That well known history was also well known when the CEO of Cloudflare wrote a lengthy blogpost[0] defending his decision to not ban KiwiFarms 4 days before writing a second blogpost reversing that decision[1]. So either something dramatically changed in those 4 days (and as the TFA says, the evidence available to the public is pretty weak) or the more likely explanation: Matthew Prince was just looking for an excuse to submit to the pressure campaign like he did with The Daily Stormer and 8chan.
That's his right as CEO of a private company of course and I can't say I'm sorry to see KF go but honestly it's getting a little embarrassing how he writes these lofty blogposts about his principled stance upholding free speech only to capitulate completely days later.
So far as I know three suicides are popularly thought to be connected to KiwiFarms. The only one I've looked into at all, the suicide of the emulator developer "near", seems pretty flimsy to me.
For one, the KiwiFarms thread on near, prior to his suicide, is pretty tame. There aren't that many comments and the comments that are there aren't so bad - at worst they accuse Near of pedophilia because he likes/defends drawn illustrations of child pornography. Near's real identity is not known so the thread doesn't even stalk him or intrude into his real life.
Near emailed KiwiFarms farms asking for the thread to be removed and said he would commit suicide if it wasn't but would pay if the thread was removed. The site owner was researching whether it would be legal to accept money when Near pupportedly killed himself - 12 hours after the initial exchange.
It's also not clear that any suicide actually took place. As I mentioned, no real identity is known so there is also no real official confirmation. All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter who is acting on behalf of someone who talked to the Japanese police - and apparently the police confirmed the suicide. A thread on KiwiFarms investigates the idea that Near faked his suicide, showing that Japan's vital statistics, a government page that reports, among other things, the deaths of foreigners in Japan has no corresponding record for Near's death. The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before. There is additional evidence that thread reviews that I've forgotten.
I haven't looked into the other two suicides - but from everything I have seen much of what is said of KiwiFarms is overblown. It's true they use racist slurs and say mean things - but the idea that they are some murderous swatting suicide cult seems vastly overblown to me.
You believe there is ~1 monthly death of US citizens in Japan? No, those stats are not useful.
> All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter
And you know... confirmation from Near's friends if you don't ignore them.
> The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before
And this is just disgusting. If you want to publicly discuss someone's attempted suicide and consider if you can legally take their money to remove that discussion... You've hit the bottom. You need to reconsider your life choices at that point.
Extrodenary claims demand extraordinary proof. Some random person on twitter said that x killed themselves because of site y. X has the burden of proof not Y. So far, Y has done everything to try and disprove X.
Yet in every public discussion to date, Y is guilty until proven innocent.
1 death by suicide per month of American citizens in Japan is probably high - maybe not if they count the military base. I don't know - I wish I could easily look up their statistics and see what they said - too bad KiwiFarms is not allowed to defend itself against accusations and what they've previously written I'm forbidden to read.
Regarding Near's friends - he wrote that he had no friends. None of the people who claim posthumously to have been his friends offered any evidence that any suicide took place. Near, when writing to KiwiFarms, said that right before he killed himself he would send copies of his passport to KiwiFarms so that they would be able to tell he actually did kill himself. Then, in his final message, he decided not to do that. There is no real evidence that Near's suicide actually took place - it's all "This person on Twitter knows Near's friend and they say he killed himself." Maybe that's accurate - but it seems like a low bar for confidence levels if we're going to ban a group from the Internet based on it.
Regarding discussing Near's suicide - Near emailed the site owner, Joshua Moon, and made the offer - "I'll pay you 125k to remove the thread or I'll kill myself." Moon replies that he doesn't even know if it would be legal to accept that offer, says that he probably won't and that he would feel guilty about taking Near's money, and the pair discuss it for a few exchanges before Near, apparently, loses patience. Moon also expresses his confusion that Near is upset, because the KiwiFarms thread is about 100 comments in length, none name Near, the thread is not active, and the comments are mostly pretty benign (e.g. "Near must be autistic to spend so much time on emulators).
