If they have the time and are willing to put in the effort, they can create a myriad of Tor onion servers that are just nginx proxy-cache nodes that forward over a VPN mesh to their application servers. The end-users would have to be aware of all the onion cache servers somehow or their application would have to load balance people across them and keep some unannounced and cycle some in and out.
I know what you mean and somewhat agree. I don't know much about KF but I assume they probably have subforums and groups of people within those forums. What I have seen people do in the past is set up what I described above and then share half of the random cache nodes with the general public and then share specific nodes with sub-groups of people keeping the site accessible to the regular or trusted users. The public cache nodes can have stricter limits on how many requests are forwarded over the VPN. Perhaps this is not compatible with KF's model. I've never seen their site aside from the CF error message.
Tor services get DDOS’d all of the time - you generally have a single host somewhere that is the first hop in relaying traffic back to the service and that is easy to overwhelm. There is a hackish way to have several of those hosts but I think it tops out at a dozen. You lose a lot of audience going to Tor so might not be worth it.
No, that's not true. The first hop (last from the service's PoV) is basically randomly selected. Unless you restrict it, there will be thousands of possible IPs.
Yes but only one rendezvous point unless you do the hackish stuff. There are a lot of options for scaling the hidden service itself, but the rendezvous point is out of your control (and should be) so that is where the real constraint is.
32 hosts officially but there are ways of protecting onion websites (caching reverse proxies with some sort of challenge) that protects drug market places that have governments trying to DDOS them offline. Not to mention that Tor has been working on anti-DDOS (From what I remember that will be based on proof-of-work) which will massively increase the cost of DDOS attacks against hidden services.
I'd be interested to know if the users of the site would be brave and willing enough to pin Kiwi Farm's content to their attributable/personally owned devices...
Surely some of the appeal or enablers for the behaviour on there is that someone else is wearing the legal risk of storing it all
There are pinning services, that do the pinning for a fee.
But Those can also be DDosed I suppose. Can have multiple pinners of course but, but I doubt that makes a difference in the longer term.
I think this is the big flaw of systems like IPFS and BitTorrent. “If you pin it, it will stay online” is all well and good, but if it's a legal risk to keep the content online, you're putting a target on your head. Now, you could make everything encrypted and anonymised, but now you're Freenet (is that what it's called?) and the risk you're hosting e.g. CSAM means nobody wants anything to do with you no matter what you have pinned.
I theory yes, but ipfs covers the distribution and publishing, not the editing. There would still have to be some stateful service for account management, posting, etc. that would suffer the same issues as the current service.
On top of that, access at two biggest gateways would likely be filtered since one is a hobbyist service and the other is cloudflare, so everyone would have to run their own nodes.
So in practice - no. Only an archive of the current state.
I wonder whether "botnet hosting" will become a thing over time. I mean one could buy "malware installs", so theoretically one could buy "decentralized storage app installs" as well, something like Sia/Filecoin/Storj.
> Hosting providers MUST be forced to provide a platform for everyone and anyone against the will of the provider. It SHALL NOT matter how many people their customers brag about driving to suicide. Nor should the hosting provider take into consideration harassment campaigns orchestrated by users of their platforms.
As people say in the free speech issue: if it's illegal - if you've got actual evidence - report it to the police. Plenty of KF users have been in contact with the police .. making bogus reports.
In a statement to The Sunday Times, the PSNI said they received a report of an incident last Tuesday.
“Officers attended the scene but found nothing ongoing on their arrival. Inquiries are continuing surrounding the incident which is being treated as hate-motivated at this time,” a PSNI spokesperson added.
Mhmm... They have nothing to do with that behaviour. wink They're just joking about the self harm and suicide. wink The swatting of the discussed people is a completely unrelated coincidence. winkwink
It's a terrible art people master. It's like the worst hateful accounts on twitter which are extremely clean - you couldn't report a single tweet, yet we know exactly what they mean. Of course this account for explicitly-super-straight is not against anyone. Of course all this public information collected on specific people and their connections is for fun and not an invitation to harass them.
>The swatting of the discussed people is a completely unrelated coincidence.
yeah, because it's so difficult to just SWAT someone and claim you're someone you're not? The MTG swatter literally used text-to-speech and said roughly "I'm from Kiwifarms and this is my username: ...". why would anyone go to the trouble of disguising their voice only to tell police who they really are? Null made it very clear that he cooperates with law enforcement if illegal content is put on the site. if it was actually that user, he'd be in a jail cell by now. there was no discussion of anything like this in any thread prior to the attack. it's so obviously a hoax.
why do people have such a fucking blind spot about this? it's the 911 equivalent of a phishing email with a forged sender address. it's trivial.
You're choosing one obvious hoax and ignoring piles of reports, from a large number of people, going back years with recurring issues that coincide with kf postings. It's not even worth linking - they're trivial to find on twitter for anyone interested.
If they are trivial to find then why aren't you linking them? This thread is the first I'm even hearing of kiwi-farms, but skimming through I'm only seeing direct evidence in favor of them and only vague unsourced allegations against them. I hope you understand that even implying a twitter mob is involved isn't doing you any favors here.
> If they are trivial to find then why aren't you linking them?
Because either you care and can spend 5min to find many personal threads on how this impacted people's lives, or not. I'm not here to summarise this for you. This is not random internet drama for entertainment.
Well your passive aggression has me even less convinced in your honesty, this isn't my first rodeo, I'm not gonna blindly trust random testimony without evidence. I genuinely fail to see how kiwi-farms is worse than Twitter or any other social media site for that matter.
You people have built up a whole fantasy about the KiwiFarms... And its obvious when someone SWATs a person like Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming theyre from the KiwiFarms, that it's a false flag. The events CloudFlare refernces that show the site was a danger were a post from 4chan pretending to be a KiwiFarms user, and a post made a user that had previously only posted once in 2020, and then got banned 14 minutes (with 7 reports) after making threatening posts in the keffals thread, plainly another false flag trying to make the site look bad while there is a smear campaign against it. People attack and lie about the KiwiFarms because it hosts embarrassing information about them.
>The evidence CloudFlare gave that the site was a danger were a post from 4chan pretending to be a KiwiFarms user, and a post made a user that had previously only posted once in 2022
Where did Cloudflare give this evidence? Are you the administrator of Kiwifarms? They certainly haven't shared this in public.
You're right, they actually gave no evidence, but if these are not the events they are referencing in their blog post (the things that the #DropKiwiFarms has been hyping up), then what is?
You're right, but people don't care about the truth. Personally I doubt that keffals is behind the attacks, since the site has been facing them for ages. A site like the KiwiFarms that compiles unsavory deeds is going to attract the ire of those same people who will do unsavory things to get that information hidden.
I'm not sure on all of your claims, and frankly I can't be bothered to get any more into this drama but I will say one thing:
I found it shocking that the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign does openly say they are making home-made drugs, and proudly say they will organise for children to take it without parental consent. I'm sure this must be illegal?
This is entirely ignored in all reporting of the Cloudflare situation. If I was a reporter and I saw this in my 5 minutes of research, I would very quickly find someone else to be the spokesperson of dropkiwifarms.
> I found it shocking that the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign does openly say they are making home-made drugs, and proudly say they will organise for children to take it without parental consent. I'm sure this must be illegal?
It is. She's distributing controlled substances/substances that require a prescription. Essentially she's practicing medicine without a license. This would be true even if she were helping adults.
Here's a former FBI Asst. Dir. asserting that they do [0] (archive link in case it's removed [1]). I'll grant you that the government can and has lied, but all of this seems a lot like one side full of tremendously shitty people saying they're not guilty, and the other side saying the opposite. In the absence of definitive proof, I'll go with character.
Why are you defending KF so hard? Even in the thread on the Cloudflare issue itself I saw the N-word, transphobic and antisemitic slurs, and calls to doxx the CEO... and that was just the first page.
yeah. it is funny. I defend it on the merits: Kiwifarms is a funny site and it deserves to exist. you're just pointing and sputtering, as if I'm saying something obviously preposterous, but I'm not.
the idea that a website ought to be completely erased from the internet just because people on it say mean things is a very new idea, and one that I haven't been convinced by.
I want content-neutral infrastructure.
KF are scum and much of what they do should be illegal, but I want those decisions made in a court of law where they can defend themselves, not by whoever got in the ear of the right tech CEO. Platforms aren't people and shouldn't have rights.
And yet the courts are inadequate about protecting small-scale, individual rights. KF does targeted harassment, not large-scale terrorism, so agencies don't have much incentive to dedicate a disproportionate amount of resources on taking them offline.
Forcing professors investing all their life into advancement of human civilization out of universities because they said a funny word? The should lose all their possessions, it's completely harmless and right, trust me!
Calling someone names and pointing out things that are glaring OPSEC mistakes? Immediately drop and do everything to attack them!
p.s.: it's very sad to see enthusiasts and prominent engineers like Marcan getting corrupted by the plague of our times.
Most of my outrage is aimed at censorship of left-wing and antiwar content. Much of which is already banned from most of reddit and deranked from google - I don't want to see the whole internet go down that road via DDoS protection, and fear KF, who I hate, was a first step and not a last one.
Tech giants started justifying their abuses through "nazis bad" and now pointing out US support for Azov gets your website hidden.
Freedom of association is enshrined in many constitutions and laws across the globe as a fundamental right. Why do you want to force people to associate with those they do not want to?
I am member of a badminton club, we have a code-of-conduct. It contains things like:
- Don't harass other players
- Don't harass or be an ass towards refs
- Don't litter it the gym, keep it tidy
- Don't take performance-enhancing drugs
- and a few other such rules.
Why do we have to ask a judge in a court of law to be able to stop associating with a team-mate that keeps shouting sexual expletives at referees, keeps littering in the locker rooms, and generally makes the situation unpleasant? Why can't we just use our first amendment (or equivalent elsewhere) rights and stop associating?
and if people think your code of conduct is too harshly enforced they can and will go elsewhere, there are thousands of badminton clubs in the world. Different strokes for different folks.
Trying to kick someone off the internet entirely is a completely different matter.
Nobody is kicking anybody off the internet here. Kiwi Farms are free to associate with anyone willing to associate with them, or host their own content. There are thousands of hosts. Different strokes for different folks. Why should anybody be forced to give up their free speech/association rights because you say so?
Two of the "lolcows" prominently featured on the front page are Ethan Ralph and Nick Fuentes. They're not nazis (they're antisocial morons), but anybody who would call the KiwiFarms a nazi site would call them nazis. The News's approach to Fuentes has been to pearlclutch and basically make him look cool to the young guys he recruits for his political cult. If anyone remembers all the embarrassing stuff that came out about him recently, guess where that information came from. Genuinely the KiwiFarms does a better job of keeping people from falling for fringe politics than the people who set out to do that. Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
Nick Fuentes is definitely a nazi, which is in no way incompatible with him being an antisocial moron. Just because KF mocks Fuentes doesn't mean they're the only or even a canonical source of embarrassing info about him. Also, anyone who studies extremism can tell you that every extremist movement is rife with infighting and petty interpersonal rivalries.
Kiwifarms was not a 'nazi' forum, it's so easy to tell who never actually lurked there or did enough due diligence to actually investigate for themselves what the site actually hosted lmfao
They host (or shield) a bunch of high-profile piracy sites (the largest repacker for example) and hosted Parler after it was kicked from AWS. I've never heard of anyone being suspended by DG. Great achievement, that surely wasn't easy.
Of course that’s always one criteria. But at it’s core it just comes down to certain customer relationships being deeply unprofitable and not worth continuing.
DDoS-Guard are in the strange position of being seen as a legitimate service within Russia, used by banks and telecoms and newspapers, but are almost exclusively used for illegal or unsavory purposes outside of Russia. They are well aware of what their global clientele are up to, but I assume they would rather avoid their domestic clients becoming too aware of it.
I don't have a strong opinion about them but i'd be surprised if they were really independent of the Russian state. Too much commercial autonomy can be a liability in some places; it goes to your head and next thing you know you're falling out of a window.
Strangely enough Russia is quite a transphobic country itself where people like Keffals are thrown into prison so I'm surprised they would take action against something they blame the West for
That’s more action than Twitter has taken against the Taliban accounts active on Twitter. They even issued a statement [0] about it, months after banning the President of the United States:
> Twitter gave the Taliban a green light to keep tweeting while noting the social media site would “continue to proactively enforce” its rules on the “glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam.”
It is quite surprising that they took action. I wonder if this will negatively affect DDoS-Guard's reputation as the first choice for hosting illegal content.
Something I'm curious about in this whole thing: who is DDoSing kiwifarms? Most people find their content reprehensible but does that usually translate into people DDoSing something?
Wouldn't surprise me. People used to DDoS to knock competitor IRC networks offline for laughs, never mind something people believe in.
It helps it's the easiest way to do damage to a website and you just can pay someone to do the tech part of the hack. A DDoS attack is as easy to buy as the web hosting you're attacking now, back in the day you had to set up the botnet yourself
Yes. Why do you think KF's enemies went after Cloudflare and not some other aspect of their operation - it's because they want to destroy the site totally and that means DDoSing it off the internet.
People pay for DDOS for the stupidest reasons, one of my favorite game servers have been under constant DDOS attack because they changed their discord icon in support of Ukraine.
In previous years, the admin noticed a repeated monthly pattern of DDOS attacks, and believed that it was due to the cycle of people getting welfare/disability and spending as much as they could each month on rent-a-DDOS services.
I’ve read some hilariously out-of-touch comments on this site, but this might take the cake. You know what else happens on a monthly basis? Normal paychecks.
Only some ivory tower conservative could believe people on welfare or disability are throwing money at tech nerd services to bring them down. What an incredible victim complex.
> I’ve read some hilariously out-of-touch comments on this site, but this might take the cake. You know what else happens on a monthly basis? Normal paychecks.
IIRC the context of that quote was that Kiwi Farms has/had several people constantly filing frivolous lawsuits against it who were literally on welfare/government support.
I thought the GP comment was wild, but "I just got my welfare check, time to hire a lawyer" is an even stranger take.
Suing people is unpleasant and expensive and tends to favor people with money who can afford to hire effective lawyers, very few of whom will work for so little that they can be afforded on welfare. If people on welfare are suing someone, it's probably because they actually have a grievance with them and feel legally wronged, regardless of whether their lawsuits are frivolous or not.
I don't think anyone on welfare is thinking, "the most enjoyable way for me to spend this money is to get involved in a legal process." If a lot of Kiwi Farms lawsuits come from people who are jobless and on disability, I think the more likely conclusion is that it might have something to do with who the site's common targets were.
> I thought the GP comment was wild, but "I just got my welfare check, time to hire a lawyer" is an even stranger take.
I don't have any links on hand, but from what I recall they were all Pro Se. My understanding is that many of them were discovered by KF in the first place because they were vexatious litigants.
One of the vexatious litigants had previously sued Taylor Swift and threatened to abuse her lawyer's daughter, resulting in a high-profile lawyer representing Kiwi Farms Pro Bono against him.
> That seems if anything to reinforce the idea that this is unrelated to welfare?
I don't recall claiming that it was because of welfare. I'm merely providing context to one of the earlier posts — a number of people on government assistance are constantly trying to take the site down, the admin notices a pattern with the DDoS attacks, and speculates it's because that aligns with when government assistance is paid out.
I am not saying that his speculation was true, but it makes significantly more sense if you understand why he may have come to the conclusion.
Are people on assistance not allowed to sue people?
The narrative is obviously "those idiot leftists on the dole don't have jobs and waste their time and money on this." The causal relationship is critical to the narrative.
> Are people on assistance not allowed to sue people?
Of course they are, which is why I never said or implied this.
I am referring to people who spend years filing frivolous lawsuits that are continuously dismissed for things like improper jurisdiction, failing to state a claim, or suing the wrong people, and ignore any judgement or advice provided by the judge. Hence why I referred to them as vexatious.
> The narrative is obviously "those idiot leftists on the dole don't have jobs and waste their time and money on this." The causal relationship is critical to the narrative.
I am fairly left-leaning and grew up on government assistance. There is no narrative beyond describing factual events.
I will try to link some relevant court cases when I get home.
To be fair just because you're on welfare doesn't mean there aren't issues you are concerned about enough to do extraordinary things about. Lowered expectations for the poor are another sort of negative generalization.
That's a fair criticism, thanks for pointing it out -- definitely wasn't my intention to say that people with lower incomes are never going to be involved in a lawsuit, just that it's probably not going to be a common thing that they're doing for fun.
Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it.
I've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone.
It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people.
Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media.
Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
I don't believe so. I think it was omitted because if it was published in the press (TV and newspapers) there would have been a public outcry of indecency.
Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people.
I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings.
Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments.
> How did you verify it was actually true?
The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group.
Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"?
If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact.
There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?).
If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
> I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
> If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic.
Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
> Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.
> But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
This is getting off topic but I disagree with this. Trump's comments and right wing news incited an insurrection. I think "fighting at the margins" is probably moot and really we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone. Isn't that how most policy and social phenomena are dealt with?
> we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone.
Can you cite an example of what you mean? There's nothing being espoused that affects "everyone" unless you're excluding all persons who don't meet your criteria for personhood. Opposed viewpoints are relative extremes to each other, so measuring by majorities is how this typically get addressed in society. Legislation isn't a benevolent, objective, or unbiased action.
KF is a fringe platform of marginal(ized) views. So was the Daily Stormr. Will no one rid us of these turbulent priests?[1] (It got some disagree-votes, but thanks for getting the point.)
I probably should have said broadly affects people* rather than "everyone".
For example, the lack of moderation on Facebook has probably been a factor in thousands or tens of thousands of suicides. Just from the fact there are a billion+ Facebook users and people are horrible to each other.
There's a case at the moment in the UK of a 14 year old girl who killed herself over abuse over social media (mainly Facebook).
Since I can't edit, here's a source for Moderates in US politics "(1) being a large proportion of the public, (2) having views that are not simply random or incoherent, and (3) appearing to be central to electoral change, as they are highly responsive to candidate ideology, voting against extreme candidates." Seems to support "the fight is in the margins" rather than change being organic, rational, or benevolent.
On social suicides, is moderation more or less a factor than the dehumanization caused by over-broad content policies on large social forums (ie- the attrition of personal communities like early tumblr and livejournal after being consumed by large companies who might try to balance the societal cost of some people dying against opex for moderation, for instance). It seems related to what happens to prisons and with zero tolerance in schools- the costs of litigation and liability driving perverse outcomes in populations due to intolerance of real difference or diversity.
It’s unlikely the GDPR applies to a US company. And in the US it’s hard to get “facts” removed (otherwise people could remove their bad credit scores by claiming it as PII against the credit bureaus themselves).
GDPR applies to any European citizen's data, anywhere in the world. It will apply to a US company too. The fines will be on worldwide revenue.
This is probably a bad example in this context though as the people being talked about on Kiwiforums are not "customers" of the Kiwifarms "company" so GDPR probably doesn't cover them.
GDPR doesn't mean you have to scrub someone from your database, it means you can only keep information if you have a legitimate need. I'm sure credit bureaus can come up with enough bureaucracy that there is a legitimate need.
Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.
Yes, I've looked at the site quite a few times over the past few years. Even if you can't find people explicitly organizing there, you do see their effects across the internet in the form of off-site harrassment campaigns, generally of internet personalities, that seemingly come out of nowhere.
> Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.
That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet.
Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it.
Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
> Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
They'd do that anyway.
Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.
The original claim was that it posed a direct actionable threat to someone's personal safety. This claim was not substantiated. Now you're shifting it to, "unflattering words are a form of violence."
But he’s right that this is happening. Just because it’s obscure and subtle doesn’t mean it’s wrong. You’re not an idiot, you know that the point of these forums is to generate effects in the world with plausible deniability, the exact kind of deniability you’re supporting here.
I doubt that's the point of these forums. Some people just like to get together with like-minded folk and bond over a shared experience, whether that's watching football or saying nasty things about trans activists.
The world would be a nicer place if these people preferred the former activity but that's neither here nor there.
You're using the "stochastic terrorism" argument, and what that does is create liability for anyone who might recklessly increase the probability of something bad happening (even if there's absolutely no clear causation). If "stochastic terrorism" were unprotected speech, then it would create immense chilling effects. People would be terrified to say anything controversial. Thank goodness it's not part of American law.
I don't think that's coherent. Twitter for example has been the host of many many harassment campaigns which are propped up by its algorithms, it also hosts videos of murder, decapitations and other gruesome crimes. There are also regular death threats, doxxings and hate speech on twitter which are tolerated.
Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations.
By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?
Do you believe that KiwiFarms is making a good faith effort to remove objectionable content to the same extent that mainstream social media platforms are? I think it's pretty clear that they're not, simply based on the prevalence of that content on KiwiFarms, and the relative lack of it elsewhere.
I don't think Twitter makes much of an effort; some of my reports on clear-cut cases like "shame if his face would be smashed in with a brick wink-emojiwink-emoji" have been rejected as they are, apparently, not promoting violence.
I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.
I've never been to kiwifarms, but I'll take your word that you find them morally reprehensible. Isn't it more morally reprehensible (and just counterproductive) to take away people's rights?
It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights.
If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.
No one has a right to use Cloudflare DDOS protection services. No one has a right to a twitter account. No one has a right to force companies to host their bigotry. This isn't how rights work.
There are hosts who don't ask for personal information and won't know they are hosting Kiwifarms if its a Tor hidden service if Josh wants to go that route.
Real principled stance there from their CEO - 3 days to totally flip-flop? I mean, if your stance is we will ban content we arbitrarily find bad then just state it as such. Put into your agreement terms precisely what is and isn’t allowed. Be consistent. This “conflicted” act makes them look weak and of questionable leadership.
Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.
My headcanon is that Price wanted to take a stand, but the legal team actually took a better look at the situation because of the pressure and had a long meeting, explaining to him why it's a really bad idea. I hope we learn what really happened in a few years.
Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.
Didn't he previously say he took down the nazi site because they were saying that the reason they weren't taken down was that he agreed with them? That provides the sort of decision making process.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a legal team would all of a sudden decide 3 days after they publically announce they wouldn't remove security services from a customer that one customer who has basically been the same for god only knows how long needs to have those services removed. I honestly, would be surprised if the original announcement hadn't already had input from legal. So if legal thought this customer was so bad, why wouldn't they have it done before they publically say they won't do it.
