected by the vast majority of the content, a significant portion of content of KF is unsavory or worse.
If you set the bar low enough, it doesn't matter what the platform's content is oriented towards, and while HackerNews may not be in the firing line right now, who's to say that it will forever remain off the radar? If we are fine setting the bar towards a platform being responsible for all user generated content in real-time, just know that this puts niche communities like HN at-risk.
I don’t buy the slippery slope argument.
Racism and calls for violence were never allowed on t_d and were removed on report / were downvoted heavily. T_d was allowed to persist for as long as it did precisely because it didn't violate any site rules, even though the reddit leadership really hated it.
KF: None of this is true.
My understanding is that KF has had this problem for years and has directly (as in, named specifically by victims) been involved with several suicides due to massive online and real-life harassment campaigns.
That is what you are arguing for. The GP said the best parts of the internet are at stake and you dismissed that off-hand by implying that the communities you participate in can either exceed the timeliness of KF's moderation, or less charitibly, there are no parts of the internet worth saving.
Dang runs a tight ship, but make no mistake that Dang and team relies just as much on user reports as other sites do. And it is impossible to moderate new users / posts within minutes of creation.
On KF, harassment in meatspace was not only against the rules (threads removed, perpetrators banned), but against the site culture. Instigators were called out and made fun of. Doxing and making mean threads about people is certainly distasteful, but until legislation catches up, this activity is unfortunately not illegal and not isolated to KF.
Your understand of KF is either biased by people with a vested stake in taking down KF, or mis-informed. Others in these threads have gone through KF's "side of the story", which makes the entire situation complicated and not a clear black-and-white case.
From what I understand, there has only been one alleged suicide tied to KF. I use the word alleged because said suicide has not to date been confirmed by authorities (Japanese or American), and the supposed victim has gone radio silent in the past. If a platform (even a supposed hateful one), can only be tied to a single suicide, how is that even comparable to the unimaginable number of suicides tied to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, etc.?
Make no mistake, I think KF is a vile place and don't support them in the least... but we must be cognisant of what exactly is at stake if we set impossible bars for moderation.
We also do not know exactly what incident in particular caused CloudFlare to about-face walk back the policy they communicated just days before later blocking KF. We can only guess that it was related to the bomb threat made by a user that was immediately taken down (sub 20min), but was still weaponised by the crowd attempting to cancel CloudFlare over their inaction.
Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side).
But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments.
Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch.
And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question.
The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies.
So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website.
Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
By moderating early and often.
KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.
Are you suggesting that Cloudflare should drop sites that don't censor the word "retard"? How about "moron" or "stupid"?
There's a huge difference between insults and active shooters and it's strange to see them juxtaposed.
If a site is host to the culture that is normalizing genuine hate (and that does seem to be the case!) I say CF should absolutely drop them.
Like they say, can't tear down Rome in a day.
None of this is illegal. None of this warrants censorship. Twitter is not real. You can block traffic you don‘t like or log out. None of the above actively influences your life until you make the choice to let it.
Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after.
Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudfl...
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...
[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...
[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...
[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...
First sentence of the definition on Wikipedia. What do you believe retaliation means in this context? If your consequence is a rebuttal or criticism, I have said nothing. Otherwise you are just wrong.
Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.
This analogy is interesting because it also applies to Keffals.
Do you really think that doxxing and harassing schoolteachers is the same as doxxing someone who goads others into suicide?
So we've just gone mask off to "doxxing is good when we do it."
If you can understand the distinction above, you should be able to understand the difference with Taylor Lorenz vs Libs of Tiktok. Unless you're operating in bad faith or just trying to be a contrarian in which case, more power to you.
Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing? Because this doesn't pass the laugh test unless you're relying on the usual vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
Releasing who she is was fine.
If a Ku Klux clan member had a very popular anonymous YouTube channel making fun of black people and bragging about it on Tucker Carlson, is it journalism to investigate and share where they work and who they are?
The fact that you assumed I was talking about targeting conservatives just goes to show that they happen to be the ones rocking the boat with violent rhetoric, which occasionally gets backed up by actions.
This is just shifting the partisan question-begging to the notion of "bad actions/bad actors." Why not just embrace the "doxxing is good when we do it" point that I originally made?