This is pretty ridiculous, the author has no idea what Cloudflare's claims are and instead focuses on arguing against the claims made by Kiwifarms admins.
I looked into it too when Kiwi Farms started coming up on HN. I hope more people do because it's troubling how many of the facts being reported about it (love it or loathe it) are demonstrably incorrect. Not liking the site doesn't make it right or even deserved.
I've used KF a bit, mostly to shit-talk the poser metal bro / MAGA bandwagoneer Räzörfist, but when other forums started getting a higher profile I poked around out of curiosity. In terms of specific facts that are misreported, I don't think claims that addresses are disseminated is true, I never saw any addresses or phone numbers or the like on keffals thread, and no users really expressed much real interest in getting them.
More broadly, I can't speak authoritatively, but I never observed any coherent harassment effort, nor did I see any posts that a lone wolf could have really used to wage a harassment campaign. That is, in keffals case I never saw any post with an address or phone number, or UberEATS creds, or anything really that wasn't on the wide internet at some point. To wit, when keffals claimed KF users instigated a swatting, and later fraudulently ordered junk food to the hotel, the forum seemed to laugh it off as an attempt to get sympathy donations or free food. Even the sinister-sounding thread where they correctly snooped the hotel from keffals twitter post was pretty benign, it was a few posts over maybe an hour noting various details and cross referencing against image searches, followed by days of mockery over keffals feeling scared but then posting photos of the safehouse.
By IA deleting the evidence, I cannot prove the claims of harassment. Therefore it effectively doesn't exist.
CF removed their Ddos protection, instead of working with law enforcement to unmask the supposedly offending users. Then all these other tech entities pile in and make it look like it never happened. No specifics we the public can know about.
KF isn't even the only site. Why are we focusing upon KF, but somehow forgetting literal abuse sites? If CF is going to go this far then what about tor? Even 4chan instigates harassment from time to time. Discord servers, telegram. Or you know, Facebook. The tool used for the jan 6th event in the U.S.
The excuse is these are big entities, but unwillfull lack of moderation is the same as intentional lack of moderation in effect, as demonstrated.
But will these entities take the same stance? No. Because this is about money and power.
Its pretty absurd that Cloudflare supports sites promoting and encouraging terrorism, but kiwifarms, who mocks people for their absurd behaviour, is beyond the pale.
I've always assumed they collaborate with the US gov on illegal activity on the platform at that level. I think they'd be forced to, perhaps behind a gag order, if asked. Or monitored exchanged points. I've definitely seen fraud, ISIS, malware, and whatnot behind Cloudflare at least at one point (not sure the current outlook). Very puzzling indeed.
I first stumbled upon kiwifarms when the Christchurch livestream shooting happened. As I recall, the thread was filled with jokes, memes, and other disturbing comments made by the members of this "community" which seemed to support the shooter's actions in spirit, albeit perhaps only in jest. The owner also took this time to mock the entire country of NZ. I have no doubts about these other claims. Shouldn't any company should have every right to refuse this kind of behavior occurring on their platforms?
The problem with hosting providers closing down websites over non-criminal speech violations is that it enables anyone with a grudge to shut down any website they dislike. Previously it used to take a court order to shut down a website, Nowadays any old troll can make a few death threats against themselves using Tor, take a few screenshots, report them to the host and the site gets taken down. Even if the webmaster quickly removes the comments it evidently isnt good enough. because as we've seen recently with Cloudflare hosting providers are now retroactively punishing sites for since-deleted content. This introduces a massive Denial-of-Service vulnerabiliy that webmasters have no way to mitigate unless they close off comments entirely. You might not like Kiwifarms and think this was a good thing, but next time it might be your favorite gaming forum or hobby site that trolls get taken down using this method.
Platform moderation is complex, but this being some new hypothetical vulnerability to remove any website from existence is simply not true. Are you suggesting we make it illegal for Cloudflare to do this?