She left the company shortly thereafter...I assume when her viewpoints became known, probably couldn't keep her mouth shut after the "outrage" of not providing service to daily stormer.
It would be silly to say there are definitely no Nazis in a company above a certain size. It's easy to fire them as soon as you know about them, but a lot of shitheads know to fly under the radar, so you can't really proactively hunt them out.
Given she has stated in public that she is a 'troll' on twitter I don't think those twitter posts are evidence that she was a nazi. They seem consistent with her shitposting on twitter.
If you think screenshots of someone saying slurs in 2014 is evidence of someone being part of the daily stormer i'm afraid a lot more of the internet is a part of the daily stormer than you think.
The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
Nobody has ever suggested that Asshurt was a part of the daily stormer, she wasn't.
>The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
Pretty sure most smart people have already distanced themselves from the EFF at this point, so that's not very convincing.
EFF, despite getting repeatedly called out by several top experts, spent years pushing downright dangerous disinformation via their "secure messaging scorecard". Not exactly a trustworthy organisation.
On that same page you linked there are about as many people in favor as against, tptacek's word is not the law regardless of his competency, and it sure wasn't as uncontroversial as you make it out to be.
> Didn't he previously say he took down the nazi site because they were saying that the reason they weren't taken down was that he agreed with them?
And about that decision, he said this:
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
> Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
I wonder if he's actually so delusional to think that he's got the power to decide what goes on the internet, or if this is just something Cloudflare marketing is trying to push to make them seem like the only option anyone could possibly work with.
Isn’t the simplest read on that statement “there should be legislation that means nobody has this power”? Basically, something like “if it’s legal I’ll do it, but I don’t think it should be legal”.
This is kind of dubious as a basic ethical position (if you think it’s bad just don’t do it) but note that it’s not entirely ridiculous as if it’s legal, others can and will pressure you to do it. Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing, you can’t be coerced by an angry mob to do it.
If he doesn't think that Cloudflare should hold any responsibility for illegal or criminal activity using their services, then I welcome them being treated as a utility and subject to all of the regulation that that would entail.
If he doesn't think he should have the power he has, he should step away from it. It's not as though he's Claudius, an inadvertent emperor who believes in the Republic but is afraid of being murdered if he lets go of the reins. He's free to quit any time he likes and take this weight off his mind. If he has qualms about handing this power to anybody else, he shouldn't have accumulated this much power in the first place.
Truth is he likes the money, and the power. That's why he has it.
That CF would have made a judgment that a larger percentage of their customers would feel uncomfortable using a service that also appears to support sites like KF is hardly surprising though. And as a corporation they're well within their rights to decide on that basis to cut off relationships with clients that they see as bad for business.
Cloudflare/DDoS-Guard doesn't care about you. You don't do enough business. The DDOS protection company cares about the reactions of the abstract things called corporations and institutions. Corporate persons have different motives than human person do. I don't think it is controversial to say most corporations and institutions have no problem with this decision. That'd be despite what any informed IT dept. employee might believe about the situation.
Cloudflare is a public company. I can tell you from being in a position to know this at a small company, but the "vendor review / procurement process" that happens to acquire a new service is non-trivial and usually offers several checkpoints to make sure that you're only onboarding vendors that meet strict criteria. One of those criteria is "not being embroiled in an obviously bad PR scandal easily revealed by a basic Google search."
CloudFlare is public and that means that their shareholders have the final say, not the individual customers. If shareholders see that CloudFlare's revenue is declining or that key customers are leaving, and there's an obvious reason why that's happening, well, that's the answer to who has the most say.
The whole operational plan that @SleepingGiants had during the Trump administration was to systematically identify corporate links and associations, and to highlight them to PR and legal teams who knew how this worked. "Cancellation" works not because individuals are easily moved by emotional arguments. It works because most companies answer to shareholders, and most shareholders care about value and growth. The company has a fiduciary duty to drive value for shareholders. When those stars align, obvious reasons why value is being artificially capped don't become "hard decisions." They become easy ways to increase value.
There are very few companies that can successfully hold an ideology. When they do hold an ideology, that ideology is usually aligned with some market force. Apple advertises privacy as its ideology because it's seemingly aligned with shareholder value. The ideology becomes expensive or even net-negative commensurate with the value being driven.
Because you (and others like you) are probably not a substantial source of revenue to Cloudflare. Big companies who are the bulk of Cloudflare's sales (and whom they spend >1.5x on courting than they do on engineering) would rather not be hosted on the same infrastructure that powers hate groups. Not really as a moral thing, but in the same way that e.g. Volkswagen or Samsung or Allianz would rather not advertise on a child pornography website, they'd also rather not host on an infrastructure provider who provide services to a forum whose members try to drive people to commit suicide, make bomb threats, fake calls to counterterrorism hotlines and generally espouse _extreme_ right ideology.
I'm not sure that it was PR. It is quite popular to be consistent and defend anybody who isn't convicted of a crime. If you are choosing to get CDN / DDOS protection and are running any site that may not be the most popular do you want to go with the company that bends their knee when the internet comes calling?
> It is quite popular to be consistent and defend anybody who isn't convicted of a crime.
I don’t know how popular this is, or at least how popular it should be.
Conviction is based on the extremely high bar of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the standard for depriving a person of their liberty.
Society rightly does not operate at that standard. Conviction was never meant to be a proxy for whether you ought to do business with somebody.
Think about killers who “got off on a technicality,” where everyone knew they were guilty. Or open criminals who for whatever reason were unable to face a jury, like many mass shooters. It just doesn’t make sense to say “well the courts never formally convicted them so we have a duty to defend them.”
Sorry if this is long-winded. I am just alarmed by this trend of equating legal standards with social standards.
There's definite legal liability here. Kiwi Farms was organizing doxxing that was directly leading to real world harm. The heirs of the next victim would have a colorable claim against CF for knowingly enabling Kiwi farms to continue organizing doxxing campaigns. CF could probably prevail in court, at least in the US, but it's always better to avoid lawsuits if you can.
The problem is the site got named in a swatting attack on a GOP House member.
That ups the stakes a bit and probably made providing a DDOS service for kiwifarms problematic.
It got named because the alleged attacker called the police and said "it was me, Kiwi Farms user so-and-so." The user in question denied making this call and claimed they had been impersonated. This happened in the midst of the pressure campaign on Cloudflare, to a GOP House member known for jumping the gun who had no prior history with Kiwi Farms. If that's not extremely suspect I don't know what is.
Agreed it was just unrelated but it made news headlines then old history about keffals , them not helping the police with the Auckland shooter so they became "the baddies".
It simply made Cloudflare's position untenable - they are not piratebay but need customers.
What is hate speech? Was Charlie Hebdo hate speech? Rushdie? A lot of people certainly think so. I see hate speech across nearly every internet platform including this one. There’s no shortage of hate speech against wealthy people or white men, etc. Is that allowed?
Hate speech is clearly defined in various laws against the concept. So it’s not really up to taste. Most popular services attempt to remove hate speech, but doesn’t look like KF does.
Btw, a forum dedicated to the principle and culture of free speech would absolutely (by definition) be promoting/hosting hate speech.
I'm not sure I understand your last sentence? If I were running a forum dedicated to the principle/culture of "free speech" I would think it's especially important to avoid promoting hate speech, or you run the risk that free speech and hate speech become seen as synonymous, and the wider public deciding that free speech isn't a worthy ideal after all.
I ended up conflating hosting and promoting which wasn't clear enough. You would be definitely be hosting hate speech, which is essentially promoting it (by using the internet to make that speech more accessible to others than it would be otherwise).
The alternative is to accept that moderation is NECESSARY for online communities (or else spam and hate speech will take up a huge part of the content and suddenly you'll realize you're essentially promoting this content afterall) and moderation will always look like the opposite of "free speech".
> There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?
Are they targeting specific rich people in a dedicated and persistent fashion to the point that said rich persons kill themselves? No, that's not happening. I've seen posts of the type you've described. They're almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned. They're much less frequent than any one of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-jew, or anti-trans comments... which are almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned as well. This site does not remotely compare to KF.
You're falling for the heap paradox: If you remove a grain of sand from a heap, tell precisely at which grain of sand it stops being a heap. You can't? Therefore it's impossible to tell if something is a heap of sand! QED
That just says "don't use the word 'heap' for anything normative", surely not "let's hope what we think is a heap is universal consensus"? I support the current thing though
Society has been doing pretty fine with some fuzziness until now. Sometimes something really goes to far and they end up not hosted anymore. That’s the system working, not it failing to work. Well, that came a bit slowly for kiwifarms sadly but I’m glade sanity prevailed in the end.
In this case, the entire forum was created to target and harass a specific person. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people / communities.
As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.
Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.
Do you agree that Daily Stormer should not have been banned? They were created to opine about white ethno-nationalism, etc. and not to target or doxx or harass specific people. Is your line moving now?
There are mechanisms in law for courts to order removal of illegal content. ISPs don't ever have to define "hate speech". Sounds to me want to censor speech you hate.
Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is. The obvious example is child exploitation, are pedophiles rights to swap images of kids currently being "censored as speech YOU hate"?.
Harassment forums like the one in discussion here have no place in civilized society and I am happy for them to be censored. The people that frequent these sites can get together in person and chat about hating all they want, but the method of their harassment (the global platform of the internet) should removed -- insofar as that is possible.
As I was discussing in the previous thread, I disagree with this.
> Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is.
Ideally, many smaller elements make their decisions about what speech to promote or convey, and "society" or the "government" is the actor of last resort-- stepping in for the most not-OK stuff when the market has been shown to fail.
Concentrated power is dangerous-- whether it's in the hands of a government or a single overly-powerful commercial actor-- and needs to be restrained one way or another.
What’s your opinion on sites not targeting specific individuals? Like, “people with Property X have no place in civilized society” where readers of this site occasionally went on killing sprees of people in the category?
The big mistake here is trying to come up with a single code by which to codify speech. I mean, a government (even one supporting free speech) has to do this, because they're the enforcer of last resort, and it's really necessary that such a code promulgated by the government err on the side of being "too permissive".
But-- we should have big markets of many participants who all make their own decisions about what they condone. Then, the individual decisions are not so toxic. And if you are doing something egregious where almost all of them say no, well, you got what you deserved.
My personal thoughts: exposing peoples' personal information for the explicit purpose of severe and illegal harassment is on the "definitely not OK" side of things. Ordinary hate speech that occasionally leads to spree violence is much murkier.
Honestly, it depends on what that property is and if the person went on a killing spree based on their views on property X or for other reasons.
If Property X is something like the color of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, etc, then I would support cloudflare banning them.
I am certainly not the master of what should and should not be on the internet, and neither should cloudflare. As a society, though, there are some things that most can agree on.
People calling for my people and my nation to be wiped off the map. (And I don't try to get Hacker News blocked by their ISP or cache provider. I understand that an open forum will have speech like this.)
I'd like to point out that I understand what's "vile" to one person isn't to another. I've had my posts reported as "hate speech" on reddit for saying that "the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous" and that "Obesity is wrong."
Banned speech should have a very high bar -- direct, specific threats of physical harm.
For the first link at least, they seem to be talking specifically about parts of Palestine occupied in defiance of international law and agreements being returned to them, not Israel broadly being eliminated. Israel/Palestine border disputes are massively controversial, so I don’t dispute people do say things like your summary of the comment, I just don’t believe the comment you posted is that. In fact I think your summary is a bad faith reading of the comment.
If you cannot define a term, you should not use it. I'm surprised that you're so honest about your irrationality, though. Normally, you would "define" hate speech as follows: "Weasel term, weasel term, weasel term" and that would be that.
I would define hate speech as speech that directs hatred at a particular group. For instance, Joe Biden recently gave a state speech (The "Gates of Hell" speech) that was completely choked with hatred for a group. Shrug. I have no interest in banning this, whether from the "president" or from anon. My understanding of Kiwifarms is that they basically just make fun of idiot liberals--a sport on endless grounds.
If you gave your honest definition of hate speech it would likely be "People who disagree with me and make me look bad showing how stupid or wrong I am."
I don't think we should target, harass and doxx people, therefore I do not do those things. That doesn't mean that I think we should censor entire websites because they are sometimes used as platforms to do those kinds of things.
When I visited it, some time ago, it mostly seemed like a lot of angsty teens shitposting.
My thoroughly unscientific analysis of the situation seemed like it was about 98% bullshit posts and maybe 2% of the posts I found truly objectionable (mostly jew/black hate) but not illegal.
I'm not doubting that there is some illegal stuff there, nor that there is some truly vile content, but, I don't even think it's in the majority on a post-level basis.
This is nimby logic. It’s indirect. There is clear damage caused by kiwi farms. I don’t care if we can come up with a philosophically coherent rule that captures kiwi farms and not other websites, it is still good that they are banned.
I am not asking for any of these people, specifically, to be removed from the internet. I am saying that I support cloudflare banning hosts which specifically target, harass, and doxx specific individuals or communities.
I'm not supportive of banning Joshua Moon from the internet. Do you agree that there is a difference here?
This move and people's response to it is not about lines and principles. It's pretty much a slippery slope and we all know it; some cheer it on because this time their line was crossed, and others see it for what it's signaling. The overall erosion of discourse on non-accepted ideas and topics that are on the scale of mean/offensive/hateful.
Yeah none of us here are happy about this site existing or innocent people being targeted, of course. But the next one will be slightly less extreme as kiwi farms and we'll say the same things.
Would you be okay with a website which targeted you, specifically, tracked down your home, your employer, your family? One which encouraged others to do the same, filled your inbox with hateful messages?
One which hid behind Cloudflare in order to hide their identity while simultaneously exposing yours?
This is how KF started and continued to operate.
You have a line. I have a line. What is happening here is that we're trying to define a common line which works for society, and it is going to "slip" over time as views change.
In the past, that line would have included books which even mentioned homosexual behavior. Today that is more tolerated and accepted, which is good in my opinion because gay people certainly exist.
I guess what I'm saying is that the line is going to have to slip a bit, and in more than one direction.
She should be reprimanded, in my opinion. The Washington Post is not encouraging their readers to harass or doxx individuals or groups, so this is a false equivalency.
How would you feel if someone made a "Finding Nemo" forum in which they tracked down your identity, your family, and your friends and encouraged its members to harass and doxx you and your family?
Oh, and this forum hid their identity behind Cloudflare while, at the same time exposing your identity and personal details?
But that’s an imaginary problem. You seem to think that having some standards even if they are not clearly defined necessary means anything could happen and the most silly things will. It is not the case in practice.
It's crazy how many people on this forum are disagreeing with you. Has HN's truly lost its community and the old greybeards who used to stand up for free speech?
Sadly, I've had to block him and all the other people on this self-righteous authoritarian crusade and don't think I'll ever interact with them again. Most of the security community (and larger technology community) used to care a lot about free speech, but they've completely abandoned that principle.
There's always going to be something of a judgment call though. You might say "this content is against our TOS", but what if that content is in a book? At a bookseller?
You can think of many other examples, but the point is, if you think there's an easy-to-create and easy-to-enforce content policy on the Internet, I think you're mistaken.
Half the internet isn't forums devoted to stalking and harassing people.
What exactly is inconsistent about their banning of services? Is there another site which is on their radar, which does what kiwifarm does, and they've come out and stated they will never ban them?
Half the Internet is indeed forums where bad behavior is taking place though. Reddit, for example, has plenty of bad (often illegal) behavior on it and the moderation is far from aggressive. You eventually go down the rabbit hole of gradations of moderation and "how much" moderation you'll require.
I run a web publishing product with over 10M deployments. The easy-to-enforce content policy is this "Are we breaking the law by hosting this content?". Basically the answer for an ISP is always no until there is a takedown order from the courts which your are under jurisdiction, OR you knowingly are hosting a phishing attack intended to defraud unsuspecting members of the public, OR you are put on notice of content infringement via sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury. It really is that simple because ISPs are immune by default.
If "go into hiding" means "not posting personally-identifiable information on the public internet", then that doesn't sound so bad. In fact, that's what I always do all the time on the internet, as should everyone.
This is why it's unwise to ever post one's location online.
It is truly pitiful, because this is ultimately what social media encourages. They encourage tagging posts by location, they rip the EXIF data from the images (which most users don't even know exists in the first place). This is all information that is fed into the advertising and mass surveillance machine.
At the very least, this is what we have castle doctrine and self-defense law for.
How was it determined that the life threats were credible? If they were *actually* credible I'd imagine Keffals is gonna end up dead pretty soon given the escalation of attacks on KF.
Did they commit violence or make any attempt on her life when they were there? Seems like a pretty good time to do it to me if they had intended to do so.
Real principled stance there from their CEO - 3 days to totally flip-flop? I mean, if your stance is we will ban content we arbitrarily find bad then just state it as such.
The thing is that just about every company and individual is going to have the caveat "be bad enough and I won't deal with you" in practice. Kiwi Farms is pretty horrible but you could have an even more awful site - say real murder for hire - and it would be dropped even faster.
Do really expect someone to offer a "principled position" that no matter the real world consequences, they'll never stand against some horror getting out onto the Internet?
Edit: I want to add that Cloudflair's original statement and it's recent statement have involved a consistent point of "we shouldn't be the one to suppress this" which is fundamentally different from "nothing should be done about these problems". They're basically saying "we should be doing this but we should be doing this based on a court order rather than on our own". Which is to say there are never any "free speech fundamentalism" in these statements.
But why would he? Bloviating about his love for free speech and then suppressing the speech that makes him trouble is much more convenient. And why should he worry how he looks to you? What you'd do, use another provider? Good luck with that, think they'd be any different?
The reality is, we're moving from an early pseudo-anarchic ideals of early internet free speech mode to the pseudo-feudal setups where if you want to have an internet presence you must have a liege lord and must live at their sufferance, or you'll quickly fall victim to one of the roving mobs that live to collect the scalps of the likes of you. It's not a fun place to be in, but that's where we're at. And as a vassal you don't have too much position to make demands on your lord. You can change the lord, for sure, but there aren't many and if none of them likes you, you're out of luck. Welcome to the Web 3.0, it's not what you thought it'd be.
The current internet has been taken over by corporations and made safe for advertisers. I could read the thoughts of neo-nazis and free love hippies back to back and really gain a better understanding of people with different philosophers to me. The current internet is overwhelmed with advertising friendly pink capitalism neoliberalism.
The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.
Kiwifarms is a downgrade from the others aka its already a slippery slope. Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are known to protect booters.
So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them.
The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
These listed companies literally break the law to grow. They create demand by knownly allowing illegal DDOS-for-Hire websites. That is not a free market if the people on top are allowed to break the law to stifle competition and force people to use them or stop existing.
I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...
Sure! We just need websites that organize brigading and harassing trans-people, women, and minorities until they commit suicide. Its an utter requirement of civilization. /cringe
I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this).
When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
I've been on there when some harrassment stuff has came up in the past and have seen some threads. It's probably 0.00x% of it's posts but it's also what it's famous for.
I am sometimes very worried about the apparent naivete of people who think this way, and then I am even more worried thinking that they might just be intentionally obtuse.
Right now there is no way to have a good faith argument due to the witch hunt. Anyone who 'confessed' to being active is a witch so their word is no good, and anyone who isn't active doesn't know the dark sorceries of the inner circle so their word is no good.
I walked into a nightclub and asked for sex. I did not get sex, so therefore nightclubs are not places people go for sex. All those people claiming nightclubbers hook up for one night stands seems like scurrilous slander to me. It’s terrible to see people believing the journalists who attended night clubs for years and reported on their supposed sexual exploits over my story which is clearly a sign of leftist bias. Why do these people believe a journalist over my reliable reporting?
I've lurked on KF with an empty account for a couple of years. (I have an interest in niche drama and as a lesbian, trans drama is pushed into any space for lesbians ANYWAY).
I didn't see brigading, but I did see doxxing.
And of course the whole thing is a mentally-toxic nut-picking echo chamber, but that's kind of par for the course on the modern Web.
This is my experience of Kiwifarms. If you do not have a thick skin, you should not be reading there. Moreover, most of the internet is probably not suitable for people who do not want to experience offense.
And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
I have seen many more threats against Kiwifarms that I have seen originate from within it. The forum seems to be a melting pot for grossly offensive people to make grossly offensive comments. And considering 4chan is still around (even if it only used to have a problem with CSAM) I'm at a loss at why Kiwifarms is being "deplatformed".
I can only assume it's like the "jailbait" subreddit - something reprehensible but action is only taken when it gets media attention.
The hilarious thing is that neither side are good or nice people. I've been queer online longer than keffels has been alive and I've been anti-censorship the entire time partially because I remember when people were trying to censor LGBT+ information. This is like my two mentally ill parents fighting.
One side is going to call me a dyke, carpet-muncher, and link the fact that I like women to being a child groomer.
The other is going to call me transphobic, a bitch, a cunt, and a TERF for not wanting to suck dick/not wanting all queer spaces to be about trans issues 24/7.
> And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
This is one thing that pisses me off about people like keffals. When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates. The Internet changed that. Since I had WWW access, I could talk to gay adults and realize that a.) you could find love being gay, b.) get advice on what to avoid and how to stay safe, and c.) start to plan out a gay life for myself. Nobody was ever inappropriate with me. (That was always straight men...) Keffels et al. are dragging us right back so gay adults can't support gay kids that are genuinely in danger or suicidal. Thanks, guys.
At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
> At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
This is something I feel too, having seen some of the most fringe communities on the internet (a good example is furrys) and how they act predatory around children. I am afraid to say it to any of my friends, colleagues, or even my partner as I feel like I would be seen as bigoted.
I think some people don't see how some behaviour is completely inappropriate (like that Reddit moderator who had a parent that raped children in the attic and, thanks to Kiwifarms, you saw how they were also very predatory). It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
Those people are sometimes right that an INORDINATE amount of moral panic are focused on LGBT+ people. (Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women).
On the other hand, most of them are so urban and online that they can't conceive of trying to navigate this space as a normie parent. Most normal parents are AWARE that strange men are potential dangers to female people and teach us about it accordingly so we're wary, we can go to them or teachers if someone DOES prey on us, etc. (I see a lot of warnings to teen girls that 'that guy doesn't think he's mature for your age, he just wants someone easy to manipulate').
