Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.”
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.
i encourage anybody who is calls themselves a "free speech advocate" to consider what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech". their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is. if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been harming their free speech. free speech is for everybody, not just the people who have opinions you agree with, and being openly trans is a form of speech.
There seems to be a double standard with who can partake in intimidation campaigns.
Before any mention of keffals in Kiwifarms she was running a harassment campaign against Destiny, making false accusations that he was a rapist and rallying their followers to get him de-platformed on all platforms.
The worst situation is having one sided intimidation campaigns where trans activists can de-platform users like Destiny but they cannot defend themselves due to either losing remaining platforms or fear of losing their remaining platforms.
Making accusations against someone and trying to get them deplatformed is not the same as threatening someone with violence. I know very few details but the moral equivalence you’re drawing in this comment is false.
Is it? Attacking someone's livelihood is a very real and impactful form of aggression. Compared threats of violence there's more cases where it's warranted, yes, but I think I would personally rather be on the receiving end of threats of violence than of someone attempting to make me lose my job and become much harder to employ.
Of course actual violence is a different case altogether.
If that's your stance then that's fine. However, the correct approach would have been for Destiny to take legal action, instead of vigilantism.
In addition, the prior comments talk about things that may causally limit freedom of speech. Losing your job does not mean losing your voice.
When it comes to how FoS is constitutionally defined (across several countries), it is worth learning about "fighting words." Nearly every justice system agrees that any goes, except words that may (not merely will) cause imminent harm. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
>the correct approach would have been for Destiny to take legal action, instead of vigilantism.
So the correct response to percieved harrassment is indeed taking legal action, and not, say, mobilizing mobs to retaliate back ? Mmm, I wonder who needs to hear that.
As far as I understand, the people on kiwifarms _also_ try to get their targets fired by enailing their employees and claiming their targets are pedophiles or something like that.
Publicly calling someone a rapist can very well get someone injured or killed. Unless you’re a victim whose pleas are being completely ignored by the legal system, it’s not justifiable and not something that should be taken as anything but a threat to someone’s life.
I have no clue who these people are or what the situation is, but I’ve seen more than enough angry mobs appear out of nowhere after an accusation of a crime.
“I have no clue who these people are or what the situation is, but I’ve seen more than enough angry mobs appear out of nowhere after an accusation of a crime.”
What are some specific examples of this phenomenon you’re referring to?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
Humans are inherently tribal. If enough of us get together in a group, we are capable of terrible things - and the justification of them.
If I'm not mistaken, the threat of violence came from someone USING the KF platform, not KF itself. If you want to make equivalences, deplatforming Destiny means removing him FROM a platform, and thus the person making threats should have been banned from KF to result an an equivalence. Yet the action taken was to actually remove the entire platform.
I'm unfamiliar with KF but if a platform can't or won't do a good enough job of moderating its content and users, then transitively the platform itself needs to be blocked.
And btw, kiwifarms had to get their own ip block because no one would host them any more that was like 5+ years ago or something. So cloudflare never really provided any service to the site as their IPs were public knowledge and could be ddos'd (hence why it is always going down)
A post deleted as soon as a mod saw it (~30 minutes) with an account ban, by an account with virtually no posting history before this drama started.... hmmm
Those people should also be banned from twitter. Just because some folks aren't banned when they should be doesn't mean we should stop banning everyone.
This isn't a left vs right thing. It's a "we shouldn't let people bring harm to other people online" thing. It seems you're the one making it left vs right.
This is a lie. What happened is Destiny had a tirade about how to him stealthing isn’t rape, and Keffals pointed it out. Then KF went wild, as seen above.
For people who don't like to hide an essay's worth of scum behind a two-syllable word, "stealthing" is used above to describe putting on a condom to obtain consent and then discreetly removing the condom after consent is obtained.
I would suggest taking a deep breath. I didn't accuse anyone of anything, I pointed out that stealthing is rape. I did so because stealthing is in fact rape. I don't know how that simple fact is misinformation, let alone dangerous - please explain.
You left the part out where Keffals once again went out of their way to then get Destiny (and by Keffals own words, livelihood) de-platformed first and how Keffals is the one in fact who started the fight with KF. (who only looked further into the person's pretty unsavory history because of their freak out)
Yes and thank god they do. I watched it several times so I could better understand what happened in this scenario and what an evil person may do if I find myself unarmed with a pile of people in a confined space like this. I learned that hiding in the corner resulted in piles of people simply ending up getting shot, and that immediately exiting out through windows and other less expected exit points greatly aided survivors. This is counter to idiotic advice my teachers gave me, like hiding under chairs and desks, which the shooter in Uvalde took advantage of to massacre virtually all the children in their room.
After watching the videos I came up with a plan as to what to do if an evil person ever enters close quarters building and I have no way to fight back. Only by watching such a gruesome video with such explicit results did it really drive home what the stakes are. I truly believe Kiwifarms may save lives by keeping up this video.
It's amazing the degree to which people are fine treating their fellow humans as means towards an end. Even unarmed victims of a massacre. We should put a Netflix Original series out that is curated gore videos with commentary from former cops, military, mercenaries, etc. about surviving horrific situations unarmed. Who cares about the families of the victims or the survivors?
>It's amazing the degree to which people are fine treating their fellow humans as means towards an end.
I could make that exact statement about those wanting to restrict the video. They want the end result of the video being unshared, and they're willing to discard the freedom of speech rights of other humans in their efforts.
In the case of the Christchurch video, the harm has already been done. One could argue that sharing the video creates demand for more shooting videos (as is argued with CSAM), but the USA considers this to be protected for whatever reason (unlike CSAM or obscenity).
I question whether mere possession of CSAM without any personal proximity to abuse isn't the digital version of allowing police an easy way to plant weed. It (the planting of this evidence) seems like way too convenient of a way to prosecute any political enemies, other disfavored groups, etc. And there's no one to cross-examine, except the policeman who potentially planted it themselves. IMO until police corruption is sorted out, these kind of prosecutions should require accusations or confirmation from the abused that the person in question actually was involved in the abuse.
In fact, this may be one of the reason why the founders were free speech 'extremists.' If merely _owning_ some information that is easily plantable is illegal, it is trivial to frame someone.
I had no idea what Kiwifarms was until Christchurch. The mainstream platforms basically invite people to go to platforms concentrated in more extreme speech by deplatforming legal but controversial speech. IMO it is more beneficial to have mainstream platforms with all manners of free speech than to concentrate extreme speech in certain locations where it becomes normalized without the benefit of mixing in more mainstream opinions. I would not be surprised to find out censorship and moderation results in increased radicalization, etc by concentrating controversial ideas in these 'extreme' platforms rather than mixing them with more moderate ideas.
Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference between saying hateful things and doxing and harassing people with threats of violence.
We don't even need to dip into the endless debate about tolerating hate -- there's no level of ideological indirection here, Kiwi Farms was just very straightforwardly driving people offline with threats of physical harm and real-world harassment.
Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA.
Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that.
In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
> Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices.
Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
> I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc.
Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).
Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal.
Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options.
Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world.
ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone.
The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack.
The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.
> Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).
I'm not disagreeing with your entire argument, just that portion.
Multiple layers of moderation are only safer for free speech to the extent that none of them have too central of a role and there's some degree of visibility as to what is happening.
One of the things that has made social media so toxic to speech is that it has A) gathered so much of the "share" of being a conduit of speech at scale, and B) creates a false feeling of consensus by creating playing fields that are tilted in various ways without the tampering being obvious.
I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech.
I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)
Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.
> I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)
I'm not sure whether Cloudflare deserves antitrust action. But, yes, Facebook is concerning.
Of course, you've got to acknowledge the flip-side. Sometimes it should be left up to the government. If your internet service is a natural monopoly (perhaps augmented with protections of a franchise agreement from the government), it's especially problematic for them to be making moderation decisions.
> it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech
This is a bad thing, according to you? Should Facebook instead make those decisions on its own?
The thing is, no matter what Facebook decides there will be criticism. If they make the decisions on their own, bad. If they ask for government to decide what speech is lawful and what isn’t, bad. If they don’t block fake news, bad. If they block fake news and realise months later it was real, bad.
And your genius solution is to break up the company. But any network, regardless of size will have this issue. The rise of Tiktok makes this very obvious. There’s tonnes of misinformation on Tiktok but it doesn’t get the same coverage because that’s not what aligns with the NYT’s priorities. Tiktok gets around the content moderation problem by simply saying and doing nothing, hoping no one notices.
So what’s your solution to TikTok? Break it up as well? Into what pieces?
The problem with people who come up with simplistic, unrealistic solutions to hard problems is that when the obvious flaws are pointed out in their thinking, they’ll double down.
The weight of any moderation decision is directly proportional to the size of the platform making that decision. This is a generally well understood principle in a lot of free speech circles, I'm surprised that of everything I've written about Kiwi Farms here, this is the thing that is getting the most pushback from people.
The principle behind breaking up platforms is that individual moderation decisions do become harder the more people that they impact. It's also not just a free speech thing, this is the same reason why it's dangerous to have a browser monoculture. If I tell you that having one company in charge of the entire web makes their individual decisions about the web more impactful and more dangerous, that's something you understand, right?
Same deal for moderation.
Of course, see mlyle's other sibling comment -- sometimes we genuinely can't do anything about a natural monopoly and we just need to recognize what they are. But in instances where we can, decentralizing power decreases the overall risk of moderation mistakes for the entire network.
> Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
CloudFlare acts against speech all the time. They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.
CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well, in many conditions that don't come anywhere approaching "organizing an international manhunt to intimidate a minority": https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#email-routing
They should stop talking about this like it's "pure speech" because it's not that at all, and even to the extent that it is, they already limit actual "pure speech" in many other scenarios not nearly as threatening as this.
OK, you're willfully missing the point because we're talking about the position relating to Cloudflare's security services, not hosting or other products that have have a more restrictive TOS.
As far as they do mention activity, they do say they ban content related to activity that is, for example, "libelous". So they'll block you for publishing insults about someone, without any further malicious activity.
They also say that they ban content used as part of malware command and control, which seems to cover spamming, meaning that they should have no problem blocking spammers trying to use their "security protection" service.
Of course it turns out I don't even have to use the analogy with spam because CloudFlare's own post that you linked to clearly states they can remove access to content that is "... harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals ...".
That's literally been KF's modus operandi for years now. Unless CF changed their terms very recently, that behavior of KF has always been proscribed. Yet CF saw fit in their discretion to make a conscious choice to continue aiding and abetting KF in its campaign of doxxing and incitement of violence, something far worse than libel or C2.
> As far as they do mention activity, they do say they ban content related to activity that is, for example, "libelous".
You're again missing the distinction between their hosting policy and their security product policy. This was the important distinction that I first pointed out to 2 comments ago, and that I posted this document which explains clearly 1 comment ago.
> Hosting products are subject to our Acceptable Hosting Policy. Under that policy, for these products, we may remove or disable access to content that we believe:
...
> has been determined by appropriate legal process to be defamatory or libelous.
...
> Our conclusion — informed by all of the many conversations we have had and the thoughtful discussion in the broader community — is that voluntarily terminating access to services that protect against cyberattack is not the correct approach.
“They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.”
The problem with your logic here is that you’re considering the voluntary filtering of messages by a party as being the same as stifling someone’s ability to say something. The filtered party can still say what they want but the intended recipient should always have the ability to ignore that if they so choose.
“CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well”
The difference between controlling what gets sent out by their email service is more a question of legal liability than free speech. They are not limiting anyone’s ability to give free speech within the confines of the law here.
To make a stronger argument maybe you need to create a stronger definition of free speech than what is defined by law to prove any violations on CF’s part.
In the case of KF, CF has only suspended them on what they could identify as undealt-with legal violations. This is fundamentally different from revoking services to silence unsavory takes.
I also imagine the doxxed information on the platform (KF) is removed after a time so attacking the whole platform at this point just seems like an effort to stifle a community with subjectively unpleasant ideologies.
"Go start your own" is not a great response to someone being concerned about corrosive effects of the concentration of market power -- especially when those concentrations are brokering critical speech and political discourse.
Whoops you started your own, now I see all the methods of payment you use have been shut off by their various vendors. Oh you used crypto? Hope you know every single address that has interacted with a sanctioned address and never accidently accept payment from them...
Have you ever considered that if nobody wants to touch your content - nobody wants to even consider allowing it over their network - then it might actually be your content that is the problem?
Have you ever considered that you're straw-manning and not engaging with what I've actually said?
I'm not supporting Kiwifarms having a platform.
I'm saying speech being effectively squelched by a small number of powerful parties is problematic. If the small party is the government, this is obviously problematic. If Facebook is a huge part of people's discourse, and subtly tilts the playing field in various ways, this is problematic, too.
I can insulate myself (mostly) from the effects of Facebook's curation. But there are still profound social costs.
I feel like it is thoroughly explained above and my other counterparts in conversation understand the point.
I am also not sure you're conversing in good faith. You're tossing out pithy one-liners that demand greater effort to respond to than to say them. This was also my experience a long time ago when we used to discuss things on IRC (including, I believe, this exact topic).
Again, there's a difference between your free speech being "squelched", and no-one wanting to entertain your nonsense, and you haven't really explained why you think there isn't.
> Okay, but there is no "concentrated power". You are just as free as anyone else to host KF.
We're not talking about hosting KF. There's lots of hosts. And Cloudflare was not hosting KF, but instead providing DDoS protection services.
But there's approximately 2-3 services that can reject DDoS at high scale. Or maybe slightly more. This is right at the threshold of concern.
Here, I think the decision that was made was a good one, but at the same time a very small number of unaccountable parties making this kind of determination is worrying.
So either don't host stuff that gets you DDoSed, or work out a way to spin up something else that copes with rejecting DDoS at scale.
Either way, if you're saying something so reprehensible that no-one will allow you to use their platform to say it, maybe you should look at what you're saying.
It's really at the point where I need to repeat the same thing:
> > > Many parties deciding independently whether to "entertain my nonsense" is good. One critical party in the path (governmental or commercial) is bad.
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
My issue is that the Kiwi post in question - which (to my reading) was a very VERY stupid bomb “joke” obliquely referencing the Belfast Troubles - appears to have been quickly moderated and the user banned. Which is, I thought, how this was all supposed to work.
The screenshot going around Twitter of the idiotic post was tweeted out within literal minutes of said post being made. I have no idea how long it took the KF moderators to delete the post and ban the user but, from a perusal of the following pages in that thread, it doesn’t seem like it was up very long.
So is moderation an issue? It doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps that post was the final straw, but CloudFlare is framing their action as having to step in and “moderate” specifically because of THAT post - and yet the post in question had already been (correctly) nuked from orbit by the KF mods.
Edit: here’s where I do the obligatory “I didn’t vote for Trump, however” mea culpa: I do not have a KiwiFarms account and honestly I find it to be fairly distasteful in a 2004 FYAD sort of way.
One thing I don't understand: if Kiwifarms is subject to very big, very expensive DDoS attacks - and I've seen no one denying that it is, that's the whole thing Cloudflare is needed for, after all - why would we even think an illegal threat on Kiwifarms originated with a regular Kiwifarms user? It seems a lot cheaper to make an account and post the illegal comment than to run a DDoS operation.
No Kiwifarms account here either, but I have read it and I do appreciate that some of the people wanting them shut down are... not very nice people themselves.
You might be right. Posted by a KF user regarding the threat:
"It's a 2020 account that wasn't active till a month ago with 1 post in the CWC forum and the other 42 in the keffals thread. The post was deletedly nearly instantly, yet within 10 minutes of it being posted Keffals had contacted CF, CF pulled the plug, and articles (which you can find in A&N right now) were being posted. Also it's notable that Keffals removed the quote/reply portion of the post which he accidently revealed before indicating he has an account here. This was so obviously coordinated, it glows more than nuclear blast."
Anecdote: in a Discord server I was one of the moderators at, we had a user post porn images from OnlyFans while the moderators were asleep, then report the server to Discord for hosting stolen content. The server got deleted by Discord. The user's account did not.
> You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online.
No, we want the government to clandestinely meet every week with representatives of major internet companies and instruct them who to ban and what information to suppress, while pretending it's independent action of the same companies driven by their love of free speech. Or maybe we don't want that, but who cares - it's what we've got.
This is kind of exactly what I mean when I say that people haven't really though this through.
You intend this to be a gotcha, but yes, unironically getting pressured by a political representative has fewer free speech implications than the government openly threatening to throw people in prison. It does have implications; it's not ideal. But are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
I've brought up SESTA/FOSTA a few times already, but they're kind of an ever-green example. The government has been pressuring companies to deplatform sex workers for ages, but SESTA/FOSTA were still a worse outcome. I don't want the government trying to do run-arounds to the First Amendment in the first place, but if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
> are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
No, I am not arguing that the government asking Zuckerberg for a regular friendly chat where it tells him who to ban and he complies is worse than the government shooting Zuckerberg in the head as a traitor and nationalizing Facebook. The latter would be worse. But both are very bad and should not happen in free democratic society where freedom of speech is valued.
> if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
It's the same world. If the operators would not comply "voluntarily", that exactly what would happen. But the censorship by it's nature does not like exposure, so the less overt means can be used, the better. If they can do it without loud clashes, just by everybody "consenting" to it "privately" - much better. If somebody dares to step out - the pressure would be increased, up to, ultimately, using the force of violence, if necessary. That has happened many times to journalists that dug in wrong places. So far none of the companies has been dangerous enough to employ such level of pressure - usually there's always somebody in the lower levels that can help with the problem, like CF, or Amazon, or Google - but we're just getting ramped up. We'll get to felonies eventually. Unless we manage to stop it somehow.
So, does Cloudflare in this blogpost actively asking governments to take a more active role in moderation decisions across the board make it more likely for the scenario you're describing to happen, or less likely?
We can disagree about which outcome is worse or about whether they're equivalent, but other than that disagreement it doesn't sound like you're arguing that Cloudflare is being prudent or helping advance freedom of speech when it asks governments to make these decisions for it.
> But are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
Not the poster, but-- I'm not so sure either way. Both are pretty bad. The government convincing private parties to do their bidding while acting like it's just the private sector making choices blinds us all to what's happened, and gives the illusion that the decision to squash the speech is a popular, voluntary one by individual actors.
So, the government forcing it is directly more harmful but at least it is visible.
> The government has been pressuring companies to deplatform sex workers for ages, but SESTA/FOSTA were still a worse outcome. I don't want the government trying to do run-arounds to the First Amendment in the first place, but if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
Passing SESTA/FOSTA didn't require any "help" from free speech advocates. The government has had a longstanding policy to go overboard against prostitution and prostitution-adjacent material long before Section 230 or SESTA/FOSTA existed. Legislating run arounds against the First Amendment (e.g. Cosmtock Laws) and pressuring private industry (e.g. Hays Code), have been goto strategies since the country's founding, if not before. The solution has always been to fight it out in the courts (as in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) or find ways around the letter of the law (Backpage pre-2018).
Pushing the issue to government at least provides consistency, rather than leaving the issue to fairweather service providers and perfidious content policies.
> at least provides consistency, rather than leaving the issue to fairweather service providers and perfidious content policies
Once again, I think this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that people who advocate for more government involvement haven't thought about this issue enough.
Consistent censorship results in more censorship than you would see with inconsistent censorship by fairweather services.
If you want any argument about that, consider that Cloudflare dropped a number of sex sites specifically after SESTA/FOSTA was passed and not before.
Of course, it would be better to have neither situation, but an inconsistent patchwork of censorship is obviously less censorship than a consistently applied standard that even free-speech-absolutists like Cloudflare have to follow.
> or find ways around the letter of the law (Backpage pre-2018).
Once again, light legislation leads to more wiggle room for companies to interpret the law, which tends to result in less censorship overall. As proven by Backpage pre-2018.
You can still fight inconsistent censorship in the courts. You can still have laws struck down. You can still work to change public perception of censored speech or normalize it. Unless you're aiming for an acceleration of censorship (which is a usually a bad strategy), then "at least" and "provides consistency" shouldn't be chained together in the same sentence. If you believe that something is a negative outcome, a consistently negative outcome is worse than an inconsistently negative outcome.
This isn't just a free speech thing, it's just a general principle that accelerationists don't always completely grasp: the scenarios where accelerationism works to produce preferable outcomes are kind of narrow and rare. I don't want to get stabbed at all, but I prefer a world where I might get stabbed over a world where I definitely will get stabbed. Making the stabbings more consistent isn't an improvement.
Well the courts view is that the government pressuring a private entity to censor is no different than the government censoring by itself.
And I would argue the lack of transparency and ability to hide the true driver of the censorship is far worse than if the government just comes out and does it themselves.
If you think US federal government has "little to no power" over the company whose main business, headquarters and most of the workers are all located in the US - you really misunderstand just how vast US federal government powers are.
I trust you can find many more links about this topic. As a side note, this is the part we have just learned. Is that all of it? FBI just told us it routinely instructs social media companies about which content they'd like suppressed. And, as we know, they get their wishes.
> what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't
How would I know? I wasn't there. I know which consequences US Federal Government can visit on you if it really hates you, and that's a real lot of bad consequences. How it went on those meetings - I have no idea. Maybe they didn't even need to threaten - though they certainly did in public - the President accused Facebook of "killing people". Do you thing if the Supreme Commander of the US Army and the head of US Federal Executive tells you you're killing people and need to stop it - it's not something you need to think really really hard about?
> Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR
I know, I've been there. We're not. But we're inching closer and closer to there. When it'd become obvious, it'd be too late to complain - by then, any complaint outside of the boundaries of your private kitchen will land you is a big trouble. Better complain while it's still allowed.