> As I recall, the thread was filled with jokes, memes, and other disturbing comments made by the members of this "community" which seemed to support the shooter's actions in spirit, albeit perhaps only in jest.
i recall one new account that signed up that was unequivocally pro-terrorist which also called for a "10x worse" shooting to happen in the UK and it was immediately flagged down as a fedpost by other users, so i have my reservations about sentiment of the forum being pro-shooter.
the same account would become active 3 years later as one of the bomb threats earlier last week, just for reference.
Dont you understand that if your website accepts user-generated comments then what users post is completely out of your control? All you can do is delete the comments. But that isn't considered good enough anymore. How would you feel if a few rogue users did this to you and got your entire website deplatformed for something you were helpless to stop?
How come HN isn't full of death threats and toxicity and generally objectionable hate content?
Your online community will adapt and shape itself to fit the moderation scheme and environment you build for. 4chan doesn't attract the clientele it does because shitty people flock to it, 4chan has the clientele it does because it's one of the only places shitty people can go be shitty in public and not be ostracized for it.
If you run a business, it's okay for you to tell shitty people that they aren't welcome, as long as you don't consider them shitty because of their skin color, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Banning someone for personal opinions or disgusting (to you) takes is a 1st amendment right of an individual and business.
It's not cloudflare's responsibility to ensure that websites run by people they don't like remain reliable and capable of weathering attacks on their infrastructure. If cloudflare thinks you aren't doing enough to not be a toxic, violent, gross cesspit of hatred, it doesn't matter if you are actually working 24/7 to take down bad stuff.
If I'm the biggest billboard maker in the US, I am within my right to not sell any billboards to the people who put up anti-abortion advertisements, purely because I don't like their message.
Rogue individuals can come to any website and post death threats. How the moderation team reacts historically or in the present has no bearing on that. The reason why it hasnt happened to HN is simply because no one started a targeted campaign to shut it down yet.
You keep presenting this as fact when it really isn't. Nation states, Brands, businesses, and influencers would have a field day with this. What other sources do you have for this?
Cloudflare taking down websites in this manner a brand new fad. Their own blog post frames their decision to take such content down as sort of a new phenomenon. Logically we can deduce that it's probably going to happen more now. And yes, nation states, brands, and businesses are going to have a field day with this, absolutely.
It wasnt just Cloudflare. There were other providers which deplatformed them recently too. (DdosGuard to name one). It also wasnt just hosting, but their domains are being cancelled by registrars. (ISNIC, 2 days ago). This coordinated deplatforming movement all seems to stem from CloudFlare's incorrect labeling of Kiwifarms as a dangerous website. You may find that if Cloudflare puts out an unsubstantiated statement against you, you will have difficulty finding hosting at alternate providers.
I'd simply switch to alternative providers or technologies for my legal content, and then proceed to worry about people who actually live under threat of death for real free speech discussions.
>"The owner also took this time to mock the entire country of NZ"
Only after said government tried to get him to turn over all information about everyone who viewed the video, read the MF or even commented on the shooting. (OC all occurring AFTER the fact/shooting) All happening right around the same time the government there was literally locking people up for merely viewing any of it. Full police state kind of tactics. He told them to fuck off when they demanded he help them hunt down unrelated innocent people.
Again, this isn't happening on "their platform", they aren't hosts, only acting as network infrastructure. Which is and should always remain neutral.. For the survival of the internet and for freedom!
Does it matter? Kiwi Farms spreads hate, therefore it deserves to be shut down.
"Net neutrality" was really about double-dipping by demanding payment to not throttle bandwidth at the server side. It was never about tolerating hate speech.
This is how the net works now. It's not the 90s or 2000s anymore. If you are, or are thought to be, spreading hate and fomenting harassment against LGBTQ or other marginalized groups, you cannot be guaranteed that netsec companies will protect you, that networks will route packets coming from you, or that banks and payment processors will handle your money. You are too big a risk for legitimate businesses to deal with you.