But most normal parents aren't plugged into the queer community enough to teach their kids how to avoid predators in those spaces. And most of those parents just have too much else going on to learn - if somebody is working 50 hours a week with 3 kids, they don't have TIME to keep up with the drama of who was revealed to be a predator this week. And the instinct to not take chances when it comes to one's child's safety makes sense.
> What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
One of the reasons I made an account for lurking was to watch and see where waves of newbies arrived to KF from and why. There are a lot of participants who ended up there after what they wanted to discuss was completely banned from the other places they talked about things online.
> It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
The lack of tolerance for dissent or deviation bothers me. In a lot of places, you can't even have procedural or intellectual disagreements about trans orthodoxy, or discuss how some of the rhetoric is hurtful to other members of the community. It's very 'there is one way to be and only one way'. Very similar to conservative Christian spaces. (My family is half conservative Christians, so I'm familiar with THEIR filter bubbles too).
> Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women
Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women? But you're further saying that you think trans women are as likely to be predators as straight men? Doesn't your own experience contradict that?
You're upset that the trans women posted on KF are going to make the public think all LGBT people are groomers. I'm upset that they'll make the public think all trans women are groomers. And comments like yours feel like punching down, frankly.
> Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women?
Isn't it a numbers game? ~50% of the population are men. You see thousands of men a day (if you don't WFH). I think the occurrence rate of trans people (in real life) is vastly smaller.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the likelihood of predation to be the same, but not experience any from one group that is vastly under-represented in daily life.
Trans people weren't a substantial portion of queer spaces until the mid to late 2010s, and I'm talking about the 90s and early-mid 00s. There was also more of a focus on passing/not talking about it + it was more common to be in the closet, so even if I had been acquainted with trans women, I probably wouldn't have known.
On the other hand, I've seen entitled behavior from trans women in lesbian spaces post 2015ish. It just hasn't been directed at me personally because predators choose their victims based on vulnerability and I aged out of that. Not many sexual predators go after men or women OLDER than they are.
The focus on passing/not talking about it might return. I'm fortunate enough to pass. The past few years I felt like I ought to be out, irl, to dispel the negative stereotypes my conservative acquaintances were hearing about. But things are getting increasingly ugly, and I get treated better when people don't know I'm trans, so I've stopped speaking up.
I'm growing my hair out and have started painted my nails and wearing dresses again, and the binders have gone back in a box. (I'm not trans but I like male clothing).
Likewise, I WANT to be out, especially since a lot of younger queer people are so very '!' when they see stable adult queer people, but unfortunately, the in-fighting means not only can I not trust the general populace to be chill, I can't trust my fellow queers not to throw me under the bus for being too 'privileged'. (Even though I'm poor and disabled, because all that matters is cis + white.)
Good point, actually, I forgot about prior probability. I concede the logic of your point.
Personally, I am a trans woman, so my social circle includes many more trans women than the average. And I am not a predator, and I don't know any predators personally, so I conclude we're not likely to be predators. But I'm just a random person on the internet, so you can't know if I'm telling the truth, or even if I am, whether my circle of friends is a representative sample of trans women in general.
I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
> I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
I agree! Which is why I made the point about straight men also being gross and my point that people should be leery because we (queer people) are doing a bad job ejecting predators and holding them accountable, not because we're any worse. And that's not just about trans women: There's a large problem with some cis gay men sexualizing teenage boys, and I will absolutely throw hands over that, too.
Also, since you are not a predator, I assume you wouldn't want to be friends with predators and would not support groups with predators in them, so predatory trans women probably don't want to be friends with you bc you'd call their asses out. Predators seek out friends and spaces that allow them to prey on people. You not having predatory friends just says your circle is not a safe space for predators which is good.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that you may not know. A lot of abusers/predators act like good people outside of their abuse victims. Nobody in my communities would have known or suspected my parents were abusive, for example. Or how many people find out suddenly that their dad/grandpa/uncle are creeps.
I just point this out because a loooot of cis straight guys say the same thing to girls and women: "Well, none of MY friends sexually harrass/rape/assault people, so it can't be that common!" Except that it is.
I think there are a lot of variables that go into understanding these things, and that non-queer people who are suddenly thrust into it once their kids come out have no way to orient themselves, which is WHY we should be more diligent.
Yes. I follow/consume media from roughly 400-1000 people on the internet. I don't know any trans people in real life but probably a good dozen or two dozen of these people I follow online (tech, art, etc. you know, normal stuff people like) are trans. That's quite statistically significant, I've only (knowingly) met 1 trans person in real life but at least 4% of the people I follow online are trans. Nearly all of them being trans women.
I think trans people get a shit time online because as soon as the topic enters anything to do with activism it is only the loudest and most extreme voices that are amplified.
This is a shame for all of the people within LGBT who these voices drown out, including other trans people.
Girls are mostly preyed on when they're younger than 20- and mostly when they're in middle and high school. At the time, out trans women were rare enough that no, none of the people who tried to prey on me identified as such. I haven't looked everyone up to make sure that they still identify that way, obviously.
So there's a confounding variable. If 5% of straight cis men and 5% of trans women are predators but I only meet 2 trans women, odds are I'm never going to run into a trans woman predator. Whereas being a geek in the 90s and 00s I was SURROUNDED by cis straight dudes. It was very common for me to be the only female in the room, or there to be less than 5 of us at a computer show.
(I also think women and trans men are about as likely to be predators but that they show/act it out differently. I tend to think assholeishness/predatory natures are fairly equally dispersed across different identity groups but expressed differently due to socio-cultural factors.)
So you go to the source site _after_ the evil things they've done are reported on, and the site posted a rebuttal. And you think you're getting a true, unaltered representation of the things that occured BEFORE this happened? Bad take.
> saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading
Either because it was now removed or hidden from public view. These activities have definitely occured on KF and just because you "don't see it happening now", doesn't mean it hasn't.
If freedom of speech doesn't protect Kiwifarms I don't see why we should put up with sex workers either. Either we should defend speech we don't like or we should make the world a better place.
You realize that Cloudflare took down a bunch of sites with sex workers on them already, right? Including ones that weren't actually violating any laws. The internet already slipped off that particular slippery slope.
They also provide a good counter to propaganda. You don't have to believe you get Covid chipped or in evil lizard people to see serious and concerning displays of media propaganda. And yes, it is US corporations in cooperation with government far more than the Russians on the English speaking net. There is just as much propaganda in Russia in Russian of course.
It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even more effectively as it did in the past.
I think there are much better ways to counter propaganda than running a site that doxxes people you don't like and harasses them to the point they commit suicide. We should not enable folks like this.
If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.
It isn't about this site in particular. These are people that make fun of others, there is no deeper "service" the platform provides, no particular insights to be gained. It is morally questionable endeavor to stay diplomatic and I hope users can learn to moderate themselves.
The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.
Note that "the site" doesn't do this. Some of their users may do so and may or may not (I couldn't dig very deep before it went down) organise via the site.
the counter to propaganda is thoughtful, deep investigation of the matter at hand, getting at least some minimal subject matter expertise and getting the opinion of experts, etc. (nowadays this has the fancy name of epistemological rationalism)
KF is at best more/different propaganda against the mainstream propaganda
"First they came for the Nazis" is how World War II could be described (1), and with the exception of a few misguided sympathizers the story ends well with the destruction of their power structure and hanging of their leadership.
Probably worth noting that among the reasons KF just lost their newest DDoS protector is that many Russians are understandably sensitive to Nazi sympathizing, even "for the lulz".
(1) One could even argue that hesitating to come for the Nazis sooner was a significant mistake in the international community that allowed the severity of the War and the atrocities that occurred in it.
The Germans came for the Nazis. The Weimar Republic was very much in favor of imprisoning them for their (detestable) ideals and proposals. The Nazis were able to parlay this persecution (and Weimar failures) into an increasing share of the electorate and eventually total control.
This is what my critics who say things like "lol, we know you're for censorship" don't understand. The Nazi movement rose because they were free to express their vile ideology. Germany prevented renazification for 80 years through censorship.
This was what Marcuse was getting at in "Repressive Tolerance". Some views deserve free expression. Others do not. If you give free expression to all perspectives, the vile ones will spread until you can't control them anymore, and then you're no longer a tolerant society but a repressive one.
We have the means and now the will to identify vile speech online and shut it down at the network level.
The Nazis also breathed air; that doesn't make breathing air immediately suspect.
Can we think of some good reasons for suppression of communication? I can name several (disruption of ongoing stochastic terrorism, disruption of immediate harassment process, failure to comply with the TOS of a private corporation voluntarily doing business with the offending party, use of network compromising service provision for third parties in the same system), and many of them apply to the KF situation.
Correct, and the difference between them and KF is (a) their market cap and (b) the work they've done, consistently, to address issues when they come up, up to and including using automation to scale the moderation pipeline.
KF either can't or won't keep its house in order, and at this point, the can't-won't difference is immaterial. I welcome someone making a solid run at providing another channel alongside Twitter / FB / et al, but this ain't it.
That difference is, I fear, ideological rather than principled.
Think of all the harassment directed at Kyle Rittenhouse, or the Covington Catholic kids, or just Republicans generally, on reddit and Twitter. Harassment was featured on the front page.
That isn't a small problem that the moderators are unaware of; it's an ideological belief that certain harassment is acceptable.
It's almost certainly both, because Nazism is also an ideology (one with no platform given and no platform deserved).
FWIW, I've gotten kicked from FB far more often for vitriolic criticism of the right than the left. At least to my eye, they try to steer an even keel... If people are seeing more Republicans get snagged, I think it's because of their own social circle (because filter bubbles are pretty thick these days).
Leaving out the 1923 putsch in Munich damages your argument beyond repair. Nazis' legal troubles in the Weimar era were not simply the result of unpopular ideas ruffling feathers in high places.
KF's concept of “large public show” has very little connection to reality. No matter how small a target tries to make their audience, they are not guaranteed to escape harassment. Like on a school playground, the bullies pick on people who are unpopular.
Correct, and as an unpopular person myself (just ask around), I'm saying that the status quo is fine. The alternative is simply too dangerous to consider, particularly for queer communities that rely on the good graces of internet freedom to communicate within hostile regimes. Setting this precedent could very well encourage other countries to strongarm service providers into dropping customers, or worse yet lead to astroturfing that takes down perfectly innocent messageboards. What happens when China tries to claim that GitHub is hosting content that's highly offensive to Chinese citizens? Does Microsoft bend?
This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
I wonder how many people remember when the censorship online was wielded against queer people?
Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised.
I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
Maybe it's not my place to speculate, but I think the modern generation of TikTok queers and image-obsessed teens has completely forgotten that social media only gives them a platform because they profit off every like and view. If the shoe was on the other foot (say, they were trying to increase profits in queer-hostile countries) they would have no problem silencing your voice just to increase user retention. This already happens on TikTok, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened on Twitter and Facebook, to lesser extents. A sad allegory for the state of queer solidarity in 2022, I guess.
Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
> Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people.
I'm already starting to see the swing back.
Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
Of course corporations would crush queer people if it made them money. But defending KF won't change that one bit. The error is assuming that the people who'd treat gay people so badly would be swayed one bit by "well, we didn't get cloudflare to take down that forum full of bigots."
I don't want them to be swayed, I want them to be able to speak their (wrong) ideas. It's fine if people want to spread lies about gay people, or even engage in hateful harassment campaigns. Homophobic violence is where I draw the line, but we have hate crimes explicitly designed for deterring and prosecuting these offenses. Everything else, in my opinion, falls under the purview of fair expression. Obviously Cloudflare doesn't have any obligation to serve them, but that's not going to stop them from continuing their harassment campaigns. It just pushes them onto more esoteric, resilient platforms.
The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
Plenty of us remember. We also don't believe that protecting KF is in any way going to prevent those sorts of threats against the speech and association of queer groups online.
For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here.
And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?
And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.
Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it.
Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
I don't really understand the relevance here. The claim above, as I understood it, was that older queer people would be more cautious around supporting actions taken against unsavory speech because they remember being viciously targeted via those same means and fear them being used against their community once again.
I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.
This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.
This is going to be a subjective broad statement based on my experience of using the Internet for 20 years and growing up in the West: I think your thought experiment holds water. I think the older generations (30-35+) just care about being accepted by society for who they are and not denied anything everyone else has (jobs, housing, using the swimming pool, etc.). I think it is the younger generations who don't want just acceptance but almost a totalitarian adherence to their world view. This is where we get the majority of content around issues and it becomes non-negotiable as we've seen from other comments in this thread around medication. I still believe the most extreme voices are the ones that are the loudest.
"Hey, remember how we left up that hate website" isn't going to convince any authoritarian regime to treat gay people with respect. The history of oppression is littered with examples of legal protections simply not being granted to oppressed groups and I'd fully expect such an authority to just continue on crushing gay people beneath its heel regardless of how KF was dealt with.
I agree with everything you said, but that's only because none of it addressed anything I said. Authoritarian regimes will always have reason to hate anyone outside the standard model of a citizen. Our concept of internet freedom and service neutrality is what helps these oppressed people connect and share their stories. This already happened in the 90s, where LGBT BBS' and messageboards gave like-minded people places to reach out with each other. Later, this gave rise to platforms like Vice News and dozens of other media outlets that could freely report on queer topics without fear of persecution.
In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
So, they pick on Russians and Islamic fundamentalists? Labor organizers? Democratically elected socialist leaders in Latin America? Or maybe Julian Assange? Oh wait, they must pick on poor people! If any of that has been the case, then good riddance. Somehow one doubts that.
> Same rules as getting bullied on the playground, if you pick a fight with the people harassing you, then you're liable to get beat up.
Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
For a standard school bully, if you're a big enough problem for the bully they move on to an easier target. Even if you fight back and lose, the bully is far more likely to move on to another target that doesn't pose a response damage risk to them (the only way that isn't true, is if you're entirely unable to pose any physical threat to them, then they may be amused by the attempt to fight back).
This has very little in common with how playground rules work.
> Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
I don't think any fight has ever stopped once someone else starts throwing punches, certainly not on KiwiFarms. The only thing they care about is how you react. If you start getting mad on Twitter, then they'll take the fight to Twitter. If you start a public campaign to take them down, the users will obviously take it personally. If you reached out to the police and talked with a therapist/loved one... what would they do? In the hyper-sensational age though, the only response anyone wants is to make an eye-opening TikTok for their 15 seconds of fame... so long as they aren't hated, that sort of fame is obviously verboten.
My goal isn't to take a shot for KiwiFarms or blame the victims here. I'm simply expressing that, as a queer person, I prefer to live in a world where KiwiFarms is allowed to exist. It's a horrible place populated by increasingly toxic people, but without it the internet lacks balance. Without websites like KiwiFarms, it's hard to feel secure hosting anything that others are allowed to use. On the other side of that coin, the people lobbying against KiwiFarms are largely stationed on centralized platforms. They're encouraging a future where all of our communication is commodified and owned by private interests. Maybe it is too late to save the internet, but I'll be the last one to adopt the fatalist mindset that everything requires direct moderation.
> Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
Honestly, this is a myth. One day, I decided to follow the "stand up to the bullies and they'll leave you alone" stuff my mother sprouted off. It started with two on two. Two bullies were threatening me and my mate, and I said to my mate we should stand up to them and they'll leave us alone. My mate decided to run. The bullies chased after him. I decided to stop the bullies and stood in there way. What happened over the course of 5-10 minutes was me standing up to these bullies, every time someone they knew came along they asked for help, eventually it was something silly like 10 of them versus me. I'm not too sure of the number because eventually someone jumped me from behind and I was beated until I was out cold. I was found by some girls who then told Janitor that I was dead. That Janitor then came to where they said I was and saw me not moving and thought I was dead. He had the unpleasurable experience of thinking he just found a 10-year old kid dead in a school hallway.
I stood up to every bully. I beat every single one of them up at some point. One bully left the school because of a beating I gave him. You know what changed? Nothing until i started dealing with them differently. Once I started acting like I couldn't care less they stopped their taunting and name calling and all the other stuff that I would beat them up for.
Calling it "harassment" is perhaps a bit misleading if it's people gossiping about and making fun of someone behind their back. Harassment generally involves intentional (as opposed to incidental) communication to the target. The issue is that this forum (like Twitter and other forums) is generally readable by the public, so someone can observe two people saying stuff about them, but it's not addressed to them.
It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.
Sounds like you've internalized the idea that it's OK to be a punching bag for other people and if you retaliate when attacked that makes you a bad person. This is your right of course, but why should anyone else feel obliged to subscribe to your moral/risk calculus?
It has nothing to do with being good or bad. Might is right. Being morally good doesn't prevent harm from coming to you unless an effectively mightier faction deters it.
Honestly, is it their goal? Admittedly, I'm not an expert in Kiwifarms, however, I understand they've taken a dislike to many people for various reasons, not just LGBT folk.
Maybe we should ban criticism against politicians while we are at it. If we don't do that then politicians will be harassed off the internet which of course would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Politicians are harassed all the time and it is frequently organized. They are told they should die, they are bullied, etc. Their house address is frequently put on the internet. There is no difference between the harassment leveled towards people on KiwiFarms and what politicians experience on a daily basis.
I swear you have spent the last week doing nothing but making bad faith arguments and refusing to listen to or concede a single point. It’s QAnon level behaviour and for what?
I don't like people going after others while trying to censor them. You are doing the same thing as me. Honestly, it's authoritarian level behavior and for what?
By this logic, there is no way you can deny someone their freedom of speech. What is the difference between someone putting you on death row for speaking out against the government versus publishing your information so that angry randos can do the same? Is the only problem with government censorship that their violence is somehow "special" and worse than other forms of violence?
I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.
Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.
These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.
Harassment (e.g. attempting to communicate with someone with the intent to upset them) is indeed bad for discourse and should be stopped. However, talking to other likeminded people about how much X sucks and you hate them would not be harassment.
That's more of a measure of how inadequate your laws currently are. I view GP's measure to be far more accurate and reasonable, and one that I use myself.
This is just civilized society finally catching up with criminals on the internet, the internet as a tolerant forum for information exchange and discussion was lost as soon as serious money got involved.
This is a pretty weak argument and extremely susceptible to Goodhart’s Law. It feels like you’re treating the existence of vile sites like this as a metric for the health of internet free speech. Be careful you don’t make the continued existence of such bigotry your target
Hard to believe that people honestly use that poem in situations like this. The poem was about not resisting virulent bigotry enough. It isn't about platforming bigots.
It's not hard to feel bad for anyone getting censored/booted off the Internet. I see that "Gossithedog" lives in England, which - I reckon - makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right (a list that doesn't include England).
We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.
I often hear this argument, but the US is currently on a much clearer trajectory towards increased authoritarianism than most EU countries/CANZUK despite all of this freedom. The situation is more complicated than just straightforward definitions of what freedom is. What really matters is not edge cases where some forum or other is banned, but whether your society is populated with authoritarian ideologies and to what extent these ideologies are present in the institutions.
It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights.
Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product.
Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
I understand this concept, but that's not the point. The GP was condescendingly referring to people outside of the US as being unable to understand freedom of speech or slippery legal slopes. We do in fact understand it, it's just that we don't all agree that the American cultural model is conducive to freedom overall, as evidenced by the current state of the country.
It's like a person smugly telling you their hydrangeas are better watered than yours while you are trying to get them to notice that there is clearly a house fire starting in one of their bedrooms.
In the US the government just ask corporations to censor content and they comply. Activists will spout their usual XKCD-interpretations of free speech, which is legally correct, but heavily fails to see the larger picture.
There's an even larger picture than this, which is that the argumentation around speech is gamed by people who have no interest in preserving it overall.
What truly matters is which speech ends up being successful and adopted in the broader society. This is why the focus is placed on the availability of platforms rather than the presence of free speech on its own. The argument is never just to let people speak without arrest or restraint, but to let them speak AND give them access to a convenient platform that will help their speech be more successful. The next step is to force platforms to host them and give them an algorithmic pipeline of views.
If freedom of speech is the key ingredient on its own, why is the US on an steeper authoritarian slide compared to the rest of the West despite more robust speech protections? Largely because authoritarian elements there are extremely adept at using speech rules for their own ends, and will then be able to discard most freedoms of any type once they solidify their grip on the institutions.
> The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right
If you mean 1A, that only protects your speech from the government, not anyone else (and even then it's not an unabridged right since there are legal limits on what you can say.)
Doxxing to facilitate swatting is attempted murder. They aren't unearthing this information because they're devoted archivists; they operate within a broader culture of harassment, and when one considers the modern arsenal of digital harassment that's enabled via doxxing, the SWAT team is front and center.
The only person who has claimed KF lead to their supposed suicide is Near/byuu after he attempted to extort the site into removing his thread. But we know he didn't kill himself as he lives in Japan and the state department releases a report every six months about the deaths of Americans overseas. It's been over a year, there have been two reports, and neither had any suicides in Japan, and the Japanese government is no slouch when it comes to paperwork. The only evidence that was ever given was a picture of an urn with byuu's name on it posted by a friend living in Hong Kong.
Nonetheless this has not stopped journalists from reporting it as fact so they can create via citeogenesis a bloody shirt to wave and justify campaigns against the KiwiFarms.
The whole thing relies on the loose causality of stochastic terrorism. It's a bit like the Nuremberg trials "only gave orders" defense, except they're not even orders, just innuendo - it's just spreading smear material and a general attitude of hate among a fractious, isolated and angry audience.
A makes the post. B makes a fake phone call to the police. Cop C arrives and pulls the trigger. All in different countries. Is A really free of the repercussions?
Actual evidence of harassment from members of kiwifarms seems to be missing in all of these discussions. There is no doubt that there was lots of doxxing and lots of mean words on the site, but I haven't seen any evidence of harassment campaigns or anything similar. The closest thing that there was to evidence is someone who called in a SWAT team on a Republican congressperson and said to the police, "I am a kiwifarms mod, please come investigate me."
