Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech
While I understand the sentiment, and have thought the same in the past ( with Aaron Swartz or Chelsea Manning); I want to pose an alternative question: What's the precedence set by continuing to do business with kiwifarms?
Over the last few days there's been a lot I've wanted to say, but I felt like I couldn't speak. I've been on HN for the better part of a decade, but I can't say anything as myself. Instead I need to use a throwaway account and only connect over a VPN, because I'm a trans woman talking about kiwifarms.
I've seen how dangerous it can be for a trans woman to stick her head up. I've watched friends and strangers alike be harassed, attacked, SWAT'd, and doxxed. Not public figures (though they don't deserve death threats either), just regular trans people trying to live their lives and speak their experiences.
I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide?
Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away.
101 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadOn the flip side, KiwiFarms appears to be a troll group and clearly has radicalized many folks in its forums.
What am I missing?
I would be curious, and maybe OP is game, is to post their screen time reports.
I would wager most individuals just need to step away from the Internet and realize the world isn’t these big fun extreme black and white bandwagons most platforms make things seem.
Freedom of speech is also our freedom to read or freedom to hear. When tech giants delete entire websites from the internet, we've all lost our ability to choose for ourselves what we'd like to read or hear.
Moral decisions are a two-edged sword: we may all agree kiwifarms is bad and should be blocked because we agree trans people have a right to live without harassment; and if Cloudflare agrees with us, they'll block kiwifarms and we'll rejoice. But what if Cloudflare had a different value set from ours? What if they decided to block all pro-abortion-rights websites? They would, after all, be within their right.
It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened?
I agree ideally, but if you always wait for literal legal orders, any moderation would take _ages_. So you'd always need some sort of value judgement on the provider's part to interpret the law as they see it and act.
EDIT: not to mention governments are also putting pressure on providers to act fast.
If you interpret that as "support for ... a cesspool of bigotry", well, sorry but that says more about your blinkered worldview than it does about anyone else.
I understand what freedom of speech is. I've weighed the options and still can't see how you could defend that site. No need to be patronizing.
In any case, the post has been flagged. You win.
Nobody is defending the site, at least not on this thread.
They aren’t allowed to do this hence the illegal qualifier.
The problem is they can also use the same means that allow you to post this anonymously to harass people anonymously. If you take this away from them you also lose the ability (which would never happen because you’re one of the good ones). Until someone decides you aren’t one of the good ones.
Trafficking is much worse then anyone thinks argument.
Two things going around the alt right circles.
Archiving the actions of proven pedophiles in the media and popular culture is not, that is a noble service
Cloudflare is an independent entity and is within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory (including kiwifarms due to supporting harassment, propagandists, illegal substances, or whatever it chooses).
I am surprised radicalized keyboard warriors on the internet feel better about the situation and their lives when they harass, SWAT, and dox others. I am sorry you've experienced this and live in fear of it. It seems out of sync with of principles they tend to mutually adopt from Jordan Peterson and similar. That said, those tend to be a bit of a philosophical mess anyhow.
Maybe it's a little thing, but I hope knowing some random other person on the internet agrees with you, and who doesn't run in the same circles, brings some comfort to you. I applaud you for navigating your identity and looking to live your life to be the best you. It shouldn't have to be in fear. Good luck out there.
- Labor union organizers and socialists used to be considered unsavory.
- The civil rights movement used to be considered unsavory.
- LGBTQ people used to be considered really unsavory, pre-1970s.
Guess we know what the parent poster and those that agree with them would have said about businesses refusing service to those movements had they been around then.
But let's step into your oranges-compared-to-apples example set. What your reductionist, presentist whataboutism misses is that the social "unsavoriness" was eventually seen to be unethical by society writ-large. However, KiwiFarms, as a vehicle for harassment against the ideal American underdogs, hasn't a leg to stand on and will remain as socially (and legally) unsavory.
Therefore, your conclusion, that the OP and those that agree would have refused service universally to Labor, Civil Rights activists and supporters, and LGBTQ, is flawed. Perhaps ironically, the OP and those that agree with the comments are contained in the union of the latter two categories anyhow.
But I don't want them to win by being silent.
EG "I am—well, I was—great at opsec. I got doxxed on farms because someone spent 50+ hours trying to nail me down until he ultimately “compare[d] her tweets to weather history to determine her city, and complied a parametric list of all the profs in nyc and went from there."
The OP mentions that they tried to follow good opsec but had an issue, and you mentioned "Showing basic restraint and not oversharing online" as the solution -- which based on OP's opsec comment they looked to follow that.
At least, that's what your prior comments communicated.