And yet, none of this information was remotely suppressed, which suggests that the government is largely toothless with regard to these requests. Perhaps corporations acquiesce due to a gentleman's agreement, or even because they think it's the right thing to do, in which case your beef should be with them more than the government. On the whole, this feels like a "think about it, man!" kind of argument to me.
Also, these sources seem sketchy at best. Do you have reporting from a reputable newspaper? I'm not saying this didn't happen, but the way this reporting is presented definitely doesn't pass my sniff test.
FWIW, I believe that the government shouldn't be threatening corporations to censor things, but I also don't think that's what's happening here. (Though I could be wrong — waiting to read some credible investigative journalism about it.) I also don't know what the precedent is for this kind of public-private coordination.
In any case, the information still gets out, whether on social media or elsewhere.
> none of this information was remotely suppressed
But of course, state censorship is rarely 100% airtight. Neither it needs to be - it only needs to hinder the information enough to make those who dissent be unable to change anything and give those that are willing to delude themselves plausible deniability (thanks for providing the example for the latter point). In the USSR, which you previously mentioned, a lot of people knew what's going on. A lot of people listened to Western "voices" and read "prohibited" literature. And talked about it - in the confines of their kitchens. They couldn't do anything more. The KGB was powerless to eliminate the "voices" and the samizdat - but they were powerful enough to not let them have any effect for quite some time.
> Perhaps corporations acquiesce due to a gentleman's agreement,
There's no such thing as "gentleman's agreement" with the federal government that can destroy your business and your life. It's like a mafia boss "asking" you for a "favor". You both understand it's not "favor" and he's not really "asking". "Or else" doesn't need to be said explicitly - everybody knows it. But nevertheless, it has been said explicitly many times, so to believe there can be some kind of "gentleman's agreement" is naive bordering on willfully blind.
> because they think it's the right thing to do
I'm sure some think that'd the right thing to do to suppress dissent to the government, because the government is only acting for our own good and thus everyone who dissents is evil, extreme and terrorist. In fact, we've heard the government explain it to us on multiple occasions. That's not an excuse.
> Also, these sources seem sketchy at best
Come on, not this BS. Just read the freaking emails, they are right there. If you are going for "unless The Pravda publishes it, it's all libelous lies and I'm not going to read it" - you are either grasping at straws or are willing to blind yourself for partisan reasons. I can lead you to sources, I can't make you read them - if you are willing to crimestop on it, go ahead. It's still not mandatory, but many are already using it at full force - they are only willing to think about subjects pre-approved by their betters and only consume information pre-processed by the approved sources, which never would deliver anything unexpected or diverging from the prescribed doctrine. Your choice.
> I believe that the government shouldn't be threatening corporations to censor things, but I also don't think that's what's happening here
It's not "threatening", it's plain telling them now. We're way past threatening - we're in the place where the government just tells, and they jump.
> waiting to read some credible investigative journalism about it
Because you are going to ignore people who are actually willing to investigate things, and only believe "reputable" ones - i.e. ones who by definition are part of the system that implements the censorship - you're going to be waiting for a long time. About as much as Soviet citizen would wait for Pravda to publish genuine critique of the Communist Party and its General Secretary.
> In any case, the information still gets out, whether on social media or elsewhere.
The information gets around even in North Korea. That's not a reason to become one.
> If you are going for "unless The Pravda publishes it, it's all libelous lies and I'm not going to read it" - you are either grasping at straws or are willing to blind yourself for partisan reasons.
It's called vetting your sources. Also, funny you should mention Pravda, when Zero Hedge is actually pretty close to that caliber of publication from what I can tell.
> Just read the freaking emails
It's not about the e-mails, but the context around them. I can't trust a far-right rag that peddles conspiracy theories to provide analysis with any degree of nuance, and without omitting key facts. "Doing your own research" will more often than not just lead you into the dark, unless you have training and experience to select good sources, weed out BS and half-truths, and follow up on leads where necessary.
> Because you are going to ignore people who are actually willing to investigate things, and only believe "reputable" ones - i.e. ones who by definition are part of the system that implements the censorship
How are reputable investigative journalists "by definition" part of the system that implements censorship? There has been plenty of reputable investigative journalism of government wrongdoing over the past few years — even in the "MSM". Unless you believe that the government and media act as one giant, unanimous bloc? That's a bit crazy.
> There's no such thing as "gentleman's agreement" with the federal government that can destroy your business and your life.
Can you cite any examples of the government crushing a private company in recent times due to not acquiescing to their demands? Based on your tone, you seem to believe that the federal government is in a position to do something drastic like imprison a CEO or revoke a corporate charter when faced with resistance. I don't think that's remotely plausible, unless we're talking National Security Letters or something. (Which are a big issue, but not directly relevant here.)
Thanks for illustrating how the censorship reaches its goals. "Reputable" sites won't publish anything that the government disapproves because they have "gentleman's agreement" and you're not going to read sources they say are "right wing rags", because they are full of "conspiracy theories", as "reputable sources" tell you. So nobody needs 100% censorship - you'll censor yourself the rest of the way. Just trust the experts and be happy.
Do we still call it “speech” if it’s a threat for physical violence? This seems even more clear when an established past of threats being actualized exists.
Edit-Maybe I’ll make this personal. I’ve been a victim of both verbal and physical bullying. At some point words cross a boundary from speech to violence. You could even see this with the audio simulations used to simulate schizophrenia. I’d say speech crosses the boundary into violence when it hurts another person and cannot be “muted” by the other. Ie doxxing someone-once it’s on the internet it’s out there for all time. Etc.
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Now we're somehow discussing "multiple layers of moderation". This was fast. No limiting principles in sight either.
> Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company.
Very obviously Cloudflare is operating at a higher level of infrastructure than ISPs or the government.
If they actually believe that they are infrastructure that people have a human right to access and that is so fundamental to the Internet that they should be treated as level 0 infrastructure, then they should consider dissolving the company and forming a public org instead.
Otherwise, yes, of course Cloudflare should have stricter standards. Even under Net Neutrality (which I support) ISPs have more moderation power than the government does. Banks arguably have far too much moderation power (I do think people should have a right to banking access), but I don't know anyone who would argue that banks should have no moderation powers at all, it would make it impossible for them to prevent fraud or abuse if that was the case.
Cloudflare obviously should not have as strict moderation as a web forum, but this isn't a binary choice. The limiting principle here is having multiple layers of infrastructure. It's choosing not to have a single company in charge of DDOS protection for 20% of the web.
“
You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online”
That’s exactly what I think should be the case. The US government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and having a representative democracy is a way to achieve that decentralization. If the power structures that arise from this model threaten this process then the first goal should be fixing it rather than introducing a new process where a smaller ideological group gets to harass those within companies into acquiescing to their moral guidelines.
The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail.
So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?
In the US, a restraining order issued by a court is merely a suggestion; police can simply ignore it without consequence, even if there is a law on the books that requires police to enforce it.
Every CEO implicitly decides what is morally acceptable or not when they act. Additionally individual people and society as a whole judge those actions within their own frame of reference.
> We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not.
> If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.
> This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals?
If someone else is going to decide what ideas I'm allowed to hear I want to have a vote in who that person is.
When CEOs make those choices for you voting with your wallet isn't going to cut it. At least with the state we have the ability to collectively decide what the limits of their power will be and hold them accountable when they overstep.
Let's not be coy here - the ultimate goal is to exactly make them cease to exist. And indeed, in any other case such action would be pointless - if they're dangerous hateful bigots that endanger lives, then what changes if they move to another provider? What has been achieved by that? It's like the police would say "we caught this terrible murderer and we forced him to change the store where he shops for groceries and to wear different brand of clothes. Yay us!" What's the point then? The only case where it makes any sense if when the ultimate goal - maybe not immediate, but eventual - is to drive it out of existence.
CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
Everyone here has defended the CEO right to make those decision. The disagreement is his argument and justfication.
He should just come out and say "I did it because i can and want to" not those long winded excuses
They have been broken, by anonymous or nearly anonymous people, constantly, distributed throughout the world behind multiple proxies.
Sorry dude, we're not gonna wait 3 to 50 months for law enforcement to sort gradually through the trail of bodies.
Like oh I'm just doing crimes using your delivery service, I'm just doing crimes in your restaurant, I'm just doing crimes in your day care, and if you believe in free speech you have to let me keep doing the crimes it until you petition the US government to compose a task force
No. The argument is that there is very little evidence here that crimes were actually committed, rather they were allegedly just discussed. Cloudflare hasn’t brought any evidence to bear.
So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline.
But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else.
The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
Their cover up of Stalins holocaust in Ukraine probably killed more people than there are transpeople in the US. Their support of the Iraq war caused an unknowable amount of damage.
From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
”Unmasking” is merely code for “doxing someone we don’t like.” Someone’s full legal name is all you really need to look them up on people-finder websites, which IMO are the real problem and in urgent need of regulation.
There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
There is no such counter on Kiwifarms - at most they’ve front paged claims (totally unsourced and totally unfounded) by Keffals and others that KF has caused three or more suicides.
A reminder, by the way, that Keffals has used her platform to promote the use of DIY HRT by minors. (https://t.co/4dnauozhuS) KF was the first to find evidence of Keffals flirting with underage trans children in her discord (known as her Femboy Ranch) and, despite my dislike of KF, her campaign seems mostly committed to memory holing these events.
What you've linked to is a DIY HRT guide sponsored by her. This is an essential resource for trans people in most of the world -- not all parts of the world are as progressive as the San Francisco Bay Area.
There's no mention of minors on that website. It's not reasonable to try and restrict this information from minors either.
edit: responding to post from deepdriver below: your first link is from a vicious transphobe who in the very first line misgenders trans women and girls, and the second post has blatant anti-Semitism in it within the first couple of sentences. Also, the packaging is pretty cringe, but saying that it is explicitly targeting kids is ridiculous -- I've seen plenty of adults with that aesthetic.
If you really care about unlicensed pharmacies on the internet, you would encourage easier access to HRT so that trans teens don't have to resort to this.
edit: responding to other post from Banana699 below: The thing that separates you and me is that the scientific evidence clearly indicates that gender dysphoria is real, and that social and medical transition is greatly helpful. My "ideology" is to follow the science, understanding that it has limitations but that it is the best known way to understand reality.
Huh? You know nothing of my views on HRT availability and created a massive straw man. Bobposting and Keffals both brag about how many young people they’ve gotten on HRT; this information is logged on Keffals’ thread and she started her rampage against KF when this archiving happened - well before any supposed bomb threat or harassment.
I have absolutely zero issues with trans people and support affirmation. I don’t like non-doctors/non-professionals, streamers who are essentially entertainers, telling kids how to medically change their body (without parental input) and then connecting them to sources that are of extremely dubious quality (bathtub HRT). I don’t think that’s a ridiculous stance.
I would have a much bigger problem with what Keffals was doing if it were possible to actually get HRT as a teenager in most of the world. The structural injustice is a million times more serious.
BTW, trans people used to be routinely tortured by the medical system not that long ago (and are still now in most of the world). At that time, what you derisively call "bathtub HRT" is how most trans people used to bypass the medical system. It isn't just out of nowhere, there is a long history of this. I've also seen people test the products of that pharmacy and say that it's medical-grade.
There are many archived Twitter posts where the owners of this site (Keffals and Chloe aka bobposting) brag about supplying minors with hormones behind parents’ backs, even sending these drugs to children directly which is highly illegal. The top “Homebrew” online pharmacy they link to sells cross-sex hormones in holofoil boxes clearly marketed to children, decorated with lolita anime art and “Keep Away from Parents” labels:
Hardly surprising given the sexualized Discord server called “Catboy Ranch” where Keffals, who is nearly 30, led many underage viewers down the path of medical gender transition. Some were as young as 13. Keffals sent them collars to show they were Keffals’ pets. Users engaged in sexual talk and discussed taking naked selfies. Ctrl+F “Catboy”):
I believe Kiwi Farms’ investigation of this activity, as well as Keffals’ failed career as a niche porn actress, are why Keffals seeks to get the site taken down. Of course, all this has been saved across multiple archive services and will never go away.
The 90% figure is false when it comes to teenagers who say they are trans after puberty.
As an autistic person with a history of trauma, abuse and mental illness, I'm deeply offended at the insinuation that I and people like me can't tell if they're trans or not. Being trans is not mental illness, it's human variation.
Not intervening in puberty for someone who will grow up to be a trans adult also does permanent harm, resulting in tens to hundreds of thousands of USD in surgery and other costs, and (more importantly) a lot of pain. The fact is that early intervention prevents a lot of suffering down the road. If your moral calculus doesn't take that into account it is illegitimate.
You didn't engage with any of what I said, and you still haven't retracted your promotion of torture advocates elsewhere in the thread. You're not a serious person.
You’re making specious arguments, engaging in ad hominem, ignoring scientific evidence that you disagree with, and generalizing your individual experience to millions of unrelated minors. I have no intention of engaging with a bad-faith respondent.
deepdriver here has promoted an organization called the "Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine" [1], and (the organization, or associated people) have campaigned in favor of:
* conversion therapy in the form of talk therapy [2], for which, the Independent Forensic Expert Group (which functions under the auspices of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims) has said [2a]:
"All forms of conversion therapy, including talk or psychotherapy, can cause intense psychological pain and suffering. All practices attempting conversion are inherently humiliating, demeaning, and discriminatory. The combined effects of feeling powerless and extreme humiliation generate profound feelings of shame, guilt, self-disgust, and worthlessness, which can result in a damaged self-concept and enduring personality changes"
* The "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)" hypothesis, the original paper of which was revised to say something completely different after it was shown to lack scientific basis [3] [4]
* right-wing propaganda about sex and relationships [5]
* ending all transition healthcare for adults up to age 25 [6]
I realize I sound like Charlie from It's Always Sunny, but it's all there. These organizations have deep links to various right-wing networks and are all attempts to launder right-wing, unscientific ideas into the mainstream.
I think the issue was mainly that (from the viewpoint of those complaining) she harassed the LoTT’s family at their homes and then went live with the article before giving anyone connected to LoTT (including LoTT herself) sufficient time to address her questions and statements.
I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
She published LoTT’s full legal name and enough of a description to positively locate her on Spokeo/White Pages/etc. That is a common cop-out for Twitter mobs; posting the ready-made parts for such a search but not the actual home address, so in the poster’s eyes it technically isn’t “doxing.”
Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal.
Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit.
That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably.
I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government.
I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack.
Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
> It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably.
Yes it should be.
Society is based on rule of the law and corporations that are controlling our most critical communication infrastructure should solely concern themselves with what is legal. Not what is moral, not what they think is just or "offensive" or "hurtful".
I feel for the trans people who are targeted and wish them well but I absolutely don't want the Cloudflare's CEO making _any kind_ of judgment regarding the content I am allowed to read and share.
> My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence.
Your position here is that the matter was so grave that people could be in absolute danger. Well, guess what? We already have laws protecting people from bodily harm and Cloudflare should have waited for the courts to decide, however you don't get to make a moral judgment here and deny ME, a citizen of the world, access to information unless our democratic society votes otherwise.
If you think this isn't how society should function, great, you can attempt to vote and change the laws.
By restricting speech and information, you are restricting and controlling human thought.
> If you think this isn't how society should function, great, you can attempt to vote and change the laws.
The laws allow Cloudflare to make this decision. Respectfully, I would offer you the same advice -- if you think that Cloudflare shouldn't be blocking openly abusive content, then pass a law banning Cloudflare from doing so. But I think you'll have a hard time getting that law to pass a 1st Amendment challenge. We barely got Net Neutrality to survive Supreme Court challenges and that depends on legally declaring the companies it affects to be common carriers, a classification that Cloudflare has not pursued for itself in any equivalent form.
> you don't get to make a moral judgment here and deny ME, a citizen of the world, access to information unless our democratic society votes otherwise.
I'll happily make that moral judgement as a free speech advocate. This has come up a couple of times already in these comments, but sites like Kiwi Farms are very direct chilling actors on free speech. They are pretty much the textbook definition of what "cancel culture" actually is and what it actually means beyond any freedom of association or freedom to criticize. They exist not to spread an ideology, but to bully people (often through real-world tactics and abuses of common infrastructure) into leaving the Internet.
People are very upset about the idea that by advocating for Cloudflare to remove Kiwi Farms, people like me are making decisions about what content you can access. They don't seem to be upset at Kiwi Farms for pushing for the same outcomes in much more egregious and openly anti-free-speech ways, and it just makes it really difficult for me to take this moralizing seriously. I'm supposed to be ashamed of contributing to a constitutionally protected process that used collective speech and freedom of association to get a private actor to make a legally protected decision about who they'll associate with. And I'm supposed to believe this is a greater threat to freedom of speech than doxing people, threatening their family members, or trying to convince employers that they're pedophiles.
I just don't buy it. I do in fact have a legal right to exercise my freedom of speech and freedom of association in regards to private actors, and I would argue I have a moral right to call out malicious actors that are doing direct harm to freedom of speech and a moral right to advocate for platform standards among private entities that cause speech to flourish rather than allowing a singular forum to use illegal tactics to make it physically dangerous for people to exist on the Internet. Getting rid of obviously malicious actors like Kiwi Farms is good for freedom of speech.
Furthermore, I don't buy the backwards logic that by arguing against expanded definitions of illegal speech and against expanded involvement of governments in censorship that I am somehow taking the pro-censorship position. But whatever, if you want to argue that Cloudflare is fundamental infrastructure to the point where it shouldn't be making private decisions or to the point that it should be treated like an ISP, then fine. That's a thing you can argue for. Get it classified as public infrastructure, we have a legislative process for doing that. Lobby the company to form a collective public organization with other CDN services that can make these moderation decisions. Both you and Cloudflare have options here if you both really believe the company is too important to make private decisions.
----
Cloudflare isn't an ISP (although note that even under most definitions of Net Neutrality an ISP could arguably have still legally banned Kiwi Farms). Cloudflare argues that its infrastructure should be treated as the same level of critical importance as an ISP, and it argues that its importance demands neutrality about even websites that are dedicated to promoting illegal behavior. Cloudflare argues that blocking even just straightforwardly malicious actors on its network should be subject to a legal process.
But I think that's a very selective claim. It's a claim that Cloudflare only seems to make when it comes to these controversies, and not a claim that seems to inform any other part of its decision-making process or business structure. Let me know when Cloudflare starts operating as a publicly owned entity, or demanding court orders before it blocks DDoS attacks, or demanding strict legal definitions of malicious traffic, and then we'll talk about whether they really believe that they're fundamental critical communication infrastructure and whether they really believe that they need a government to tell them to remove obviously malicious actors from the network.
In the meanwhile, forgive me for being skeptical about Cloudflare's claim that its moderation decisions should all just be proxies for court rulings. Let me know when Cloudflare actually subjects itself to any kind of binding restrictions or any kind of public democratic accountability for its moderation decisions, rather than just using this excuse conditionally to avoid responsibility or criticism.
Most of the posters on the site might do nothing illegal, but one or two did make actual threats that crossed the line into criminal conduct. Even if the posts were immediately deleted by moderators, people still took screenshots.
So if I threatened you right here in this post, and someone screencapped it before a moderator deleted it, then HN has no right to exist? Or does there need to be another person or two also threatening you? Just the fact that it happened, regardless of it being against the site's TOS and taken down by site admins, means that the site is now complicit and loses any right or privilege to protection?
Kiwifarms also serves a weird specific role. Many of the people people discussed there do propagate harmful things. Like normalizing cutting, starving, violence and much more.
There is no control instance for things like this. Normalizing harmful things ok YouTube in front of children is not cool, we all know YouTube barely cares either.
For a concrete example look into Chris Chan and how Kiwifarms was literally the only instance out there protecting Chris from way more evil groups.
My point is even if Kiwifarms is a hateful environment, I think they serve a purpose in our society.
Where are these so-called threats of physical harm and real-world harassment? People keep saying this but never even attempt to back it up with anything more than the allegation.
Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News.
The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online.
We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong.
The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
Is bullshit.. That's why it's a paradox. Intolerance of "intolerance" is intolerance!
And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
> And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case.
This is another reason why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision.
I understand people have mixed feelings about the Paradox of Tolerance, but I generally don't think that it even comes into play here except in its most pure form (Popper was a lot more narrow about what he considered intolerable speech than most people realize). I'm not here to litigate Popper -- the Paradox of Tolerance is worth talking about in general, but I don't think that the Kiwi Farms' ideology was the most dangerous thing about the site. I think that they were actively pushing people off of the Internet. They were actively taking away the rights of other people to speak.
The ideology of Kiwi Farms (to the extent it has one) is dangerous, but it's a secondary conversation from what the site was really doing.
I heard so many stories during this campaign from people talking about how they were scared to go online, how their family members were being intimidated just to get at them, how systematically isolated they felt. Is that the result of an ideology with negative consequences, or is that the result of a site that's just literally and plainly threatening freedom of discourse online? I think it's the second.
And I saw a lot of excuses made to Kiwi Farms victims that they could make the abuse stop by just not being public online: not talking about it, not streaming or having online businesses. Essentially, the solution people proposed to stop that abuse was to go away and stop existing in the public sphere so that Kiwi Farms wouldn't have a "reason" to target them. Well, when someone is arguing that the correct way to combat abuse is for the victims to give up their speech rights and to exit the public sphere, then who should be the first person to lose their right to speak in that case?
How do you know that A: the person whose name I won't say isn't lying, because that person's a professional victim. And B: if that person isn't lying, that those threats came from Kiwi Farms users.