Yes.
> vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
The arguments aren't vague when mass killers have mentioned right-wing talking heads in their manifestos and suicide notes. Maybe conservatives (people of all political affiliations actually) should watch what they say instead of crying when they face consequences for their speech, no?
EDIT: I can see some people may not like what I'm saying; but I actively help organize real marches in Texas for orgs like NAACP, AAIA, PPC, etc. We have a stable of lawyers (TCRP, SCSJ, ...); and, I can assure you this is how free speech works in reality.
Is there anything metaphysically inherit to the internet as free speech? That's up for debate. Would the early internet had been successful if this type had not been the ones to build it, I'm on the fence.
The early internet was full of university staff, large company staff and military. They were mostly professionals and colleagues, and weren't assholes part because you had to be pretty smart and well educated, part because they were watched by their organizations, and part because they had colleagues that could take them to account. If you were an ass, chances were great your victim would easily figure out who to complain to.
There was "censorship", it was just more implicit. The model just started to fail once things got big enough that this model of accountability no longer worked. Systems had to be grafted with various patches to survive the new chaos, such as email, or died off by being spammed and trolled into oblivion like Usenet.
The internet simultaneously amplifies speech (this is not new: the printing press did so even more); but, it also concentrates speech. I'm not sure anyone thought about what that latter part would mean.
Like you said, we saw commtech leapfrogging over soctech in the early days of the printing press. But soctech caught up and we got over it. The same exists today - I'm sure we'll develop new soctech to handle it, but I have a desire to hasten that development rather than give up and relying on crumbling/outdated soctech infra in the meantime.
Do you think you provided a reasonable and objective analysis of events and viewpoints? It doesn't seem so to me, an outsider who had never heard of keffals or kf
No, I provided a selection of examples from the two HN threads on the happenings to demonstrate the subjectivity of what people consider harassment.
In any case, even if harassment is purely subjective, isn't it in within anyone's personal purview to take personal action if they feel something is harassment?
We cannot simply accept "free speech" as a value without question: it has to serve an underlying purpose as a tool with which our values are enacted. The purpose of free speech is to serve the best interests of society against bad actors, i.e. governments, who would use censorship to centralize power. Defending hate speech and organized violence contradicts the underlying purpose of free speech as a value in the first place.
Free speech absolutists fail to see through the tool to the values beneath, to the detriment of society.
To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.
Naturally, they will vigorously reject claims that it's a hate site: it's in their interests to portray themselves as such, and hate groups are not known for placing a high value on the truth. It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence. We do not need a court's opinion to make this judgement, though I would welcome such an opinion nevertheless -- these people should be held accountable in a court of law.
As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values. In terms of values, I expect them (1) to have values compatible with peaceful society, and (2) to act in accordance with those values. Should they fail to do so, it reflects poorly on the people responsible for making those decisions.
I don't think it's obvious. It sounds possible, sure, but they vigorously deny it, and when it comes to actual, falsifiable claims, I don't think the evidence is terribly strong. (For instance, the alleged "Kiwi Farms death list" contains people who did not even have an active thread on the forum). When you make a serious claim like this, it does seem like some more evidence is in order than "everyone knows it".
> As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values.
Then where does the limit go? Do you, as a general rule, support large monopoly corporations having veto rights over all public speech?
Except... In reality, horrible people say horrible things on the Internet, all the time, and if we have the Police running around constantly trying to protect one odious group from another, then perhaps it's better to wait until one group substantively commits a prosecutable offense, then deal with them, then.
None of that happened. We went straight to mob justice. Again.
Oh, did the Twitter Jury return with a verdict already? I didn’t see Judge Musk tweet that the case had completed.
Imagine if private companies started acting like this. You’d suddenly find your power shut off because they read one of your tweets and decided that you’d committed a hate crime for complaining about the rising energy prices…
There is nothing even remotely related to criminal charges or the legal system involved in this case. The CEO of one company decided to censor a forum because he felt like it, without any due process, without even notifying the site.
Your generalization is false -- utilities such as electricity are regulated by the government and provide a life-critical service. No one has suggested that we should shut off the heat for alleged bigots in the middle of winter.