My initial comment communicated that OP was probably going to be fine. Or not. It's not like I can tell.
[1] unless "existing while trans" counts as target-painting.
Social media is broken - having a fight on the street has real world consequences, having a fight online has none. Many people use fighting online to a proxy to assert their status they can't achieve in the real world.
That being said, Free speech and other base rights like privacy, association are activity being reduced in most countries. Take free speech for example once you remove actually hateful people you encounter less of those people, so the extreme things you do see become the new vile, and so on until no one can speak without being labeled some proxy for a reason you should not listen to them.
While I have no idea what kiwifarm or whatever is, blocking those already loney people is just going to make them express themselves through violence.
Book burning is now commonly practised, the books of today just look different. They are videos hosted online.
While I agree with what has been said about the vileness of Kiwifarms, you who now celebrate a way to suppress speech you disagree with seem to somehow fail to understand that you are falling into the same trap. Now that it is accepted that "corporations do not have to serve customers they don't want to", the wealthy and the politically powerful will seek to take advantage of the loophole and they have persistence, time horizon, and clout to make it happen. Who is to say that Cloudflare and the other tech companies will be owned by people aligned with your interests fifty or one hundred years from now? And when they get that control, it will be your websites that will go dark, your beliefs declared "inappropriate", your adherents who are denied service.
Remember, when you build a muzzle, it fits on anyone, even you who created it. When the muzzle slips over your face, what will you say then in repentance to those of us who tried to warn you?
You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media...
They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.
But the fat is that organizing criminal activities is a criminal activity! Having a whole platform where there is rampant, blessed-by-the-mods organized crime is not something acceptable. Even if you give credence to the idea that this activity is not representative of the platform as a whole, it is responsibility of the platform to prevent crime being harbored there, just like in any other business.
Morals and ethics are a complex thing, impossible to "solve" in a perfect way, and both restriction and freedom have their costs and benefits for everyone. Maybe instead of understanding this events as the demise of freedom, we could understand them better as a way to learn --as a society-- how to manage this balance properly.
Continuing to do business with Kiwifarms is an acknowledgement that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and any illegal activity such as swatting is the fault of the individual.
Are Mark Zuckerberg and Meta responsible when people livestream murders or plan terrorist attacks using Facebook? Obviously no.
Now I will acknowledge that there's some dispute over Kiwifarm's actual role in any illegal activity here. Did they encourage or organize criminal activity? As somebody who hasn't followed this drama from the beginning and who doesn't know what actually happened on Kiwifarms, I'd be a bit interested to try and read the source to try and somewhat figure out the truth of what happened for myself free of bias about who did what to who. Unfortunately, after shutting the site down, it's now impossible to get an objective answer after the fact and piece together the truth about this drama for myself. And trusting corporate claims or biased actors on any side of this story is just about impossible in today's hyper-politicized world.
As far as being able to read the posts and piece it together yourself, you can probably find something on the Wayback machine if you want to. Cloudflare's action was about preventing activity on those threads (i.e. planning/instigating further attacks), not to completely censor the contents.
I think the issue is whether Cloudflare("CF"), as an internet infrastructure, should be involved in balancing free speech with other rights and if so, what kind of bar should they have before deciding to act.
Looking at the issue in this way, your argument that:
> Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away.
may be right and most people would agree. But some people may be more concerned about how CF has reached that decision and the future implication of this action. After all, there is a possibility that CF may have gotten this one right even with inconsistent reasoning/ shaky evidence. In that case, there may be future cases where CF jumps the gun too fast.
Some are also scared about how much (perceived) power CF has over current internet infrastructure. This is understandable as CF is a company and their decision making process isn't as transparent as public system. But if there wasn't such dominance by CF and it was merely one of many competitors, this wouldn't be a big contention.
TL;DR People are arguing about different things: short term result and long term implication. You can agree with the banning of Kiwifarm but still be concerned about how CF reached that conclusion.
From removing the dislike button on youtube, mass censorship of comments, paypal and other payment providers refusing to do business with people they deem "problematic" and now this, it seems like the liberal west is only nominally liberal (don't even get me started on inane "ESG Scores"). It used to be the puritanical conservatives that were against everything and now it seems the pendulum has swung the other way. While I personally find kiwifarms and such sites to be utterly disgusting and revolting, their cancellation is yet another precedent set in what seems to be a nascent global hegemony that will eventually turn feudalistic.
Should they be placated if the school just said "we are utterly disgusted and revolted by the bully's actions against your kids! But we also take a strong stance against punishing the bullies, because detention or expulsion would set a dangerous precedence that will eventually be abused"
But I realised, I myself am afraid of being harassed if I don’t post from a throwaway account.