The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc.
The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical
Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.
The 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech aren't the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a philosophical concept and is, in fact, "freedom from consequences."
There is consequences to everything. It’s the philosophical right to talk. Not the right to an audience or the right that people won’t be mad at you for disagreeing.
If I call your fiance ugly you may not invite me to your wedding even though I have freedom of speech. If I tell the waiter they’re ugly, they may not serve me food even though I have the freedom of speech. Everything has consequences.
What if you criticize Amazon? Should you be banned from using all their services? What if you criticize private enterprise in general? Banned from everything except services provided by the state then? Your interpersonal examples where both people/groups have very little and similar amounts of power. 'Consequences' to speech become dangerous when corporations or even larger groups of people get involved.
You have somehow made a logical equivalence of some benign speech like "criticize private enterprise in general" and then projected that on "every company in the world bans you".
(1) There is always some company willing to sell a product/service for the right price. Even to genocidal maniacs, and especially to everyone who is more socially acceptable.
(2) Every competing company smaller than Amazon wants to steal Amazon's business. If you are banned by the big company, they are likely to want your business. They may use their compassion and willingness to be criticized / reverence for "unlimited freedom of speech" as a competitive advantage.
(3) Every "undesirable" company eventually finds suitable replacements for their vendors. DailyStormer, Parler, 8Chan, InfoWars. They are all still on the internet.
There are legitimate concerns when there is a monopoly / small oligopoly in an industry with no substitutes. And there are legal concerns when governments sanction people/organizations without due process. But your comment wasn't useful to any informed discussion of these topics.
Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences. Obviously speech can have all sorts of different consequences (both positive and negative) at all kinds of layers of society.
By that definition Freedom of Speech is a ridiculous idea.
Are you saying I should be able to spend my entire day advocating for your rights to be removed, insulting you or whatever else and you still need to treat me like any other person and can't get annoyed at me?
Or the opposite, if someone treats me really well I can't be friends with them because that would be a positive consequence of their speech?
We all need to act like emotionless machines that completely ignore all speech so that free speech can exist?
but "giving the individual the choice to listen to whatever influence they wish" means that when somebody uses the threat of physical violence to silence one of those influences, anybody who stands up for free speech must push back against that. everybody deserves to have their say, except those who would seek to silence others.
defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
Free speech is not completely unfettered. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech that incites imminent lawless action - and that would likely cause such action - can be punished under the law.
In all likelihood this appears to be what is happening with kiwi farms. Of course, the issue is that Cloudflare can’t undertake legal enforcement, but they have a terms of use and so contractually are duly within their rights to end service to kiwifarms.
Don't forget the ending: Brandenburg's incitements to non-imminent violence were upheld as legal. And the person recording/distributing the incitements (the cincinnati reporters [ i.e. Kiwifarms in this case]) was not charged at all.
Are you sure the incitement that provoked this response wasn't someone illegally (and against ToS) using the services of Kiwifarms, rather than the owners and operator of kiwifarms? It's my understanding Kiwifarms removed the Belfast post quite quickly. Indeed imgur is still hosting the image of the post, shall imgur also be charged?
Posting someone's address can obviously facilitate a swatting. In some cases, it might even make someone an accomplice to one. But just recklessly posting someone's address doesn't make one an accomplice.
There's no implied request for someone to SWAT or even harass the person. I get that this provides no comfort to the victims, but this isn't Brandenburg incitement.
> Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting.
Yes, but it is not only that. It is also being part of an relgious, cultural or otherwise marginalized group and not having to fear for your life because you have been a little too vocal.
The truth is that freedom of speech (like most other freedoms) must comstantly be balanced between the different actors. E.g. in 1930s Germany the members of the nationalist socialist party of Germany have been quite free to utter their disgusting voices while as a jewish citizen you would have had a hard time if you did so. And the reason for this was that the speech of the Nazis ended up being more than just opinions, but threats. And those threats turned into violence and genocide.
Today, we are again at a point where speech turns into threats turns into violence. Karl Popper's paradoxon of intolerance and all that. Any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, otherwise you cease to be a free society at one point or another. Because the intolarent will not fight for free speech once they are in power, they will abolish it for everybody but themselves. The actual Nazis back then were quite happy painting themselves as victims only to later remove the very rights they claimed.
Once people get beaten, lynched and killed by fascist mobs and loose their rights to bodily autonomy discussing freedom of speech seems naive. People who have to fear violence and incarceration cannot speak freely. And if you look at the statistics for right wing violence the point I raise here is anything but academic.
Update, as I read more on the topic: In the case of KiwiFarms this is not even close to being about free speech. On that platform coordinated attacks on specific people have been planned, driving a few into suicide.
To all those downvoting: How would you think if the target of these attack was your mother, sister, daughter? Should there be a legal way to make them stop? Or should it just be legal to coordinate harassing and threaten people whose appearance, opinion, political opinion, sexual preferences, etc you don't like?
And before someone comes with the slippery slope argument: I live in Germany, we have certain Nazi symbols banned for decades here and it hasn't harmed the discourse one bit. You just can't walk around and go like "Heil Hitler" in public without having to fear some sort of retaliation. You can still talk about Nazis, you can learn about them, you can still be a Nazi. But if there was a slippery slope, why didn't it slip – for decades?
Btw.: Most Europeans would regard the censorship of female nipples, swear words and anything remotely sexual like it is so commonplace in the US as an impediment on free speech. But if it is ingrained in the prude traditionalism, it is suddenly okay censorship, right?
Downvotes, but no arguments? What has this site become? I might be getting something wrong here, so please explain it to me, instead of just downvoting.
Why should I take this argument on good faith when literally this same argument has been repeatedly used in attempts to deplatform comedians, popular politicians, writers, journalists and tons of ordinary people?
Were said comedians, popular politicians, writers, and journalist calling for immediate violent acts and intimidation of others.
If yes, then I believe they should be censored.
If no, , then they should not.
Authoritarians will use both arguments at the same time, they have no problem with hypocrisy. They will threaten you with violence, and demand their violence be published, while with the slights of those they do not like demand censorship.
Calls for violence must not be tolerated, for if they are civil society cannot exist.
What? Testing it? To make sure we can actually exercise it in practice? Because "be careful how you use it or you might ruin it for everyone" wasn't ever how the 1st amendment was meant to work. Like, what would be the point. Let's let the 1st amendment say you have to check in with anyone sensitive and if they don't like it, you can't say it, because "we live in a society" Let's have a new Mandatory Courtesy and Respect amendment.
I am so utterly ashamed of the tech industry at this point. I'm glad I retired and don't have to pretend to your faces.
"The Internet interpretes censorship as damage and routes around it." Oh how naive and libertarian us techies were in the reactionary nineteen hundred and nineties.
private companies have no obligation under the 1st amendment. violence and hatred have no place in this world or on the internet.
i'm ashamed of all the people who stand up and defend nazis, fascists, and cyber-bullying and doxxing. this isn't about sensitivity it's about vile human actions, and viewpoints like yours are what allowed for fascism to spread in europe, asia, and america.
Free speech is free speech, and it includes speech that you and others will find hateful, cruel, and disgusting. Doesn't stop it from being protected by free speech laws.
Would you say trans people have been hurting the free speech of people on Twitter by reporting them and harassing them en masse for speaking against them and refusing to follow their demands of tolerance?
I am not aware of what Kiwifarms have done, but I am aware of what is often said when people claim harrasment of trans people. And that would not be considered harrasment in any other context.
So maybe this is the case that has finally gotten too far, but when you have been crying wolf as many times as the trans movement has, well I am not going to care.
most recently, they executed a targeted intimidation campaign to the point where somebody felt the need to flee Canada. and then continued it when kiwifarms users discovered that person's new home in ireland.
(edit: corrected US to canada. most of the coverage of this was coming from NBC, assumed that meant the victim was american)
It might help the "victim" if they weren't constantly posting online and leaking their whereabouts. But hey, how else would they be able to solicit donations?
When I grew up, people used to say that you should never post your personal details online. I think we should normalize that attitude again.
It really makes me wonder why they decided to go with a DDoS attack as opposed to counter-doxxing the operator of KiwiFarm, who also seems to be a donation-soliciting public nuisance and "internet celebrity".
kiwifarms users identified the victim's locations by identifying her hotel from a picture she posted that included a small portion of the bedsheets in the hotel she was hiding in after they intimidated her out of her own home.
in what ridiculous world does that count as "posting your personal details online"?
If you are trying to hide from internet stalkers, why would you publicly post a picture of your hotel? As a society, I feel like we have normalized oversharing to the extent that young people don't have regard for their own personal safety.
In any case, I think this young woman should stay strapped if there are people coming to her house.
Even if I'm teaching my children to not publish too much online your comment sounds exactly like "If she weren't wearing that miniskirt she would not have problems going outside, she should dress modestly and then no one would harass her"
Well it seems to me like the kiwifarm posts demeaning information about this person who is co-ordinating the DDoS, like that they were a pornstar or something. So this campaign seems like a tactic to shut down the discussion of facts that are inconvenient for their reputation, like a SLAPP suit.
Nobody is arguing that any one group should have blanket free speech protections. There are definitely trans people who turn to harassment and threats to try to protect their community, which isn't okay.
But at least three trans/gnc people have died through suicide, directly attributable to Kiwi Farms. Near, a brilliant and widely respected open source contributor, specified in their suicide note that it was because Kiwi Farms had made their life hell for years (https://www.ign.com/articles/near-bsnes-remembrance). Just because there are some bad apples in the trans community doesn't make this okay, and they don't get carte blanche to make threats online - they get banned from social media like most other people. There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
> There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
Huh? Of course there is. It's called Twitter. I've seen posts from all kinds of people calling for the deaths of all men, for example. Literally: "kill all men", verbatim. I've seen them get called out on it, only to laugh in the face of the "reddit virgins" who had the audacity to talk back to them. It's a mistake to think they are not hateful.
How many people commit suicide because of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? I have absolutely no doubt it's a far greater number than some trolling website in the darker corners of the internet. Why isn't cloudflare condemning them?
No - with Twitter there's some accountability; they respond to police requests and frequently ban abusive users. There was nothing people could do about the vile harassment campaigns on KF (a site that grew organically from harassing and stalking an autistic sonic fan) until CloudFlare had their hand forced.
There isn't much people can do when some Twitter mob starts harassing them either. They openly coordinate capaigns to ruin people's lives, dump personal information and pictures, call companies to demand that people be fired, apply pressure on sponsors and advertisers. Coordinated efforts to hurt some enemy as much as possible without actually resorting to physical violence.
If you have examples of such people getting banned or arrested, feel free to post them. I've seen numerous examples to the contrary over the years to the point it turned into a neat little collection.
And that somehow excuses blatant hate speech? Is it okay to hate men and openly call for their deaths because they don't "feel threatened"? Is hate speech okay or is it not?
I don't feel threatened by bullshit bomb threats either but apparently it's enough for cloudflare to deplatform some site. So why do they say nothing in other cases?
Ok, so Cloudflare should provide services forever to a platform that people use to insult trans activist and publish their addresses because you read “kill all men” in a stupid tweet…
Hell yes. If they're gonna condemn sites to oblivion for hate speech, I demand they be consistent about it. They need to stop neglecting their duty as arbiters of right and wrong. There's so much wrong on the internet. Better get to work.
It is very worrying thinking about the kind of world my son would grow up in if we allow that sort of rhetoric to escalate under the cover of harmless banter and "you're not really threatened by that, come on, suck it up, you whiner".
The same world where a similar, much more benign comment, aimed at women would very likely get you fired, ruined and turned into a social pariah that isn't allowed to be touched by a ten-foot pole. And if a company dared employ you, they'd be pressured into firing you.
The fact that no US Citizens in Japan had been reported dead by the government in the time period that Near supposedly killed himself pretty much tells me it’s probably a hoax.
However, I do hope it was not a hoax, and not because I want him dead, but because I am not looking forward to the era where people commit fake “suicides” as the ultimate way to bring attention to a cause or argument, or just as a way to “win” and get the last word. It’s the climax of clout chasing IMO. But it takes away from people who actually do commit suicide and minimizes their tragedies, as our first instinct will eventually be to assume all suicides are fake.
We have not crossed that line yet as a society, but I fear someday we will. Already I doubt anyone has actually killed themselves because of KF.
If you look at this, yes, no deaths are shown for the date of Near's death. But if you actually pay attention, no deaths are shown anywhere past May 2021.
On and before May 2021, the death rate is about one per month. It's pretty much impossible that just by chance there would be seven consecutive months with no deaths; the reasonable conclusion is that the death listings are not in fact complete and that anyone who died after May 2021 just isn't listed.
> On and before May 2021, the death rate is about one per month. It's pretty much impossible that just by chance there would be seven consecutive months with no deaths
That's possible, but it's worth pointing out that only unnatural deaths are cataloged. This does not include deaths by a natural cause.
It is difficult to die unnaturally in Japan, and given the small number of US Citizens living there, it is certainly possible to have long periods of no unnatural death.
By that reasoning there shouldn't be a death per month in the previous years. But there was. Going from that to nothing is a drastic change and rather improbable.
There are many trans people who have been terrorized by KF, had their partners and parents harassed and so on. I'm not going to link their Twitter threads because plenty of people in this thread openly admit to being KF users.
edit to respond to xwdv below: Unlike you, I care about trans people and their loved ones being terrorized.
I don’t care if they’ve been terrorized what I’m saying is I don’t want people faking suicides as the next attention grabbing strategy, and as a way to wrongfully throw blood on other people’s hands. Just do not cross that line. Deaths are one of the few things that people still somewhat respect online.
Friend of a friend knew them IRL, and was extremely upset with me for thinking they might be faking their own death. Near is likely dead as much as we don't want to believe it.
>It's very hard for me to take this seriously when the same rules are never applied to trans people and their advocates.
I know that I'm going to regret stepping in this pile of community dog poo, but ...
The simple idea behind "the rule of law" and the concept of "justice" is that it applies equally to all. Regardless of what someone claims to "support" or "oppose" online, death threats are illegal (and sometimes deadly) and should be dealt with accordingly.
I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling". As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; in the absence of such evidence, which your post is, your claims are inflammatory, at best. Were there an option to report your comment (or were I intelligent enough to know how that option worked), I would have done so.
I know that I should not have to spell this out, but it is not OK to threaten people's lives. This, regardless of whether (i) you are trans, (ii) you support trans people, (iii) you hate trans people, or (iv) none of the above.
>>>I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling".
Keep in mind that this is a billionaire who seems to get mediocre support from social media platforms against threats of violence. What chance do the mere plebs have?
Thank you for providing some supporting details. I'm fairly certain that my comment stands as is, with the one change being that as-of-now I have seen some of the threats that you were describing, some of which should have resulted in an immediate police report *and* an immediate suspension or permaban from Twitter.
As I said, justice means equal application of the law, and threats of violence and calls to violence are never OK, even when they are "on your side". It doesn't matter if you are calling for the killing of trans people, or the killing of people who are mean to trans people; calls for violence are wrong, and threats of violence are wrong. I hope that we can at least agree on this one thing.
And frankly, shame on Twitter if they did not take quick action on the posts that you linked to. And FWIW, the first post (an obvious threat) has had its account deleted, the second post was neither a threat nor a call to violence, the third post (an obvious call to violence) has been deleted, but the account remains (but is dormant), etc. So it appears that something _was_ done, but I know neither by whom it was done, nor when it was done.
It is as mussel IQ level thinking as drivers who raise the "but cyclists don't respect the traffic lights" flags whenever something is discussed about road safety.
> if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been harming their free speech. free speech is for everybody,
As far as I know you have many pro-trans channels to communicate online, and it's very natural that you find the opposite as well on the internet. I love the fact that you guys never complain about anticlerical content that's rampant in the most popular platforms. It's almost like you only dislike one type of discrimination.
Please point me to co-ordinated mass harassment campaigns with the objective of leading clerics to suicide, and you might change my mind. Otherwise your comparison is absurd.
If you believe that words are violence then it cuts both ways whether you are trans or just another group that is discriminated against online. Since when is suicide the only endpoint to look at? Shifting goalposts much?
But it's okay, they're supposedly "Nazis", so it's okay to punch that way and coordinate harassment, deplatforming and marginalization. I see at least two people on that list that are ridiculously benign, just hold "bad" opinions. One of them is so obviously a hit-job, it's sad.
Or how about articles detailing how "favored" groups like Antifa coordinate, glorifying their doxxing and very potential real harmful consequences for the people they target (who may or may not be innocent). This is targeted at much less high-profile individuals as opposed to the SPLC one above.
I honestly have no idea how people can be okay with this kind of behavior (the above is just the tip of the iceberg, as I don't have the resources and institutional backing like the SPLC to document, record and collate the hate and filter the best examples for you. Honestly, couldn't find half the stuff without resorting to site-searching Gab for references to articles. Google.)
Future generations will frown upon us for this dark part of our history.
Freedom of speech isn't about speech. It's about hearing. There are people who want to read or listen to what others have to say, and often for reasons besides agreement with the author's statements. By silencing someone, you are preventing others from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. I certainly don't agree with the posts and comments on kiwifarms, but I want to understand what they believe and why. Also, there is a diamond in that dung heap of a website. Kiwifarms users archive tons of stuff, and those archives are very valuable.
Moreover, I cannot help but notice the double standard you've created. You still provide services to godhatesfags.com. Hell, cloudflare provides DDoS protection for ISIS content. How can you say that kiwifarms is too dangerous when you're ensuring that copies of Inspire and Dabiq are available for extremists to read? If you want to talk about dangerous content, go after the people who claim that they want to murder innocent people and have done so many times in the past.
providing hateful content spreads hate. clinging to some idea that absolute freedom of speech allows us to be moral and just is quite frankly bs when the spread of fascist / terrorist / homophobic / racist propaganda contributes to the destruction of democracy and the very freedoms we hold dear
You talk as if hate is a kind of mind-virus which must be defeated with quarantine.
For one thing, this is illiberal. You're not respecting people as your equals if you want to stop hatred by preventing them from reading things that can make them hate.
But more importantly, if it's that way, we have lost already. The tools you want to fight these evils with, work just as well in the enemy's hands, if not better.
We need a way to fight propaganda which works better for us than for them.
OK, apply that logic to the Bible and the Qur'an. Both endorse slavery. Both encourage believers to hate gays and to treat women as chattel. Countless followers have dedicated their lives to the tenets in these books, and in many cases they end up harming others because of it. Are you going to ban those books? If not, why not?
Because most people follow a neutered form of religion that isn't an acute or extreme threat to democracy and freedom. It is a diffuse threat to some freedoms for sure. But it doesn't compare to actual ISIS or fascist propaganda. There is no way to categorically separate these things. It's about matters of degree and pragmatically deciding to draw a line somewhere, instead of being ideologically pure and pretending that the best thing to do is draw no line.
You do know we have documented proof that broadcasting hate speech tends to cause people get violent, right? Should we allow free radio of a thousand hills [0] to broadcast?
Utterly disgusting take. Harassing and threatening people, unrelenting campaigns during years to drive them to suicide, is okay because it's "an effective tool to shut down" what you deem to be "degenerate" behaviour.
Many things aren't black and white but what you just said is pure evil. Your parents ought to be ashamed.
Instagram has driven people to suicide too, meta doesn't care. Same goes for any social platform.
You seem to have visited a very different Kiwifarms than I have. They always made a point about not interacting with the shown individuals. There haven't been any threatening or harassment campaigns. In fact people saying such things out loud have been shamed for their behaviour.
Not sure if you know the Chris Chan saga and the role Kiwifarms had and has in protecting Chris?
I am not excusing them, I have no exclusive opinion about them either. But your image of the site is simply wrong.
If you want to claim that they do, then you should provide some evidence. Preferably not in the form of circular references to unsourced blog posts/articles.
Just to be clear I didn't not mean to call anyone degenerate. I was just talking about some people's dangerous online behaviour that could harm others.
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
This is the logic of vigilantes. I'm not saying what you have done is on the same level as vigilante murder or anything, but don't try to justify it as something high-and-mighty. You've once again terminated a customer on a whim. And that's your right, but stop trying to make this out to be anything more than that.
KF can (and does) say whatever they want. That does not give its users the right to doxx an individual or threaten them or otherwise illegally harass them via extra-judicial measures. It’s that simple.
It’s also in Cloudflare’s very own terms of service that KF agreed to when they signed up
Is there doxxing and threats actually carried out on KF that are not suppressed by the moderators? I've read some of the lolcow threads and have never seen serious threats or serious doxx material like addresses. I'm not saying it doesn't happen because I have not read a lot of KF content but I think people need to provide supporting evidence for these claims. My suspicion is a lot of the bad stuff is not organized directly on KF but rather secret discord/telegram groups.
There also seems to be a double standard where dropkiwifarms.net has a link to a google drive that seems to be somewhat similar to the content that might appear on a lolcow thread and could be interpreted as 'doxxing'. For example it has a copy of Joshua Moon's resume and a legal document showing his name change.
Are you sure "doxxing" is illegal in all US jurisdictions, as well as the jurisdiction it is hosted in? If it's for the purpose of harassments it may be illegal. Remember California DOJ released (doxxed) online the name and address of all California CCW holders, including judges and other sensitive holders (DV victims, etc). At least California seems to think it's peachy.