If that evidence existed, given the microscope this site was under, someone would have found it.
that's actually false, if you're referring to keffals at least, the doxing of the second hotel where the whole ordering food happened was done by Vile on doxbin[0]. Furthermore there's a lot more places that get those doxes on the web, pretty much all i've learned from kiwifarms was in the last 3 days or so and I still know of half a dozen.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech.
Speak for yourself. Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. It’s way beyond 1st amendment and the technicalities of Government limits.
ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following.
The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
This has been said many times in all of these threads, but the operator of the site has always been very clear that he will comply with all legal subpoenas he is served. He condemns death threats and really anything that isn’t just pointing and laughing.
The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?
Also said many times in all these threads: Getting law enforcement to act on these sorts of things is a difficult game, and a lengthy one even if you get very lucky.
Meanwhile, victims can face years of harassment while they wait for a bored cop to get a "yep, they used Tor" conclusion to the case.
Cool. Let's say you are forbidden by law from posting comments on the Internet. Not because I'm limiting your speech, but because I made the law "it's illegal to make ceejayoz sad".
Come on.
The Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless it is super loud late at night near sleeping people." We read that in, because we're not idiots.
Why should I not be allowed to use my freedom of speech to ask a company to not do business with someone doing something nasty?
Why should that business not be allowed to use their freedom of association to not do business with those folks?
Why is legal action the only acceptable approach to bad actions? Direct action, pressure, and boycots have worked well against injustices in the past; see sit-ins in the American south during the civil rights era as an example.
I don't believe in "freedom of association" for monopolies and oligopolies, it's an end-run around our rights by another means. And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Organizing through market pressure only works if you're already rich, it's just another concentration of power at the top in what's already a very unequal country. No one is going to pressure or boycott facebook off the internet.
> And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Sure, freedom of association goes both ways. We decided as a society to add protections for minority groups to prevent that sort of specific abuse. I don't think we'll do the same for Kiwifarms, and I'd argue that's the correct call.
I don't believe abuses are okay if you have more market power, and I don't believe they will stop with Kiwifarms, which was not the first victim of this phenomenon.
I was active on an anarchist forum that died because Cloudflare pulled the plug on 8chan, which hosted said forum. You may want a world where a few companies decide what you can and can't say; I don't think I can afford to live in one.
'Just go to the state monopoly instead and hope they're responsive' is a poor strategy. As is well established in law, cops and prosecutors aren't obliged to protect yu even though they have vast legal immunity of their own.
> ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
Yes, because that speech was within the limits of constitutional free speech. Most of my knowledge about free speech comes from reading up on how America has defined it for more than a century.
No, the censorship is not through the “proxy of corporations”, it’s directly instituted by corporations. It’s simply company leadership deciding they don’t want noxious people in their private club anymore.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you start talking and everyone tells you to shut up, then tough shit, you live in a society that doesn't like what you’re saying. This has always been the case, and it continues to be the case.
For many years, marginalized groups of all stripes were denied the megaphone of popular media, but they fought and convinced people they were right and built popular acceptance. If Kiwifarms wants to get the private protection and reach afforded to broader society then they need to convince the public that its actually good to harass and stalk trans people. Good luck.
A lot of marginalized groups (or at least their loudest activists) used the internet to organize and then pulled the ladder up behind them, and I don't want to live a society where only a few tech billionaires get a vote.
Cloudflare is not "society" but a specific for-profit corporation located in a specific part of the world, just like google and amazon and reddit.
Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour.
"There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
You presenting that as "interesting" and thinking a choice quote that is absolutely a hateful transphobic interpretation of the state of things ("literal correct information") is extremely telling.
Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too.
Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
I personally find Ovarit interesting reading in general. I don't consider it to be a "hate site", but rather, one of the very few places on the internet where women can be openly critical of the ideology of gender identity, particularly with regards to the legal and social implications, from a feminist perspective.
I remember when the public image of Mumsnet was all warm and friendly and Mums looking out for each other and all of a sudden every time I hear about them it's because they've gone on a rager againist some poor person whose greatest crime is that they decided they wanted a sex change.
3 people are dead because of that site. What they were doing was a crime. Criminal activity is not is not protected free speech. That's like arguing carding and SIM swapping sites are just expressing their right to free speech and should be protected.
Well, seeing as this thread is about a website losing their DDoS protection, it would be whichever criminal mob that the DDoS protection was defending against.
The "point" is that anyone engaging in illegal violence, or similar, anywhere, should be punished via the legal system, and not via some other forms of illegal violence.
And that goes to anyone involved in any part of this whole fight.
"Free speech" is a bit of a misnomer. The valuable thing is the freedom to hear, not the freedom to speak.
With a DDOS the goal is to prevent people from reading someone's words. With harassment the goal is to prevent people hearing the targets future words.
And what if the legal system do not protect (or punish) all equally?
There was no physical not psychological violence here. Only Ddos. Why is that bad? Do you have an inherent right to not be buried under request? protected from bots?
This is not a case of "good ideas" vs "better ideas", this is a case of DDoS: "inconvenient ideas and IP Bandwidth" vs "censorship and better IP bandwidth"
The cheesecake factory has no meaningful ideological motivations, unless you include the advancement of poor dieting amongst Americans, which I suppose could be considered to be anti-american in a sense.
Additionally, it's a retail store. I can't imagine they would lose a lot of business if their website was down. Still, they could just as easily fall victim to a DDoS racketeering scheme I suppose.
If somehow someone objected to cheesecake factory's practices (let's say they're a vegan or they disapproved of cheesecake factory's health practices or something), then it would be disproportionately easy for the cheesecake factory to conduct a DDoS attack on the protester's website than vice-versa. So the idea that we should support DDoS as some form of free speech is obviously pro-corporatist in my perspective, because it empowers those with more financial and bureaucratic control over the internet.
So let's see, if I don't like this comment of yours and I find out where you live and go and shoot you in the face so you can't make such comments again, that's also competition in the marketplace of ideas, right? It's my idea to shoot you in the face against your idea of making comments I don't like.
You're equating a website going offline to shooting me in the face? No, that's not a competition of ideas. It's murder. Does that really need to be spelled out for you?
Congratulations, you got the analogy. Both me shooting you in the face and a mob agreeing to perform a DDoS against a web server are both measures of force.
"I don't like what you're saying, so I'm going to shoot you in the face so you stop."
"I don't like the content your web server is serving, so I'm going to DDoS it so it stops."
The DDoS is not an idea in the same way that a bullet isn't one. Therefore no, this is not "the marketplace of ideas in action".
Sending a packet is free speech. Being prevented from sending a packet is censorship. It's pretty simple. Not really sure why we needed to take a detour into shooting people, but here we are.
No, there's no law anywhere that includes actions performed by machines in the definition of free speech. DDoSing a server is not performance art, and neither is shooting someone.
There's no such thing as a natural right. A right only exists where it goes unchallenged or where there's a force to answer such challenges. That force can come from laws and the power of a state or it can come from someplace else, but it needs to come from somewhere. You can believe that you have the right to send any packets you like however you like, but if you can't defend that right and you don't have anyone who will defend it for you, you may find there are those who will ensure your belief stays as just that.
The problem is that human lives are likely to be lost over this precedent being set.
This isn't about 1 website here. This is about the precedent.
Every time cloudflare gets bullied into taking a website offline, it is ammunition that an authoritarian government can use against it.
What happens when one of these countries starts to threaten cloudflare employees lives, to force them to take down some human rights organizations' websites?
Maybe it won't happen tomorrow. But every time a mob forces cloudflare to take these sorts of actions, it weakens cloudflare's ability to fight against the real threats.
If you want to stand by your opinion in this, then fine. But I get to hold you responsible for the deaths that happen, if cloudflare is no longer able to stand up against these greater threats.
Look, if you simply don't care that authoritarian governments could use this precedent to target minorities, then you should just say so.
I, on the other hand, am concerned about the lives that could be lost, due to authoritarian governments having more ammo to pressure cloudflare with.
This specific time might not be the tipping point. But if stuff like this keeps happening, the real threats can use the precedent to target vulnerable groups, and yes that can cause lives to be lost.
You seem very obsessed with authoritarian governments. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live under authoritarianism either.
Why don't we stretch this in any old way back to DDoS? Why should the government say which packets I can and cannot send? Any encroachment by the government into something as silly as sending DDoS packets slices down my ability to speak freely. If they start at DDoS, then what's stopping them from limiting other forms of speech?
See, I can do the same thing. Just because free speech in the form of sending DDoS packets isn't liked by people doesn't mean we should be willing to give it up. Right? Because once we start limiting what kind of packets we can send, we're only a slipper slope away from being told which other kinds of packets we can't send.
Still, I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario which is otherwise devoid of government interference. In this whole story, all I see is a bunch of civilians. If there is a government actor, department, or anything, please share. Otherwise it just looks like standard whataboutism directed at the govt.
> Any encroachment by the government..... my ability to speak freely.
Look, if you are ok with authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations, then say so.
> I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario
So, one big reason why cloudflare is used, is by human rights organizations to protect themselves from being DDoS'ed by authoritarian governments.
If you don't care about that, then just say so.
> is otherwise devoid of government interference.
It is not devoid from government interference, because cloudflare stops authoritarian governments from interfering with human right's organizations.
And, as I said before, this precedent hurts cloudfares ability to protect human right's organizations from being taken down by these governments, by protecting them from DDoS attacks, from those governments.
> If there is a government actor, department, or anything
Every time cloudflare is pressured to stop protecting websites, this is ammo that authoritarian governments can use against them, to drop protections for other organizations, such as human rights organizations. It might not happen tomorrow, but it is more ammo that these governments can use.
Why do you keep avoiding this idea of authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations?
> that you're ok with the government censoring which packets people send.
So, if an authoritarian government, tried to target a gay rights organization, yes I would be ok with a different government protecting this targeted minority from DDoS attacks.
This is because I do not want important human rights organizations, such as ones that protect gay people from being oppressed, from being taken off the internet by bad people.
Do you see how I just directly addressed the question, by saying that yes I am in favor of the government protecting, for example, gay rights organizations, from being DDoSed?
Do you really oppose this protection? Would you support an authoritarian government, taking down a gay rights organization?
I think the answer is because they simply support attacking and targeting human rights organizations, such as gay rights organizations, or ones that protect targeted minorities.
I tried to get them to talk about this issue, and they basically admitted that they support removing, for example, gay right organizations from the internet, via DDoS attacks.
Because apparently protecting gay rights organizations would infringe on their free speech to target and remove those organizations from the internet.
Well, yes, it would indeed infringe upon such a right (if it existed), but this argument can be applied to any action. The fact that murder is illegal infringes upon my natural right to shoot kelseyfrog in the face. If they want to argue for total lawlessness I won't stop them, but it would be less disingenuous if they would stop beating around the bush.
The content of the idea is superfluous. The point is that if you give the government the ability to tell people what packets they can and cannot send, then you're implicitly trusting that they won't abuse this power in the future and decide that there are other things people can and cannot send.
You're avoiding the question. Your claim is that making DDoS attacks illegal infringes upon your right to freedom of speech. My question to you is, since freedom of speech is the freedom to express ideas, what idea does performing a DDoS attack express?
Well, by definition almost a Distributed DoS attack implies some kind of mob. Now, it could conceivably be some rich individual illegally paying money to an illegal botnet, but it could also very well be a larger group of people conspiring to illegally pool their money to buy time on an illegal botnet. It could also theoretically be a large group of people illegally conspiring to attack the site directly using their own machines.
You seem to be under the impression most crimes are prosecuted. Very few are, because, amongst many other things, the police do not exist to protect citizens.
So why not try to do something about the police, and instead focusing on Cloud Flare. Surely there are many more important crimes that Cloud Flare can't help with, and that the police could if it were forced by people to act as it is supposed to.
Also, have any of the people complaining about this on the internet actually filed complaints with the police/procesutor's office? Have they even attempted to follow the legal channels before deciding to take the law into their own hands?
Surely a prosecutor standing for re-election would be much more likely to be swayed than a massive mega corporation. But why go through the bother of actually doing something that could help set legal precedent when you can simply tweet furiously.
What doesn’t make sense to me is why is Cloudflare harassed for providing an utility to some bad actors while other traditional providers aren’t?
Is Comcast getting any flak for providing internet to the KKK offices? Or their water provider? Is Netflix getting any complains for providing entertainment to terrorists? Or vodafone for mobile connectivity?
I think because some of us look at Internet access or phone service as akin to water or electricity service. You just don't deprive someone of those things.
Regarding your Netflix example, I doubt Netflix knows if any particular customer is a terrorist.
Having access to a CDN provider isn't in the same "basic rights" league.
I look at having a home and a place to sleep at night as categorically more important than KF having CDN access, but maybe I'm just being weird about stuff.
>I think because some of us look at Internet access or phone service as akin to water or electricity service. You just don't deprive someone of those things.
I agree that trying to cancel people from being able to enjoy baseline physical necessities is not a line that's being crossed yet, but an attack on utilities may not necessitate this. Let's say Joshua Moon also happened to run a small hobby store in a strip mall. Would going after the utility providers (or landlord) for this store be "fair game" in order to attack KiwiFarms? Why or why not?
Anything is fair game when the ends justify the means and the target is accused of killing people on your side. The only reason power companies aren't yet subject to pressure to disconnect bad people is because that tactic is presently judged as infeasible.
They absolutely will ask landlords to kick somebody out. If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
>If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
Do you have any examples of this line being crossed? I mean I'm sure that oftentimes the mob has raised these issues to landlords and managed to get leases revoked, but I haven't seen an actual serious attempt to attack an unresponsive landlord in the way we've seen with the attack on Cloudflare.
Also I am almost certain if you were using your natural gas utility to shoot flames at the neighbors houses, or using your power to electrocute people walking by, that you'd have your service disconnected rather quickly until it was proved you're not a public harm.
While from my original post it's assumed it was intentional malice creating the dangerous situation, but there plenty of real world situations where service is disconnected for safety reasons.
We act like utilities are some inalienable right, but this is by far the worst argument ever. Licensed installers setup the utilities and have the work inspected. At any point where your environment presents a hazard, the utilities will be disconnected until it passes another inspection.
Not sure that protection is a utility, but even then I think the reason Cloudflare gets criticism/critique (not harassment...) comes as a result of the online nature of LGBTQ communities and Cloudflare's location in the closest thing to a physical epicenter of those communities.
I don't know what distinction you were imagining, but I think this one is relatively simple
Netflix theoretically can’t provide entertainment to known terrorizes because KYC rules would prevent them from being able to pay for it.
Comcast must provide service as part of the agreement to give them local monopoly privilege.
The water company where I am is the government so they are forced to provide service because of the 1st amendment.
Vodafone similarly bought public airspace and it came with rules. I wonder if they can pick and choose their customers.
Cloudflare though is just a regular company. They provide a service, but there is nothing restricting them from banning people. It’s like how Google can ban you for almost no reason.
It's because Cloudflare actively protects these bad actors. They host DNS, they host proxy services, and they hide identifying information from WHOIS. They say they won't listen to anything short of a court order, so now we have to convene juries and get indictments to get Cloudflare to do anything at all.
Cloudflare is playing a big game.
Comparing Cloudflare protecting bad actors to the water company providing water to KKK members is completely disingenuous, but you know that, obviously. You should pick better examples.
Does the KKK use water cannons to hose people down? No. Any benefit KKK members derive from having running water is incidental to their KKK activities. Likewise if some terrorist is watching Netflix to unwind it's not furthering their terrorist activities specifically.
On the other hand, multiple groups of people have targeted Netflix for producing or promoting content that those people find offensive, which is a different situation from providing content.
When white supremacist organizations meet in conference halls at hotels people absolutely raise a stink and complain that the hotels should cancel the conferences and ban them from attendance. Cloudflare is actively and directly enabling the specific activity that people find detestable, same as hotels hosting white supremacists.
Even if that were true, and I think it's pretty doubtful to just attribute a suicide to some people who made fun of or harassed the deceased, it's a criminal or civil matter. If people on that forum committed a crime, let them face the legal penalties. Why should the website be made persona non grata by Internet companies?
How many more are dead from activities on Facebook, Instagram, etc? Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
If even only half the material presented in "The social dilemma" was credible, Meta have absolutely been knowingly responsible for more harm than KF. I don't know what the right solution is.
It's not countable, but vastly more than three. There are civil wars and ethnic cleansing that get organized and supported on Facebook (e.g. Ethiopia and Myanmar). Gang violence and mass murder also get spread on Facebook. Nevermind the harassment and bullying that happens on Facebook, which is, of course, orders of magnitude more than what goes on on KF.
It's just not very sensible to think that big companies care about a few people dying because of a small forum when they demonstrably do not care about many, many, more people dying because of a big forum. It seems way more plausible to me that big tech companies work together to kill small social media than that they have some secret ethic which compels them to care about small harms over big harms.
Oh, I see. Thank you for clearing this up for me. When big, rich, powerful companies get people killed they didn't intend to, so, actually, no harm done. When big, rich, powerful companies accuse a small community of getting someone killed obviously they did intend to do it and so they need to be shut down.
Can't you engage the point in good faith? Of course intent matters! If you have a fleet of trucks and occasionally one of your drivers gets in an accident, that's way different than if you have a fleet going out there running people off the road.
I think you may have good point hiding in there (maybe "Facebook may not do it intentionally, but they've been so negligent that..."), but it's lost in the dripping sarcasm. The point you're replying to wasn't that ridiculous.
I would say that I did engage in good faith. I mean the argument I'm making and I'm making my arguments the way I feel is best.
It is, of course, completely ridiculous to think that "intent" separates Facebook and KiwiFarms. Facebook doesn't intend to cause civil wars, genocides, spree killers, gang violence, body dismorphia, self-harm, harassment, and suicide. Facebook intends to connect people so that they can develop a social network and monetize the social network and they are willing to break a few eggs to make that omelette.
You might as well say that it is the color of Mark Zuckerberg's shoes that matters as say it is Facebook's intent. No, obviously, what matters is the bad stuff and the people harmed. It's not like any of those people are less dead because of Facebook's intentions. If Facebook had terrible intentions and excellent outcomes that would be a much better world.
The other problem with saying intent is what matters is that the people who make this argument also make some kind of magical mind reading claim that they know the intentions of others. "Intent is what matters, and I know the intentions of KiwiFarms! They are bad!" Just save everyone some time and explain that you know KiwiFarms is bad and that is why they must be destroyed.
KiwiFarms is bad because they intended to get people killed. No, there is no evidence for that. And yes, there is plenty of evidence against that in the form of trying to get people hurt being against the rules and moderation of the site. No, there was no police or legal action against KiwiFarms for the crimes we "know" they were committing - but all that is beside the point. We know their intent! It is bad and they must be removed!
If you had a crystal ball and could magically determine how many incidents of harassment per daily active user were coordinated on KF vs. Facebook, which site do you think would come out looking worse?
Or... Let's say a group of a dozen people got together and decided to make life a living hell for their target. They are going to mock the target mercilessly, following up on any online interaction by posting vile shit, sending nasty DMs on every platform they can find, etc... Nothing illegal, but just being awful.
But let's say in one world, they're coordinating this stuff on Facebook, and in another they're coordinating it on KF. Now let's say the target gets logs of the coordination, and they report it to the site where it happened. Which site do you think would be most likely to take action, FB or KF? I think the obvious answer is that FB is much more likely to try to put a stop to the harassment.
Also, for you to claim you're arguing in good faith when your entire response to a reasonable argument was to mockingly agree with it and say "Very illuminating!" is really rich. If you want to actually convince people of your points, you're going to have to do a lot better.
For the record, I really don't like that KF has been forced off the internet the way it has. But you're not going to convince anyone by being sarcastic and pretending that KF isn't an awful place where users try to do awful things.
How do you even define intent when Facebook knows this stuff is happening but doesn't do anything? Intent is hardly relevant when they are aware of consequences of their behavior and still don't change. Don't know intend for it to happen, but it does happen and they're aware of it and continue I do it. I honestly think this is just another case of third world lives being less important to people.
Yeah I know, isn't it illuminating to see Facebook profit off of disinformation campaigns and to be used as tool and aided a genocide in another country, killing thousands. Here we also have Twitter [0][1][2] still unable to remove CP images off of their website for years despite it being absolutely illegal in many countries.
I think the fine should be substantially higher since they are 'big, rich and powerful as well' [3].
Intent - mens rea in the law - is not about the intent to [commit insert crime here]. It is about the intent to do the thing that resulted in the crime. That is why if you get blackout drunk and drive through a crowd of kids, you get charged with manslaughter: you didn't intend to kill those kids, but you intended to get blackout drunk and drive, which resulted in the death of the kids.
Facebook absolutely would have criminal intent the same way kiwifarms would - in both cases, they intended to serve content from their users.
At least seven. I did a quick search on DuckDuckGo, because I remembered at least one suicide covered in Danish media. The first page alone yielded seven different teenagers from Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada and Danmark.
So just guessing here, but Meta properties alone must have killed thousands of teenagers.
‘ratsmack: harassment was explicitly their stated goal from the very beginning. The very name is a play on the first person they decided to go after (and why the forum formed).
Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
Because they have more resources and it's easier to take down a small target than a large one. I am more than fine with Zuckerberg and others being held to account for harms negligently or callously inflicted by Facebook.
Not even the tweet you linked says this. The person says they have been depressed and mocked their entire life and that they have tried therapy and medication and that it did not work. That seems much more like a depressed person driven to suicide than a forum being responsible for responsible for their death.
To my knowledge there was a thread with ~13 pages of comments making fun of near, but nothing threatening or harmful to his life. So far as I know the true identity of near was never known - so it's not even like the mean internet comments were intruding on his life. Can you link to the mean things (or an archive of them) that the KiwiFarms people did or said that drove near to suicide? If not, can you summarize the things they said or did?
It literally says, "Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse." By all means, continue to enjoy your willful ignorance, it must be nice.
One of Near's friends just tweeted a message where they had begged, "do something about this site already" the day they killed themself. Nier committed suicide because of KF harassment. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1567014389282385922
I happened to see someone else post KF's response while it was protected by DDoS guard and read it.