I can't take seriously the idea that corporations have any human rights at all. Corporations are distinctly non-human, so the idea that CloudFlare has "freedom of association" seems nonsensical. If I run a newspaper and print bold-faced lies, that's (rarely) illegal, but if you run false advertising that's not permitted.
I think this is a very large and unstated assumption. If you stick with it, where do you end up?
For example, landlords are private corporations and not utilities. Should they be free to kick out alleged bigots, too? Should their banks? If all the private corporations band together to decide to deny you service, rendering you homeless, unemployed, etc., in what meaningful sense do you enjoy free speech?
Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
Again, you're exaggerating to ridiculous extremes. No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless. Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on, though I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job. Certain industries are regulated, and those freedoms limited by this regulation, such as banks, to serve the interest of the public. But again, the essential freedoms are present by default, and important.
My specific argument is that large, monopoly providers (e.g. CloudFlare) should be regulated industries, because to do otherwise would undermine the authority of the government.
> Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
This is more common than you'd think. In Italy, there was a case where a (registered, legal) quasi-fascist party sued Facebook for being banned - and won. Facebook got a court order to reinstate their access. The reason for this was simply that the Italians had decided that they should be allowed to have a platform, and so Facebook wasn't in a position to say otherwise.
> I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people.
Agreed.
> No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless.
I'm not sure. The common line of reasoning that I hear goes something like this: "While the government can't shut them down (owing to legal technicalities), they still should be, and so anything that is done to them is ipso facto morally justified.". Grant that this may be a strawman, but it doesn't seem far off from the paradox of tolerance, under which depriving them of things more precious than their homes would seem justified.
> Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Where does the limit go?
Firstly, if private corporations can deny people the (de-facto) ability to spread their views, why couldn't they also deny them of their (de-facto) ability to, say, eat? The basic issue at play doesn't seem to be that speech rights are ontologically different from other rights, just that private corporations are not bound by these rights.
On the contrary, denying them of both would obviously be more efficient at preventing "bad" speech - if people had their bank accounts closed as soon as their phone heard them saying a racial slur, this would trivially result in people saying less racial slurs.
Secondly, if people are deprived of all their abilities to, say, host websites, then by what metric do they still enjoy free speech? If I'm running a newspaper, and all the printing presses decide to stop doing business with me, then how am I to get anything published? Doesn't this have the direct and obvious result of moving power over from the (democratic) government to corporations?
> Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job.
This is a very interesting point. But what do you mean by people?
Do you mean the employees? That's fair, but, though I hate to belabor the point, it's not really the employees on the ground making this kind of decision. Maybe we should have more workplace democracy, but the way it empirically works in practice is that the guys at the top tells them what they have to do, and then they do it.
But if you mean the owners, then I will have to most vehemently disagree. "Property rights should be unlimited" is not a natural corollary of freedom of association, and a tiny clique of property-owners deciding who gets to speak is not a desirable social result.
You work PR for Cloudflare, right?
I do not work for CloudFlare.
DDoS-Guard and VanwaTech are just specialist providers that offer hosting to websites that very few companies would willing to work with.
It's not an oligopoly either.
Cloudflare being a monopoly, or DDoS protection market being an oligopoly is absolute bullshit.
>It's not like you could start up your own.
You can. Vanwatech you just mentioned was run by a little kid who was bundling testcookie-as-a-service with filtering services from a bunch of other small providers like BuyVM.
You can get something like this started for much less than $1k/mo.
>Who else is big within the DDoS protection market?
Just off the top of my head: OVH, Voxility, Level3, Akamai, Neustar, Path.net, Stackpath, Hyperfilter, Javapipe, Sharktech, Blazingfast...
Landlords can do this in the US almost anywhere.
Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
This is goalpost-shifting. Kiwifarms does moderate threats and such. It does not moderate mere "hateful and harassing content" (whatever that means, I assume a lot of "harassing" content does overlap with illegality), but if the clear no-no actions are swatting and such then clearly KF actively tries to prevent that.
I fear that the implicit argument here is that in order for these efforts to be treated as "good faith", then forum owners need to not only remove clear legal threats but all sorts of speech (particularly "hate speech") that can be stochastically linked with the generation of those threats. That having sufficient moderation entails that moderators address not only actual threats but in removing a wide range of speech.