But if you have no intent to harass it would be legal then no? I mean California released names and address of judge and DV victims and other people who don't want abusers to find them from the CCW registry so they must not consider it harassments just to release the information. Those people definitely had no idea it was going to be released online, and I imagine some of the judges probably have tried very hard not to have an internet presence. They (the person who had their identification released) may have considered it harassment but without proving the DOJ "intended" to harrass...
I would argue California DoJ set the example that even releasing personal information in what appears as retaliation to an event seems to be lawful in their eyes. When California DoJ started doxxing they did it right after Bruen Supreme Court case was released.... but hey I can't prove their intent.
We've come to a place where apparently not hosting a forum with the purpose to make life hell for people they don't like (including through illegal means) is vigilantism.
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Post the screenshot then. Show us what changed between when CF said "KF is acting within the bounds of the law and will remain online" and today.
Refusing service to customers you find contemptible is completely reasonable. Continuing to service customers out of a sense of fairness even though you find them contemptible is also reasonable. Pretending that you have a sense of fairness that keeps all legal entities online and abandoning it to protect your bottom line is hypocritical and cowardly.
Being a company that protects the vulnerable is every bit as honorable as being a company that stands for freedom of expression. Today Cloudflare proves it is neither.
If you go on Twitter, 90% of the replies aren't happy with Cloudflare's action. They want Cloudflare to do more and blaming CEO for why it took so long.
Just shows how the activists are hammering Cloudflare CEO into submission. These people want complete abandonment of Freedom of Speech/Expression despite of what CEO is saying in this thread that it isn't about FoS/FoE.
I am just terrified of what holds for our future. We used to celebrate speech as progressives back in the 90's and used to defend it with fierce opposition to any supression. They say, freedom and liberty are one generation away, if the newer generation wants CCP-style authoritarianism, they will get it.
Maybe centralizing a measurable percentage of the internet onto a single provider to the point they are frequently in this situation wasn't a great idea.
Consider this next time you consider Cloudflare. Not because of what decision they made, but because they are trying to make themselves the pipe that connects any two points on the internet.
I dearly wish there was public-sector internet that was governed by the same rules as the post office. Stay within the law and nothing happens to you, violate the law and get arrested.
We have something even better than that! The Internet is decentralised, no matter how much CF tries to pretend it isn't. Just choose not to use services like CF.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that KF did violate the law, mainly through harassment. Of course the law couldn't give two shits protecting random citizens from (so-called) "non-violent", non-property crime.
KF is a shitty place full of shitty people and its members almost certainly violated the law. But they didn't do it on Kiwi Farms. You can't harass somebody by posting comments on your own website. If "conspiracy to harass" is a crime you could commit that, but I've read page after page without seeing that and I haven't seen any screenshots of it that weren't reported and removed either.
You think that would be a viable option? One half of the country thinks that we don't need to hand over internet in the hands of Gov. The other half wants to abolish SCOTUS. But in spirit, if it works well like the post office, I am onboard with that idea. The other idea would be to pass laws that make what Cloudflare is doing illegal.
The internet is global, some individual countries might have faults with their government, but the idea as a whole could be viable. It would need to be managed by a supranational, non-partisan, multipolar entity.
Yes, the vulnerable here being, of course, the people who expressed non-cis gender identity online and were harassed and bullied into shutting up or (preferably) killing themselves, not the forum orchestrating these hunts.
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Does Cloudflare wait for a court order before taking action when it detects a DDoS attack or when it suspects that a client is malicious?
The law is by design reactionary. In this case, I don't mean that in a bad way; what I mean is that the law is designed to respond to criminals, not to preempt them. If all of your moderation decisions, even in cases that go beyond hate speech or bigoted content into straight-up abuse of infrastructure and direct targeting of individuals -- if you need that to be reliant on a court then you are giving up the ability to prevent abuse and you can only respond to that abuse.
Do you worry about due process when someone's site is getting knocked offline by automated requests, or is your primary worry about protecting your customers?
What's even worse is that by abjugating your responsibility to protect your customers even in cases where there are clear threats, and by encouraging the law to become even faster and more trigger-happy to compensate, you encourage the creation of censorship engines that are even more dangerous than the ones that you are in charge of. We should have better laws around doxing and threatening people online, but even once we get better laws, Cloudflare is still going to have a part to play in detecting targeted attacks. No just law is going to be fast enough or nuanced enough to make these decisions for you.
You can't get rid of your responsibility to such a degree that you won't need to make moderation decisions even about non-ideological and purely abusive content like doxing forums. And by refusing to recognize your role in that process, you allow people to be completely driven offline and censored in the exact same ways that your company is dedicated to preventing. It's no different than allowing a DDoS attack on one of your clients to continue because you haven't specifically heard from a judge yet that you should stop it.
It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.
This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
You provide a service and like every service provider you have a TOS/AUP. The issue is the Acceptable Use Paragraph is clear as long as the content isn’t Copyright or CSE then it’s fine as you will absolve yourself of any responsibility.
No other CDN/WAF tolerates nationalists who threaten people, Cloudflare does.
No other CDN/WAF makes the reporting process essentially doxing yourself to the threatening website. Cloudflare does.
No other CDN/WAF intentionally puts all the most vile sites on dedicated CDN hosts so they get DDoSed while the normal customers don’t.
It’s purely so then when the vile sites get DDoSes then they use those learnings to improve the controls for all customers.
Much like providing security guards for a Proud Boys rally. It’s an intentional business decision to provide those services.
You could chose not to. But you don’t.
>It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.
>This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
Exactly.
I didn't know KiwiFarms existed before it was in the news and trending everywhere, so I don't know a lot about what really went on there in the past years. What concerns me more general with this situation. There is a lot of power in the hands of people able to rile up the mob to de-platform whoever the current very-bad-person of the day is. With the outrage on social media platforms, and then the media pressure from those reporting on the outrage, companies just do the safe, self-interested thing and acquiesce, branding it as some noble act.
It's wrong that whether someone can have a platform, or use a service, or hold a job, is determined not by some kind of objective TOS, but rather whether or not an online mob is demanding their scalp. It's arbitrary, unjust, and has and will harm harmless people.
You don't know about KF because you're not being targeted by them. That site's purpose is to harass people off of the internet, and potentially to the point of them killing themselves. It's the ultimate form of a de-platformer.
So, in this case, you're worried about vigilante mobs deplatforming a platform, and the slippery slope involved, but the folks being deplatformed are a worse form of what you're arguing against.
It's hard to understand what you're standing up for here, because there's no way to argue for the existence of this site without contradicting yourself, and negating your own argument.
> It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.
Actually, if they processed data from any European person they would be required to follow GDPR. And if they processed data from any Brazilian they would be required to follow LGPD.
Any significant deliberate blindness towards privacy, defamation, and hate speech laws are unlawful acts that must be punished according to the Law. Idealy by extraditing the website administrators so they can they can face criminal charges over their misconduct.
I disagree somewhat. rule of law' sounds like such a neat, objective solution to social problems, but in practice it centralizes a vast amount of decision-making in organs of state (courts and to a lesser extent, public prosecutors.
This in turn drastically shapes incentives, because of the cost of litigation and highly variable access to legal infrastructure: as we all know, police have no formal duty to protect despite having vast levels of legal immunity from consequences when they make bad decisions.
Hence the pressure campaign on your firm, because exerting leverage through market forces and PR strategies is simply more effective than begging some state authority to intervene. Of course, it hurts you somewhat insofar as it's harder for you to sell a service to anyone and everyone when people see that you're willing to revoke access in some cases. but then you were willing to do that already, eg to pre-empt perceived legal risks from FOSTA/SESTA.
I think sites like Kiwifarms have a right to exist, but on the other hand they don't have any particular right to DDOS protection. If a site is so chronically unpopular that it's constantly getting kicked out of nice infrastructure perhaps the operators need to reconsider their security stance or reflect on the basis of said unpopularity.
Of course, DDOS attacks can be engineered rather than being an expression of organic network sentiment, but then so can mitigation strategies.
Tell me then - why does Cloudflare still offer its services to drug dealers? To sites run by terrorist groups like ISIS? To outright criminal scamming operations?
I have no faith in your principles. From my perspective, the only principle you have is your share price. That's fine, of course. I don't expect you to stick your neck out or risk your business. But don't pretend like this is some principled stand.
Seconded. People go to the TOS, arguing about what constitute hosting etc.
I don't believe in cloudflare principles either. Seems like they only grew "responsible" when it attracted negative public attention in the last days/weeks.
this looks like PR, damage/image control to me.
we do not have a good solution for partial censorship on the internet right now (always the same issues, who can decide to take out a website who implement it, due process, vpn moderation etc)
for me, having principles regarding content removal at this point is pretty much black and white, either you are totally against censorship (without due process), or you are ok with it.
Cloudflare actions denote they don't hold any of the principles above even if they know all about the selective content removal complexities.
P.S: Interrestingly, the Department of Homeland Security seems to be able to seize various domains quite easily.
Forgive me if my understanding is wrong, but if someone were to host a message board or similar site with UGC and have it backed by Cloudflare, and a troll makes posts and threads threatening disasters on multiple occasions even though the site's administration removes them with haste, would Cloudflare also deny service to them? Basically take the current situation but instead of Kiwi Farms, replace it with "Grandma's Cat Forum".
This is exactly the determination. The post being spread around as evidence of harm was by a user with four posts, all within the last week, all on this thread, despite being a member for two years.
If I were trying to get a website deplatformed at least the approach is clear and easy.
It is far more than just a few posts. It goes far beyond speech online.
The entire history/founding of KF is predicated around violence perpetrated against trans people.
They actively stock, harass, and cause harm IRL. Even far-right anti-trans people like MTG allege they were behind the SWATs against her - and that is not the first accusation.
This has resulted in deaths.
They recently followed a women into a different country, after they chased her from their home.
They tracker her down and someone posted a photo outside of her new residence.
like a cartel hostage sign. A not so implicit threat that they can find you no matter where you hide and are an IRL person is literally a hundred feet away.
The distinction the parent post making is that, it was an agent provocateur who intentionally did things that would have crossed the line into actionable threats of harm. If that's true, it would seem to be an effective way of silencing people.
This also is how authoritarian governments create cause to neutralize groups.
You're not a law enforcement organization. You don't have the ability to investigate and determine whether or not the threat is genuine or if it's an agent provocateur.
Banning them creates a hazard, since now to get an opponent banned from the service, they can create content that reaches to this level.
What I don't get is how online forums with free registration have been a thing for WELL over 30 years now, yet some people think that the possibility that people make accounts to deliberately post things to get the forum sanctioned is still viewed as some insane conspiracy theory - and you a monster, if you suggest the good guys would ever do such a thing "to themselves".
Ok, can we know what was this great threat then that suddenly made you change your position in just a few days?
Furthermore, do you believe that someone who is issuing a threat on a public platform is going to not act it out because you took it away? If anything it just sounds like it would make them even more incensed to do it, just makes absolutely no sense to frame it as some immediacy issue.
As I asked previously, there is any indication of kiwifarms involvement? there's nothing in that link pointing to it, aside from someone calling in to say they are a specific user in the forum, which lets be honest here it's madness to think is relevant.
I looked into KF as this was all breaking last week. I don’t have any links as they’re no longer accessible, so take what I say as you will.
When I went on, on the forum’s official home page put front and center there was a link to a post written by an admin/moderator (which was also pinned by moderators) doxxing some trans woman with her address and last known location and the need to bring her to “justice”, whatever that meant.
Frankly it was appalling and I felt like from that one post alone (there were hundreds of posts) I had seen enough
Trying to make sense of this whole thing just makes me feel like i'm going mad, everyone supposedly knows that is common sense that they are guilty of several swattings, harassment, etc, but not a single person can show anything even close to resembling action, or even non-absurd obvious joke threats, while the archives do show rules against it(for whatever that's worth) and reportedly even by the detractors those threats had been deleted. How can something gain this much notoriety, show up in so many articles being blamed for those things and not a single source can give something backing it up that isn't wild speculation?
Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.
Maybe I should just stop trying to make sense of it at this point and go to bed.
The same thing happened with 8chan, and has certainly happened with other sites/organizations/etc. It's easy to run a smear campaign against a group that "everyone knows" is evil, no need to even provide evidence.
You could have seen the evidence if you had started caring when they were harassing trans people.
> Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.
So you know where crimes are currently being committed? Have you reported them to the authorities?
So all it takes is for a malicious actor to engage in false flag operations against me and CF will completely walk back their abuse policies and terminate my services, even if I act the best I can to moderate and remove the offending content?
I'm not saying what happened on Kiwi Farms was a false flag because I don't know that, but neither do you. It's hard to process just how antithetical your actions today are compared to your words 3 days ago.
Excellent; since you're concerned about it, it should be quite easy to provide that evidence, right? Personally, I would settle for quotes with private information redacted (usually I'd ask for archive.org copies or such, but in the case of doxxing I agree that's not ideal).
That's fair, actually; if that is the case then I very much hope to see a post in the near future explaining what happened as soon as it's no longer an active matter for the police.
> Just rang up a couple of lads down in Belfast and
asked them to plant bombs in all of those places.
also, 3 armed men will be at each place, waiting.
Seems to have been moderated/scrubbed from the keffals thread but I do see replies referencing it.
The post was screenshotted and posted to Twitter almost instantly and it seems that the post itself was quickly moderated and the user banned.
Seems like a straw that broke the camel’s back situation, but it’s very odd how CloudFlare is talking about “moderation” when it seems as though KiwiFarms quickly took care of moderating it themselves.
And fwiw, I had no idea what KiwiFarms was before this week.
I know you are concerned, or at least that you wrote that you were concerned, but given that it is a real concern why do it then, what do you accomplish? whatever threat that was supposedly being organized will still come to fruition, no?
Ever think the feds have half a brain among them, and know there's no threat?
I know how gullible people are in these culture-warish times, but I still hope you've lost credibility with some significant fraction of us. Maybe those of us old enough to remember when the average techy was libertarian and opposed censorship. The Farms is right back up, by the way. But at least now you can wash your hands of it. Don't think Twitter will stop coming at you though. You need to understand those people want to punish and teach.
Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides.
When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.
I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.
That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.
With all due respect, that may be true in most cases and a good message to receive for most people in therapy, but it's not true in all cases. As has been shown time and time again, humans are very receptive to propaganda and brain washing, and there's only so much harassment a person can take. A "regular" person might need to hear that the world doesn't have an agenda against you, that you're responsible for your actions, and if there's something about your life that you don't like you can take action to change it. But if there's an actual campaign against you, that advice no longer holds, and eventually that kind of harassment can definitively drive somebody to suicide. The only time I've heard of Kiwi Farms before today was when Near committed suicide. There's plenty written about the tragic event, but you can start with their goodby thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640?s...
If a US national dies in Japan, the Japanese authorities report that information to the US authorities. The state department publishes a list of all deaths of US expats living abroad, and there are no deaths anywhere close to the date when Near/Byuu allegedly committed suicide:
Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.
The numbers provided by both countries are inconsistent with each other, and half of 2021 has no reported suicide in the State Department data. Please stop spreading this conspiracy theory based on statistics not being entirely consistent with the story, if they aren't even consistent with themselves.
Near is almost certainly not dead. There is no evidence of his death, he’s been seen alive by fellow foreign devs active in SE Asia and interacting with Hector’s Asahi Linux streams and Hector’s VTuber accounts, and he did not appear on any canonical government (Japanese or US) death lists.
Near was dealing with way more than KF. He wanted his thread deleted because it documented him absconding with thousands of dollars of donor money and dozens of rare games he was supposed to return or donate after archiving. He further engaged in rather aggressive behavior with other developers in the emulation community. His thread had actually been dead for nearly a year when he suddenly emailed Josh asking for it to be deleted (which he offered six figures). He threatened suicide when Josh gave the email to his lawyer and asked whether or not said approach by Byuu/Near was legal. Funnily enough the email and the resulting spike in activity on his thread was actually precipitated by a few posts on here about him.
Again, my stance is as follows: KF is filled with despicable behavior and people. However we absolutely must be accurate and precise when it comes to what happens there and why certain people would rather the site not exist.
Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.
The standard shouldn't be whether someone is struggling with mental health.
It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence
As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.
Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.
So first of all, "violence" has a definition. We can't keep expanding the definition in order to justify actual violence in retaliation.
You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.
We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.
This is literally what they do though. They harass them with the message that they will never stop until they do it. It's not just random bullying that then pushes people over the edge. It's commands that you need to commit suicide. It's calling your family and workplace and telling them you've committed suicide. The "joke" there being that not only do you initially shock the family, but when your target does commit suicide, the family doesn't believe the real call.
Really? Users of the site have actually done this? Do you have any info on instances of this happening? I've always thought it was online "harassment" which is easy to avoid.
People harm themselves. that's the action. thats the violence.
I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.
People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.
You have to admit there is a very significant difference between going online and saying manga sucks and participating in an organized and targeted harassment of a particular person.
I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.
It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.
It's not a stretch at all. They want to punish words as if they were violence, i.e. put people in prison, send armed men to arrest them forcibly, etc. That's at the very least. This is openly stated, "some words should be illegal" is 1000% a sanction on violence against people for the words they speak.
In your examples, you get it right at the end: we seek to contextualize actions and use peoples words as evidence of context. It is the context of the acts that matter, not the words said.
Right, and zoomers would probably broadly agree with that, but almost everyone else doesn't, so it's very contentious. "Sticks and stones" liberals still basically control the world, at least until we start dying off in 30 years or so.
There is some recent precedent for criminal responsibility for someone else's suicide: the (in)famous case of Conrad Roy and Michelle Carter. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging him to commit suicide over texts and phone calls.
> is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.
Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.
> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
>
I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry
The site and the person who host it (there is no legal entity involved here - just a person) have not done anything other than facilitating speech, which is heavily legally protected. The users of the site have done a lot, though.
The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.
I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.
Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
Privacy protections should apply regardless of whether it's a megacorporation or a disorganized group of independent actors.
Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.
Still really unclear what law is being broken in that case. Unless you're proposing new speech-curtailing legislation. They're Intenet-famous. They're of interest to forever-onlines. This one in particular is of interest to women and parents who've so far resisted brainwashing.
> The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides
> Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.
The fact that Kiwifarms have won every suit against them is an example of the legal systems failings. Organizing mass harassment should be illegal.
It shouldn't be up to harassed individuals to seek justice, prosecutors should be able to go after them. If the issue is with the law itself, the government needs to effectively legislate.
Kiwifarms legal opponents aren't celebrities, or politicians, or even ordinary people. They are some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. If I had to be sued by somebody I would pick someone living with severe mental health issues every single time.
I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.
Something can be both legal and ethically wrong. You can apply your same reasoning to Cloudflare's censorship of Kiwifarms: nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
>I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.
So long as you're arguing that instead of "tHe CoUrTs ArE nAzIs", then I have nothing else to add because I'm in full agreement with your sentiment concerning law.
>nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
Of course; Cloudflare has a right to freedom of association and fundamentally I support whatever they choose to do, legally speaking.
However, there is a consequential problem in that the internet is becoming more and more centralized by the day and Cloudflare access is one of those facets.
Generally speaking, if you're a big website you either need Cloudflare or your own CDN to distribute the load and ward off hostile entities.
Consequently, Cloudflare is able to dictate a significant portion of the discourse on the internet by simply allowing or blocking their services. This wouldn't be a big deal if the internet was decentralized like it should be, but it isn't so the internet can't route around such nonsense anymore.
The site exists to document the lives of and poke fun at some of the most vulnerable people in society. Even if explicit calls for illegal actions are banned, being featured on Kiwifarms is like having a target painted on your back. Their efforts to violate these individuals privacy and pry into every aspect of their lives is just incredibly immoral.
If Kiwifarms users can't see that what they are doing already is unethical, why should anyone believe that they truly think these other illegal actions are wrong? They just know not to talk about it out loud because then you will actually get in trouble with the law.
The only reason the site has been able to get away with it for so long is because they are targeting vulnerable people who are least well equipped to legally defend themselves.
As I already explained, those more extreme individuals plan these actions in more covert locations - smaller forums, subreddits, image boards, discord, telegram groups, etc. There are no rules banning such behaviour in these places. The owner and mods of KF actively not only delete such content but repeatedly remind people of the prohibition. They also actively report users who violate US law and fully cooperated with any legal demands brought by State and Federal law enforcement. Josh has even banned mods who disagreed or facilitated such behaviour outside the forums.
So kf is a target finding service. The nasty work is done "elsewhere", just like a good terrorists organization - keep the wetwork in small cells while the political arm directs them in plausibly deniable ways.
You and others keep citing "deleted within hours" as evidence of the site admins doing something to address the problem, when the horse has already left the barn. People who participate in those activities almost certainly have email or mobile alerts set up and have long since copied the victim's information.
I'd say it's evidence of conspiring to delete evidence before victims and law enforcement can act, particularly if the threads are completely deleted, as opposed to being locked and moved to a mod-only area so the posts are preserved for law enforcement action.
Are there any automated filters that detect personal information, filters that are trivial to employ?
Are the users who post doxxing/violence threads banned?
What is the purpose of the forum in the first place? Answer: to harass and doxx trans people.
I wonder how [redacted] would feel if people knew he was defending a site that exists solely to harass trans people.
You can't bring in someone's personal details like that in an HN thread, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. I've redacted them now.
It's pretty shocking that you'd have done this in a comment right after asking whether users who post doxxing threads are banned. The answer on HN, btw, is yes—although if an account has a lot of history on the site, as yours does, we tend not to ban on first offence.