Their story, which doesn't seem to appear in the responses in that Twitter thread, was that a 2 year old account that only posted once previously in its history suddenly activated, posted a picture of someone holding a threatening letter of some type outside of someone's home, then this was screencapped on Twitter a short time later (~15 minutes). The post was removed 2 minutes after it hit Twitter by the submitter (they originally thought their mods did it, but corrected this, saying it was removed with the note "retarded").
I don't ever read that site other than to look at stuff like this when it hits the news, so I don't claim to know anything more than that, but you were for a time able to look at the forum threads and see the posts they mentioned, etc.
I don't know of any SIM swapping sites that have been taken down - I would be happy to be corrected here but there doesn't seem to be a populist fervor demanding it. Aren't there ISIS members on Twitter? There are also people advocating for the industrial scale genital mutilation of babies. I just checked and Purdue Pharma is still online and their cynical campaign of mass murder puts 3 people dead in a very stark perspective. This whack-a-mole approach to de-platforming seems reactionary and very fashion based and not based on coherent set of morals. There seems to be no proportionality. This extrajudicial punishment sounds like a neat solution to a lot of problems but I'm worried about setting precedents that will almost definitely be used against things I care about. Anti-war movements always start out as fringe minority (now casually defined as extremists paroting Russian talking points) and are very undermining to a state that has decided to mobilize its population for war - which leaves me counting down the days until I'm deplatformed.
I'm a free speech advocate but 100% agree with you.
Our legislators needs to make laws against targeted, anonymous, non-journalistic doxxing. It needs to include clauses that escalate the severity when revenge porn or racial, sexual, or other discrimination is being incited. If this bullying results in suicide, that should also increase the severity of the crime.
Until these laws exist, prosecutors need to use this angle and try these cases anyway.
If someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news. What does "government leader" means? what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means? Especially in the era of twitter and immense followings from people that are just regulars and not some ultra-rich celebrities.
Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
>If someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news.
Fair enough.
>What does "government leader" means?
>what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means?
I'm not a lawmaker, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things.
>Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
Why would the US make any laws against doxxing? As of so far we've been nearly completely allergic to any laws for privacy. It's going to be very problematic in itself attempting to make a legal argument that disclosing an anonymous persons name is not protected under the first amendment.
Whoop tee doo. I've seen dozens of livestreamed murders on Instagram Live and Facebook Live. Reddit has /r/chiraqology where there are hundreds of videos of gang bangers and drill rappers beefing with each other and shooting at each other, and commenters celebrate the lifestyle and keep detailed ontologies of it all.
Nobody is talking about nuking any of these platforms from existence just because of some isolated illegal incidents.
The Chiraqology stuff is wild. People threaten each other on YouTube and then follow through with murder! The only reason it’s not banned is because nobody with power cares what happens to impoverished black kids in Chicago unless they can make money from it.
If Reddit were materialists to that degree then they wouldn't have banned popular gore subs.
It's more likely the sub taps into a vein of black culture that happens to be interwoven with some violence, and Reddit tolerates it because they don't want to be seen as trampling out anything to do with black culture.
Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
There are still plenty of subs for hating fat people, Muslims, Indians, etc. Reddit just doesn't care about most of its issues, unless a journalist writes about them and puts on the heat.
>Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
Not the same, but combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed.
> combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed
That's a reeeeach. I've been subbed there since 2013 and there were also many contemporary posts of white Americans (because that's disproportionately who serves and dies in combat) and European service members being shot and blown up by IEDs and so forth in GWOT (although the votes and comments were more controversial).
The war in Donbas also yielded plenty of footage of white casualties. And now the latest Ukrainian conflict.
The most controversial time on the sub was when ISIS was at their peak and people were straight posting their propaganda (executions and so forth). That was all disallowed unless it was only traditional combat footage, preferably with nasheeds stripped out. If the sub was about enjoying brown death that carnage would've been allowed.
I doubt that banning the subreddit would stop the violence, all that would do is sweep the problem under the rug where it's easier for people in power to ignore.
The solutions put forth by the elected officials of Chicago and Illinois seem to fall into two general strategies; providing funding for anti-violence programs in Chicago, and lobbying for DOA legislation in Washington. Those outreach programs, such as Chicago CRED, READI Chicago and Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, have social science studies backing up their efficacy, but say they need more money to have a greater impact (Chicago's 2021 budget was $12.8 billion, with $16.5 million allocated to violence prevention.) They're very clear about needing more money to hire more social workers, but I can't find any statements from these organizations about the need for moderating reddit and youtube.
People talk about threatening reddit and pulling out advertising all the time. It's also why on a random basis that reddit goes around and wipes some communities off the map. Especially when they start showing up in other media.
Reddit nukes hate subs weekly. They're slow to get to it, but they do it. As far as Facebook live and Instagram live, those platforms weren't made with the sole purpose of harassing and doxxing people. Neither is reddit. When they find communities that promote those things they do take them down. Their moderation is slow and overwhelmed, but don't pretend Facebook encourages murders on live streams. KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it.
If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
They nuke hate subs selectively. There are plenty of hate subs they leave online routinely and don't nuke.
Heck, there are plenty of anecdotes showing they bias towards keeping hate subs targeted at "majorities" alive, and have actively changed their ToS multiple times to discriminate between who they consider vulnerable.
Wrong, Reddit explicitly allows hate speech against white people because it follows the nouveau definition of "racism" not including whites. There's a Reddit admin response to repeated requests to ban /r/FragileWhiteRedditor somewhere that outlines this.
> KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it
Wrong. The admin, Null, has explicitly said they don't allow doxxing or swatting and complies with law enforcement
> If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
That's cute but what you're describing as absurd is basically what Keffals et al are doing with this website by hounding every service they tangentially use to get them banned. If they could make the site operator unbankable or unable to receive postal mail it's pretty obvious they gladly would
Pussypassdenied is basically misogyny, fatlogic is fat hate, religiousfruitcake is full of Islamophobia and antisemitism, combatfootage is just videos of foreigners dying with vile bigotry filled comments(wouldn't be surprised if many of them were innocent). Reddit hardly does anything about the hate they host, honestly.
If they have killed them, they shouldn't be kicked of the internet. They should be charged with the appropriate charge and go to prison if found guilty.
People who have threads on KiwiFarms have (allegedly) committed suicide. That's about all that's required to attribute each death causally to KiwiFarms. It's an incredibly weak standard.
KiwiFarms members often don't just take notes of those they laugh at. They actively get involved in harassing them, online, through the phone and in person.
So was this the case for any of the people who actually committed suicide in a way that establishes a reasonable causal nexus? My impression is that the answer is "no".
Yes, but iirc the suicide note doesn't claim that the KF thread was leading to ongoing direct harassment that motivated the (alleged) suicide. Just that the mere existence of the thread played a role. So we're back to "if someone has a KiwiFarms thread and kills themselves, then KiwiFarms is to blame".
If somebody writes about something in their suicide note, that easily clears the bar for "relevant for their decision making about their suicide" to me. What would the required evidence look like for you? Sworn testimony to a notary saying that it was KF and nothing else?
- Whether ongoing harassment from KF was relevant to their suicide
Unless one equates the mere existence to the thread itself with ongoing harassment then one can answer affirm the former question without the latter. The "required evidence" for the latter would require some sort of allegation that KF members were actively harassing Near at some point reasonably prior to their suicide, which afaik was just not alleged.
People do archive those pages and have seen links were posted multiple times here. The issue is those pages posted end up going against to what the people wanting KF down say.
it's not made for illegal activities, it's made for discussion and making fun of people. rhetorical hyperbole (e.g. "Bob is a big fat idiot") is protected speech and the site owner routinely fights this in court and wins every single time.
What they were doing was not a crime, as evidenced by every lawsuit against the site getting thrown out and the owner's extensive cooperation with law enforcement.
The line with "Kiwi Farms is responsible for 3 suicides" seems to be repeating that lie until it sticks. The truth is more complicated:
if you think the fault lies with the website and the posters won't just use some other website (plenty of death threats on twitter are still up)... you are sorely uninformed.
with a very high suicide rate among transgender individuals I'm not sure if the deaths can solely be attributed to the site.
Moreover some of the people, who pushed to shut down the forum, openly support the transition of teens (even without the knowledge of their parents).
Yet trans teens face an even higher risk of attempting suicide. Therefore one must ask if those who wanted to remove KF are not responsible for more suicides by promoting and facilitating transition among teens in identity crisis i.e. by making their problems even worse.
If they committed a crime, let the authorities deal with it. Committing another crime (DDoSing a website) is hardly the answer. Vigilantism is also a crime.
Freedom of speech, famously, doesn't give you the right to shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater [1]. It also doesn't give you the right to target, stalk, and harass people.
The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site.
Except you do have the right to shout "Fire" at a crowded theater, at least in the US. The original Supreme Court case (about criticism of the draft) was, IMO, a miscarriage of justice. Fortunately it was overturned a few decades later.
To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.
>This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence.
It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
What they wish to do is cut the head off the proverbial snake when the snake hasn't committed a crime or directly conspired with people who did commit a crime. It might be an effective strategy, but it's not one our laws allow, because we don't base guilt on "but-for" causation alone. Nor do we base it on that icky feeling we get when we look at the proverbial snake.
What I would prefer is that they have a day in court. Even this twitter thread tries to make the case that these aren't "criminals" effecting the DDoS, but rather they should be viewed as "victims."
I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.
Kiwifarms looks like it is essentially a technical evolution of the tabloid. Tabloid media has been doxxing people and saying really terrible things about them forever. It's hard to feel sympathetic for people like tabloid media, but tabloid media still has a place in society.
when 'all the news that's fit to print' stops reporting what goes against their upper crust values, you need to look in the gutters for the truth.
There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.
I mean, what are your alternatives? Should the government legislate as to which clients companies should accept and which they shouldn’t? Even if the client is unprofitable?
Should the government itself offer these services?
Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands.
Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.
> What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
As you might have read, I am european. Threats of violence can be illegal here. I did not seek to explain the US flavour of freedom of speech here, I sought to explain a limitation on it I grew up with and why I think it produces a (to me) desirable outcome.
Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out.
By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights.
When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago.
Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?
> What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
I'm not sure how speech can impede on the right of others to speak freely. Speech can certainly discourage others from speaking freely, and that's bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but it's too vague to justify shutting down an entire forum because some speech there might discourage others from speaking freely.
If I were to threaten to shoot your kids if you again post something that I don't like, while making clear that I know where you live, my speach will certainly imped with your ability to express yourself freely, or wouldn't it?
If you think it wouldn't I'd like to know how your thinking goes. I am not from the US, so maybe the whole theoretical idea is different from the ground up.
> If I were to threaten to shoot your kids if you again post something that I don't like, while making clear that I know where you live, my speech will certainly impede with your ability to express yourself freely, or wouldn't it?
You're right, certain speech, like direct threats of violence can impede on other people's right to freedom of speech. But such speech is illegal even in the US and also banned on Kiwi Farms.
How about coordinating to targeted attacks? Imagine a muslim terrorist groups forum and how their coordination works there.
Is it legitimate to take that platform down? You don't have to answer, the US certainly thought so during the past wars.
Is it legitimate speech to write some vague SMS to the wrong person? You don't have to answer, whole wedding societies have been killed for that speech.
Now one could argue, "Yeah but they might have been terrorists, or associated themselves with the wrong people."
But what is terrorism and why does a free society break it's promise of freedom of speech to fight it? Terrorism is trying to reach political goals by (often) violent means, with the aim to create fear. This fear stifles the free discourse in a free society by targeting specific symbolic targets. And isn't that a definition that fits many fringe political groups that would target individuals and make their lives hell like it apparently happened in the case of KF?
No. You're absolutely wrong here. The issue isn't that "it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet" - that's a dog whistle to try to say Cloudflare is a victim.
Let's be clear about a few things:
Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not.
Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP.
Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS?
The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled.
They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility.
Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action.
What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands.
So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it.
But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban.
So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members.
KF is essentially a deniable harassment vector (ie they say 'we don't condone harassment, so please don't harass Random Person* who lives at 123 Name Street and whose phone # is 212-555-1212 and whose email is... (etc)).'
Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime.
The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc.
I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.
This has all the hallmarks of an overreaction to a moral panic, not a rational response to the actual evidence. People become incredibly sure of their positions and don't even want to look at the evidence, but to be honest, the evidence doesn't matter, because people won't be persuaded by it anyway given the stress level and strong emotions.
Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.
I mean, this is a site with a body count. How many people do you think hid themselves from the public, or guarded what they said online or had to be suspicious of mundane interactions for fear of being targeted? Why is their freedom of speech less important than Kiwi Farms’?
As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.
How else would the website be removed? Should Cloudflare have hosted a vote or something? I think they took it down because millions of people wanted them to, not on a whim.
What is supposedly being suppressed by Cloudflair is kiwifarm's ability to coordinate violent harassment campaigns against vulnerable individuals. I'm pretty sure neither the US nor any nation state includes immediate, credible threats of and facilitation of violence in their concept of Freedom Of Speech.
Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.
Yet the "free speech absolutists" are absolutely nowhere to be found when the speech of groups other than right wing bigots are relevant to the discussion. If we must protect the speech of the most vile and disgusting and hateful and wretched monsters on the planet then surely we should also protect the speech of those who are oppressed and suffering. Where's that?
I personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know.
I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twitter - nastier content, in greater volume, with a larger audience.
I have found comments about people on kiwifarms that have been moderated out of other sites (not death threats or harassment, but factual information), in that regard it has been somewhat useful.
How is 4chan worse? They rapidly take down any CSAM and anything that vaguely resembles a raid. Most KF threads wouldn't survive on today's 4chan for even an hour.
This 12 years old comment describes the situation in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 , although neglects to mention that things were this way due to strict moderation on 4chan.
I, personally, have seen much worse on 4chan than I have on Kiwifarms. If I read the Cloudflare blog post and didn't know which site it was referring to I would have put 95% of my money on it being 4chan over Kiwifarms.
I am not an omnipotent arbiter of what is bad or worse, this is my own subjective opinion. I just haven't seen anything on Kiwifarms that would call for such a response. It made it seem like we were hours away from people dying.
I guess as an example though:
> they rapidly take down any CSAM
I haven't seen that posted to Kiwifarms in the first place, regardless if 4chan has a quick response.
I've read that 4chan works proactively with law enforcement, regularly notifying them as soon as possible. They don't have a "wait for a warrant" policy that neutral providers claim, they will eagerly submit and support LEOs. This might be why it has survived so long.
The common idea about the forum is that there is no moderation, but the truth is that the moderation is invisible. (The content is beyond the pale, and I don't support it which used to be needless to say)
I think they probably do. There is another comment below saying the owner/moderator/whatever of Kiwifarms also works with "law enforcement organisations" on anything illegal on the site.
Mass murderers have live-streamed their rampages on Facebook. I'm sure Facebook also work with police.
Other than the horrible nasty comments (which I've seen much worse on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/social media in greater numbers) I don't see what's so special about Kiwifarms.
I think this is obviously bad. I believe in Europe is just flatly illegal under GDPR? I would expect this to be illegal everywhere (if it was private information like medical records etc.) but I'm not a lawyer.
There is another comment below saying the owner/moderator/whatever of Kiwifarms also works with "law enforcement organisations" on anything illegal on the site.
Yeah, the guy comes across as a massive [expletive] in that article. It reminds me of the piratebay "F U" emails from decades ago. It seems to me that a lot of Americans or American Companies (and Swedish pirates) ignore other countries' jurisdiction.
Edit: just reading into this and New Zealand apparently wanted to take legal action (up to ten years in prison) against any New Zealand citizen who simply watched the video on Kiwifarms forums? That's astonishing.
> New Zealand apparently wanted to take legal action (up to ten years in prison) against any New Zealand citizen who simply watched the video on Kiwifarms forums?
Sounds like the owner was right to say "go fuck yourself" then.
This is how I (and I'm sure many others) first heard about kiwifarms, the NZ govt threatening to arrest citizens for even watching footage of the shooting. I was running a little warrant canary meta-service at the time (since the EFF let theirs lapse) and asked Josh Moon if I could implement theirs as a part of my service. Never got a response from him, or it got caught in spam.
Heard about them again when they hosted the twitch source code and revenue leaks, and now a third time with all of the cloudfront stuff. Hosting content like this is always a big gamble, I'm sure Moon knew this was always a possibility.
While his reply was incredibly edgy and immature, I'm don't think this is a compelling example. The NZ police wanted information on people discussing the shooting after it had already occurred.
Yeah, not ones from Saudi Arabia either. It's an american website, and in that context working with law enforcement means working with american law enforcement.
Yep, I was curious recently and opened KF and 4chan boards. KF is rather tame meanwhile the first page of /pol/ on 4chan was like walking into a KKK convention complete with the hoods and seeing the Third Reich in attendance at their own booth.
/pol/ is far worse from a "hate speech" perspective, but not as nearly as bad when it comes to serial harassment.
From a "people are in imminent danger" perspective I don't see how 4chan isn't worse. Remember "Some of you guys are alright, don't come to school tomorrow" from a few years back? Is there an equivalent to that on KF that I'm not aware of? The people there have given up on life in a completely different way than edgy board 4chan users.
The difference is probably that KF mocks individuals in easy to locate and follow threads. 4-Chan's set up is just too chaotic; proving that 4-Chan is going after a specific person would be...difficult. KF organizes its mocking into easily discoverable forums and threads, which makes it easy for the individuals in question to find all the nastiness.
Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is difficult. The thousand+ posts about keffals are all collected together where she and others can read them all at once, which also contributes to making it look 'worse'.
A haystack may have more needles in it than a sewing kit, but you KNOW which ones are in the sewing kit.
I agree with this. I think the aging-off process on the 4chan boards has probably protected it from a lot of heat. The heinous stuff will be gone and forgotten in a few days but any comments on Kiwifarms remain forever.
Multiple 4chan archives exist, and Google indexes them. Most even have a search function, 4chan doesn't (except for currently active thread titles in catalog)
It's also a cultural thing. 4chan is not a place where you go obsess over one particular person with aims to ruin their life. It's, as you say, a place of chaos and inanity.
It's more incidental/emergent than intentional, though. And that can happen with any group that has more than a certain number of empathy-impaired people participating. (Including most groups of teenage girls.)
But you were talking about fascist nations, not civil society. Defenestration seems to have more impact that deplatforming in such places. Russian police also have no issue with arresting people for holding completely blank sign, on the basis that the medium (a sign on which a message of protest could be included) is a sufficiently message-like reason to take someone off the street. Mind you, the same is true of the US to some extent.
In a free society business owners do whatever they want. That includes hosting content that runs counter to government positions, and the right to NOT HOST content they disagree with (for whatever reason, even financial or publicity-related reasons).
In Putin's Russia, organizations are forced to carry content they don't agree with, or they are prohibited.
That's not an exaggeration. If the government says you must publish an article about how awesome a new airplane or how righteous the orthodox church is, or how bad the evil Ukrainians are, you must do so.
Many free speech morons think that organizations should be forced to carry messages they disagree with... because freedom.
Freedom is being able to tell someone to fuck off.
Freedom is also having to deal with the consequences from the public if you tell the wrong person to fuck off or you don't tell a deserving person to fuck off.
What the free speech morons are proposing is so much worse than what we have now that the terror it could cause would be inconceivable, unless you're an anti-government journalist in Russia, of course. It's not inconceivable, it's your Monday.
It is so charming to see all of the fReE mArKeT lovers on HN twist themselves into pretzels when it comes to things like this.
It's not a hard concept but the free speech morons seem incapable of understanding it.
If the free speech morons had their way HN would be powerless to stop me from posting the addresses and phone numbers of people I disagree with.
I touched on this somewhere else in the thread, but it is not uncommon for companies to end up in a position where they have so much control over society that they need to be limited in their power, else they just hold too much power and that is not good in the long term.
Something like cloudflare, where their decision to host or not host you can be the difference between being able to be online and not, needs to be regulated as a utility because executives at cloudflare should not have the authority to determine who can and cannot host a website on the internet.
Mob rule is not good, and mob rule will lead to oppression of some form if left alone for long enough.
There is no exception to that rule, it is only a matter of time before it happens.
There should be reasonable restrictions on behavior based on harm, but those restrictions should not be in the hands of mob rule or companies like cloudflare. Those restrictions should be based on rule of law and determined in a courtroom with informed jurors and a fair trial.
There are times where that is excessive, this is not one of them because cloudflare is such an important piece of infrastructure. For a private form? You can delete whatever the heck you want, you should be able to.
Something like cloud flare, however, is more of a utility. Giving it the power to shut people off is giving it too much power.
No, but I feel like the ideology of the person posting this misses the fact that they are on the side of what empowers people like Putin.
Kiwi farms is clearly an issue that needs to be handled, but in my mind to handle it requires you be hesitant, it requires you be reluctant to shut them down because you don't want to step over that line. It means setting up barriers to your authority to shut other people down.
This, what I see here, is a glee for it. It's loarding your power over others, it's enacting revenge.
That is the toxicity I see. Pragmatic handling of speech requires that you sometimes shut down bad actors, but when the people in charge are doing it without concern, or the people driving it or using unchecked forces to do it, that's an issue.
I do not believe that there is any connection between the presence of KF and the ability of states to crush oppressed groups. States are not actually bound by their principles and they regularly break those principles to attack minority groups that they do not like. Whether people are gleeful, dispassionate, or upset about Cloudflare stopping business with a forum whose purpose is largely to harass people has zero influence on future defenses that various oppressed groups must make against oppressive regimes.
Does it? I never heard of them before and I still haven't. I do know these lulzcow sites have been around for decades and honestly there are even some 'snark' subreddits that are beginning to amount to the same thing. Pure vitriol aimed at one minor celebrity, and occasional dozxing
You just create enemies who sharpen pointier sticks in the shadows. If you want to fix the behavior of individuals, it requires education and their exposure to "normals". All this does is generate "feel good" moments and "LALALALA I can't hear you". But o hey, it's no different than the numerous crises plaguing America, including homelessness, collapsing healthcare, poverty and more.
Just some Facebook likes and nothing actually gets solved.
Another thought, Hitler on his rise to power was also deplatformed, literally thrown into prison. Everyone laughed at him and his Nazi party. Next thing you know he is out of prison and is genociding an entire continent.