Maybe that fear is not justified — I never heard of KiwiFarms before Cloudflare booted them. I don’t mind people writing crazy stuff intended to offend.
Harassment is a pretty solid breach of the golden rule.
Dong Nguyen was run off the internet for a fun little mobile game that some people on Twitter got frustrated by. Scott Cawthorne was unpersoned when he gave money to the GOP. Lindsay Ellis made a single wrong step and was bullied and harassed by the type of people upset about Kiwifarms now. Hell, there's a fresh 2 minutes hate every day on Twitter that leads to someone completely irrelevant having their life ruined because they didn't like something popular.
This wouldn't be a problem if people removed their identity from the internet and just started doing everything anonymously, but apparently ego is a monetisable commodity now.
It needs to happen to someone on both sides. So let me turn this around: Who has KiwiFarms doxxed and harassed simply for the act of being trans and saying that CloudFlare should drop KiwiFarms (or something similarly innocuous).
imo the difference here is not "I have an example and you don't", but it's pretty clear from these discussions that a lot of people would be okay with people who defend KiwiFarms losing their jobs, while the thought of a trans person facing similar consequences for criticizing KiwiFarms is inplausible. Take the Cloudflare CEO's initial defense of not cutting service, which lead to a Harvard professor saying that Prince "simply wanted trans people dead", or something to that effect. If this is the kind of rhetoric that is considered okay in the current moment then what would happen if someone like me had posted a similar essay under my real name that caught the attention of Keffels or someone in her orbit? I can't prove it, but the outcome seems unfortunately obvious to me..
No. You made the claim here, not me. I understand you would now like to change the subject to something you feel more prepared to debate, but I am not obliged to cooperate by allowing you to drag me into a tangent.
Seems a little bit weird that a "right wing forum" would SWAT one of their own representatives, claiming the hit while using a voice changer, just in the middle of an open crusade against them, while some trans activists are trying to taken them off the internet.
Aren't swattings against members of the congress investigated in U.S.?
But yes, swattings are still a pretty big deal and I suspect that someone will eventually be arrested for it! If so, and it turns out that the attack was a false flag, well... no one would care. The damage was done, and this person will probably be treated as a hero for what they did, albeit perhaps not too openly.
Transwomen face very real danger of death and harm[0], for the record, both generally and as a result of targeted doxxing and harassment in online forums. Since KiwiFarms does this, why do you not consider this an intrinsic threat?
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1...
>A trans woman who opposes KiwiFarms faces no comparable intrinsic threat
Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened.
No, I'd defend that website's existence.
>Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened.
Keffels getting attacked by KF is obviously not strong evidence that any random trans woman who criticizes KF in any capacity will be attacked.
These problems are all being collated together, but they are not of equal strength. Things that cause physical harm, such as SWAT'ing, are obviously illegal and I doubt you would get any kind of support from anybody here for these actions.
Problems such as doxxing are more ethical, and they can result in physical harm in extreme cases. But their main goal is mental distress.
Then you have harassment, which is where I think free speech comes in. You have the right to speak, and others by extension have the right to reply. If you are speaking in public places on hotly contended topics, you will likely find opposition. The market place of ideas can only work if this is possible.
Bare in mind also that the internet public space is not the same as the public space down the road. On the internet, not only are you battling with local ideological differences, you're also battling with people from fundamentally conflicting cultures. If you want a meaningful discussion about local ideology (i.e. trans people living in Western Countries), I would suggest to go somewhere that includes only local people.
> I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide?
You shouldn't and this is of course a problem with KiwiFarms, one I think even the owner agrees with.
Again, though, whilst dealing with an international community, your idea of 'illegal' doesn't carry. In some Countries, for being trans, the punishment is death. Some of the people you will interact with in these international communities believe this entirely and want to see this globally adopted.
Thanks to the invention of the internet and many years of global immigration, some of these people now even live next door. When we lost social uniformity, we also lost safety and increased social tensions.
> Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away.
I would like to see KiwiFarms do better to clean up their act. At the very least, threats of violence or actions that encourage violence (doxxing, SWAT'ing, etc) seems like a good place to start.
I don't think wiping them off the internet is to the way to go. For example, big tech worked together to remove Parler (for apparently organizing Jan 6, although it later transpired that it was actually organized on Facebook and Twitter), and all these people migrated to other platforms, which are now even more resilient.
(On a different note, I remember all Parler accounts got doxxed, and this was widely celebrated. Where was their right to speak and safety? I created an account there years ago just to see what it was about, and it was just as boring as Twitter.)