That’s from two personal friends who are both extremely active in the emulation scene. Feel free to discount it - when the site’s back up, I’ll grab the screens of users in Hector’s streams that use the same exact eccentric writing style Byuu/Near did. (Archive.ph is too stale to have it.)
https://jp.usembassy.gov/services/death-of-a-u-s-citizen/ Nobody was ever able to get any of the documentation listed on this page from the Japanese side, even family, and the Japanese continually report they have no record of the death. There are also no “blotter” style documents in Japan or the USA documenting his death.
I’m willing to be proven wrong - and accept others will not believe what is hearsay to them - but as someone who has been involved in emulation for years my Bayesian prior is extremely, strongly on the side of him being alive.
>Nobody was ever able to get any of the documentation listed on this page from the Japanese side, even family
Do you mean the allegedly-deceased person's family has been unable to confirm their death with the government? This seems like a significant fact I have not seen reported. Do you have a link for this claim?
You can't bring in someone's personal details like that in an HN thread, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. I've redacted them now.
You did this repeatedly, which is a serious abuse. I'm not going to ban you for it because this entire thread was so hellish, but please don't do anything like this again.
> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat
If one patron starts beating another to a pulp, the bartender breaking up the fight does not signify a failure of the rule of law or law enforcement. You stepped in to help. It would be nice if you were given official air cover to do so. But I and most Americans prefer a system where the government has extra hoops to jump through to halt even dangerous speech.
The bartender example is so wrong that it has wrapped around into rightness.
What really happens is that the bartender signals the cooler to throw out said patrons to settle it some place where it isn't their liability. It goes to the street, who knows where and what they'll do to each other.
And that's pretty much what cloudflare is doing here, saying "you can't do this in here" and now we get to see where the chips fall.
> What really happens is that the bartender signals the cooler to throw out said patrons to settle it some place where it isn't their liability. It goes to the street, who knows where and what they'll do to each other
This is more accurate, thank you. Either way, not a failure of law enforcement. (It is if the bartender calls the cops, they do nothing, and the victim turns up the next day in a hand basket.)
Every website gets threats. The Stoneman Douglas shooter wrote a YouTube comment about how he wanted to be a school shooter, just weeks before his attack, which went unmoderated. Kiwifarms immediately deleted the threatening post. Why hold small discussion forums to such a higher standard? They deleted the post in minutes; so you expect them to delete violating posts faster than YouTube?
In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call.
I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?
There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.
You are free to make a decentralized crypto-driven platform filled with nazi's. What you're ignoring is there are very valid reasons these platforms don't exist. They become deplorable crapsack worlds that 'normies' will not visit. It is never going to have any mainstream popularity. "Oh, you're on that nazi child porn software". And it requires a massive amount of moderation to ensure such a form does not become a complete hellhole (see failures of NNTP).
When you pull your crypto driven system out of the light, you are going to have to fight what lives in the dark. If you screwed up the protocol of your system and it's taken over, well it's gone, you exist outside the law and there are no means to get it back. Do a bunch of trolls with stolen crypto generation means exist on your network and flood out all the legitimate users, well too bad.
Civil society exists between the authoritarians that want dominion over everything and those that embrace chaos and would leave the world in ruin. It is a delicate and imperfect balance, but where it exists allows humanity to flourish.
I believe we're arguing past each other. What I'm saying is there is no business model (one is even needed for free projects like the linux kernel) that motivates people to spend this effort. The people with the technical know how and desire to obtain the materials on it already use it. Beyond that group there is little motivation to expand such network, civil society tends to operate in the open.
I'm talking about an elegant technical solution to cloudflare's very real business problem. If they deliver a solid open source solution to the dark web name resolution problem, there's less pressure on them to host all sorts of marginal content.
A rare win/win.
"civil society tends to operate in the open"
... Some of us aren't up to your standards of civility and propriety, and we're going to find ways to get on without your permission.
Claiming that pedophiles also wish to communicate privately as an argument against private communication is beneath my comprehension. To even think that way gives me a sort of ice cream headache of the soul. Knowing that a large and growing share of people actually think that ways triggers and harms me.
The government should have the ability to violate privacy subject to judicial review. Otherwise, no law could be reasonably enforced.
Successive governments have undermined the authority of judicial review and I'd support anyone campaigning to change that. But, the solution isn't to try and build a system that prevents the government from ever piercing the privacy of citizens. That's just a recipe for anarchy.
Honestly, maybe a few years ago I might have been on your side. But, this whole cryptocurrency saga has just soured me on techno-libertarianism. A society needs an effective government (accountable to the people) that can enforce the law.
The public key cryptographic algorithm is in the public domain so the question is really just how humanity will grapple with the fact that humans can communicate privately.
I agree it presents a lot of problems, crypto has harmed millions of people, and the people who presented crypto as investments should be held accountable by standard government rules.
Yet, people freak out when things like Tornado Cash get sanctioned. If there is total inviolable privacy, then criminals will act with impunity.
But yes, these are indeed complicated problems. All I really know is that I sleep much better at night knowing I've never aided this movement in any way.
There are at least five orders of magnitude more people who are called Nazis than there are actual people who hold all the main Nazi ideals and beliefs today.
The problem is: how do you determine that nobody else was taking this seriously? I don't know anything about Kiwifarms, so I may simply look foolish asking this, but: how do you know there was an imminent emergency? Did you conduct your own independent investigation? Or was this a response to some alarming Twitter outrage? Those are the type of questions on my mind. Essentially, did you do all the things one would reasonably expect of law enforcement who are equip to handle emergencies in a situation like this?
You are right, the simple idea of vigilante corporations makes my skin crawl. The double standards, of sort, are pretty logically inconsistent and frustrating. You’re saying, “Cloudflare acknowledges that policing the internet is not an appropriate responsibility for a platform provider, but we’re gonna do it anyway because the rest of society doesn't have its act together.” I guess I am to some extent expecting a citation on that last part so I can verify your claims are serious and not just corporate knee jerk.
Finally, let’s assuming there is indeed an emergency and the you are 100% spot on with your mitigation strategy. Crisis averted. Then what happens? Is this permanent? Once the immediate emergency is over, would you be comfortable reinstating Kiwifarms as a customer? There are some “don’t be Google” vibes here that make me uncomfortable too.
In a fair environment, once an emergency is dealt with and justice served, we go back to normal. I find it hard to believe you’d be amenable to that type of resolution because I’m used to corporate decisions being final and essentially unable to be appealed. Or, at least they’re final until Twitter starts griping about the new injustice such a final outcome has caused.
You may not want the mantle but, by choosing to act, you are, at least for now, picking it up. Yes, this is way more nuanced than “free speech”. I hope you’re ready…
>Or was this a response to some alarming Twitter outrage?
People have died. Byuu/Near comitted suicide after an harassment campaign that lasted years and included death threats, doxing, and harassment both online and irl.
Free speech in my book is about protecting people like Near from being harassed into silence or death, more than it is about enabling said harassment campaigns.
Cloudflare is framing this like there is an imminent emergency that they just averted. I think the burden is on them to bear the supporting facts. The blog post doesn't have any.
Imagine I own a bunch of billboards around town. A customer comes to me with cash and wants to display someone's personal details and a message encouraging harassment on my billboards.
Do I have to wait for law enforcement to stop me from displaying their content? Or can I, as a private company, make a judgement call and decline their business?
I think the answer here is pretty obvious and your attempt at passing the buck is pathetically weak.
How do you intend to generalize this case to other websites with user-generated content? Because the precedent set today is that a single threatening user-generated comment is enough to pull Cloudflare security services for the entire site, regardless of how quickly the website performs their own moderation, as long as it stays up long enough to be screenshotted and passed around on Twitter. That's basically carte blanche to deny service to any website with user generated content whenever you want.
Cloudflare's post the other day seemed like a very reasonable framework for making decisions on issues like this, but Cloudflare's actions today just severely undercut your credibility on this issue.
Did blocking the content save anybody's life? If so, how? If you don't know, can you even articulate a theory in which blocking content could save a life imminently threatened?
I don't dispute that a life was threatened and murder may have been imminent, I'm taking that for granted. I just don't understand how this action could have any effect upon that course of events. Murder is a physical-world thing, not an online content thing.
I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas from, but not taking every threat seriously is a serious failing of internet forums over the long term.
(the next paragraph is an example and not real, do not take any intent from it, which in itself may be ironic considering the argument I'm making).
If I call out "We should kill assetlabel because I do not like their politics", in itself it is not a serious threat, as I don't know you and cannot act on it. But it would be a mistake to tolerate the statement, even in a 'joking' manner (you can see in my previous post the 'joking' manner is commonly used by fascists to downplay serious threats). Again, the issue with allowing this behavior is it normalizes it. Now we step it up, what if 4 people repeat this same threat, 10, 20, 100? With each person repeating the line the chances of someone knowing you and acting on this behavior increases greatly. Any such threat must be moderated, and sites must have a history moderating such behaviors and not tolerating them.
In the early days of the internet being anonymous was somewhat easy, and in the later days of the internet it is nearly impossible, and more worryingly you must continue to remain anonymous in the future after such threats are made against you as you have no idea how long someone may harbor aggression over the situation. Based the early days of the internet we've normalized violence and threats and carried it on much too long as it has consequences in the real world.
Unelected technocrats taking the law into their own hands and using arbitrary judgment calls to manipulate infrastructure is not an improvement on the current legal system. Especially when they are making promises they don't keep and when they then try to gaslight people into thinking this has nothing to do with external political pressure.
There was one threat which was immediately removed by the moderators. Why is it your business to take down an entire site because one user on it broke the rules and was stopped by the site moderators?
Actually it's about the fact that you don't want to spend the money to enforce an AUP, like just about every other ISP does. Instead you want someone else to make the that system for you. Every printer gets to decide if they want to print Mein Kampf, and most decide that they won't. Movie theaters get to decide if they want to show dirty movies. Liberal society recognizes human interactions beyond the merely legal.
What you're saying is you're fine hosting harassment until it gets bad enough for a court to finally intervene and order it offline. But Kiwifarms was already banned in New Zealand for hosting a snuff film showing innocent people getting slaughtered for their religion. I'm not sure what exactly you wanted: a US court issuing an order that would almost certainly be unconsitutional prior restraint? An obscenity prosecution?
Society has decided that it's your choice what kinds of speech the company you control enables, and you've decide to tell us that you're going to pretend it isn't. Well, it is. Those sites are up on Cloudflare, because you want them to be, and nothing you say is going to change that reality.
So then why did you become the liability decision maker on behalf of your customer, if you were not required by the law?
After many sales emails that we ignored, your sales guy found and called me on my personal cell when I was on vacations in Mexico City, trying to push a 5000/mo DDoS mitigation contract, and i explained to him that we are happier paying 100k/year to a net neutral company VeriSign (now down to 27k), than offloading the legal liability decisions on our behalf to your Majesty Matthew Prince.
While it makes sense to use CF for a booter DDoS-for-hire outfit accepting Monero, any legitimate company that has real money and jobs at stake should not use CF.
> could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
> Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context
To get this straight: your position is that this is not about free speech because something clearly illegal happened and you acted purely to expedite matters since law enforcement was too slow to react and there was material danger.
So you are then tying your reputation to there being eventual legal consequences for what happened in recent days on Kiwi Farms?
I always appreciate your stance (as you have tried to maintain for many years) on the importance of trying to be neutral.
It is kind of funny that your latest argument / blog was your best and just a week ago…
So thank you. Anyone capable of reading between the lines here doesn’t fault you or believe the “new threats story”.
But that’s okay. Media pressure, bad PR, ESG scores, losing customers, and the bigger HR problem of employees/ engineers becoming deranged and unfocused is not worth the trade off. It casts a pretty shadow over the real and good company stuff.
Thanks for being reasonable and understanding this is just not the way things should be.
Hopefully you can quietly lobby for clearer legal guidance or a better measured shift in the public conversation.
Until then… here’s to the next one! See you back here in 6-12 months all over again, haha.
Did Cloudflare give KF notice that it intended to take this action and enable them to avoid service disruption? Or did Cloudflare intend that KF should experience service disruption?
KF admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Sure, but KF hasn't specifically clarified whether the block was without _notice_ as opposed to just without _discussion_. And even if KF had specifically claimed that there was no notice given, I still want to ask CF to confirm or deny this. I may be suspicious of CF, but I don't want to turn around and trust KF's statements unconditionally. Also, I've attacked CF for this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32709749] and I would want to change what I said if I was wrong.
I remember many years ago with lulzsec, where cloudflare refused to shutdown their services. Whether what they did was moral or not, it was a still a crime and I imagine it was because they agreed with the message.
To the best of my knowledge nobody's life was threatened or endangered.
I'd compare it to a website shutting down someone's account because they send a meme where they might not have the rights, which is illegal, which also isn't usually resulting in a ban.
Now where you draw the line is a philosophical question.
> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
By making that call regardless, I don’t think you’ve increased the likelihood of law enforcement (or other appropriate parties) stepping up to deal with such cases in a timely manner in the future. Maybe rather the opposite, which would be unfortunate.
+1, what was the thing that changed today vs a week ago?
If this is going to eventually become precedent (despite what is said this is now the new basis from which other decisions are made) other site owners and future one’s should have an idea of what exactly wasn’t dealt with. Cloudflare’s reach is extensive and becoming a critical part the internet so there’s plenty at stake here.
The lack of transparency by Google, Facebook, etc is the worst part of this whole top-level internet moderation trend.
August 5 was a month ago and the MTG SWATing was obviously an anti-Kiwifarms troll…
> Officials said they received a second call from the suspect, using a computer-generated voice, saying they were upset about Greene’s view on transgender youth rights.
Posters in the Keffals thread believe the fake bomb threat was to blame for Cloudflare’s reaction. The account which made the post barely had any other activity on the site. The post itself was removed quickly by moderators. If it’s true that an obvious fake bomb threat which was swiftly removed was the cause for this action, Cloudflare has some hard explaining to do to its remaining customers. Fake anonymous posts and an ideological Twitter mob can apparently DoS your entire operation with Cloudflare.
If the threat was something else, I and other customers would love to learn exactly what it was.
The bomb threat could have originated from a disgruntled cloudflare employee on cloudflare network/hardware, I wonder then if they'd take themselves down? Probably not, different strokes for different folks.
To be fair the far majority of threads on Kiwifarms did not call to act at all. I am no regular visitor but so far I never saw someone calling for violence or anything. Rather the opposite was a common message along 'enjoy the content but don't interact with them'
I don’t necessarily disagree, but what does banning them from Cloudflare achieve?
Is it just that the company feels unconfortable providing them any kind of service given the nature of the currently posted content?
Because banning them should have no effect on their ability to generate/serve that content, maybe make it a bit more expensive (though I see that their site is still blocked, so maybe immediately disabling Cloudflare isn’t an option for them either)
We do not call "rule of law" "due process" in US. Due process is the tempering of the application of law ("Rule of Law") by the state. You start off clouding matters (npi).
> traditional rule of law systems.
As opposed to what, "modern and innovative corporate rule of law systems"?
INAL but I am pretty sure there are all sort of legal actions that can be taken before the entire "due process" is completed.
You are aware, Mr. Prince, that people can be arrested and put in jail ("Rule of Law") and have a court date at a much later date ("Due Process")?
[p.s. for hn]: It's not that I give a fig about wikifarms (which was TIL for me). But this posturing by Cloudflare and framing this as a responsible action in context of 'a broken legal system' (aka "traditional") is too much.
Yes, let's have CEOs of SV companies apply the "Rule of Law" for us. While you are at it, why don't you 'edit' the content that you are 'fronting'? "Traditional editorial systems" are also desperately in need of the wise guidance of CEOs and corporations! /s
>Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not.
Indeed it’s not - you have no problems with censoring your critics. It’s about you being bad actors (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32705613) but now pretending not to, because share prices started to tank.
Josh has received no contact from federal law enforcement. He has never not complied with their requests and is open about every request he does receive. He does this by creating a post notifying the community of the post and how he responded.
He’s also pro-active in both deleting and reporting any posts that advocate violence, whether that’s a bombing, shooting or stalking.
There is no credible evidence of any physical violence or deaths resulting from KiwiFarms.
Chloe Sagal stated in her farewell messages that her pain came from negative comments made about, and to, her by fellow members of the broader LBGTQIA+ community.
Byuu/Near faked his death, as he did not appear on any Japanese or US death lists. He also has been seen by other developer expats in the time that has passed since his purported suicide.
There is no evidence for the claims being made in the drive to cancel this website. I say this as someone who has never posted there and personally find much of it reprehensible to my ethics and politics.
What risk? Can you please share details? From my perspective, it seems like this is a thin excuse, and there was not actually a credible risk that you were mitigating.
> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
sure, but I presume CF makes the decision of whether or not to facilitate access to/sell services to other undesirable bits of the internet all the time without requiring law enforcement intervention.
* Does CF wait for LE or a court case to block or drop malware distribution or command&control channels from their cache/NS/1.1.1.{2+} resolvers?
* Would CF wait until LE intervenes to drop a known, demonstrated CP host?
* Would CF continue to cache pirated material until a court stepped in even if approached by an alleged copyright holder?
* Would any of the above actors have a right of appeal with CF?
So you believe that your company shouldn’t be constrained by morality? This is why I look skeptically at hiring any engineering and product leaders from Cloudflare at any company in which I work
>I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not.
Says the people blocking access.
>the risk created by the content
What risk? Fearmongering is always the first defense of those who wish to limit free speech. "Something will happen if we don't." Can I get a crystal ball like yours from amazon?
>no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
What threat?
>Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech,
Free speech should trump the rule of law. When it doesn't you end up with tyranny.
I have no idea why and this piecemeal information leak looks bad
You’re just going to wind up like Facebook where their content moderation completely missed the fanning of genocide in Myanmar and that actual outcome, all the “immediate threats” not just one person getting doxxed
Rule of law? I have no clue what distinction you’re making, as it is neither a legal free speech or rule of law issue. Leave the communication to the lawyers?
Will you also ban violent threats from the left to Andy Ngo? He has been thoroughly documenting it. And published a NYT bestseller “Unmasked”, a written account of how violence from the extreme left is being ignored.
I’d like to see equal treatment, that’s the least worst option.
I want extreme objectivity at the highest level.
Edit: I’m questioning OBJECTIVITY and Andy Ngo is just a fucking example. Find some hypothetical antifa forum, the point is about standards.
Yea they’re scattered around. Just hypothetically, I want promise that at the very least we are not in a ideological hell hole.
The details of this is irrelevant IMO, let me repeat the argument I’m posing: Is there an objective standard that can be applied across the political spectrum?
We should be concerned that there is a political hijacking. That sits extremely unwell with me. We need to condemn all violence otherwise any actions by Cloudflare are just politics and frankly, terrifying.
> Arguing pure hypotheticals is rarely productive.
Posing hypotheticals is exactly how to test the limits of the system. It is a key component of the legislative and law making process. The entire field of law, millions of lawyers think about hypotheticals on a daily basis to analyze, write and interpret the law. Humans have evolved to have a dedicated frontal lobe whose job is to predict hypothetical scenarios and conduct cost/benefit/planning analysis. As a software engineer, I write hypothetical inputs to create unit tests so my system doesn't break. Thinking about hypotheticals is basically fundamental to all things in life and the universe.
Well, who should? Is anything with the authority going to or even inclined to in the slightest?
Cloudflare has maintained a lobbying/policy department since quite early on, but I'd argue that the post from the 31st wasn't so much that there _should_ be policy against this than that there simply isn't. Given the coming EU DSA or, hell, the comical farce that is/was Texas HB20, it seems clear that further government regulation of online speech is coming in some capacity. How is Cloudflare discussing these issues with lawmakers? Are they taking the approach that existing law and enforcement mechanisms are fully sufficient, or are they arguing that there is a common strain between KiwiFarms, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer that has demonstrated a known pathway between speech and violence that needs some sort of updated legal framework?
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Given kiwifarms most definitely remains up[1] (all your action did was let them be DDOSed for an hour or two) and this imminent dealy threat has not materialized, will you invite them back to your infrastructure? Or was this just an excuse and you were unhappy about the bad PR?
The issue is about "free speech" AND "due process" AND the "rule of law". In the US, the law is emphatic that the government shall not infringe upon the free speech of the individual except under very limited circumstances. People on HN insisting that these are private corporations doing private things are painfully naive "useful idiots" or shills for the government. Zuckerberg just admitted that the FBI and intelligence services applied pressure on Facebook to suppress information that would harm the campaign of the candidate who ended up winning the last presidential election. That is fact. The "requests" from government are ALWAYS going to be couched in the language of risk and helping law enforcement. And what would the consequences of a media company's refusal to comply be? What corporate executive wants to find out?
There is already US case law prohibiting this. At scale, governments prefer to act through "private" enterprise. Such enterprises are "state actors" suppressing speech. That is why government prefers monopoly capitalism. Who wouldn't rather have just one or a few partners to manage?
Of course this is a free speech issue, but it's much more. Cloudflare's volte face is super sus. Even if it's the case that no direct government agents were involved this time, the astroturfed pressure campaigns run by state sponsored NGO money are just the privatized surveillance and secret police state hard at work.
The deep issue is that US politicians and citizens are abandoning "rule of law" expectations in domestic politics. These free speech issues are the visible manifestation of a shift in the structure of power in US politics to an unapologetic administrative uni-party, accelerating in real time. Arguing the ludicrous details of this Kiwifarms blocking is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
So you are fine to bypass the laws on your own? How practical.
Kiwifarmers can call each other on the phone, stand on a soapbox in a park, print pamphlets and distribute them. They are still free to say whatever they want to whomever they want without fear of a Government throwing them in jail unless they break the law. Anonymous posts simply allow Kiwifarmers to say things they would likely never say to your face. Cloudflare simply chose to not allow their paid for service to support this behavior. Big deal.