I truly fear we are in for bloodshed in the future because all we do is try and shut out the crazy Qanons, the MAGAs, the white supremacists and just complete fucking degenerates but nobody actually tries to fix the problem. We are just stuffing the problem in a closet and hoping it doesn't find its way out.
> Another thought, Hitler on his rise to power was also deplatformed, literally thrown into prison. Everyone laughed at him and his Nazi party.
And now for what actually happened:
> Approximately two thousand Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, but were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers... Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf to fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released. Once released, Hitler redirected his focus towards obtaining power through legal means rather than by revolution or force, and accordingly changed his tactics, further developing Nazi propaganda
If there is any lesson here it's that Hitler wasn't punished severely enough and forgiven too quickly.
What would you have had society do? Just ignore his literal attempted violent overthrow of the government??
The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech.
By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.
I don't see kiwifarms trying to silence keffals, I 100% see the reverse happening unless archiving keffals public statement about giving children drugs you aren't authorized to provide to anyone is somehow censorship.
And on Kiwifarms I can go learn optimal ways to commit suicide, of which several methods involve drugs. Do you think null does KYC do children can’t view that? Doubt it. You are clearly biased.
"Using your speech to silence people" is very vague, "the destruction of their reputation and social network" and "lying about them" could refer to any case of cancel culture. These things are bad of course, bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but they are way too vague for cloudflare to ban any forum that has speech like this (which is any forum I'm aware of, including HN).
The point isn't to prescribe behavior for cloudflare. The point is to show that "no censorship" doesn't provide a simple rule to follow in all cases. Speech itself can be censorship. In this case an entity like cloudflare needs to evaluate the particulars of the case, not apply a general rule.
This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign -- the social or other merit or the speech censored, etc.
Kiwi Farms is a particular clear case to illustrate this point.
> The point isn't to prescribe behavior for cloudflare.
No, that we're dealing with cloudflare, with DDoS protection, is the point here. If you want to run a forum where you ban speech that you feel silences people, that's great, but if you want to deny DDoS protection to other forums that don't have this rule, or don't enforce it to your satisfaction, that's very different.
> This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign
No we really can't set this aside. Removing DDoS protection directly makes it impossible to run any unpopular website. "Harassment campaign" is a vague term, that can be used (and arguably in this case is used) for any kind of persistent criticism, ridicule, outrage, doxxing - I see harassment campaigns on twitter every day.
A simple web server can hold millions of connections. With some smart caching you could serve a wide audience. If the DDOS is big enough you will max out your 1GB/s line - I'm not sure on ways around that. Even blocking ranges on your router won't fix it.
This is not too hard of a problem, but the issue is that it's expensive. You can likely get to ~100k packets/second of forum serving + DDoS attack filtering on one core, but you will eventually saturate your (likely 1 gbps or less) upstream connection. The only real mitigation to this is to have a much bigger upstream connection than you need.
Edit - clarifying that 100k pps per core would only be achievable if the vast majority of the traffic (>95%) could be filtered out.
Not really. Just allusions to bad things. The actual response from the site owner showed that it was likely an agent provocateur who used a dormant account, and then posted a screenshot to twitter. The post in question was deleted by staff within minutes.
They corrected that, apparently the person self-deleted their comment (with the note "retarded") some minutes after it was screencapped for Twitter. But yes, a 2 year old account that had never done anything but one random post posts some threatening message apparently outside someone's house, gets screencapped on Twitter and self-deletes minutes later is their story, basically.
If service providers wanted to take down e.g. HN, such a pretext would be easy enough to create. HN would never get to that point, however, since most posts here don't piss off "protected groups". From my brief perusal in the week that I've been aware of KF, nearly every thread was intended to piss off such a group. That's a widely appealing if thankless task, so alternatives will probably be created soon enough.
Is it too early to say the internet is done for because it's looking that way to me. keffals has given the government the recipe to kill off any website they want gone. I'm hearing that keffals creatures are now attacking TOR to get them to drop kiwi too.
This isn't going to stop, 4chan is definitely next then every other site that isn't mainstream.
I don’t think 4chan is next. I believe the site has staying power because its users are anonymous. Anonymity means it’s very difficult for leaders to emerge which means it’s difficult to rally behind a particular cause. This means it’s difficult for 4chan to grow in influence as an organized force. It’s just a steady state of low-level chaos, which is good for containment. I’m also quite confident that the FBI monitors the site and I don’t think they want to see all those borderline people scurry off into different corners of the internet should the site go offline.
Speaking from personal experience, when a “bad” forum is shut down the members are not usually successful in spreading their toxicity into other areas. Sadly it sort of just dies.
Anything is possible at this point. Even the administrator of Kiwi Farms is expecting APNIC to revoke their /24, because the Twitter mob has been very vocal of who their next harassment targets are.
Yes, and they actually already discussed such a possibility back when the Daily Stormer first moved to Tor[0].
They ultimately shot down the idea, and just put out a statement condemning them instead[1][2].
I think it's unlikely they would implement such a thing for KiwiFarms now that they've already set the precedent with a site that is arguably much worse.
4chan's experienced this kind of attack back in 2003, the year it was found. Users from another website contacted its host over it's hosting of lolicon. moot diplomatically resolved the issue and 4chan has more-or-less been up since. The lindy effect dictates that, having experienced these kinds of shocks along the way, 4chan will be up for another 15 years.
How is the government involved in the decision made by a private company? I fail to see the point you're trying to make here. Also, I seriously doubt that Keffals is influencing the entire "government" (what country are we even talking about). Also, "attacking TOR"? Do you know by any chance how TOR works?
I visit some "non mainstream" D&D forums. I'm pretty sure I've seen the n-word written zero times there. Not a single forum avatar is a swastika. I'd be cautious about elevating KF to the level of "every other site that isn't mainstream."
They should consider building their own DDOS protection. I've heard thats pretty simple and something website owners should be expected to do on their own. After all, it's not like most website owners rally behind like one or two giant services to mitigate the issue of DDOS against their sites.
I for one never voted to have CF and DDoS-Guard as censors of the internet.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] threadI'm glad their little "community" is being seen off into the void. Good riddance.
> The ban may have also inadvertently blocked a New Zealand-based neo-nazi group called Action Zealandia.
> The Action Zealandia website, which is believed to be hosted by a website run by Moon, is also offline.
(https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/technology/2022/09/infamous-k...)
It's very easy, anyone with basic grasp of C can modify the Tor client to do this.
https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-reclaiming-onionb...
If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.
> If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.
You seriously overestimate how many people care enough to DDoS kiwifarms.
Doesn't sound easy to me if you need to get more people to care than they do now.
Just search 'kiwi farms' on Twitter.
It's simply not possible for the server to distinguish between real and malicious rendezvous requests.
But as a thought experiment, would an IPFS based distributed website survive attacks of this nature?
It could be pinned by individual users and gateways and accessed using browser plug-ins.
[1] https://ipfs.tech/
Surely some of the appeal or enablers for the behaviour on there is that someone else is wearing the legal risk of storing it all
On top of that, access at two biggest gateways would likely be filtered since one is a hobbyist service and the other is cloudflare, so everyone would have to run their own nodes.
So in practice - no. Only an archive of the current state.
To my knowledge, it's content addressable, and therefore limited to static content, because if the content of a file change, the URL to it changes.
-- Stallman, probably?
/endsarcasm
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psn...
In a statement to The Sunday Times, the PSNI said they received a report of an incident last Tuesday.
“Officers attended the scene but found nothing ongoing on their arrival. Inquiries are continuing surrounding the incident which is being treated as hate-motivated at this time,” a PSNI spokesperson added.
It's a terrible art people master. It's like the worst hateful accounts on twitter which are extremely clean - you couldn't report a single tweet, yet we know exactly what they mean. Of course this account for explicitly-super-straight is not against anyone. Of course all this public information collected on specific people and their connections is for fun and not an invitation to harass them.
yeah, because it's so difficult to just SWAT someone and claim you're someone you're not? The MTG swatter literally used text-to-speech and said roughly "I'm from Kiwifarms and this is my username: ...". why would anyone go to the trouble of disguising their voice only to tell police who they really are? Null made it very clear that he cooperates with law enforcement if illegal content is put on the site. if it was actually that user, he'd be in a jail cell by now. there was no discussion of anything like this in any thread prior to the attack. it's so obviously a hoax.
why do people have such a fucking blind spot about this? it's the 911 equivalent of a phishing email with a forged sender address. it's trivial.
https://news.yahoo.com/respected-developer-died-suicide-expe...
Because either you care and can spend 5min to find many personal threads on how this impacted people's lives, or not. I'm not here to summarise this for you. This is not random internet drama for entertainment.
Where did Cloudflare give this evidence? Are you the administrator of Kiwifarms? They certainly haven't shared this in public.
I may be wrong.
(I don't know if I believe Null, personally, but both he and keffals are about as reliable narrators as Humbert Humbert.)
I agree it's unlikely CF would give a justification. (Hence why I said I don't necessarily believe Null.)
I found it shocking that the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign does openly say they are making home-made drugs, and proudly say they will organise for children to take it without parental consent. I'm sure this must be illegal?
This is entirely ignored in all reporting of the Cloudflare situation. If I was a reporter and I saw this in my 5 minutes of research, I would very quickly find someone else to be the spokesperson of dropkiwifarms.
It is. She's distributing controlled substances/substances that require a prescription. Essentially she's practicing medicine without a license. This would be true even if she were helping adults.
Here's a former FBI Asst. Dir. asserting that they do [0] (archive link in case it's removed [1]). I'll grant you that the government can and has lied, but all of this seems a lot like one side full of tremendously shitty people saying they're not guilty, and the other side saying the opposite. In the absence of definitive proof, I'll go with character.
[0] https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/15664385387652792...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220905075857/https://twitter.c...
I defend kiwifarms because it's funny and it's one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet.
Also, cute edit. Would make a perfect reply to yourself.
Oh, another edit. Well, ok then. You think it's "funny" with racism, antisemitism, transphobia and doxxing/harassing people. Case closed.
the idea that a website ought to be completely erased from the internet just because people on it say mean things is a very new idea, and one that I haven't been convinced by.
if you don't like it, just don't visit.
Forcing professors investing all their life into advancement of human civilization out of universities because they said a funny word? The should lose all their possessions, it's completely harmless and right, trust me!
Calling someone names and pointing out things that are glaring OPSEC mistakes? Immediately drop and do everything to attack them!
p.s.: it's very sad to see enthusiasts and prominent engineers like Marcan getting corrupted by the plague of our times.
Tech giants started justifying their abuses through "nazis bad" and now pointing out US support for Azov gets your website hidden.
I am member of a badminton club, we have a code-of-conduct. It contains things like:
- Don't harass other players
- Don't harass or be an ass towards refs
- Don't litter it the gym, keep it tidy
- Don't take performance-enhancing drugs
- and a few other such rules.
Why do we have to ask a judge in a court of law to be able to stop associating with a team-mate that keeps shouting sexual expletives at referees, keeps littering in the locker rooms, and generally makes the situation unpleasant? Why can't we just use our first amendment (or equivalent elsewhere) rights and stop associating?
(https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566729178807926785)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/23/putin-gender...
> Twitter gave the Taliban a green light to keep tweeting while noting the social media site would “continue to proactively enforce” its rules on the “glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam.”
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma...
EDIT: This was yesterday evening, EU time
https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566746606396997635
He says he has a "family emergency" and will be unavailable for a "week or more".
It helps it's the easiest way to do damage to a website and you just can pay someone to do the tech part of the hack. A DDoS attack is as easy to buy as the web hosting you're attacking now, back in the day you had to set up the botnet yourself
If they end up running the site on a server with no DDoS filtering at all, people will probably DoS them because it will be super easy.
Only some ivory tower conservative could believe people on welfare or disability are throwing money at tech nerd services to bring them down. What an incredible victim complex.
IIRC the context of that quote was that Kiwi Farms has/had several people constantly filing frivolous lawsuits against it who were literally on welfare/government support.
Suing people is unpleasant and expensive and tends to favor people with money who can afford to hire effective lawyers, very few of whom will work for so little that they can be afforded on welfare. If people on welfare are suing someone, it's probably because they actually have a grievance with them and feel legally wronged, regardless of whether their lawsuits are frivolous or not.
I don't think anyone on welfare is thinking, "the most enjoyable way for me to spend this money is to get involved in a legal process." If a lot of Kiwi Farms lawsuits come from people who are jobless and on disability, I think the more likely conclusion is that it might have something to do with who the site's common targets were.
I don't have any links on hand, but from what I recall they were all Pro Se. My understanding is that many of them were discovered by KF in the first place because they were vexatious litigants.
One of the vexatious litigants had previously sued Taylor Swift and threatened to abuse her lawyer's daughter, resulting in a high-profile lawyer representing Kiwi Farms Pro Bono against him.
The truth is wilder than fiction.
That seems if anything to reinforce the idea that this is unrelated to welfare?
- KF finds some vexatious litigants and starts targeting them
- The vexatious litigants sue KF
- ???
The pattern that's jumping out to me here isn't that people are on government assistance.
I don't recall claiming that it was because of welfare. I'm merely providing context to one of the earlier posts — a number of people on government assistance are constantly trying to take the site down, the admin notices a pattern with the DDoS attacks, and speculates it's because that aligns with when government assistance is paid out.
I am not saying that his speculation was true, but it makes significantly more sense if you understand why he may have come to the conclusion.
The narrative is obviously "those idiot leftists on the dole don't have jobs and waste their time and money on this." The causal relationship is critical to the narrative.
Of course they are, which is why I never said or implied this.
I am referring to people who spend years filing frivolous lawsuits that are continuously dismissed for things like improper jurisdiction, failing to state a claim, or suing the wrong people, and ignore any judgement or advice provided by the judge. Hence why I referred to them as vexatious.
> The narrative is obviously "those idiot leftists on the dole don't have jobs and waste their time and money on this." The causal relationship is critical to the narrative.
I am fairly left-leaning and grew up on government assistance. There is no narrative beyond describing factual events.
I will try to link some relevant court cases when I get home.
It takes literally one disgruntled person to pay $5 to take down most IPs that don't have DDoS protection. Sometimes a free booter is enough.
Until then, it doesn't seem likely.
It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people.
Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media.
Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
Was this information omitted because it was false or libelous, perhaps? How did you verify it was actually true?
Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people.
I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings.
Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments.
> How did you verify it was actually true?
The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact.
There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?).
If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.
> If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic.
Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
> Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.
This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.
This is getting off topic but I disagree with this. Trump's comments and right wing news incited an insurrection. I think "fighting at the margins" is probably moot and really we should be tackling this where it broadly affects everyone. Isn't that how most policy and social phenomena are dealt with?
Can you cite an example of what you mean? There's nothing being espoused that affects "everyone" unless you're excluding all persons who don't meet your criteria for personhood. Opposed viewpoints are relative extremes to each other, so measuring by majorities is how this typically get addressed in society. Legislation isn't a benevolent, objective, or unbiased action.
KF is a fringe platform of marginal(ized) views. So was the Daily Stormr. Will no one rid us of these turbulent priests?[1] (It got some disagree-votes, but thanks for getting the point.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
For example, the lack of moderation on Facebook has probably been a factor in thousands or tens of thousands of suicides. Just from the fact there are a billion+ Facebook users and people are horrible to each other.
There's a case at the moment in the UK of a 14 year old girl who killed herself over abuse over social media (mainly Facebook).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
On social suicides, is moderation more or less a factor than the dehumanization caused by over-broad content policies on large social forums (ie- the attrition of personal communities like early tumblr and livejournal after being consumed by large companies who might try to balance the societal cost of some people dying against opex for moderation, for instance). It seems related to what happens to prisons and with zero tolerance in schools- the costs of litigation and liability driving perverse outcomes in populations due to intolerance of real difference or diversity.
This is probably a bad example in this context though as the people being talked about on Kiwiforums are not "customers" of the Kiwifarms "company" so GDPR probably doesn't cover them.
GDPR doesn't mean you have to scrub someone from your database, it means you can only keep information if you have a legitimate need. I'm sure credit bureaus can come up with enough bureaucracy that there is a legitimate need.
This describes every political movement that has ever existed ever
That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet.
Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it.
Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
They'd do that anyway.
Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.
Freedom of Expression, and to a larger extent, social media, allows icky people to identify themselves for you.
Who wants to turn that off...and why?
The original claim was that it posed a direct actionable threat to someone's personal safety. This claim was not substantiated. Now you're shifting it to, "unflattering words are a form of violence."
The world would be a nicer place if these people preferred the former activity but that's neither here nor there.
Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations.
By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?
I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.
Twitter reviewed the content and said NO.
They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time.
The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.
It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights.
If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.
Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.
Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a legal team would all of a sudden decide 3 days after they publically announce they wouldn't remove security services from a customer that one customer who has basically been the same for god only knows how long needs to have those services removed. I honestly, would be surprised if the original announcement hadn't already had input from legal. So if legal thought this customer was so bad, why wouldn't they have it done before they publically say they won't do it.
I think the twitter mobbing of CloudFlare worked.
It would be silly to say there are definitely no Nazis in a company above a certain size. It's easy to fire them as soon as you know about them, but a lot of shitheads know to fly under the radar, so you can't really proactively hunt them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNgLq_naOKw
The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/weevs-case-flawed-begi...
>The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
Pretty sure most smart people have already distanced themselves from the EFF at this point, so that's not very convincing.
EFF, despite getting repeatedly called out by several top experts, spent years pushing downright dangerous disinformation via their "secure messaging scorecard". Not exactly a trustworthy organisation.
It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
Then why link the slurs at all to accompany the argument?
> It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
On that same page you linked there are about as many people in favor as against, tptacek's word is not the law regardless of his competency, and it sure wasn't as uncontroversial as you make it out to be.
And about that decision, he said this:
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
> Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
This is kind of dubious as a basic ethical position (if you think it’s bad just don’t do it) but note that it’s not entirely ridiculous as if it’s legal, others can and will pressure you to do it. Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing, you can’t be coerced by an angry mob to do it.
>Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing
Perhaps we shouldn't be hurrying to get rid of freedom of association.
Truth is he likes the money, and the power. That's why he has it.
As a CF customer, I am far more concerned with a policy or precedent of capriciously cutting off customers than a policy of defending "bad" customers.
So yes, they worried about their income.
Cloudflare is a public company. I can tell you from being in a position to know this at a small company, but the "vendor review / procurement process" that happens to acquire a new service is non-trivial and usually offers several checkpoints to make sure that you're only onboarding vendors that meet strict criteria. One of those criteria is "not being embroiled in an obviously bad PR scandal easily revealed by a basic Google search."
CloudFlare is public and that means that their shareholders have the final say, not the individual customers. If shareholders see that CloudFlare's revenue is declining or that key customers are leaving, and there's an obvious reason why that's happening, well, that's the answer to who has the most say.
The whole operational plan that @SleepingGiants had during the Trump administration was to systematically identify corporate links and associations, and to highlight them to PR and legal teams who knew how this worked. "Cancellation" works not because individuals are easily moved by emotional arguments. It works because most companies answer to shareholders, and most shareholders care about value and growth. The company has a fiduciary duty to drive value for shareholders. When those stars align, obvious reasons why value is being artificially capped don't become "hard decisions." They become easy ways to increase value.
There are very few companies that can successfully hold an ideology. When they do hold an ideology, that ideology is usually aligned with some market force. Apple advertises privacy as its ideology because it's seemingly aligned with shareholder value. The ideology becomes expensive or even net-negative commensurate with the value being driven.
I don’t know how popular this is, or at least how popular it should be.
Conviction is based on the extremely high bar of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the standard for depriving a person of their liberty.
Society rightly does not operate at that standard. Conviction was never meant to be a proxy for whether you ought to do business with somebody.
Think about killers who “got off on a technicality,” where everyone knew they were guilty. Or open criminals who for whatever reason were unable to face a jury, like many mass shooters. It just doesn’t make sense to say “well the courts never formally convicted them so we have a duty to defend them.”
Sorry if this is long-winded. I am just alarmed by this trend of equating legal standards with social standards.
It simply made Cloudflare's position untenable - they are not piratebay but need customers.
Everyone has a different line in the sand. For me, a platform designed to promote hate speech crosses that line.
A forum dedicated to the principal and culture of free speech is designed to promote hate speech?
Btw, a forum dedicated to the principle and culture of free speech would absolutely (by definition) be promoting/hosting hate speech.
What is your personal understanding of the term?
The alternative is to accept that moderation is NECESSARY for online communities (or else spam and hate speech will take up a huge part of the content and suddenly you'll realize you're essentially promoting this content afterall) and moderation will always look like the opposite of "free speech".
You absolutely can not say the same thing of Kiwifarms. Let's not be deliberately obtuse here.
There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?
Kiwifarms was founded to troll and harass a specific webcomic author. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people or communities.
Surely you see the difference here.
Are they targeting specific rich people in a dedicated and persistent fashion to the point that said rich persons kill themselves? No, that's not happening. I've seen posts of the type you've described. They're almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned. They're much less frequent than any one of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-jew, or anti-trans comments... which are almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned as well. This site does not remotely compare to KF.
Why should we?
Society has been doing pretty fine with some fuzziness until now. Sometimes something really goes to far and they end up not hosted anymore. That’s the system working, not it failing to work. Well, that came a bit slowly for kiwifarms sadly but I’m glade sanity prevailed in the end.
As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.
Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.
Harassment forums like the one in discussion here have no place in civilized society and I am happy for them to be censored. The people that frequent these sites can get together in person and chat about hating all they want, but the method of their harassment (the global platform of the internet) should removed -- insofar as that is possible.
> Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is.
Ideally, many smaller elements make their decisions about what speech to promote or convey, and "society" or the "government" is the actor of last resort-- stepping in for the most not-OK stuff when the market has been shown to fail.
Concentrated power is dangerous-- whether it's in the hands of a government or a single overly-powerful commercial actor-- and needs to be restrained one way or another.
We may disagree on where that line should be, but most people absolutely have this line.
But-- we should have big markets of many participants who all make their own decisions about what they condone. Then, the individual decisions are not so toxic. And if you are doing something egregious where almost all of them say no, well, you got what you deserved.