Swatting is not organized on KF. It's illegal, any planning of such an attack would be deleted and the users banned, and if necessary their details would be shared US law enforcement. It's not only against the rules, it's against the site culture. You're not meant to go out and do stupid offsite or IRL shit (gayops). People who do (or suggest it) are mocked and shunned. KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them, not proactively harassing them.
Someone swatted a congresswoman; in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username. But there is no evidence of any planning on the site itself, and anyone who did so would be incredibly stupid given the admin has repeatedly warned that doing so would result in contacting law enforcement with the details of the perpetrator. Given that a great many people want the site gone, it seems likely this was a low-effort frame job.
Like ... swatting is easy. Saying you're someone you're not is easy. Blaming it on someone you don't like is easy. You just have to call 911 and say a bunch of unhinged bullshit. Anyone, anywhere, can do it.
Other claims like "KF bullies people to suicide": there is a point-by-point rebuttal to this at the top of the Keffals thread. I'd link to it, but the site is yet again down ...
EDIT: here it is:
>1. Near / Byuu
>Byuu had a 13 page inactive thread on the forum at the time he e-mailed Null offering him money in exchange for deleting his thread. He told Null if he does not accept this offer he would commit suicide, this is extortion. Null told him he can not accept money in exchange for deleting threads and he will not be extorted. The next day a twitter user claiming to be Byuu's co-worker says that Byuu went through with the suicide. His only proof was that he claimed to have called the Japanese police and they confirmed it to him, something that the police would never do since he is not a relative of Byuu. He also posted a picture of an urn that supposedly had Byuus ashes in them as "evidence" of his death. The US government puts out a report every 6 months that includes all American citizen that have died abroad. Byuu's death was never on this list. No American citizens have died overseas within the time-frame that Byuu's death supposedly happened. The japanese government is meticulous when it comes to bureaucracy so this is unlikely to be an oversight. Byuu being dead is extremely unlikely. Something Kiwifarms users have pointed out is that Byuu has gotten in legal trouble with the Japanese police because his emulators broke their copyright law, something that is a very serious offense in Japan.
>2. Chloe Sagal
>Sagal's thread had been inactive for 8 months before his death. Sagal suffered from BPD and extreme mental health issues. He antagonized his room-mates to the point where they kicked him out and he became homeless. He started a GoFundMe to get help from the trans community to get back on his feet, nobody donated to this GoFundMe due to how unpopular he was in the community. Before Sagal set himself on fire in a public park he held a long speech about mental health and homelessness amongst trans people and how difficult it was for him to get help for his situation and how he was abandoned by his own community. He never mentioned Kiwifarms.
>3. Julie Terryberry
>Julie was a mentally ill young woman in a relationship with a man 10 years older than her that started when she was 17 and he was 27. She came from a broken home and extreme poverty. Her boyfriend was abusive and regularly beat and cut her. Kiwifarms repeatedly tried to get her help to escape the abusive situation she was in. Her boyfriend regularly threaded to leave her and she told him in return she would kill herself if he did. He left her and she killed herself. The only person who has ever blamed Kiwifarms for this death was the abusive boyfriend who has an account on the s...
Assuming this is how it happened – you'll have to excuse me for not trusting MTG on her word considering she has demonstrated to have only a passing familiarity with reality in the past – it strikes me as a ridiculous thing to do by an actual KF member, and certainly isn't the kind of action from someone with the best interest of the site in mind.
I read up on the spat that lead to CF's ban a bit, and Keffals claimed to be responsible for the site's owners mom to lose her job, in spite of not being involved in her son's activities at all. Seems pretty mean-spirited, to say the least, and among other things evidence of a "the goal justify the means"-kind of mentality that I'm not a huge fan of.
No one is looking good here; KiwiFarms doesn't have a good look, but this Keffals person also doesn't come off well. She seems like an unpleasant person and while she is right to complain about KF IMHO, that doesn't mean she's the "the good guy" (or gal) in this story, or that everything she says can be trusted at face value.
You don't know the half of it:
https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/keffals-clara-sorrenti-lucas-jo...
Streisand affect?