Watch what you say online. Speech has consequences. LibsofTikTok, Jordan Peterson, J.K. Rowling, all of .win, the Babylon Bee -- they're next.
b) there are hundreds if not thousands of trans activists able and willing to play whac-a-mole and exert pressure to shut down the site wherever it is found -- and many of those are experts in network infrastructure, which Null is not. Besides, Null is just one guy, he has only so much energy and financial resources. And he's running out of options in terms of people willing to host him.
39 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadFrankly everyone seems to get their take from the same circulated screenshot and whatever the social pressure campaign claims to be true.
That's his right as CEO of a private company of course and I can't say I'm sorry to see KF go but honestly it's getting a little embarrassing how he writes these lofty blogposts about his principled stance upholding free speech only to capitulate completely days later.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a... [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked
For one, the KiwiFarms thread on near, prior to his suicide, is pretty tame. There aren't that many comments and the comments that are there aren't so bad - at worst they accuse Near of pedophilia because he likes/defends drawn illustrations of child pornography. Near's real identity is not known so the thread doesn't even stalk him or intrude into his real life.
Near emailed KiwiFarms farms asking for the thread to be removed and said he would commit suicide if it wasn't but would pay if the thread was removed. The site owner was researching whether it would be legal to accept money when Near pupportedly killed himself - 12 hours after the initial exchange.
It's also not clear that any suicide actually took place. As I mentioned, no real identity is known so there is also no real official confirmation. All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter who is acting on behalf of someone who talked to the Japanese police - and apparently the police confirmed the suicide. A thread on KiwiFarms investigates the idea that Near faked his suicide, showing that Japan's vital statistics, a government page that reports, among other things, the deaths of foreigners in Japan has no corresponding record for Near's death. The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before. There is additional evidence that thread reviews that I've forgotten.
I haven't looked into the other two suicides - but from everything I have seen much of what is said of KiwiFarms is overblown. It's true they use racist slurs and say mean things - but the idea that they are some murderous swatting suicide cult seems vastly overblown to me.
You believe there is ~1 monthly death of US citizens in Japan? No, those stats are not useful.
> All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter
And you know... confirmation from Near's friends if you don't ignore them.
> The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before
And this is just disgusting. If you want to publicly discuss someone's attempted suicide and consider if you can legally take their money to remove that discussion... You've hit the bottom. You need to reconsider your life choices at that point.
Yet in every public discussion to date, Y is guilty until proven innocent.
Regarding Near's friends - he wrote that he had no friends. None of the people who claim posthumously to have been his friends offered any evidence that any suicide took place. Near, when writing to KiwiFarms, said that right before he killed himself he would send copies of his passport to KiwiFarms so that they would be able to tell he actually did kill himself. Then, in his final message, he decided not to do that. There is no real evidence that Near's suicide actually took place - it's all "This person on Twitter knows Near's friend and they say he killed himself." Maybe that's accurate - but it seems like a low bar for confidence levels if we're going to ban a group from the Internet based on it.
Regarding discussing Near's suicide - Near emailed the site owner, Joshua Moon, and made the offer - "I'll pay you 125k to remove the thread or I'll kill myself." Moon replies that he doesn't even know if it would be legal to accept that offer, says that he probably won't and that he would feel guilty about taking Near's money, and the pair discuss it for a few exchanges before Near, apparently, loses patience. Moon also expresses his confusion that Near is upset, because the KiwiFarms thread is about 100 comments in length, none name Near, the thread is not active, and the comments are mostly pretty benign (e.g. "Near must be autistic to spend so much time on emulators).
More broadly, I can't speak authoritatively, but I never observed any coherent harassment effort, nor did I see any posts that a lone wolf could have really used to wage a harassment campaign. That is, in keffals case I never saw any post with an address or phone number, or UberEATS creds, or anything really that wasn't on the wide internet at some point. To wit, when keffals claimed KF users instigated a swatting, and later fraudulently ordered junk food to the hotel, the forum seemed to laugh it off as an attempt to get sympathy donations or free food. Even the sinister-sounding thread where they correctly snooped the hotel from keffals twitter post was pretty benign, it was a few posts over maybe an hour noting various details and cross referencing against image searches, followed by days of mockery over keffals feeling scared but then posting photos of the safehouse.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/why-keffals-really-took...