My personal thoughts: exposing peoples' personal information for the explicit purpose of severe and illegal harassment is on the "definitely not OK" side of things. Ordinary hate speech that occasionally leads to spree violence is much murkier.
If Property X is something like the color of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, etc, then I would support cloudflare banning them.
I am certainly not the master of what should and should not be on the internet, and neither should cloudflare. As a society, though, there are some things that most can agree on.
Okay, please, if you dont mind, specify how that line is drawn up
They're also not encouraging their viewers to harass, contact, and troll specific individuals.
I don't support doxxing, and this is a false equivalency at best.
I don't watch CNN, so I had to read up on the boxing meme thing first.
HN was made to discuss tech topics. KF was made to harass and doxx a specific target.
I'm not here to explicitly define "hate speech", but I think that we can agree that KF has crossed that line into hate speech.
Unless you're cool with encouraging harassment and doxxing, that is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701383
Threats that what happened in Germany in the 30s will happen again, and it's deserved:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701442
People blaming Jews/Jewish conspiracies for various actions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692308
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32691199
I'd like to point out that I understand what's "vile" to one person isn't to another. I've had my posts reported as "hate speech" on reddit for saying that "the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous" and that "Obesity is wrong."
Banned speech should have a very high bar -- direct, specific threats of physical harm.
Those comments are really awful and wtf upvoted....
Some of those other links are vile though.
I would define hate speech as speech that directs hatred at a particular group. For instance, Joe Biden recently gave a state speech (The "Gates of Hell" speech) that was completely choked with hatred for a group. Shrug. I have no interest in banning this, whether from the "president" or from anon. My understanding of Kiwifarms is that they basically just make fun of idiot liberals--a sport on endless grounds.
If you gave your honest definition of hate speech it would likely be "People who disagree with me and make me look bad showing how stupid or wrong I am."
It was the entire purpose of the site.
My thoroughly unscientific analysis of the situation seemed like it was about 98% bullshit posts and maybe 2% of the posts I found truly objectionable (mostly jew/black hate) but not illegal.
I'm not doubting that there is some illegal stuff there, nor that there is some truly vile content, but, I don't even think it's in the majority on a post-level basis.
See the problem?
I'm not supportive of banning Joshua Moon from the internet. Do you agree that there is a difference here?
Yeah none of us here are happy about this site existing or innocent people being targeted, of course. But the next one will be slightly less extreme as kiwi farms and we'll say the same things.
One which hid behind Cloudflare in order to hide their identity while simultaneously exposing yours?
This is how KF started and continued to operate.
You have a line. I have a line. What is happening here is that we're trying to define a common line which works for society, and it is going to "slip" over time as views change.
In the past, that line would have included books which even mentioned homosexual behavior. Today that is more tolerated and accepted, which is good in my opinion because gay people certainly exist.
I guess what I'm saying is that the line is going to have to slip a bit, and in more than one direction.
We should be consistent and non-arbitrary. There’s so many more examples.
How would you feel if someone made a "Finding Nemo" forum in which they tracked down your identity, your family, and your friends and encouraged its members to harass and doxx you and your family?
Oh, and this forum hid their identity behind Cloudflare while, at the same time exposing your identity and personal details?
Would you support Cloudflare banning said forum?
Publishing libsoftiktok's information was definitely intended to harass them, and implicit support for doxxing.
> Would you support Cloudflare banning said forum?
No.
I agree and I'm very worried for it.
You can think of many other examples, but the point is, if you think there's an easy-to-create and easy-to-enforce content policy on the Internet, I think you're mistaken.
What exactly is inconsistent about their banning of services? Is there another site which is on their radar, which does what kiwifarm does, and they've come out and stated they will never ban them?
It is truly pitiful, because this is ultimately what social media encourages. They encourage tagging posts by location, they rip the EXIF data from the images (which most users don't even know exists in the first place). This is all information that is fed into the advertising and mass surveillance machine.
At the very least, this is what we have castle doctrine and self-defense law for.
But they're not credible and nothing will happen.
The thing is that just about every company and individual is going to have the caveat "be bad enough and I won't deal with you" in practice. Kiwi Farms is pretty horrible but you could have an even more awful site - say real murder for hire - and it would be dropped even faster.
Do really expect someone to offer a "principled position" that no matter the real world consequences, they'll never stand against some horror getting out onto the Internet?
Edit: I want to add that Cloudflair's original statement and it's recent statement have involved a consistent point of "we shouldn't be the one to suppress this" which is fundamentally different from "nothing should be done about these problems". They're basically saying "we should be doing this but we should be doing this based on a court order rather than on our own". Which is to say there are never any "free speech fundamentalism" in these statements.
The reality is, we're moving from an early pseudo-anarchic ideals of early internet free speech mode to the pseudo-feudal setups where if you want to have an internet presence you must have a liege lord and must live at their sufferance, or you'll quickly fall victim to one of the roving mobs that live to collect the scalps of the likes of you. It's not a fun place to be in, but that's where we're at. And as a vassal you don't have too much position to make demands on your lord. You can change the lord, for sure, but there aren't many and if none of them likes you, you're out of luck. Welcome to the Web 3.0, it's not what you thought it'd be.
It was a wilder place, but so was the Wild West. Is Vegas less interesting than Tombstone?
I find it to be a different kind of interesting (and this one is far more convenient than what we had when it was AOL and BBSes).
http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...
(Need TOR browser or Brave)
For example, appending ".moe" to the ".onion" in that URL:
https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificed...
Which also allows it to be archived (as the mainstream archive sites don't recognise Tor hidden services):
https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaa...
Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.
So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them.
The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
But sex workers, they're "immoral". Which is why cloudflare dropped THEM without fanfare or warning. https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk78x/switter-down-cloudfla...
When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
I didn't see brigading, but I did see doxxing.
And of course the whole thing is a mentally-toxic nut-picking echo chamber, but that's kind of par for the course on the modern Web.
And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
I have seen many more threats against Kiwifarms that I have seen originate from within it. The forum seems to be a melting pot for grossly offensive people to make grossly offensive comments. And considering 4chan is still around (even if it only used to have a problem with CSAM) I'm at a loss at why Kiwifarms is being "deplatformed".
I can only assume it's like the "jailbait" subreddit - something reprehensible but action is only taken when it gets media attention.
One side is going to call me a dyke, carpet-muncher, and link the fact that I like women to being a child groomer.
The other is going to call me transphobic, a bitch, a cunt, and a TERF for not wanting to suck dick/not wanting all queer spaces to be about trans issues 24/7.
> And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
This is one thing that pisses me off about people like keffals. When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates. The Internet changed that. Since I had WWW access, I could talk to gay adults and realize that a.) you could find love being gay, b.) get advice on what to avoid and how to stay safe, and c.) start to plan out a gay life for myself. Nobody was ever inappropriate with me. (That was always straight men...) Keffels et al. are dragging us right back so gay adults can't support gay kids that are genuinely in danger or suicidal. Thanks, guys.
At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
This is something I feel too, having seen some of the most fringe communities on the internet (a good example is furrys) and how they act predatory around children. I am afraid to say it to any of my friends, colleagues, or even my partner as I feel like I would be seen as bigoted.
I think some people don't see how some behaviour is completely inappropriate (like that Reddit moderator who had a parent that raped children in the attic and, thanks to Kiwifarms, you saw how they were also very predatory). It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
Those people are sometimes right that an INORDINATE amount of moral panic are focused on LGBT+ people. (Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women).
On the other hand, most of them are so urban and online that they can't conceive of trying to navigate this space as a normie parent. Most normal parents are AWARE that strange men are potential dangers to female people and teach us about it accordingly so we're wary, we can go to them or teachers if someone DOES prey on us, etc. (I see a lot of warnings to teen girls that 'that guy doesn't think he's mature for your age, he just wants someone easy to manipulate').
But most normal parents aren't plugged into the queer community enough to teach their kids how to avoid predators in those spaces. And most of those parents just have too much else going on to learn - if somebody is working 50 hours a week with 3 kids, they don't have TIME to keep up with the drama of who was revealed to be a predator this week. And the instinct to not take chances when it comes to one's child's safety makes sense.
> What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
One of the reasons I made an account for lurking was to watch and see where waves of newbies arrived to KF from and why. There are a lot of participants who ended up there after what they wanted to discuss was completely banned from the other places they talked about things online.
> It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
The lack of tolerance for dissent or deviation bothers me. In a lot of places, you can't even have procedural or intellectual disagreements about trans orthodoxy, or discuss how some of the rhetoric is hurtful to other members of the community. It's very 'there is one way to be and only one way'. Very similar to conservative Christian spaces. (My family is half conservative Christians, so I'm familiar with THEIR filter bubbles too).
Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women? But you're further saying that you think trans women are as likely to be predators as straight men? Doesn't your own experience contradict that?
You're upset that the trans women posted on KF are going to make the public think all LGBT people are groomers. I'm upset that they'll make the public think all trans women are groomers. And comments like yours feel like punching down, frankly.
Isn't it a numbers game? ~50% of the population are men. You see thousands of men a day (if you don't WFH). I think the occurrence rate of trans people (in real life) is vastly smaller.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the likelihood of predation to be the same, but not experience any from one group that is vastly under-represented in daily life.
Trans people weren't a substantial portion of queer spaces until the mid to late 2010s, and I'm talking about the 90s and early-mid 00s. There was also more of a focus on passing/not talking about it + it was more common to be in the closet, so even if I had been acquainted with trans women, I probably wouldn't have known.
On the other hand, I've seen entitled behavior from trans women in lesbian spaces post 2015ish. It just hasn't been directed at me personally because predators choose their victims based on vulnerability and I aged out of that. Not many sexual predators go after men or women OLDER than they are.
I'm growing my hair out and have started painted my nails and wearing dresses again, and the binders have gone back in a box. (I'm not trans but I like male clothing).
Likewise, I WANT to be out, especially since a lot of younger queer people are so very '!' when they see stable adult queer people, but unfortunately, the in-fighting means not only can I not trust the general populace to be chill, I can't trust my fellow queers not to throw me under the bus for being too 'privileged'. (Even though I'm poor and disabled, because all that matters is cis + white.)
Personally, I am a trans woman, so my social circle includes many more trans women than the average. And I am not a predator, and I don't know any predators personally, so I conclude we're not likely to be predators. But I'm just a random person on the internet, so you can't know if I'm telling the truth, or even if I am, whether my circle of friends is a representative sample of trans women in general.
I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
I agree! Which is why I made the point about straight men also being gross and my point that people should be leery because we (queer people) are doing a bad job ejecting predators and holding them accountable, not because we're any worse. And that's not just about trans women: There's a large problem with some cis gay men sexualizing teenage boys, and I will absolutely throw hands over that, too.
Also, since you are not a predator, I assume you wouldn't want to be friends with predators and would not support groups with predators in them, so predatory trans women probably don't want to be friends with you bc you'd call their asses out. Predators seek out friends and spaces that allow them to prey on people. You not having predatory friends just says your circle is not a safe space for predators which is good.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that you may not know. A lot of abusers/predators act like good people outside of their abuse victims. Nobody in my communities would have known or suspected my parents were abusive, for example. Or how many people find out suddenly that their dad/grandpa/uncle are creeps.
I just point this out because a loooot of cis straight guys say the same thing to girls and women: "Well, none of MY friends sexually harrass/rape/assault people, so it can't be that common!" Except that it is.
I think there are a lot of variables that go into understanding these things, and that non-queer people who are suddenly thrust into it once their kids come out have no way to orient themselves, which is WHY we should be more diligent.
Please be careful about spreading this particular fact. It's unfortunately true, but not everybody has what it takes to handle it responsibly.
It makes people suspicious and paranoid, which leaves them susceptible to manipulation by the actual threats among us.
I think trans people get a shit time online because as soon as the topic enters anything to do with activism it is only the loudest and most extreme voices that are amplified.
This is a shame for all of the people within LGBT who these voices drown out, including other trans people.
So there's a confounding variable. If 5% of straight cis men and 5% of trans women are predators but I only meet 2 trans women, odds are I'm never going to run into a trans woman predator. Whereas being a geek in the 90s and 00s I was SURROUNDED by cis straight dudes. It was very common for me to be the only female in the room, or there to be less than 5 of us at a computer show.
(I also think women and trans men are about as likely to be predators but that they show/act it out differently. I tend to think assholeishness/predatory natures are fairly equally dispersed across different identity groups but expressed differently due to socio-cultural factors.)
Didn't see it so it must not exist? That's the kind of "research" everyone should ignore.
> saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading
Either because it was now removed or hidden from public view. These activities have definitely occured on KF and just because you "don't see it happening now", doesn't mean it hasn't.
It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even more effectively as it did in the past.
If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.
The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.
KF is at best more/different propaganda against the mainstream propaganda
"First they came for the Nazis" is how World War II could be described (1), and with the exception of a few misguided sympathizers the story ends well with the destruction of their power structure and hanging of their leadership.
Probably worth noting that among the reasons KF just lost their newest DDoS protector is that many Russians are understandably sensitive to Nazi sympathizing, even "for the lulz".
(1) One could even argue that hesitating to come for the Nazis sooner was a significant mistake in the international community that allowed the severity of the War and the atrocities that occurred in it.
This was what Marcuse was getting at in "Repressive Tolerance". Some views deserve free expression. Others do not. If you give free expression to all perspectives, the vile ones will spread until you can't control them anymore, and then you're no longer a tolerant society but a repressive one.
We have the means and now the will to identify vile speech online and shut it down at the network level.
Can we think of some good reasons for suppression of communication? I can name several (disruption of ongoing stochastic terrorism, disruption of immediate harassment process, failure to comply with the TOS of a private corporation voluntarily doing business with the offending party, use of network compromising service provision for third parties in the same system), and many of them apply to the KF situation.
I could cite examples of harassment and "stochastic terrorism" on Twitter, reddit, Facebook, etc, but I doubt I need to.
KF either can't or won't keep its house in order, and at this point, the can't-won't difference is immaterial. I welcome someone making a solid run at providing another channel alongside Twitter / FB / et al, but this ain't it.
Think of all the harassment directed at Kyle Rittenhouse, or the Covington Catholic kids, or just Republicans generally, on reddit and Twitter. Harassment was featured on the front page.
That isn't a small problem that the moderators are unaware of; it's an ideological belief that certain harassment is acceptable.
FWIW, I've gotten kicked from FB far more often for vitriolic criticism of the right than the left. At least to my eye, they try to steer an even keel... If people are seeing more Republicans get snagged, I think it's because of their own social circle (because filter bubbles are pretty thick these days).
This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised.
I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people.
I'm already starting to see the swing back.
Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?
And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.
This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.
In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
For a standard school bully, if you're a big enough problem for the bully they move on to an easier target. Even if you fight back and lose, the bully is far more likely to move on to another target that doesn't pose a response damage risk to them (the only way that isn't true, is if you're entirely unable to pose any physical threat to them, then they may be amused by the attempt to fight back).
This has very little in common with how playground rules work.
I don't think any fight has ever stopped once someone else starts throwing punches, certainly not on KiwiFarms. The only thing they care about is how you react. If you start getting mad on Twitter, then they'll take the fight to Twitter. If you start a public campaign to take them down, the users will obviously take it personally. If you reached out to the police and talked with a therapist/loved one... what would they do? In the hyper-sensational age though, the only response anyone wants is to make an eye-opening TikTok for their 15 seconds of fame... so long as they aren't hated, that sort of fame is obviously verboten.
My goal isn't to take a shot for KiwiFarms or blame the victims here. I'm simply expressing that, as a queer person, I prefer to live in a world where KiwiFarms is allowed to exist. It's a horrible place populated by increasingly toxic people, but without it the internet lacks balance. Without websites like KiwiFarms, it's hard to feel secure hosting anything that others are allowed to use. On the other side of that coin, the people lobbying against KiwiFarms are largely stationed on centralized platforms. They're encouraging a future where all of our communication is commodified and owned by private interests. Maybe it is too late to save the internet, but I'll be the last one to adopt the fatalist mindset that everything requires direct moderation.
Honestly, this is a myth. One day, I decided to follow the "stand up to the bullies and they'll leave you alone" stuff my mother sprouted off. It started with two on two. Two bullies were threatening me and my mate, and I said to my mate we should stand up to them and they'll leave us alone. My mate decided to run. The bullies chased after him. I decided to stop the bullies and stood in there way. What happened over the course of 5-10 minutes was me standing up to these bullies, every time someone they knew came along they asked for help, eventually it was something silly like 10 of them versus me. I'm not too sure of the number because eventually someone jumped me from behind and I was beated until I was out cold. I was found by some girls who then told Janitor that I was dead. That Janitor then came to where they said I was and saw me not moving and thought I was dead. He had the unpleasurable experience of thinking he just found a 10-year old kid dead in a school hallway.
I stood up to every bully. I beat every single one of them up at some point. One bully left the school because of a beating I gave him. You know what changed? Nothing until i started dealing with them differently. Once I started acting like I couldn't care less they stopped their taunting and name calling and all the other stuff that I would beat them up for.
The “stand up to a bully” thing is good TV. In reality it doesn’t really work well.
It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.
Sounds like you've internalized the idea that it's OK to be a punching bag for other people and if you retaliate when attacked that makes you a bad person. This is your right of course, but why should anyone else feel obliged to subscribe to your moral/risk calculus?
I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.
Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.
These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.
Hopefully more of them are taken offline.
We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.
It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
That’s what 100% matters.
I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights.
Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product.
Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
It's like a person smugly telling you their hydrangeas are better watered than yours while you are trying to get them to notice that there is clearly a house fire starting in one of their bedrooms.
Does the old laissez-faire approach continue to work when more than half the living population is online?
What truly matters is which speech ends up being successful and adopted in the broader society. This is why the focus is placed on the availability of platforms rather than the presence of free speech on its own. The argument is never just to let people speak without arrest or restraint, but to let them speak AND give them access to a convenient platform that will help their speech be more successful. The next step is to force platforms to host them and give them an algorithmic pipeline of views.
If freedom of speech is the key ingredient on its own, why is the US on an steeper authoritarian slide compared to the rest of the West despite more robust speech protections? Largely because authoritarian elements there are extremely adept at using speech rules for their own ends, and will then be able to discard most freedoms of any type once they solidify their grip on the institutions.
If you mean 1A, that only protects your speech from the government, not anyone else (and even then it's not an unabridged right since there are legal limits on what you can say.)
We understand. And the 2nd amendment. And the rest of the constitution. We just don't think the American ideas are the best.
Nonetheless this has not stopped journalists from reporting it as fact so they can create via citeogenesis a bloody shirt to wave and justify campaigns against the KiwiFarms.
The whole thing relies on the loose causality of stochastic terrorism. It's a bit like the Nuremberg trials "only gave orders" defense, except they're not even orders, just innuendo - it's just spreading smear material and a general attitude of hate among a fractious, isolated and angry audience.
A makes the post. B makes a fake phone call to the police. Cop C arrives and pulls the trigger. All in different countries. Is A really free of the repercussions?
Actual evidence of harassment from members of kiwifarms seems to be missing in all of these discussions. There is no doubt that there was lots of doxxing and lots of mean words on the site, but I haven't seen any evidence of harassment campaigns or anything similar. The closest thing that there was to evidence is someone who called in a SWAT team on a Republican congressperson and said to the police, "I am a kiwifarms mod, please come investigate me."
If that evidence existed, given the microscope this site was under, someone would have found it.
[0]https://doxbin.org/upload/Keffals
This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech.
Spreading this pro-KF propaganda needs to stop.
ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following.
The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
Death threats, fraud, harassment, libel, and other harmful forms of speech have had legal consequences for much longer than that.
The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?
Meanwhile, victims can face years of harassment while they wait for a bored cop to get a "yep, they used Tor" conclusion to the case.
Fraud is theft. Harassment is forcing a non-consenting party to listen. Libel is a civil issue, not criminal.
Come on.
The Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless it is super loud late at night near sleeping people." We read that in, because we're not idiots.
Why should that business not be allowed to use their freedom of association to not do business with those folks?
Why is legal action the only acceptable approach to bad actions? Direct action, pressure, and boycots have worked well against injustices in the past; see sit-ins in the American south during the civil rights era as an example.
Sure, freedom of association goes both ways. We decided as a society to add protections for minority groups to prevent that sort of specific abuse. I don't think we'll do the same for Kiwifarms, and I'd argue that's the correct call.
Yes, because that speech was within the limits of constitutional free speech. Most of my knowledge about free speech comes from reading up on how America has defined it for more than a century.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you start talking and everyone tells you to shut up, then tough shit, you live in a society that doesn't like what you’re saying. This has always been the case, and it continues to be the case.
For many years, marginalized groups of all stripes were denied the megaphone of popular media, but they fought and convinced people they were right and built popular acceptance. If Kiwifarms wants to get the private protection and reach afforded to broader society then they need to convince the public that its actually good to harass and stalk trans people. Good luck.
https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-o...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-c...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-state...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rend...
Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour.
"There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too.
Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
Generally speaking, the best way to handle situations like that is to get the police to put someone in a cage.
And that goes to anyone involved in any part of this whole fight.
With a DDOS the goal is to prevent people from reading someone's words. With harassment the goal is to prevent people hearing the targets future words.
Both are forms of censorship.
There was no physical not psychological violence here. Only Ddos. Why is that bad? Do you have an inherent right to not be buried under request? protected from bots?
Well, we have a lot of laws against that in every major country.
Yes, if police catch you doing that, then they will put you in a cage.
Additionally, it's a retail store. I can't imagine they would lose a lot of business if their website was down. Still, they could just as easily fall victim to a DDoS racketeering scheme I suppose.
If somehow someone objected to cheesecake factory's practices (let's say they're a vegan or they disapproved of cheesecake factory's health practices or something), then it would be disproportionately easy for the cheesecake factory to conduct a DDoS attack on the protester's website than vice-versa. So the idea that we should support DDoS as some form of free speech is obviously pro-corporatist in my perspective, because it empowers those with more financial and bureaucratic control over the internet.
"I don't like what you're saying, so I'm going to shoot you in the face so you stop."
"I don't like the content your web server is serving, so I'm going to DDoS it so it stops."
The DDoS is not an idea in the same way that a bullet isn't one. Therefore no, this is not "the marketplace of ideas in action".