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Do you not see how concerning (not to mention arrogant) it is when a corporation decides to act because it believes the law is inadequate. When individuals do this, we call it vigilantism.
Turns out there's no such thing as neutrality. Connecting content to the world is a choice your team approves or declines. You can complain about scalability of that decision all you want. Cloudflare is not neutral, and will never be. You're an active participant and you have to deal with your responsibility.
Is the phone company responsible for connecting content? How about your internet service provider? At what level does someone become responsible?
This is a question for the law, not for the mob. The internet, thanks to a completely fucked up legal regime (section 230), is currently very gray.
Facebook and Twitter, which are commonly used to facilitate large-scale violent riots and play host to far more doxxing and cyberbullying than kiwifarms could ever hope to, get a pass despite being the main facilitator of that communication. In contrast, infrastructure services like Cloudflare (and even AWS) have been subject to intense pressure to drop other sites where people say bad things.
Under this theory, we need to be taking Facebook and Twitter offline immediately. And maybe also the phone company too.
All levels of awareness have responsibility. While telcos and ISPs do have enforcement mechanisms when they are made aware, using Cloudflare's own suggested model, Cloudflare is closer to the content and therefore responsible earlier.
> All levels of awareness have responsibility. While telcos and ISPs do have enforcement mechanisms when they are made aware
I don't think that's right? Legally we've set things up so that no matter how despicable your site is, your telco or ISP can't decide on their own shut you off. They're regulated as infrastructure, and are required to keep doing business with you. They'll shut you off if they receive a court order, but not on their own judgement.
Telcos and ISPs are forbidden from taking you offline for speech. The process is about whether you have done something illegal that goes beyond speech (for example, accessing pirated material or child pornography).
Well, the phone company can't legally listen in on your private conversations.
In contrast, nothing prevents Cloudflare from looking at a company's public-facing website (ie as an unprivileged visitor just going to the domain) and deciding whether or not one wants to do business with that company.
Your decision today. You took ownership before for the arbitrary decisions to remove DS and 8Chan, take ownership now and do not try to backpedal. You are Cloudflare's leader.
>That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
You failed to take ownership of this issue either way. Your response suggests you can't understand the responsibility that you continue to have and are trying to shirk it. My suggestion is, find someone who is willing to be compensated to have this responsibility if it burdens you so. That's part of a leader's job.
My guess is that the people who pressured CF to take down kiwifarms knew about this, and knew that they had bowed to public pressure before and removed sites.
There was a lot of compromising and embarrassing information on KF about the activist who started this campaign (a streamer called Keffals). It looks like the whole feud actually started when Keffals wanted to take down this site to remove the embarrassing information, solicit donations, and gain some activist street cred. Users of KF did not respond well to the initial calls to take it down, and things escalated from there.
>My guess is that the people who pressured CF to take down kiwifarms knew about this, and knew that they had bowed to public pressure before and removed sites.
It doesn't really change the situation. CF isn't a public utility, there are no sorts of 'due process' that they need to follow on cases like this, especially in extraordinary circumstances. Advertisers pull campaigns all the time due to public perception changing.
My critique isn't on Mr. Prince deciding to keep KF up or not, it's specifically on his trying to walk away from the responsibility of making a choice either way. If he does not like the unwanted attention received from having to make these difficult choices nobody is forcing him to be in that position where he's expected to.
Similarly, if KF's owner doesn't want to get banned from using companies services they can work on their moderation and public perception.
I agree with you, and I think that refusing to establish a firm line is what opened them up to this campaign.
If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
> I agree with you, and I think that refusing to establish a firm line is what opened them up to this campaign.
Additionally Mr. Prince had options at his disposal after the first time this happened. Cloudflare's a large valuable company. He could have retained a 'Director of Enforcement' after that event and told the world "their word is final on enforcement actions, I am removing myself from the moderation pipeline to focus on growing the business". Then if one of their decisions backfired, dismiss them. There's plenty of talented people willing to accept a large compensation package for that risk.
>If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
Probably also something to consider: this is a public company. The latter option is maybe not tenable for a large public corporation subject to the whims of shareholders. By that I mean times and beliefs change over time and a public company has to adjust to that in order to continue to attract investors. Private companies can work with whomever they feel and if it's their niche to work with 'high risk' clients, nobody is stopping them.
I can't even view the US Constitution [1] when my IP is on DigitalOcean (most of the time). Kiwifarms was perfectly accessible from the same connection last night. It's ironic talking about 'due process' when I can't even browse the highest law in the land due to this company.
They seemingly can if they just stop posting every waking moment of their life on the internet so it can be scooped up and analyzed by kiwifarm trolls.
Why should an individual doing nothing wrong HAVE to change their own behavior simply to stop being harassed? That’s not a solution, that’s going into hiding.
Also, considering people doxxed her address and kept showing up / swatting her, I doubt that would even be a short term solution at all, other than emboldening the harassers.
They positioned themselves as a low level internet infra provider, they are not technically "giving platform". The closest thing they are doing to giving them a platform is protecting them from DDoS.
Watching company employees consistently pop up on critical threads (not fingering CF here, many including at least Stripe come to mind as frequently occurring too) feels a lot like gaming the forum. Vetted messages like this from a recognizable source will often end up pinned to the top of the thread, but I don't really think they overly contribute to the conversation in most cases, and I find myself wishing there was some rule against it.
Not to say there shouldn't be a place for official responses, just that it's kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
(The counterargument would be that the status quo provides unparalleled public access to top-level staff, I'll leave that angle for someone else to explore ;)
I don't have any huge problem with eastdakota's comment here, and I think I agree with Cloudflare's action (I listened to a Behind the Bastards podcast recently that covered an individual who was bullied until they committed suicide by kiwifarms, so I understand the stakes) but - there is nothing in their comment that presents "actual information"; it does not present any facts; it just presents the perspective that their legal team would like all of us to take on their action. dmw_ng's criticism is entirely fair.
Companies in this position are damned if they do, damned if they don't. I for one at least appreciate thoughtful, substantive responses from company leadership in company-specific threads, and I'm happy that at least on HN we are more likely to be given a real, substantive response than the corporate drivel that is shoveled to most other media outlets.
> ...kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress
People must be allowed to change their minds without being stigmatized or judged for it.
> ...displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
Well, why should one look for additional (potentially irrelevant) context [0] when there's debate that could be had on its resolution? I mean, it is a struggle to get everyone to agree even when they are on the same page [1].
Do you have any evidence to support your claims that Cloudflare donated money to Westboro Baptist Church? Unless you have good evidence, your claims are slander.
> Vigilantism isn't a great thing, but what choice do we have when authorities allow hate sites like Kiwifarms to stay online? After all, as Yonatan Zunger famously wrote, tolerance is not a moral precept.
In conclusion, vigilantism is fine if done against someone you dont like... cool
Whom I personally like is irrelevant. We're talking about public safety here. We opened a Pandora's box of hate and violence when we created the internet. The state, which is ordinarily charged with protecting the public from danger, has failed to respond to the threat, justifying its inaction with references to 18th century texts written before the steam engine became practical. If the state refuses to act, we as technologists must. For the good of society, we have to cut off access to hate --- not only at the DDOS prevention level, but at the browser, the network, and even operating system level. To stand by and do nothing while violent speech floods our communication channels is to be complicit in this speech.
For example: why is the Tor project facilitating the spread of hate by keeping Kiwifarms accessible? The Tor project's mission of preserving user privacy does not include facilitating access to harassment material.
I can't tell if your posts are parodies or not. This "cut[ting] off access to hate" through the entire technology stack would just function to limit people's free access to inconvenient information. Think of the Russian state. It may decide that any expression of Ukrainian identity is inherently hateful, and censor it using this system. Do we want to bring such a thing to the West? When the truth is deemed hateful and violent, such a system will be used to uphold an empire of lies. And I'm sure there will be a "backdoor" for regime-approved hate targeting its foes to slip right through ;)
>We opened a Pandora's box of hate and violence when we created the internet
With the advent of the internet, people's ability to easily communicate with each other was drastically increased. We opened up the ability for us to collaboratively see beyond the official narratives handed down through the media, government spokesmen, and educational institutions. Such a thing is of course abominable to those who desire centralized control over the demos, truth be damned, but I am grateful for it. Technologists should instead oppose anything like what you describe, and build technologies that thwart the efforts of those who wish to limit our ability to communicate with each other.
Not tolerating asocial behavior is not vigilantism. Me not accepting your calls for violence is not a violent act in itself. To think otherwise is near suicidal.
>Why do browser makers like Mozilla not put Kiwifarms and other hate sites on their "safe browsing" denylists when these sites are obviously unsafe for marginalized people?
Those lists are for malware. Not for site content. You have grossly misunderstood the function of those lists.
That is fine until your side ends up on the unsafe list.
Maybe you think if there is a place that is too critical to these marginalized groups that is unsafe and should be blocked. Ok, but then what happens when somebody who doesn't agree with you gets into the a position of power? They could easily say if you support trans then you are indoctrinating kids and that is unsafe and block all LGBT websites.
You are advocating for an arms race. Are you sure you can win?
> We as principal technologists must call on software makers around the world to adopt an "ethical source" approach to their products and build protections against hate into every layer of the stack. Bigotry is odious, and the price of freedom, as it's said, is eternal vigilance.
Kiwifarms, Gab (Still uses Cloudflare), 4chan, 8kun and the rest of them are still alive even after this. It's not Cloudflare's problem anymore, it is now the internet's problem.
So are you going to write a letter to ICANN just like the Ukrainian Government did to get them to take down all .ru or all possible 'hate' domains and TLDs? I bet you won't and even if you did ICANN won't do anything.
This just made them more uncensorable and now they can't be monitored easily and they are all still alive. This doesn't solve the doxing issues, therefore nothing has changed.
While I agree with you that the content on kiwifarms is not covered by free speech, you should not play law enforcement and wait for a court order instead.
> Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech
That's a clever way of spinning the issue. But no amount of spinning can change the fact that you are clearly using doublespeak. Contrary to what you say in the post, this clearly isn't in the spirit of the policy you had promised [1], or even had advertised just a few days ago. [2]
You are mostly just giving in to pressure. I can't blame you for that, given that I have to use a pseudonym here myself.
Otherwise, if this was just a matter of different principles, you would also kick out media websites who regularly dox people, or publish dumps of hacked websites, etc.
Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it.
The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.
The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
>Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.
How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.
There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?
Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.
Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:
You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”
Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.
After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.
You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.
If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.
But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.
>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
You should, as a general rule, never take a charitable view of the actions of businesses. If you start with the most machiavellian interpretation possible you will be more right than wrong. Not that you will be always right, but absent special information it is the presumptive default.
I was actually monitoring the Keffals threads to laugh at the salt on display. It was hilarious at times, then you'd run into stuff like people determining what restaurants she was likely to be at so they could detonate a bomb and kill her. It's such a brazen display that, even if it was a joke, I don't think the first amendment would be an acceptable defense if your door got busted down over it.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.
Isn't "swatting" just the practice of calling 911 and saying e.g. "I'm at [streamer's neighbour's address] and there were gunshots fired at my neighbour's house! Please send armed police!"?
I don't think there's a simple way to stop swatting, though if a streamer/someone else who is a likely swatting target phones ahead of time and asks to be put on a "likely to get swatted, please disregard suspicious calls" list then the police should honour that list (AFAIK there is something like this but it often doesn't help).
To be clear, nothing I say is any sort of endorsement of Kiwifarms. Cloudflare is a business so it’s Machiavellian. Kiwifarms is… I don’t even know what Kiwifarms is. Something worse.
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.
> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
That's exactly a problem with theses sites; they are horrible and yet can slowly recruit people because companies still provide them with services that allow them to stay public.
Such groups can splinter endlessly into unidentifiable new subgroups. How do you stop those? What is your imagined end-game here — making freedom of association default-deny?
> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
Maybe link some of her tweets? I see this point being made repeatedly as essentially an argument of faith, but in fact Keffals simply does not engage in the kind of targetted harrassment that KiwiFarms does. There is, I think, exactly one tweet someone found where she said "I hope they get doxxed" or whatever.
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
> But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes.
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
> One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
You know... I was typing up a reply to this, but I don't think we're gonna agree.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
> And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
>> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
Proving the negative is impossible. The internet is too vast. Proving that it exists is effectively impossible, because there's always bar-moving on
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
> Proving that it exists is effectively impossible
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
>I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.
Having never read Kiwifarms I don't know whether the threats are real or not.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I don’t know where posts are coming from when I see them online. We can only guess at the specifics (which will hopefully be released when there’s time for an after-action report) but presumably cloudflare may be able to see ip addresses and have some idea of location. If someone posts “I’m coming to kill you” a dozen times but the ip is in Europe and doesn’t appear to be a VPN then that’s less cause for concern than the same posts made by someone with a residential ISP ip that’s half an hour away from the target.
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
When the topic under discussion are the contents of a publicly available website, unless you think that Cloudflare has some kind of tooling scanning for specific terms on the CDN origin (why?), no, I am pretty confident in saying they do not have any additional information. This is not some arcane matter of network management, this is the public contents of a public website that anyone can verify.
>Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
Interesting how that screenshot on Keffals' Twitter feed crops out the number of downvotes that post would have received, as well as the replies from other posters calling that poster a fed and a glowie.
Yeah, it's a meme as old as the forums themselves. It's hilarious that this one post that everyone immediately saw through was the one that made Cloudflare react.
The post you are responding to is insinuating that if a group is willing to commit one crime (DDOS) they may be willing to do another crime / questionable act like make a bomb threat post to frame KF.
Am I missing something? The linked source contradicts that comment. The source only links one post by one user - a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading - and it was removed.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
Just say that you want Kiwifarms deleted from the internet. There is nothing tenuous or uncertain about that stance, if you own it openly. Hiding behind concern over a false and un-serious threat is a coward's strategy.
I honestly know nothing about the site, somehow before today I've missed the place existed. I can see in past history HN history it's been quite a contentious site.
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
I know nothing here, but it sounds from other posts like it is being moderated very aggressively, and posts like these survive for mere minutes.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.
No, I do think Kiwifarms should have been prosecuted and unhosted, for failing to curtail frequent mass harassment threads against ordinary and mentally ill individuals, which led to real-world harm. I'm just not going to defend deplatforming by quoting downvoted and deleted jests from a few users who could also be anti-KF astroturfers.
Just adding some light to the escalations; there were bomb and shoot threats over the last few days.
The userbase on the site upped the tone of their "jokes"/threats after the last blog post and thats what caused the final suspension.
I don't know what happened prior to today, but earlier today there was a bomb threat which was apparently removed by the site's moderators within minutes, but it hit Twitter anyway. The fact that this isn't mentioned anywhere by the people currently leading the "campaign" already proves there's an agenda.
People have always posted (usually fake) threats in kiwifarms threads. They have always been removed promptly. The same is true of basically every large website on the internet. When cloudflare made their post saying they wouldn't remove kiwifarms, the site already had that reputation.
There are "bomb and shoot threats over the last few days" on FB, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, CoD/CS lobbies etc everyday. Like Kiwifarms the content is removed when reported. What is the issue?
There absolutely were not, and this is a gross exaggeration. One user made a clearly satirical comment about posting IRA soldiers with bombs at every cafe in the Ulster area. This was screenshotted by Keffals and posted to Twitter as a serious threat. Everyone else posting in the thread understand it was an extremely dumb joke. The post was removed by the KF owner within minutes. If that is why the site went down, I’ll be amazed and disappointed.
I think the point is that this isn't even KF's first go at the bomb threat thing. They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides... and CF was always OK with. Always.
Until now.
When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.
Until now.
I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].
One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.
Ok, the investigative journalist's thread shows literally no proof or even evidence that kiwi farms was involved in the swatting, and the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one. Neither of the other two links said anything about swatting.
I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.
Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.
And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?
No, her personal statement isn't enough, how could she know who did it? I'm sure in the heat of the moment someone going thru something like that would make assumptions and galvanize their position somewhat, it's completely understandable, but it's hardly evidence. Also the article doesn't say anything about the timeframe between her dox being posted and the incident.
The admin explicitly saying for people to stop "encouraging SWAT pranks" when speaking apparently(?) about two other elements is a bit closer but still quite weak, its an open forum from what I gathered so far surely there would be archives or some screenshot or something for said "pranks" towards the streamer being discussed right? especially if there is mention of him actually having to deal with the FBI in previous times.
I didn't overlook the tweets, I just couldn't find a single mention of swatting there.
Yes, the evidence for a causal link in swatting is weaker, but evidence exists: discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
>discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
what is this proximal link? and if that link is something like 3 days or a week or something, on an open forum, i'm not sure it's that relevant, literally anyone can watch the website without participating for what I understand.
>And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
I saw the bedsheet investigation, but what harrassment did they engage in? the situation where the orders happenned was in a second hotel, and after a big of digging it wasn't even kiwifarms that got the dox on that one, it was Vile on doxbin[0], and he also admitted to being the one making the orders.
> There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
what is the evidence for this unlawful harassment, and what is the moderate evidence for the swatting? if all you have is what was posted above for the swatting then we'll agree to disagree, which is fine, what is however the plenty of evidence for the former? And no, that twitter thread really doesn't cut it afaic.
> I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
Well, here's the thing, I know little about kiwifarms in particular and everyone is saying that there is extensive evidence of other crimes, articles are being written saying that they were the one responsible for swatting people and a thousand other things, and the citation/source rabbit hole just leads to a dead end, or ends up circular, so yes i'm going to have my doubts and at least want to see some of this extensive documented harassment trove, archiving things on the internet is but a couple clicks away.
I'll leave the thread for today for it is getting too late, have a good one.
- Moderators on KF felt the need to address the topic of swatting.
- People dox'd on KF were definitely swatted-- the missing evidence is to what degree the actual swatting was coordinated on KF. It's relatively indisputable that KF was in the causal chain.
- Harassment occurred, coordinated on KF to someone immediately after relocating from a swatting.
What about to people like me, who have only ever heard of kiwi farms in passing, who don't really know anything substantial about any of this stuff and want to know more? Is it obvious to us? I'd like to see what everyone's talking about when they talk about this site, and if they're right, without actually going there. Can you help me out with that?
A hypothetical court. I was just using it as an example of how the argument wouldn't hold muster in situations where it would really need to.
> What lack of evidence?
You posted this:
> No one is answering you because it's obvious to even the most intermediate observer where this work is coming from.
Again, "well, it's just obvious, dude" is not evidence. It's similar to a "god of the gaps" argument. If there's evidence Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms did it, and if there's not evidence that Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms still did it. That makes no sense.
>They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides
all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).
the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.
remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
Oh shit maybe we're all wrong then! Can I ask, then, what is the purpose of the site, if it's not to co-ordinate the harrassment of individuals by sharing their personal information?
Ok have fun doing whatever it is you do that isn’t doxing on your forum when it’s back online (after the doxing and the threats took it offline) I guess.
I dont have an account there... My HN is also not some driveby throwaway. You are putting words in my mouth now because you are out of arguments. This is a discussion forum.
The purpose is to document the bizarre (and oftentimes outright creepy and/or illegal) behavior of the terminally online. You know, stuff like helping your friend sell his bathtub brewed hormones to minors without their parents finding out. Or running a Discord server called Catboy Ranch that has several minors on it, and you send them personalized collars that declare them your property. Just ordinary, innocent stuff that is no one else's business, clearly.
What are you talking about exactly? As far as I've been able to find, they don't even have a history of harassment, let alone something illegal, not as a forum/community. As we saw with this "threat" here.. it was reported and deleted as soon as the mods saw it and the user perma banned.. Just like every other attempt by a "member" to post something illegal or interact with someone off site.
these were obviously (stupidly poor taste) jokes, and they were removed as soon as the site admin was made aware. death threats are against the rules of the site. what exactly makes this so urgent that KF has to be blasted off the internet?
100% they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. First you pretend you care about free speech for a week and gesticulate in public. Then you come up with some extraordinary circumstance so it doesn’t seem like it’s the new normal.
After hearing about the drama and reading kf's pov, I can definitely understand why the people ddosing kf want it down. The stuff they do is illegal and absolutely vile but overlooked by the people in power because it suits their politics. It scares me as a prospective parent.
This happens because a lot of times trans people find themselves in the position where they realize they are trans but can’t do anything about it because they were born in a country that doesn’t offer the qualified help to them (at all or in timely fashion). Sometimes it has to do with their parents refusing to hear what’s on their mind. That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously. The thin line where this kind of behavior might turn into something less innocent might not be immediately obvious, especially when phrased in a way that is supposed to elicit emotional response.
"Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to DO NOTHING, THAN TO RISK CAUSING MORE HARM THAN GOOD." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit."
You seem to be of opinion that this is a simple situation with clear cut options one of which is always safe while the other can bring harm. That is not the case, as usual with problems that cause so much discussion on the internet. If the trans person is not able to get necessary treatment (which is well documented by medical professionals) it’s very likely they will experience depression and they may even suffer harm as a result. How can you evaluate that doing nothing in this situation may indeed bring less harm than another option? That is usually a decision that needs to be made by a medical professional, but what if that’s not possible? What if the doctors aren’t trained to deal with situations like this and would still bring harm by their choices?
You have trouble believing that trans people, whose problems are ignored by most population, choose to help people experiencing the same problem, that they know may lead to suicide if untreated, when nobody else does? How is it surprising? The only proper solution to this problem is to give all trans people equal and quick access to properly trained medical professionals who can treat them correct way, and that’s not happening.