My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
> not proactively harassing them.
That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
it's like one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I am bringing accountability, you are a journalist, he is a bully.
>That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
this is self-evidently ridiculous. it would justify any kind and degree of censorship anything of remotely controversial, and there's no way to disprove the accusation. someone, somewhere, becomes "radicalized" and commit some crime, and months ago you said something vaguely related to it: that means you're a "stochastic terrorist". it's an absurd thought-terminating cliche.
and note that this is never applied with any kind of consistency or good faith, and never to people comfortably inside the Overton window even when they do objectively evil shit. e.g. will the neocon pundits who lied for months about Iraqi WMDs ever be prosecuted as "stochastic terrorists" because they made it more likely that the US went overboard and launched an illegal war? will BLM organizers get done for "stochastic terrorism" because their rhetoric made race riots more likely?
"stochastic terrorism" is just a fancier and more sinister way of saying "stirring up trouble", a catchall excuse/euphemism for authority to clamp down on speech they don't like.
Journalism is a profession with backing organizations and an ethical code. Random idiots posting about transwomen they don't like isn't that.
there is more diligence and fact-checking on KF than in many "professional" news organizations.
* He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though.
* He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published.
* There's been no independent confirmation of his death otherwise
* The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time.
That doesn't mean the death is impossible.
The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth!
Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.
Guilty until proven innocent. And naturally we’ll take away your freedom of speech since your guilty, and also generally disregard anything you have to say to defend yourself, we don’t listen to someone guilty of a crime.
The underlying issue here seems like a really complicated and socially tricky one - how should someone respond to a demand of the form "remove evidence of my past online activity or else I'll kill myself". It's probably not specific to KF. Theoretically archive.org could face the exact same situation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome. This false dichotomy allows them to cling to their ideology.
I don't know why you've decided that we don't.
in my city a school was closed entirely due to administrators failure to act on reported abuse
You'd have to ban mainstream news outlets for the exact same reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Marquan_M.
They are categorically different when it comes to the practical question of law regarding how we can come up with a system that doesn't pose undue unintended risks to free expression.
In arguing the latter, free speech purists are often incapable of communicating an understanding of the former.
The same is not true for anything internet. When I was growing up as a teen the internet was just about to grow into the first e-commerce bubble around y2k. Not linking your real identity to online accounts was common sense and thought to people everywhere.
People seem to have forgotten this. The internet is not a real place. You enable yourself to be cyberbullied by sharing your identity. It can be entirely avoided, easily.
How do I do it? By not giving out any personal information. It really is that simple.
Are you sure that you actually want a world where mens rea plays no role in criminal determination? You're not just making a free speech critique here.
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
"With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion"
At this scale, for corporations, total value to society is part of the calculus society does. And KF has no value to demonstrate to offset the harm.
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.
I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.
If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.
Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P
I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.
I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.
Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.
Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.
In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.
Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.
Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.
The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).
Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.
You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.
Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.
Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.
That's about it.
Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.
I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.
Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.
Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.
Yes please! Pretty please with a kiwi on top?
Whether or not you're trying to, you are.
Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.
The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?
It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.
> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes
So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?
Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.
> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.
If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.
Also, it is not a small percentage of users. The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.
You're confusing proximate reason with main reason. The incitement was the proximate reason, and the harassment formed the backdrop context that gives meaning to that proximate reason. Please don't tell me you expect them to spell out the basic context that is staring you in the face. You don't have the mind of a child. You very well know that if the identical bomb threat was posted on a Justin Bieber fan club forum, Cloudfare would not be disabling anything. And you know this because you implicitly understand that context is an actual thing. Because a literal bomb threat was issued after that previous post. I'll repeat again. There is such a thing as a metaphorical dam that breaks after sufficient pressure. You don't go "A-ha! That was just one extra drop of water! I wonder why the dam broke?" No, this is beyond childish.Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet, then mass censorship is not only possible but inevitable. Anyone can throw away a burner account making a terroristic threat on any number of websites. The fact that these threats will only be taken seriously when they confirm the narratives of those in power is a major problem. Cloudflare was right to point to due process being the mechanism to prevent this sort of biased treatment, but then immediately opened up a giant loophole that allows for people to avoid it!