No, there's no law anywhere that includes actions performed by machines in the definition of free speech. DDoSing a server is not performance art, and neither is shooting someone.
This isn't about 1 website here. This is about the precedent.
Every time cloudflare gets bullied into taking a website offline, it is ammunition that an authoritarian government can use against it.
What happens when one of these countries starts to threaten cloudflare employees lives, to force them to take down some human rights organizations' websites?
Maybe it won't happen tomorrow. But every time a mob forces cloudflare to take these sorts of actions, it weakens cloudflare's ability to fight against the real threats.
If you want to stand by your opinion in this, then fine. But I get to hold you responsible for the deaths that happen, if cloudflare is no longer able to stand up against these greater threats.
This isn't how normal people think.
I, on the other hand, am concerned about the lives that could be lost, due to authoritarian governments having more ammo to pressure cloudflare with.
This specific time might not be the tipping point. But if stuff like this keeps happening, the real threats can use the precedent to target vulnerable groups, and yes that can cause lives to be lost.
Why don't we stretch this in any old way back to DDoS? Why should the government say which packets I can and cannot send? Any encroachment by the government into something as silly as sending DDoS packets slices down my ability to speak freely. If they start at DDoS, then what's stopping them from limiting other forms of speech?
See, I can do the same thing. Just because free speech in the form of sending DDoS packets isn't liked by people doesn't mean we should be willing to give it up. Right? Because once we start limiting what kind of packets we can send, we're only a slipper slope away from being told which other kinds of packets we can't send.
Still, I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario which is otherwise devoid of government interference. In this whole story, all I see is a bunch of civilians. If there is a government actor, department, or anything, please share. Otherwise it just looks like standard whataboutism directed at the govt.
Look, if you are ok with authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations, then say so.
> I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario
So, one big reason why cloudflare is used, is by human rights organizations to protect themselves from being DDoS'ed by authoritarian governments.
If you don't care about that, then just say so.
> is otherwise devoid of government interference.
It is not devoid from government interference, because cloudflare stops authoritarian governments from interfering with human right's organizations.
And, as I said before, this precedent hurts cloudfares ability to protect human right's organizations from being taken down by these governments, by protecting them from DDoS attacks, from those governments.
> If there is a government actor, department, or anything
Every time cloudflare is pressured to stop protecting websites, this is ammo that authoritarian governments can use against them, to drop protections for other organizations, such as human rights organizations. It might not happen tomorrow, but it is more ammo that these governments can use.
Why do you keep avoiding this idea of authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations?
> that you're ok with the government censoring which packets people send.
So, if an authoritarian government, tried to target a gay rights organization, yes I would be ok with a different government protecting this targeted minority from DDoS attacks.
This is because I do not want important human rights organizations, such as ones that protect gay people from being oppressed, from being taken off the internet by bad people.
Do you see how I just directly addressed the question, by saying that yes I am in favor of the government protecting, for example, gay rights organizations, from being DDoSed?
Do you really oppose this protection? Would you support an authoritarian government, taking down a gay rights organization?
I tried to get them to talk about this issue, and they basically admitted that they support removing, for example, gay right organizations from the internet, via DDoS attacks.
Because apparently protecting gay rights organizations would infringe on their free speech to target and remove those organizations from the internet.
Also, have any of the people complaining about this on the internet actually filed complaints with the police/procesutor's office? Have they even attempted to follow the legal channels before deciding to take the law into their own hands?
Surely a prosecutor standing for re-election would be much more likely to be swayed than a massive mega corporation. But why go through the bother of actually doing something that could help set legal precedent when you can simply tweet furiously.
CloudFlare’s original announcement mentions law enforcement. The bomb threats will almost certainly see investigation; that’s domestic terrorism.
Is Comcast getting any flak for providing internet to the KKK offices? Or their water provider? Is Netflix getting any complains for providing entertainment to terrorists? Or vodafone for mobile connectivity?
Why is it different for cloudflare?
Regarding your Netflix example, I doubt Netflix knows if any particular customer is a terrorist.
Having access to a CDN provider isn't in the same "basic rights" league.
I agree that trying to cancel people from being able to enjoy baseline physical necessities is not a line that's being crossed yet, but an attack on utilities may not necessitate this. Let's say Joshua Moon also happened to run a small hobby store in a strip mall. Would going after the utility providers (or landlord) for this store be "fair game" in order to attack KiwiFarms? Why or why not?
They absolutely will ask landlords to kick somebody out. If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
Do you have any examples of this line being crossed? I mean I'm sure that oftentimes the mob has raised these issues to landlords and managed to get leases revoked, but I haven't seen an actual serious attempt to attack an unresponsive landlord in the way we've seen with the attack on Cloudflare.
We act like utilities are some inalienable right, but this is by far the worst argument ever. Licensed installers setup the utilities and have the work inspected. At any point where your environment presents a hazard, the utilities will be disconnected until it passes another inspection.
I don't know what distinction you were imagining, but I think this one is relatively simple
Comcast must provide service as part of the agreement to give them local monopoly privilege.
The water company where I am is the government so they are forced to provide service because of the 1st amendment.
Vodafone similarly bought public airspace and it came with rules. I wonder if they can pick and choose their customers.
Cloudflare though is just a regular company. They provide a service, but there is nothing restricting them from banning people. It’s like how Google can ban you for almost no reason.
Cloudflare is playing a big game.
Comparing Cloudflare protecting bad actors to the water company providing water to KKK members is completely disingenuous, but you know that, obviously. You should pick better examples.
On the other hand, multiple groups of people have targeted Netflix for producing or promoting content that those people find offensive, which is a different situation from providing content.
How many more are dead from activities on Facebook, Instagram, etc? Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
It's just not very sensible to think that big companies care about a few people dying because of a small forum when they demonstrably do not care about many, many, more people dying because of a big forum. It seems way more plausible to me that big tech companies work together to kill small social media than that they have some secret ethic which compels them to care about small harms over big harms.
Very illuminating!
I think you may have good point hiding in there (maybe "Facebook may not do it intentionally, but they've been so negligent that..."), but it's lost in the dripping sarcasm. The point you're replying to wasn't that ridiculous.
It is, of course, completely ridiculous to think that "intent" separates Facebook and KiwiFarms. Facebook doesn't intend to cause civil wars, genocides, spree killers, gang violence, body dismorphia, self-harm, harassment, and suicide. Facebook intends to connect people so that they can develop a social network and monetize the social network and they are willing to break a few eggs to make that omelette.
You might as well say that it is the color of Mark Zuckerberg's shoes that matters as say it is Facebook's intent. No, obviously, what matters is the bad stuff and the people harmed. It's not like any of those people are less dead because of Facebook's intentions. If Facebook had terrible intentions and excellent outcomes that would be a much better world.
The other problem with saying intent is what matters is that the people who make this argument also make some kind of magical mind reading claim that they know the intentions of others. "Intent is what matters, and I know the intentions of KiwiFarms! They are bad!" Just save everyone some time and explain that you know KiwiFarms is bad and that is why they must be destroyed.
KiwiFarms is bad because they intended to get people killed. No, there is no evidence for that. And yes, there is plenty of evidence against that in the form of trying to get people hurt being against the rules and moderation of the site. No, there was no police or legal action against KiwiFarms for the crimes we "know" they were committing - but all that is beside the point. We know their intent! It is bad and they must be removed!
Or... Let's say a group of a dozen people got together and decided to make life a living hell for their target. They are going to mock the target mercilessly, following up on any online interaction by posting vile shit, sending nasty DMs on every platform they can find, etc... Nothing illegal, but just being awful.
But let's say in one world, they're coordinating this stuff on Facebook, and in another they're coordinating it on KF. Now let's say the target gets logs of the coordination, and they report it to the site where it happened. Which site do you think would be most likely to take action, FB or KF? I think the obvious answer is that FB is much more likely to try to put a stop to the harassment.
Also, for you to claim you're arguing in good faith when your entire response to a reasonable argument was to mockingly agree with it and say "Very illuminating!" is really rich. If you want to actually convince people of your points, you're going to have to do a lot better.
For the record, I really don't like that KF has been forced off the internet the way it has. But you're not going to convince anyone by being sarcastic and pretending that KF isn't an awful place where users try to do awful things.
I think the fine should be substantially higher since they are 'big, rich and powerful as well' [3].
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Facebook absolutely would have criminal intent the same way kiwifarms would - in both cases, they intended to serve content from their users.
So just guessing here, but Meta properties alone must have killed thousands of teenagers.
KF never evolved.
Because they have more resources and it's easier to take down a small target than a large one. I am more than fine with Zuckerberg and others being held to account for harms negligently or callously inflicted by Facebook.
Near literally said he was committing suicide due to the abuse from Kiwi Farms. If you're doubtful, it's because you're willfully ignorant.
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986839743037448
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986855014428672
It could be guilting those who harrassed and bullied him. But it's probably just highlighting how bad it was for him.
To me, it's pretty clear KiwiFarms were a major contributing factor to their sucide.
One of Near's friends just tweeted a message where they had begged, "do something about this site already" the day they killed themself. Nier committed suicide because of KF harassment. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1567014389282385922
Their story, which doesn't seem to appear in the responses in that Twitter thread, was that a 2 year old account that only posted once previously in its history suddenly activated, posted a picture of someone holding a threatening letter of some type outside of someone's home, then this was screencapped on Twitter a short time later (~15 minutes). The post was removed 2 minutes after it hit Twitter by the submitter (they originally thought their mods did it, but corrected this, saying it was removed with the note "retarded").
I don't ever read that site other than to look at stuff like this when it hits the news, so I don't claim to know anything more than that, but you were for a time able to look at the forum threads and see the posts they mentioned, etc.
Our legislators needs to make laws against targeted, anonymous, non-journalistic doxxing. It needs to include clauses that escalate the severity when revenge porn or racial, sexual, or other discrimination is being incited. If this bullying results in suicide, that should also increase the severity of the crime.
Until these laws exist, prosecutors need to use this angle and try these cases anyway.
- leader of a mafia
- any government leader
- billionaires in general
- anyone in a position of power
Investigating their crimes and doxxing them is very different from "lmao look at this piece of shit loser, let's bully it to death".
Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
Fair enough.
>What does "government leader" means?
>what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means?
I'm not a lawmaker, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things.
>Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
That's exactly why I put the above caveat.
Now be a good boy or else CNN might release your name and address: https://www.engadget.com/2017-07-05-cnn-will-expose-reddit-u...
Nobody is talking about nuking any of these platforms from existence just because of some isolated illegal incidents.
It's more likely the sub taps into a vein of black culture that happens to be interwoven with some violence, and Reddit tolerates it because they don't want to be seen as trampling out anything to do with black culture.
Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
>Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
Not the same, but combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed.
With the war in Ukraine, it's gotten more diverse (even if there's still some ME content published)
That's a reeeeach. I've been subbed there since 2013 and there were also many contemporary posts of white Americans (because that's disproportionately who serves and dies in combat) and European service members being shot and blown up by IEDs and so forth in GWOT (although the votes and comments were more controversial).
The war in Donbas also yielded plenty of footage of white casualties. And now the latest Ukrainian conflict.
The most controversial time on the sub was when ISIS was at their peak and people were straight posting their propaganda (executions and so forth). That was all disallowed unless it was only traditional combat footage, preferably with nasheeds stripped out. If the sub was about enjoying brown death that carnage would've been allowed.
The solutions put forth by the elected officials of Chicago and Illinois seem to fall into two general strategies; providing funding for anti-violence programs in Chicago, and lobbying for DOA legislation in Washington. Those outreach programs, such as Chicago CRED, READI Chicago and Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, have social science studies backing up their efficacy, but say they need more money to have a greater impact (Chicago's 2021 budget was $12.8 billion, with $16.5 million allocated to violence prevention.) They're very clear about needing more money to hire more social workers, but I can't find any statements from these organizations about the need for moderating reddit and youtube.
If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
Heck, there are plenty of anecdotes showing they bias towards keeping hate subs targeted at "majorities" alive, and have actively changed their ToS multiple times to discriminate between who they consider vulnerable.
> KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it
Wrong. The admin, Null, has explicitly said they don't allow doxxing or swatting and complies with law enforcement
> If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
That's cute but what you're describing as absurd is basically what Keffals et al are doing with this website by hounding every service they tangentially use to get them banned. If they could make the site operator unbankable or unable to receive postal mail it's pretty obvious they gladly would
Not concern trolling, a google search only turned up a kiwifarms thread that _could_ have been relevant, but is now obviously inaccessable.
- Whether KF was relevant to their suicide
- Whether ongoing harassment from KF was relevant to their suicide
Unless one equates the mere existence to the thread itself with ongoing harassment then one can answer affirm the former question without the latter. The "required evidence" for the latter would require some sort of allegation that KF members were actively harassing Near at some point reasonably prior to their suicide, which afaik was just not alleged.
For the love of god, please use archive.ph or archive.org.
How many people are dead because of twitter/facebook/tiktok stalking, arguments, etc?
The line with "Kiwi Farms is responsible for 3 suicides" seems to be repeating that lie until it sticks. The truth is more complicated:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712037
Moreover some of the people, who pushed to shut down the forum, openly support the transition of teens (even without the knowledge of their parents). Yet trans teens face an even higher risk of attempting suicide. Therefore one must ask if those who wanted to remove KF are not responsible for more suicides by promoting and facilitating transition among teens in identity crisis i.e. by making their problems even worse.
The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.
And the "you" is meant as in general, or in this case Kiwi Farms.
The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.
It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.
There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.
Should the government itself offer these services?
Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.
What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands.
Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.
How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out.
By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights.
When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago.
Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?
I'm not sure how speech can impede on the right of others to speak freely. Speech can certainly discourage others from speaking freely, and that's bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but it's too vague to justify shutting down an entire forum because some speech there might discourage others from speaking freely.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
If you think it wouldn't I'd like to know how your thinking goes. I am not from the US, so maybe the whole theoretical idea is different from the ground up.
You're right, certain speech, like direct threats of violence can impede on other people's right to freedom of speech. But such speech is illegal even in the US and also banned on Kiwi Farms.
Is it legitimate to take that platform down? You don't have to answer, the US certainly thought so during the past wars.
Is it legitimate speech to write some vague SMS to the wrong person? You don't have to answer, whole wedding societies have been killed for that speech.
Now one could argue, "Yeah but they might have been terrorists, or associated themselves with the wrong people."
But what is terrorism and why does a free society break it's promise of freedom of speech to fight it? Terrorism is trying to reach political goals by (often) violent means, with the aim to create fear. This fear stifles the free discourse in a free society by targeting specific symbolic targets. And isn't that a definition that fits many fringe political groups that would target individuals and make their lives hell like it apparently happened in the case of KF?
Let's be clear about a few things:
Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not.
Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP.
Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS?
The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled.
They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility.
Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action.
What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands.
So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.
Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it.
But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban.
So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime.
The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc.
I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.
Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.
Uh I do
As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.
Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.
I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twitter - nastier content, in greater volume, with a larger audience.
I have found comments about people on kiwifarms that have been moderated out of other sites (not death threats or harassment, but factual information), in that regard it has been somewhat useful.
This 12 years old comment describes the situation in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 , although neglects to mention that things were this way due to strict moderation on 4chan.
I am not an omnipotent arbiter of what is bad or worse, this is my own subjective opinion. I just haven't seen anything on Kiwifarms that would call for such a response. It made it seem like we were hours away from people dying.
I guess as an example though:
> they rapidly take down any CSAM
I haven't seen that posted to Kiwifarms in the first place, regardless if 4chan has a quick response.
The common idea about the forum is that there is no moderation, but the truth is that the moderation is invisible. (The content is beyond the pale, and I don't support it which used to be needless to say)
Mass murderers have live-streamed their rampages on Facebook. I'm sure Facebook also work with police.
Other than the horrible nasty comments (which I've seen much worse on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/social media in greater numbers) I don't see what's so special about Kiwifarms.
For example: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...
Not ones from New Zealand, though: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/christchurch-mosque-shootings-...
Edit: just reading into this and New Zealand apparently wanted to take legal action (up to ten years in prison) against any New Zealand citizen who simply watched the video on Kiwifarms forums? That's astonishing.
Sounds like the owner was right to say "go fuck yourself" then.
Heard about them again when they hosted the twitch source code and revenue leaks, and now a third time with all of the cloudfront stuff. Hosting content like this is always a big gamble, I'm sure Moon knew this was always a possibility.
While his reply was incredibly edgy and immature, I'm don't think this is a compelling example. The NZ police wanted information on people discussing the shooting after it had already occurred.
/pol/ is far worse from a "hate speech" perspective, but not as nearly as bad when it comes to serial harassment.
From a "people are in imminent danger" perspective I don't see how 4chan isn't worse. Remember "Some of you guys are alright, don't come to school tomorrow" from a few years back? Is there an equivalent to that on KF that I'm not aware of? The people there have given up on life in a completely different way than edgy board 4chan users.
Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is difficult. The thousand+ posts about keffals are all collected together where she and others can read them all at once, which also contributes to making it look 'worse'.
A haystack may have more needles in it than a sewing kit, but you KNOW which ones are in the sewing kit.
KF are mean librarians.
4chan are just 12 year olds.
Uh, this has happened many times. The thing is that it's more difficult to systematically document.
I still remember watching AS's videos and being confused as to how something so bland pissed off that many people.
A good 'ol gun to the head does the same job for cheaper plus it takes care of the root of the problem
De-platforming are tools just like guns. Applied properly they are a force for good.
In this case, it was used well.
In a free society business owners do whatever they want. That includes hosting content that runs counter to government positions, and the right to NOT HOST content they disagree with (for whatever reason, even financial or publicity-related reasons).
In Putin's Russia, organizations are forced to carry content they don't agree with, or they are prohibited.
That's not an exaggeration. If the government says you must publish an article about how awesome a new airplane or how righteous the orthodox church is, or how bad the evil Ukrainians are, you must do so.
Many free speech morons think that organizations should be forced to carry messages they disagree with... because freedom.
Freedom is being able to tell someone to fuck off.
Freedom is also having to deal with the consequences from the public if you tell the wrong person to fuck off or you don't tell a deserving person to fuck off.
What the free speech morons are proposing is so much worse than what we have now that the terror it could cause would be inconceivable, unless you're an anti-government journalist in Russia, of course. It's not inconceivable, it's your Monday.
It is so charming to see all of the fReE mArKeT lovers on HN twist themselves into pretzels when it comes to things like this.
It's not a hard concept but the free speech morons seem incapable of understanding it.
If the free speech morons had their way HN would be powerless to stop me from posting the addresses and phone numbers of people I disagree with.
Something like cloudflare, where their decision to host or not host you can be the difference between being able to be online and not, needs to be regulated as a utility because executives at cloudflare should not have the authority to determine who can and cannot host a website on the internet.
Mob rule is not good, and mob rule will lead to oppression of some form if left alone for long enough.
There is no exception to that rule, it is only a matter of time before it happens.
There should be reasonable restrictions on behavior based on harm, but those restrictions should not be in the hands of mob rule or companies like cloudflare. Those restrictions should be based on rule of law and determined in a courtroom with informed jurors and a fair trial.
There are times where that is excessive, this is not one of them because cloudflare is such an important piece of infrastructure. For a private form? You can delete whatever the heck you want, you should be able to.
Something like cloud flare, however, is more of a utility. Giving it the power to shut people off is giving it too much power.
Kiwi farms is clearly an issue that needs to be handled, but in my mind to handle it requires you be hesitant, it requires you be reluctant to shut them down because you don't want to step over that line. It means setting up barriers to your authority to shut other people down.
This, what I see here, is a glee for it. It's loarding your power over others, it's enacting revenge.
That is the toxicity I see. Pragmatic handling of speech requires that you sometimes shut down bad actors, but when the people in charge are doing it without concern, or the people driving it or using unchecked forces to do it, that's an issue.
Just some Facebook likes and nothing actually gets solved.
Another thought, Hitler on his rise to power was also deplatformed, literally thrown into prison. Everyone laughed at him and his Nazi party. Next thing you know he is out of prison and is genociding an entire continent.
I truly fear we are in for bloodshed in the future because all we do is try and shut out the crazy Qanons, the MAGAs, the white supremacists and just complete fucking degenerates but nobody actually tries to fix the problem. We are just stuffing the problem in a closet and hoping it doesn't find its way out.
And now for what actually happened:
> Approximately two thousand Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, but were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers... Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf to fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released. Once released, Hitler redirected his focus towards obtaining power through legal means rather than by revolution or force, and accordingly changed his tactics, further developing Nazi propaganda
If there is any lesson here it's that Hitler wasn't punished severely enough and forgiven too quickly.
What would you have had society do? Just ignore his literal attempted violent overthrow of the government??
https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-a...
The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech.
By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign -- the social or other merit or the speech censored, etc.
Kiwi Farms is a particular clear case to illustrate this point.
No, that we're dealing with cloudflare, with DDoS protection, is the point here. If you want to run a forum where you ban speech that you feel silences people, that's great, but if you want to deny DDoS protection to other forums that don't have this rule, or don't enforce it to your satisfaction, that's very different.
> This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign
No we really can't set this aside. Removing DDoS protection directly makes it impossible to run any unpopular website. "Harassment campaign" is a vague term, that can be used (and arguably in this case is used) for any kind of persistent criticism, ridicule, outrage, doxxing - I see harassment campaigns on twitter every day.
Edit - clarifying that 100k pps per core would only be achievable if the vast majority of the traffic (>95%) could be filtered out.
The cloudflare blog is a better resource on this topic.
This isn't going to stop, 4chan is definitely next then every other site that isn't mainstream.
How is that even possible? Would the Tor project hard-code an onion-site it won't resolve?
Its not that far fetched to imagine a campaign against verisign to remove a .com domain.
They ultimately shot down the idea, and just put out a statement condemning them instead[1][2].
I think it's unlikely they would implement such a thing for KiwiFarms now that they've already set the precedent with a site that is arguably much worse.
[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/23270
[1] https://twitter.com/torproject/status/898256109789687808
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-project-defends-human-rights...
I for one never voted to have CF and DDoS-Guard as censors of the internet.
Great, they aren't. There are hundreds of other providers to choose from.