Belief has nothing to do with it, gender dysphoria is an established medical diagnosis. The question is: why are these transgender people recommending and selling drugs to children? Do you seriously think this is okay?
Here's the published criteria for such a recommendation:
> Mental or medical underlying issues are in control
The gender dysphoria must be persistent. How is it possible to determine that without long term observation? The patient needs to consent after being informed of and understanding the risks. Can a child understand and consent to this?
It's absolutely insane that people think it's okay to just ignore all this and sell hormones to children. This is not help, this is drug dealing. Whoever is doing this is exposing children to significant risks.
Hormones are not specifically targeted to young people, and all the trans dyi resources I’ve seen have a ton of disclaimers and aren’t exactly easy to find and use. It is a last option for people who have no other choice, and it is regarded as such in community. To go this route you need to do actual math, do the blood work and read about this a lot. Do I think it should be available for children? In a perfect world - no, as children have access to medical professionals and puberty blockers. In this one, where an opinion of 17.999 year old may be completely discarded by parents who are 100% sure they know their child better then the child themselves? Where people can be told their appointment is in two years? Where the doctor can be a bigot and discard valid concerns? And not having this option at all may lead to many suicides? Yeah, I think this option may be justified. How many years would you consider to be permanent enough for you? Are you claiming that all parents are correct all the time?
That is absolutely insane. I don't care what the gender politics situation is. These hormones have significant risks associated with their use and are not things that can be sold to children.
You do know that there are plenty of faceless grey market hormone sellers that'll sell hormones to literally anyone who sends them cryptocurrency and maybe sometimes a bank transfer? "Trans activists" with large followings aren't the ones doing that.
Yes, that's illegal drug dealing. No way around that. However, that's not what was described to me in response to my original question.
What is this supposed to mean?
> That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously.
> trans people [...] choose to help people experiencing the same problem
Did I misinterpret this? Because it seriously sounds like there are trans people out there selling these "DIY trans" drugs. If they're knowingly selling to children in an attempt to help them as previously claimed, I'm sorry but that's extremely fucked up.
Some older studies from the 80s and 90s that are even higher (well into the 90%), but they may not be the best representation of the modern trans situation.
They didn't say that there was "dangerous escalation" in the past two weeks. They said that there was a pressure campaign over the last two weeks, and they also said that they didn't want to comply with this campaign.
They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?
Cloudflare didn't say that they contacted law enforcement in the last 48 hours; they said that they've been in contact with law enforcement for weeks and law enforcement hasn't acted (i.e. to give them a court order to shut the thing down.)
Maybe, but people shitposting about blowing up half a city just to annoy a streamer doesn't really sound like the kind of threat that would make a company do a 180 on their position..
Thank you for this comment. The only possible negative here is "Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online." Cloudflare supposedly being "concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency" is disingenuous at best.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense
How do you know?
And to be specific, the claim was "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
There is at least one CF customer who was doxxed by Kiwifarms after expressing displeasure with Cloudflare's initial decision. CF CEO (eastdakota) blocked this customer when he complained about it [1] So much for free speech + great customer service!
You got the name wrong. And the attack was against the GNAA "i'm a nazi" president and online shock-racist employed at Cloudflare at that time, nothing to do with their later death which is none of our business. It was also to remind that Weev claims there is a different GNAA-adjacent sympathizer employed at Cloudflare who is a personal ally to Stormfront.
Cochran is the person that both GossiTheDog and eastdakota were talking about. (I'm not sure about the Jaime vs Jamie spelling – my impression is "Jaime" is what she preferred at the time of her death, so I'm going to go with that – as to why eastdakota and the screen-shotted NBC News story spelled it "Jamie", I don't know – maybe just typos or autocorrect.)
My point was that the person I was replying to was either misinformed or disingenuous about eastdakota's reasons for blocking GossiTheDog. I don't see the relevance of the rest of what you are saying to my point.
I think if you used to work with someone, and now they are dead – being upset at people publicly attacking them, when they aren't around to defend themselves, is a very understandable human reaction. eastdakota's reaction here is very human.
They weren't attacked, Cf was attacked for employing them and their allies. Cf has a habit of financially supporting actual far-right activists such as Westboro Church, besides this. They are under watch.
> They weren't attacked, Cf was attacked for employing them
That sentence is illogical. Attacking X's employer for employing X is an attack on X – it is saying that X is unworthy of being employed
> Cf has a habit of financially supporting actual far-right activists such as Westboro Church
You make it sound like they donated money to WBC. From what I understand, at one point they accepted them as a paying customer. WBC is an atrocious organisation, but a business having them as a customer isn't "financial support" – do you apply the same standard to the many other businesses who undoubtedly have WBC and/or its leaders and members among their customers? Who is their cell carrier? What supermarket do they shop at? Which airline do they fly?
> KF started doxxing and threatening CF employees, as well as their other customers.
First I’ve heard, and I’ve followed this story closely. Do you have a source?
Sounds about as likely as KF SWATing a Republican Congresswoman and calling the police to say “it was us, Kiwi Farms” in the middle of this conflict over hosting, which is exactly what was claimed in that case.
>The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy.
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
> As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Cloudflare. Their core product is security done the wrong way. They have the potential to do evil things at an enormous scale with little to no recourse.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I haven't seen any evidence that they are significantly more dangerous than Facebook or Twitter. The "human lives in danger" is transparent bullshit. They are actually doing this due to a pressure campaign being carried out by a small number of activists looking to drive any speech they don't like out of existence. Thankfully it hasn't completely worked yet and they are still able to respond in their own defense, so we have something other than the unchallenged claims of Cloudfare etc to determine whether they've actually done something wrong.
I think Cloudflare did think it was a dangerous site, but they would really prefer not having the responsibility of being the arbiter of what can and cannot be hosted, as well as all of the negative publicity that comes with being so. At the same time, I believe they believe that current legal process surrounding how things like this are handles are so woefully underdeveloped that turning a blind eye is not being neutral, it's being irresponsible.
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
> Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold.
If CF is going to police the internet then they had better do it fairly and justly. I do not believe CF is equip to do that, and neither does Prince. That is the issue here as evidenced by the parent and GP being unclear on the rules. It’s very hard not to see this decision to terminate KF as a corporate knee jerk.
A person, claiming to be a moderator on Kiwifarms, swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene (but unfortunately misspelled it as "Kiwifarm" in the note claiming responsibility). I have no doubt that this person did it with the express intent of getting Cloudfare to withdraw their services. Up until then Marjorie Taylor Greene had been quite popular on Kiwifarms.
Correction: someone who claimed to be associated with KF swatted a member of Congress. The username mentioned (which I will not quote here) denied all responsibility on the site. Surely we're not taking artificially voiced 911 calls from VoIP numbers at face value here are we?
Cloudfare really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. Their Wednesday post was fantastic, and for once I had an ounce of hope they’d do the right thing.
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
I don’t think companies just get to decide to be a utility company anyway. It is clearly a play to disregard responsibility. If governments started treating them like a utility and started requiring things like free services to people who don’t make a certain amount of money or price caps you bet your ass they would fight it tooth and nail.
> They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday
How so?
On Wednesday they said they will block content "that ... incites ... violence against people".
Then now they're saying "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
I think a lot of people in the comments don't understand what Kiwifarms is.
I say this as someone who occasionally browses there and gets some (admittedly sick) enjoyment from it: the main draw of the website is a place for people to get together and bully mentally ill "weirdos".
It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too.
While I'll personally miss watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout, this is a wise and fair decision by Cloudflare, and there's a good chance they may have saved Keffals' life.
What specifically makes their victims 'weirdos' and why do you feel the need to comment that you get off to 'watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout'
That's exactly what you are doing right now.
They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
And gay children...
What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
The site was set up to target Chris Chan in particular, but later shifted to "lolcows" in general - ie people that continue to give the bullies the bizarre reactions that they're looking for. They don't exclusively target trans people, nor do they even go to trans spaces looking for people to insult. After all, the average trans person would just block them and move on with their life and that makes for a boring thread.
>why do you feel the need to comment that you get off to 'watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout'
Because I'm on HN, and it's more important here to show that you know what you're talking about rather than show that you're a good, law-abiding citizen. If you seriously can't understand why people enjoy looking at trainwrecks, you need to speak to more people.
>They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
I don't know the Lizzy Waite saga, but Clara Sorrenti specifically had that whole Catboy Ranch thing going on, plus the constant drama with other streamers and just a general behavioural pattern of always feeding the trolls.
>What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
Yep, that shouldn't have happened. (But then again, neither should anything else on this site...)
> nor do they even go to trans spaces looking for people to insult. After all, the average trans person would just block them and move on with their life and that makes for a boring thread.
for what it's worth I have friends that have been harassed via this site and this is not the case. they don't stop if you block them. they keep finding ways around it and they make your life hell.
One of the more chilling is that after chasing someone out of their own home and into hiding, they tracked them down and someone posted a photo standing outside of their hotel.
Not so much reddit a AMA verification, more like a hostage situation.
As someone who got exposed to 4chan far too early in life, I think I can answer the first bit. Ever heard of Hoarders? My 600lb Life? It's the same reason people watch that garbage.
Being gay isn't a mental illness, and it isn't the same thing as reality TV. The LGBT community is, at present, an easy target. There are also a large number of LGBT people who struggle with mental illness (shocking in a society where KiwiFarms exists, I know), and mentally ill people are also easy targets.
I've never even heard of Kiwifarms until now. Judging by your comment I can see why. Sadly, I think this will be a "Streisand effect" moment and will likely draw more attention to this site.
The admin already admitted that he would make a torrent of the site while considering his giving up scenario - public pressure on providers to drop their service does make continued access and community harder and less organized
> there's a good chance they may have saved Keffals' life.
Last I looked kiwifarms was still available on the url listed on their wiki page (not to mention posts viewable via the internet archive). Does this mean Keffals is going to die? I'll bet £100 of mine to $1 of yours she isn't killed by anyone this with a kiwifarm association in the next year.
Also, you have a very poor understanding of the frequency of internet shitposting if you're taking a random bomb threat on the internet seriously, those things happen thousands of times a day qnd amount to nothing 99.9999% of the time.
I'm not familiar with kiwi farms besides hearing the noise about them periodically and second hand accounts of them doing this or that, but I'll be candid here, how I feel about it really depends on what they mean by "weirdos." If they're just harassing trans people or whatever I can understand the outrage. If they're exposing child predators on discord (I've heard this said in this thread, don't know if it's true or not) I wouldn't say I'm unsympathetic.
This is what you have? A clearly very angry man with a default judgment against a single anonymous someone on the internet threatening to have him involuntarily committed for life in retaliation for what exactly? A family photo posted online of someone counts as child abuse? Note that the author of your link didn't link to the thread. So "on record" is a bit of a stretch to say the least.
I've got to admit, it is a bit unsavory if it is true, and I think the author is probably not making it up, but it's not quite as scary as it's being made out to be IMO, and I've still seen no actual proof of the accusation, whether I believe it or not is irrelevant.
What's happened here is that they (and you'll see this has happened across a lot of the extreme right in America) have started to label trans people as "pedo" or "groomers", in an effort to make it seem like trans people are really child predators, which makes many people more tolerant of their attacks and more sympathetic of anti-trans policies such as bathroom bills.
So, can you show me any instances where a trans person was accused of being a child molestor by kiwifarms when they were not, or any attack on a trans person that has occurred as a result of this? I don't think requesting such information is unreasonable, you're asking me to form a hateful opinion of a group of people, which I'm completely OK with doing if I actually see actions that give me good reason to hate them.
I searched the page for the words "kiwifarms", "kiwi farms" and "kiwi" and got no results. It appears your response has nothing to do with my question. I didn't ask if it were used by people against gay people, I asked if there were instances of kiwi farms calling a trans person a child molestor who was not one, and/or if a trans person had been harmed physically as a result of a false accusation by them of this kind.
Funny, because if I can then all the people levying accusations can, but refuse to.
I've googled it, and I can't seem to. I can find more accusations on google, but not any actual evidence of it. I'm not saying it's not true, I just want to see it. If you're asking me to hate a group of people because they're awful, you should at least be able to show me they're awful.
> It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too.
During the Black Lives Matter riots, we had a full summer of looting, destruction, violence and riots. The BLM ideas also "spread out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too". And they resulted in violence in a scale much, much larger than Kiwifarms.
Should DDoS-protecting companies have banned the BLM websites?
Clearly you don't understand the difference to "people responding to a serious and systematic injustice" and "people trying to harass others until they commit suicide."
Consider developing some sort of moral or ethical sense.
Oh, and there is no official "Black Lives Matter" site. Someone registered one after the fact, but they have no official standing or really do much of anything.
Looting and burning down the family owned corner store was an amazing moment of restorative justice. We need to fight back against the 'systematic injustice' that uninsured small businesses have wrought onto marginalised communities. If you don't support looting, murder and arson then you lack a moral compass.
Your example makes no sense, BLM does not directly or indirectly endorse nor is affiliated with groups that endorse rioting in fact you had people in BLM telling people not to riot.
Kiwifarms on the other hand do indirectly endorse harassment, swatting and doxxing.
In fact you do have people on that forum working day and night to dox people of interest.
A much better example would be: Reddit, with it indirectly supporting radical left wing causes, because they haven't been as active banning those hateful communities.
Cloudflare bans websites for unproven claims but is perfectly happy to provide protection for ddos-for-hire websites that so happen to help their bottom line by generating a reason for people to use DDOS protection for which Cloudflare is one of very few options that does not have a fixed limit.
Cloudflare has to be in bed with the US government, otherwise it would have been shutdown for ignoring illegal activity (ddos-for-hire) that's been reported to them (aka ignoring complaints is meant to remove your S.230 protection).
CF could have said to KF "For various reasons we no longer wish to do business with you. In 24 hours we will stop redirecting to your servers. Please make appropriate arrangements." Had they done this, they would not have actually been censoring KF. They would also have been behaving like a responsible service provider by not cutting off service without notice.
Instead, they seem to have made the decision to do this in a way where they actually block access to KF, rather than in a way where they simply chose to stop doing business with KF. I could be wrong about this; maybe substantial notice was given, and CF reasonably believed that KF could have avoided service disruption. But given that they wrote a bunch of copy to go with this decision, including the copy for the redirect page, I'm inclined to think that this went off exactly as CF intended. They didn't give notice and attempt to prevent their customer from having service disruption because they wanted them to have service disruption, and they wanted everyone to know they wanted this.
CF should not do this. I don't care who KF is or what they've done. CF should either do right by their customers, or stop doing business with them in a responsible way. Not in a way designed to injure their customers. Especially after taking their money, but that's hardly the point.
Cloudflare: "... we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site."
No, Cloudflare isn't obligated to continue to provide services to support "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life". Perhaps if KiwiFarms had better moderated their content and discouraged such behavior this could have been avoided.
The bomb threat was removed in less than 15 minutes and the user was banned in less than 30 minutes and threats are discouraged both by the website and by other users which could be seen by the amount of downvote reactions to the threat before it was removed.
My point is not that they had an obligation to continue to have a business relationship with KF, but that if they chose to terminate the relationship, they had an obligation to do so in a responsible way.
> Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
In other words, they had plenty of time to give KF notice and terminate the relationship. This didn't even have to stop them from contacting law enforcement. But they did something else instead.
> We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign.
Given their principled stand just two days ago, this sounds like a pretty weak "haha we totally don't cave to pressure, it's just coincidence, so don't think pressure campaigns work on us!"
Has Cloudflare proactively blocked any websites without a pressure campaign?
"Cloudflare has been made aware that your site is in violation of our published Terms of Service. Pursuant to our published policy, Cloudflare will terminate service to your website. Cloudflare will terminate your service for switter{.}at by disabling our authoritative DNS."
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem.
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
That's not what happened here. They made an appropriate decision.
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
To be even clearer, in this case it’s not even really quite clear that this was legal content at all! Coordinated stalking of people!
Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy!
And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
Because we’re a U.S.-based company subject to SESTA and the one site in question we took down affirmatively told us they were violating SESTA. SESTA is a very bad law. But, if you’re violating it, don’t wave that fact in the face of your infrastructure providers who are liable under the law for providing service to you. We continue to work to overturn or repeal SESTA.
We never told you we were violating SESTA. We never waved it in your face. You could have given us some warning, but you didn't.
Until you show evidence on your work to overturn/repeal SESTA, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many other sites that are clearly violating SESTA, so obviously you don't think it's that big of a liability as you claim to be.
Not to mention your Head of Sales reached out to us offering Cloudflare services a year after kicking Switter off when we mentioned we were dealing with DDOS attacks as an escort directory.
I do understand that Cloudlfare can't just violate SESTA/FOSTA.
That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.
This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.
But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.
And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.
I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
Cloudflare will ignore reports of DDOS-for-Hire websites that are illegal almost everywhere in the world, including the US. So, you see yourself as free to ignore laws when you feel like it?
I was thinking “if I was your lawyer” and didn’t type it. Then hit enter and saw my message, and edited it. The problems of getting in flamewars while making breakfast!
I would recommend to anyone to follow the advice of their lawyers regarding posting to hacker news! But it’s mainly a joke
EDIT: and to the original post, I was being way too glib. I do kinda believe what I say but there are less agressive ways of saying it. Again, breakfast posting, but legitimately touchy subject for obvious reasons and I should keep my cool.
> to be under oath and claim nobody at your company was like “maybe this site is coordinating illegal activity” and you said “nah” and continued to provide services for them?
I think Cloudflare did the right thing. But I'd fight for a CEO's right to make calls about user-generated content without worrying about liability because someone suspected something.
I suppose the contention here is that at one point you’re looking at a website, are told its modus operandi, see a lot of the content it hosts… and at one point 230 starts being less relevant.
Like if you have multiple incidents with the same site at one point you need to actually acknowledge that these incidents are here! You might still declare “it’s ok though” but honestly that arguments way easier with something like Reddit compared to something “single-use” like KF.
Obviously not a lawyer, but it feels possible to argue this in a securities fraud case
Is that a rhetorical question or a sincere one? Legal liability. American law has lots of direct liability for Cloudflare under SESTA/FOSTA for being involved in sex work websites. There's not equivalent liability for hate websites.
It is rhetorical. CF admits that they have contacted law enforcement several times about contact in kiwi farm. They clearly get the hosting of the “problematic” content. They understand how that site is used. That seems like an admission of guilt to me!
Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
As far as I'm aware, KF didn't come with the kind of direct liability under US law that sex work content does. I welcome the chance to learn that I'm wrong here!
This seems like the correct thing. They realise the content is dodgy.
Report to law enforcement repeatedly hoping that they look at it and give them a legal reason to shut them down.
If they shut things down as a private company, so long as the customer is not in breach of the service contract and the content is not illegal, couldn’t they mount a defence?
This sounds like a reasonable strategy. I don’t understand this need for private justice.
> And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
> It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
They can't directly remove your physical freedom but corporations especially when acting in unison can remove most of your economic freedom. If enough precedents are set where large service providers deny service to groups and individuals at the behest of the mob, eventually it will become politically and financially expedient for these providers to pre-emptively deny service to a whole basket of people.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.
It's not difficult to say, but it can be difficult to live at any meaningful scale. That invites endless pressure campaigns and similarly endless accusations of acting arbitrarily, capriciously, or with insert-bias-or-agenda-here. None of those are free to handle in any responsible or timely fashion. Never mind what happens should a genuine mistake be made.
It puts the company in the same position as Facebook in regards to moderation. It's endless, expensive, and your work is never good enough. Not a desirable position for most.
100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.
The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].
On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here).
There were no good choices because they didn't think through their ethics in advance -- even given their history with other sites like Daily Stormer... They decided they were "just" an economic entity, not a moral one. Unethical use of the services was something that tainted the buyer, but not the seller, and besides, should they really take on the obligation to think about such difficult non-technical things when that could be pawned off on lawyers or politicians or something?
The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.
I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.
This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.
>100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes)
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)
Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
Yeah regardless of your stance on KF, you have to support cloudflare as an independent business to decide who they want as a customer. KF has many other options to serve their site. It’s really their own fault for using a product like Cloudflare that can be easily coerced into dropping a client through a Twitter mob.
>Hate speech in the United States cannot be directly regulated by the government due to the fundamental right to freedom of speech protected by the Constitution. While "hate speech" is not a legal term in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.
There is no government involved here though. If Cloudflare has a hate speech company policy, then as a company they can choose who they serve.
Kiwifarms is free to get another company that aligns with their goals.
I'm having trouble understanding how 1) everyone thinks Cloudflare is the singular hole through which the internet flows and 2) how a private company does not have the freedom to do what they want.
If you don't like what Cloudflare is doing, then speak with your wallet and don't use them, there are numerous other providers of ddos protection
See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.
Which is how we end up here with a thread full of people morally outraged that a group decided to not tolerate hate speech, harassment, stalking, and driving people to suicide. I think you’re right that a majority doesn’t agree with the content but a majority certainly tolerates it.
The economy of Germany is a highly developed social market economy.[24] It has the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world, and fifth by GDP (PPP). In 2017, the country accounted for 28% of the euro area economy according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[25]
The EU has a similar population size, wide censorship laws for this kinda of conduct, and a similar economy size. China has a similar economy and much stricter speech laws. The US isn't economically special because of free speech
The lack of free speech laws means its impossible to accurately determine whether the reported figures are accurate, since the government can just censor what they don't like. So no, I (and I imagine most conservatives) don't accept that conclusion.
oh ok, well if were in the conspiracy zone then you just have to accept that actually they have a 1 million times greater economy, because no figures can be trusted.