It's not. The speaker also must (in general) have a history of tolerance of / implicit support of / explicit support of / creation of vile content, and (history suggests) the corporation making the call to pull the plug has to be feeling the pressure to either act or to be seen as also implicitly supporting such vile content, which will have financial ramifications down the road as they're seen as "Those KiwiFarms guys" and people of their own free will choose to do business with Instart instead.
The laws that force association in a corporate setting are extremely narrowly-tailored (at least in the US), and "harassers" isn't a protected class. For everything else, there's the First Amendment... The one that guarantees freedom of association. And the Internet is, at the end of the day, actually made of corporations and institutions that voluntarily associate with each other... Or don't.
This is reminiscent of dealing with someone who thought we needed to close mosques after 9/11.
Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.
Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.
Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.
Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.
But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.
Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.
The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.
Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.
Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.
Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.
You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.
The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.
Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640
> Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet
Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.
> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".
(1) Bullying and cyberbullying can both occur without direct interaction. If you're negatively gossiping about someone in the real world and the target is within earshot, that's bullying. If you bully someone enough to the point they kill themselves, that's morally equivalent to murder, even though our legal system hasn't yet caught up to this reality. What KF was doing was analogous.
(2) The legal boilerplate they put up to shield themselves from liability is irrelevant. It's not about their mere words, it's about the inevitable causal consequence of their policies and content that they tolerate and foster on their platform.
> inevitable casual consequence
What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.
That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.
KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.
The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.
Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?
I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?
You can criticize someone's ideas all you want, but dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity in the way that KF did is not that. It is cyberbullying and it's lethal and the people involved should be fined or locked up in prison for engaging in behavior that had a non-trivial probability of causing another person's suicide.
I would say the same about people dogpiling someone online about their physical appearance or ethnicity. It should be moderated out of existence, and if that doesn't work it should be illegal.
If you throw bricks off a building, I similarly want you locked up for the same reason. You probably won't kill someone, but the causal connection is such and the probability is sufficiently high that we lock people like you up, because you're a menace and direct threat to your fellow humans.
Of course, I'd want the punishment for throwing the brick to be larger, I am not throwing proportionality out the window.
Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.
The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.
Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.
With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)
Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.
Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.
And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.
Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.
This should disturb any right thinking person.
Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.
In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
They clearly want to keep this content up.
People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.
If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.
The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.
Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.
Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.
Because in this case, accountable really means it.
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...
The post directly addressed this matter.
Don't be an apologist for these guys
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.
He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.
With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.
Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.
Come on. Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech and no company in their right mind should support that
stop using this dumb analogy. it was invented to justify prosecuting people for speaking out against the draft, and it was later denounced by the very person who coined it.
in this case it's more like: a random person who never went to the theatre before shouted fire in the theatre, the person was summarily booted from the premises and banned by the theatre staff. then later on the police come by and shut down the theatre because they hosted fire-shouters.
In their market position, Cloudflare has the power of a small government. In American capitalist society in particular, there’s increasingly no daylight between large corporations and the government. If the big companies say you can’t speak, what good is the right?
What Cloudflare appears to have done is cave to a Twitter mob in violation of their own stated principles and common sense. This has irreparably harmed not only Cloudflare’s reputation, but the prospects for free and open speech on the Internet.
But free speech means being able to insult and make fun of anyone, where it's accepted, of course. (I'm only talking about speech here, I'm not talking about bomb threats or any intolerant "action". These should have immediate and extreme consequences. )
I am against racism or making fun of someone's gender, but I completely support their right to free speech. Those for whom free speech is conditional, including many "progressive thinkers", I would rather not associate with.
The US specifically has a panoply of exceptions to free speech law, some modern (EDIT: not hate speech, but yes creation of a hostile work environment via rhetoric, divulging classified information, the extraordinary legal injunction of prior restraint of speech if the speech can cause injury and its legality will be resolved in an imminent legal case) and some dating back to the founding of the nation (sedition, treason, espionage).
The interpretation of the First Amendment protection is extremely broad (as it should be) but not unlimited.
True threats and a specific form of incitement are NOT protected. Section 230 offers a site protection from some of the liability (otherwise Twitter would have been shut down years ago). But a person posting unprotected speech is fully liable.