None of this works to paint KF in a positive light, it's like a murderer coming out in defense of cannibals.
CF removed their Ddos protection, instead of working with law enforcement to unmask the supposedly offending users. Then all these other tech entities pile in and make it look like it never happened. No specifics we the public can know about.
KF isn't even the only site. Why are we focusing upon KF, but somehow forgetting literal abuse sites? If CF is going to go this far then what about tor? Even 4chan instigates harassment from time to time. Discord servers, telegram. Or you know, Facebook. The tool used for the jan 6th event in the U.S.
The excuse is these are big entities, but unwillfull lack of moderation is the same as intentional lack of moderation in effect, as demonstrated.
But will these entities take the same stance? No. Because this is about money and power.
i recall one new account that signed up that was unequivocally pro-terrorist which also called for a "10x worse" shooting to happen in the UK and it was immediately flagged down as a fedpost by other users, so i have my reservations about sentiment of the forum being pro-shooter.
the same account would become active 3 years later as one of the bomb threats earlier last week, just for reference.
Your online community will adapt and shape itself to fit the moderation scheme and environment you build for. 4chan doesn't attract the clientele it does because shitty people flock to it, 4chan has the clientele it does because it's one of the only places shitty people can go be shitty in public and not be ostracized for it.
If you run a business, it's okay for you to tell shitty people that they aren't welcome, as long as you don't consider them shitty because of their skin color, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Banning someone for personal opinions or disgusting (to you) takes is a 1st amendment right of an individual and business.
It's not cloudflare's responsibility to ensure that websites run by people they don't like remain reliable and capable of weathering attacks on their infrastructure. If cloudflare thinks you aren't doing enough to not be a toxic, violent, gross cesspit of hatred, it doesn't matter if you are actually working 24/7 to take down bad stuff.
If I'm the biggest billboard maker in the US, I am within my right to not sell any billboards to the people who put up anti-abortion advertisements, purely because I don't like their message.
It would take seconds to change the kiwifarms DNS but apparently the admins don't care about their userbase being able to communicate all that much.
Glad to see service providers have freedoms too. Kiwifarms still has plenty of options.
Only after said government tried to get him to turn over all information about everyone who viewed the video, read the MF or even commented on the shooting. (OC all occurring AFTER the fact/shooting) All happening right around the same time the government there was literally locking people up for merely viewing any of it. Full police state kind of tactics. He told them to fuck off when they demanded he help them hunt down unrelated innocent people.
Again, this isn't happening on "their platform", they aren't hosts, only acting as network infrastructure. Which is and should always remain neutral.. For the survival of the internet and for freedom!
"Net neutrality" was really about double-dipping by demanding payment to not throttle bandwidth at the server side. It was never about tolerating hate speech.
This is how the net works now. It's not the 90s or 2000s anymore. If you are, or are thought to be, spreading hate and fomenting harassment against LGBTQ or other marginalized groups, you cannot be guaranteed that netsec companies will protect you, that networks will route packets coming from you, or that banks and payment processors will handle your money. You are too big a risk for legitimate businesses to deal with you.
Watch what you say online. Speech has consequences. LibsofTikTok, Jordan Peterson, J.K. Rowling, all of .win, the Babylon Bee -- they're next.
Well Kiwifarms is still up and running after all of that nonsense, making it a giant waste of time.
a) it's down right now;
b) there are hundreds if not thousands of trans activists able and willing to play whac-a-mole and exert pressure to shut down the site wherever it is found -- and many of those are experts in network infrastructure, which Null is not. Besides, Null is just one guy, he has only so much energy and financial resources. And he's running out of options in terms of people willing to host him.
a) It is still up.
b) And after all of the hacks and DDoSing by the script kiddies running booters and attempts to fully de-platform them, it is still up and working.
Looks like a complete giant waste of time and a total failure to shut them down.