Actually, shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater IS explicitly free speech in America, and in fact, the idea that it's not is a layman's mistake (or a wives tale if you prefer) that is corrected in basically freshman legal classes.
In modern legal discussion, the idea of "fire in a theater!" is basically an immediate identifier that you are not educated in this part of the law at all and your opinion is low quality.
Not trying to insult you here, I too have used this very analogy on the internet in the past, just laying out what exactly others see when they see what you wrote.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want their company to be used to kill anyone. Even if they are wrong that there is an "emergency", it seems likely they believe that there is one. Isn't a more plausible explanation that they truly believe free speech is important, but that it's not the only deciding factor?
Easy: for-profit organizations do not have conscience, in principle.
What they tried at first, which is very "90s internet", is to become a bit of a troll yourself:
"We are deeply committed to the principles of free speech and will never deny a customer service to our critical infrastructure based on the content of their messages. You are banned. Now, go away, lolcow."
Reddit did something similar -- not with the /r/thefappening, but later on with /r/the_donald. Recall when /u/spez randomly edited comments left by contributors there, sending a clear message "we have no rules, and we will break you if we feel like it". The public apology ( https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/ ) conveys the subtext that it will happen again, there are no firm rules, and you are not welcome here.
I dunno quite what the plan is here going forward. weev and null are kind of an amazing force for chaos and if you can get them defensive and off kilter, that's certainly interesting.
Overall though I have found kiwifarms a helpful resource for understanding online harassment. I appreciate that members do their coordination in the open; by reading forum activity you can understanding roughly where the next massacre will happen. The community targets lulz as weakness and many of their most persistent attackers have gotten sucked in and doxxed themselves, notably in the Chris-Chan maelstrom.
The community has successfully killed people and the fact that they have a centralized repository with documentation will be helpful for the next Michelle Carter style prosecution.
What? Citation needed. Has there been a single massacre committed by any of its members?
Ironically, it's SomethingAwful that is credited* with rousing the press attention required for Reddit to rescind its free speech ideal (making SA chaotically the progenitor of both 4chan and r/ShitRedditSays). There too was suspicion of raiding with questionable activity from those who wanted the ban.
*I'm not sure; take anything about this internet drama with ample salt. Some primary sources are the graph of pages reachable from the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
About this, however:
> We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. (from Reddit's statement, https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_cha...)
yea...
As for generalization, a 2012 writeup on Reddit's situation cites LiveJournal's incident in 2007 and further LambdaMOO's, from 1992: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997
If I wanted to understand this world further I'd probably call Drew Curtis. Of all the people in this space he seems to be the most levelheaded and usually seems to get what's really going on.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
Yep. KF is their harassment HQ where they share information about individuals they don't approve of. It's creepy.
The bus has sailed on that one though.
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Seems to me that Transwomen just took the only scrutiny contrary to their own agenda temporarily off the net, putting one of the most technically competent hosting providers on the list of people who won't associate with them (people acting in opposition to Transwomen).
No comment on the hating on black people, as I learned long ago, platforms are not users of platforms, and horrible people can be found everywhere.
Despite all of this horribleness that apparently goes on with KiwiFarms, it still seems Transwomen is able to go on doing whatever it is it does.
Strictly speaking, your yardstick for empowerment measurement has a rather funny operating principle, as intuitively speaking, I'd expect the opposite result.
My comment about transwomen being disempowered is in the broader social sphere, where trans people in general are under social and legislative threat against their access to basic decency, public visibility, and medical care.
Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_punishment
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
[edit]
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
This is a modern-day equivalent of lynch mobs that has nothing to do with reason, good intentions or due process.
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...
However these websites are also blatantly anti-semitic and there is a lot of Holocaust denial going on. Russia has laws against both anti-Jewish hate speech and Holocaust denial.
It will be interesting to witness what happens when the Western far-right collides with their Russian buddy's laws against anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
The site literally displays taglines like “obviously Hitler had a problem with Jewish people.”
I get why this site is so infamous.
Eh, a few users using naughty words on the internet doesn't really say much about what a site "is all about". Unless you're equating "naughty words" with "horrible person" and extrapolate a narrative about what such a person could possibly post. Which is a pretty Twitter-level view of the world..
I love how easy it is to spot you guys. You can't help yourselves. You wish you were normal.
> This seems to be based off one of two things (lists two cases)
But it's just guesswork, we don't know if and what cf saw and what was reported to any law enforcement.
Random possible alternative: Cloudflare got a considerable increase in their "kf complaints" pile and because of the outside pressure legal actually looked at them for the first time and said "we can't take this risk". There's just so many ways this could've played out, null's "it wasn't even us, promise" is just meaningless.
Neither kf nor cf is great at being truthful and open at the moment. We can wait for the arrests or court documents if any will happen.
(2) : https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566303971911909376
(3) : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/599a356e-2bc1-11ed-a4d5-a...
Keffals did something extremely brave in using herself as a live-fire target. She knew she was being doxxed, so she went to Northern Ireland and mentioned looking for a particular kind of restaurant. This inevitably resulted in bomb threats and fake calls to the police.
Bomb threats are taken seriously in Northern Ireland. It seems that this time the threat was given enough credibility for Cloudflare to take it seriously and cut them off.
(As a Brit, there's a deep irony in the idea of someone fleeing to Northern Ireland for their personal safety!)
The reason originally given was that they "misgendered" them. The chief released a statement saying that he had personally reviewed all recordings and found no evidence of this. Also made a statement that they knocked on Keffals door, and took them into custody without any issues, in direct contradiction to Keffals statement about waking up with an assault rifle in their face from the 'SWATing'.
Worth noting that as part of the police detaining them, they also confiscated their phone and hard-drives. Which might explain why they are 'fleeing' all over the world except to Canada..
It is approaching something like a religious taboo or literal OCD, as if they would be irrevocably damned by reading some bad words. While at the same time pathologizing everything outside their own narrow spectrum of permitted opinions as some kind of "-phobia".
Really everything about this group is contradictory:
* self-professed socialists / communists / anarchists who eagerly support megacorporations
* gloat about how they've basically won already, while justifying their actions with being existentially threatened (didn't Umberto Eco write something about that once?)
* academic background and vocabulary, try to shut down any nuanced discussion
* ironic statements like #killallmen are fine, while even mild criticism of them is proof of genocidal intent
Yes, there are vile comments on KF, and a large number of users do seem to be edgy trolls (the bad kind, i.e. those who go after targets other than cis/white/hetero men, see last point above), if not outright neo-Nazis. That does not mean that the factual information they post isn't accurate.
Deplatforming will radicalize them further, while hiding the problem from view. Conspiracy theory: perhaps that is the actual intent of such actions, to destabilize democracy and prepare it for Russian / Chinese / Western authoritarian takeover?
[1] https://xkcd.com/978
Northern Ireland is probably one of the safest places in the entire UK to be if there's a threat to your life.
It's also, incidentally, the only place in the UK or Ireland where concealed carry permits are available.
I don't think your comment is constructive or substantive.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/near-byuu-suicide
Furthermore the KYM page is convenient for other uninformed readers, but it is obviously incomplete and not a primary source of information for me because I watched this entire episode unfold in real time.
This situation is highly nuanced. However, the KYM page gives fair treatment to the issue.
I can see now how the "both sides to every story" implied KF had a moral leg to stand on. Not my intention. I think people almost intentionally avoid visiting the KF site out of some sort of fear, but people shouldn't be afraid to see what's going on over there.
I know some will say that is too much work for some internet drama, and while that's a valid opinion, any further opinion on the issue itself by those people would be entirely invalid due to lack of proper research.
And honestly, what's the strongest rebuttal to the claim that the suicide was faked? I guess I've seen claims that some journalists independently confirmed it, but I don't know where these stories are nor what sort of confirmation they received? It shouldn't be particularly unthinkable to consider that Near just was going to abandon their current pseudonymous internet presence and wanted to damage Kiwifarms as a free add-on to this.
Given that a friend of mine had to jump thru many hoops to report to CF a website that was very clearly and obviously abusive with hard evidence for it. It was a blackmail type website that was preying on women in the cam industry.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_lizthegrey-twitch-activ...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_timesupcloudflare-pt-3-...
And finally:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_blocking-kiwifarms-acti...