Facetiousness aside, the censorship laws in the EU are around hate speech like flying Nazi symbology, not laws that let them silence people reporting economic numbers.
The problem isn't that nobody understands that free speech is not limitless, the problem is that literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech and how to enforce it; there is no perfect answer. Cloudflare was taking the position that it's not their job, and they're not alone as far as internet services go. There are, in fact, other hosts that do basically the same thing, see Nearlyfreespeech for example.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
> literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
Are you suggesting that large services like Cloudflare shouldn't exist, and instead there should be an ecosystem of DDoS-filtering reverse proxies? I do agree to that, though I think the problem remains that most of them do not want to be in the business of trying to decipher law and morality. So at the end of the day, the buck does stop somewhere.
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
I don't understand trying to hide behind an argument other than "my tribe is in power here so you submit to our rules". The post you linked falls apart with how you define various concepts (how you define the terms of peace, etc.). The argument is eventually settled (like nearly all of them these days) by who is in power. They'll define the terms of peace and in a way that paints their causes as good and their enemies as evil.
If this is how you view someone using their weight to protect people from literally being stalked, harassed, and driven to suicide for fun then gods help us all if that ever stops being the case and the next tribe decides that it’s fine.
This act is evil and morally wrong in all political reference frames. Anyone who’s arguing that it’s partisan or woke is focusing too hard on the victims, trans women, and not hard enough on the perpetrators.
This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.
> Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL gate acts is not free speech
“Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
I think it’s easier than that, hate speech just isn’t speech, it’s an act of violence that happens to use your mouth, pen, or keyboard — 1A as it’s currently interpreted is way too broad, the court seems to find other forms of violence, even those done for political expression, as not protected, but gives exception here for some naive “sticks and stones” argument.
It is in America, for the most part. You can absolutely organize to harass people if the harassment is in the form of verbal abuse, for instance. Cloudflare is saying that something happened in the last few days on KF that was a genuine "emergency". I don't think this is just an excuse, actually – Prince seems unusually committed to honesty about this sort of thing. I presume people were organizing specific violent acts on KF, which is not "free speech" even in America.
Your second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA, it’s the loser equivalent of saying “mine is 12 inches”. It’s not true, never happened, and nobody believed them.
> second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA
They said they called people to "plant bombs" where the woman was going and had posted "armed men...waiting" for her. That sounds an awful lot like "the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [1].
If hate speech is not free speech, then they who define what is hate speech, define what you can or cannot say.
If there's defamation, harassment, or incitement to violence, we should deal with that in an open court with juries of our peers, not in some dark board room.
That's easy. Are they calling for illegal actions against people?
That's a pretty easy litmus test.
As a colloary, it's akin to comparing "I don't like the president" vs "Let's go kill the president" (this is a comparison of allowed vs unallowed speech in the USA, not a call to).
Advocating voting against is 100% legal. Advocation of killing is 100% ILLEGAL.
Kiwifarms was doing the latter, up to and including actions threatening violence, "assisted" suicide, and murder.
Same, there’s no contradiction here. The same political group that is pressuring the companies that currently hold the real power to take down this hate is also pushing for a national hate speech law.
Where I’m sure the disagreement lies is whether or not you find it morally okay to protect the current victims by less than ideal means.
To be fair, there is the entire concept of cancel culture which basically is all about organizing to harass people and is basically supported by every large platform.
Hate speech is often about saying other people ought not be able to express their ideas and opinions, and that the most effective way to bring about this result is for them to not be not alive any more.
Eliminationist rhetoric is a subset of hate speech overall, but it certainly exists and is trivially easy to discover. It's odd to me that none of the self-professed 'free speech absolutists' ever seems to engage with this point.
Most eliminationist rhetoric is still protected in the States under current precedent. It advocates unlawful action but without "imminency". It could have been forbidden under the old "clear and present danger" standard.
Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.
All of this is irrelevant and besides the point, 'hate speech' is not a magical word you say when mean people on the internet say things you don't like.
If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
Hate speech always leads to further extremist behavior and death threats. Now, the US is very tolerant of hate speech in itself. The problem is haters are completely incapable of avoiding the next step wherein they call for the call for the deaths of those they hate. The very moment they do that I am perfectly fine with all of our existing laws on things like terroristic threats being wielded against those making the threats.
You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to repercussions, in specific when those actions are a call to harm.
> free speech as a philosophy is about allowing all speech, cause other it's just mostly free speech
Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
> Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
correct. most people don't hold a free speech philosophy. people just like taking a high moral ground they don't actually have.
> Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech
us govt can't prosecute death threats unless they can prove intent beyond you just saying it, they can't also arbitrarily prosecute for lying
> If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
if you said the same thing at a much lower volume, no one would care. the problem there is noise pollution, not the content of the speech said.
I see that policy works extremely well in cases like <https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885>. As long as you give all the information necessary for someone interested to interact in a harmful way, it's fine, but you have to frame it in a way that doesn't suggest harassment. Just speculate about all the locations they could possibly be having lunch, and trust that nobody will harass them.
Spreading rumors about them and interacting with friends, family, and known associates is fair game. Also posting their public contact information is also fair game.
I presume users on kiwifarms (KF) use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction techniques to publish private information elsewhere (such as private addresses) so that the information can then legally be reposted on KF. Coordination-of-information has an accomplice role in some of the illegal activities "reported" by KF.
I do think, if there was competent legal governance in this space, that's the conclusion they would have reached. I think you understand my larger point, regardless.
I think Cloudlfare’s choice to block them is fine and CF was probably fine allowing their use of the service before, given the damage to their reputation they apparently considered acceptable.
Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
>Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting.
Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.
If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
>If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law.
>However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting.
Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied.
>If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare
On the one hand, I would have supported Cloudflare in continuing to provide service to Kiwifarms as someone not employed there if that was their conviction.
On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
Not just immoral and reprehensible, the campaigns of targeted harassment they undertake limit the victims' speech. If you care about people being able to freely express themselves, today is a good day. I don't know why the free speech defenders miss this (I do know).
And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
That doesn't seem like something tech companies should be making judgements on. They are because the government is totally failing here. But if these sites are so dangerous that they need to be immediately shut down, the government should be giving a directive to do it.
Yes to all of the above. And I stand by my statement. All of those things can be true and I can still find the site reprehensible and wish to provide exactly 0 resources to assist them in way.
Let's not obscure things by calling it an issue of "hate speech." That is an impermissible broadening. As they said, "hard cases make bad law." The only way to mitigate the badness is to make the decision as narrow as possible.
It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
>It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here?
edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it.
the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right?
The big counter celebrating the number of people they've harassed into committing suicide? People have gone to jail for it. CF should be the least of their concerns right now.
This is such a bad faith comparison and in no way related. Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
> Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
Pretend for the sake of argument that Facebook did use Cloudflare, or that my example were about some other platform that does.
> A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Exactly my point. When someone does something banworthy on Facebook, we let Facebook ban just that one person, rather than banning all of Facebook.
I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service.
The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.
The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.
It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters.
The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists.
The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so.
Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
Is it censoring free speech when the goal of the speech is to actively harm people? I’m not sure of any nation that has no caveats to their idea of free speech
Is declining to participate by re-transmitting such speech even censorship? You can't force a company to take you as a customer, being a shit head isn't a protected class.
That's only a few providers and too expensive for anyone but someone using Google ads to fund their operations, because Cloudflare created that cost by its illegal actions.
Regardless of the behavior of the people at kiwifarms, I still find it odd that we have protected classes of people that are more equal than others. Everyone should receive the same rights.
Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Hate speech is outside of that scope, otherwise we wouldn’t have another term for that (all calls for violence could be hate speech, but not all hate speech is calls for violence)
Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
My interpretation of hate speech is that it attempts to "dehumanize" a category of people with malice.
Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.
Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.
I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
>While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk.
I wonder if their evaluation of the "escalating risk" had anything to do with the legal standard of imminent action is. Probably not.
Is it really though? If so, then more than half the rappers would of been locked up for this by now.
I suppose who ever put such a law in US court system is holding their breath for the guy who got on International TV / web streaming / a huge crowd of people in Ferguson (?) and said 'burn this bitch down' - burn this mutherfucker down.. [1]
I dunno, maybe he was arrested for this and it is a real thing, if so I missed the news about it.
Or maybe it's technically possible to have to go to court for such a thing, but maybe only a few ever have, and the outcome of such a thing is anyone's guess, even those really into speech law [2]
GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important.
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
> true threats and "incitement to imminent lawless action" are separate doctrines
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
> Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
>Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
Which websites are you referring to, in what numbers are you talking about, and how are you determining that those calls for violence are imminent? Wouldn't that suggest that a lot of violence has already occurred stemming from those websites? (presumably not stopped by a slow legal system like Cloudflare implies would have happened in this case)
There are plenty of laws that prohibit speech used that is a call for violence.
>Under Texas law, any threat of violence to either person or property can be the basis of a terroristic threat charge. However, that threat of violence must be accompanied with criminal intent to either follow through with the threat or terrify another into believing you may do so. There are six specific types of intent covered by Texas law, and the prosecutor only needs to prove you had one of them to obtain a conviction.
cause a reaction of any type to his threat by an official or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies;
place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, room, place of assembly, place to which the public has access, place of employment or occupation, aircraft, automobile, or other forms of conveyance, or other public places;
cause impairment or interruption of public communications, public transportation, public water, gas, or power supply or other public services;
place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury; or
influence the conduct or activities of a branch or agency of the federal government, the state, or a political subdivision of the state.
> unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action
So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
That makes so much sense, it seems like it would go without saying. If the violent act itself was legal (like a war, or an organized boxing match), why wouldn’t it be legal to solicit or petition for it?
>So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
No. It's fine to call for violence as long as your call is not designed to provoke and cause imminent lawless action. Brandenburg advocated for "revengeance" against the government if their demands were not met, and that was protected speech. Hess v. Indiana also affirms that advocating for lawless action is protected speech.
The point is more - you can legally say "kill Joe Biden" on the internet, but it becomes illegal if you're saying it to someone holding a gun to Joe Biden's head, who then fires it.
That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation.
Hosting content, more moderation.
I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction about why providing a CDN is fundamentally and completely different from hosting. Still coming off your servers eierher way.
It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too.
“It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle.
And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
I think the internet is just irrecoverably broken in a way such that technical problems like DDoS or NN escalate to social problems. We should not even be having these discussions in the first place: It should be infeasible for attackers to conduct DDoS. It should be infeasible for ISPs to surveil their users. The internet as we know it was designed to facilitate communications between non-antagonistic peers, that design is no longer suitable for use by democratic society at large.
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”.
It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset.
Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
> Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something.
It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
Well this particular example is a US website. The relevant (inadequate) legal framework for handling the situation is US Federal law, which ideally Cloudflare would have had to reference to determine whichever outcome should have happened here. So, while I'm far from an expert on policy, I imagine that'd be the place to start?
Is it? I thought that it was hosted outside of the US, and that while the admin was an American citizen he didn't live on US soil. That's from vague memories from years ago though, so maybe not accurate or up to date.
Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
Cloudflare has a really clear and seemingly mandatory option which is to just assert what we all know to be true: They can boot clients whenever they threaten their business. Everybody does this. There are near constant stories of users getting business-critical Google or Apple accounts suspended without warning or explanation. Those companies are ruthless about protecting themselves from liability and will err on the side of losing customers even when the violations aren't proven. Cloudflare wants to be seen as being above the fray and they just absolutely aren't. Anyone who thinks "it's just politics" is delusional. These are real people doing real things with real consequences.
It’s a fundamental issue though — there’s no “figuring it out” that a government can do that won’t either censor or facilitate. 25 years has been long enough to find tactical policy changes that make it easier, but there aren’t any, which is why nothing has happened. The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Practical dichotomy — that’s why this thread exists. You either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
> either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
Nobody has been legislated to do anything here. Cloudflare is dumping Kiwifarms. There are other hosts. That's one middle ground: a diversity of opinions on what constitutes unacceptable speech. Here's another: the government has no right shutting down Kiwifarms in the absence of a true threat [1], but Cloudflare is free to.
If you look at the history of communication technologies, particularly public ones (e.g. the printing press and television), this pattern recapitulates. An idealistic explosion of creativity. Weaponisation. Scrambling alongside states over-reacting. Then a middle ground.
We don't have anything close to consensus on the Internet, save perhaps for X-rated content. So private actors are figuring things out. We'll probably see a government response carving out protections for both speech and platforms, though hopefully nothing as onerous as what was done with TV [2]. And then over decades an equilibrium will arise. An equilibrium between "de-shrining free speech" and "entrench[ing]hatred."
The middle ground that already exists - the right of free speech doesn't guarantee an audience, and the right to assembly doesn't guarantee a platform. Censorship is permitted within the marketplace of ideas as an inevitable consequence of the fact that coerced speech cannot be considered free, but the government is far more limited.
If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
It's odd how situational people are about when free speech requires someone to be given a platform and when it doesn't. There's an almost impressive 180 on free speech rolled up in this philosophy, and it's a philosophy that I'm unfortunately seeing online more and more nowadays.
The idea is that the government has the power to censor private institutions and public schools as it sees fit, but private companies have no right to censor or exercise their own freedom of association. Actively harassing people online is free speech that people should just ignore, but trans people merely existing publicly and openly in public spaces is dangerous propaganda that the government needs to put a stop to -- merely being open about their own existence is crossing the line. It's a philosophy that's happy to censor identity, and loathe to censor actions. It's a philosophy that sees government involvement in speech as fine, and private/social involvement in speech as an existential threat to the 1st Amendment.
Free speech is used as the justification for these policies and arguments, but it's only a justification. The actual goal is the reinforcement of existing social norms and hierarchies, and free speech is applied situationally in order to further that goal.
In general, be suspicious of anyone who claims to be a free speech advocate who has this kind of backwards view of the 1st Amendment. The point of the 1st Amendment isn't to make it easier for the government to censor, and it isn't to make it harder for private institutions to moderate their own spaces. That's not to say that we can't talk about the free speech implications of moderation decisions -- but if you're excusing government censorship while criticizing companies, I immediately get real suspicious.
> The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Most of us never enshrined free speech above all else. It was never controversial that free speech had limits, that sites had the right to moderate content and ban accounts, or that businesses could refuse service to anyone. Prior to 2016, something like this would not have even been newsworthy.
Painting this issue as black and white is just wrong. Both sides have immense ramifications for the world. Accountability for censoring bodies and people on these platforms is not easily solved.
> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.
They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
Why shouldn't we prefer private parties administer the free speech which is most fitting for their platform, as opposed to overly broad legislation at the national level by a government which doesn't appear like they'll catch up on tech within 5 years?
Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation.
In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people.
And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here ...
I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention.
Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them.
This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue.
If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say."
So where was that on the website? Honestly you should be applauding that they actually switched from final solutions (obvious edgy joke) to a normal name in what seems to be like a reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
I see a pattern that everything requiring international collaboration is very very slow to fix. From tax havens to climate change. Because you can hide out in another country or blame another country and so on.
The notion that government should be in charge of effectively eliminating speech we don't like so that private companies don't have to is _far worse_ than the current state of things.
The problem is who defines what is hate - don't trust a govt to make that - they are the last people I would trust.
We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
I am honestly dumbfounded about the government hate on HN. It's elected by you and your peers. You can influence it and you can even be part of it yourself. If you want change do it and stop spreading FUD.
Our city council recently replaced all the street lights with new LED lights - one of our neighbors is convinced it is 5G - this is the same person who votes as well.
Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time.
Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
Right. Centralization of morals and ethics simply causes mass polarization and, eventually and inevitably, war over "which side wins." Those in favor of the rational gray area will be trampled on by both sides.
I'm basically happy right now with private companies being the de facto moderator of speech because your alternative of government censorship is unacceptably risky to people's freedoms, and private companies are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
----
> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
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> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic.
A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site.
Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me.
It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.
> I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
Yes, of course it would be. The end result of litigating free speech in the court system, is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time.
The courts have extremely strong protections for speech. They are way way stronger than what private companies do.
Just adding the word "government" doesn't make something more scary. In this case, adding "government" to the enforcement mechanism for speech would mean that basically nothing gets banned.
> is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time
This is kind of a run-around. Cloudflare's blogpost argues that it wants to get this content offline, it just wants courts to be in charge of that process. It acted because it believed the courts were too slow.
If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur. The actual argument in that case is whether you want this moderation to happen at all.
I take Cloudflare at their word that they actually wanted a court to tell them to deplatform this content. And because of that I take them at their word that they believe the government could feasibly pass laws that would censor the content people are asking them to deplatform.
> If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech"
Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.
i think this is the sort of thing that exposes a general failure of capitalism.
the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce.
FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc).
But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
> But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.
The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself.
The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong?
And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?
The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.
Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
> figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet.
I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech.
What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals.
How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
> What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
A lack of moderation to remove hate. Hate breeds hate, and drives good people away. In a similar way that bullshit breeds more bullshit unless removed.
Let me try an analogy for technical people.
Say you're a person deeply knowledgeable about computers and technology, and you're posting in an audio related forum.
Somebody posts a glowing review of an expensive device that claims that shaving the edge of a CD and painting the border with a marker will give you a bigger soundstage, more clarity and make the audio sound crisper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-QxLAxwxkM
You can try to explain why it's bullshit, but it's hard. You have to go into details about how a CD actually works, why this BS about reflections has no effect on a CD mechanism, how error correction works... you'll have to write several pages of deeply technical information that you have to boil down to something understandable to mere humans. It's a tough job. Not only you need technical understanding, but you also need to be good with words, and good at explaining complex concepts simply. And you have to have the time and dedication to spend an hour or two writing about it for free. That's a lot of unusual characteristics for a single person to have.
Then somebody goes "shut up nerd, it sounds better!" in response. And they proceed to post more reviews of volume knobs that somehow improve the sound because the wood is special, gold plated optical cables, and other such junk.
It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit. So eventually the smart people will get fed up and leave. Especially because they can find places where they're appreciated -- they'll find a home on a more specialized home where their expertise is actually valued. Meanwhile the original forum will get even more BS.
Same happens with social topics. It's easy to spread conspiracy theories and hate. It's hard to explain complex social issues. Without moderation the first will trivially overwhelm the second.
Well, so far you've almost proven my point. You've responded with a trivial insult and no actual counter-argument, which was far easier to write than my comment and contributed nothing to the discussion.
> they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line
No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
I'm sorry but no. The law is the minimum level of enforcement for a working society, not an ethics guide. You're allowed to do better than wait for the situation to go from multiple suicides to a PR crisis before taking action.
If I offered protection to a group of unreasonable actors and discovered they needed protection because they like to bully people into taking their own life for fun, the last thing I would want is to accept money from them, let alone offer them protection.
"In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man's finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end. Neither can mere growth of bulk or power be admitted as a worthy ambition. Nor can a man nobly mindful of his serious responsibilities to society view business as a game; since with the conduct of business human happiness or misery is inextricably interwoven."
-- Louis Brandeis, "Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
Anyway, do we really want the police handing our internet businesses lists of criminals to manage directly? I for one don't want government and police taking full control over managing access for supposed bad actors, to cover ALL criminal activity without moderation accountability from site owners.
I don't get it, Cloudflare is not the court, nor is it a monopoly.
It's not some tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech.
It's just a business, and business can decide to not provide service to assholes, just like your local restaurant.
It already decided it won't provide hosting service to the despicables, but somehow the security service is vital to freedom of speech? I don't buy it.
It's all about their legal exposure, and it looks like the heat's too much this time.
If Matthew Prince didn't style himself as the tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech then yes, most of this disappointment would not have happened.
People are mostly not claiming they have no right to drop them, or an obligation to keep them up, but claiming one thing and then 3 days later buckling under pressure is extremely disappointing. Especially when the underlying implication is that the website would hopefully be taken down by actually illicit means, those being DDOS attacks.
The only thing that bothers me about this decision is the fact that they made a wrong-headed announcement of principle that calls the decision into question.
Free speech absolutism which extends beyond legal protection, and which demands private organizations and individuals to materially protect and service all speech is hopelessly naive. Volunteering to do it is past the point of absurdity.
By engaging in that absurdity, they undermined the credibility of their motives making this decision today. They knew there’s a red line, and if at least two adults were in a room before the previous statement was issued it would be almost impossible to believe that they hadn’t discussed that red line. That knowledge should have guided them against making any statement at all, because even clarifying their red lines would create perverse incentives.
I don’t begrudge Cloudflare their principles, nor their decision to deviate from them in the face of reality. I also don’t doubt their motives as written in both statements, though I think they may wildly underestimate how much trust and good will that requires… and how little reason they have to assume it’s present. I do personally wish they’d reached this decision sooner, as a non-binary person who could certainly be targeted by KF campaigns. But I have a strong free expression instinct too, and a set of privileges of my own which sometimes delay my recognition of real present danger that I don’t experience directly.
If any Cloudflare staff is reading this comment: you made the right decision. Please try to use caution when such a decision is potentially on the horizon but hasn’t yet been made. Just as real human lives are at stake when you provide (or don’t provide) services to any particular customer, real human lives are at stake when you damage your credibility making that decision.
I’m depressingly amused by that. If you’re a free speech absolutist to the point where you’re unwilling to draw a line between Kiwifarms attacks and the real world consequences, surely you shouldn’t blame the anti-KF campaign for the way KF reacted?
The problem here is that Cloudflare didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that the words on Kiwifarms might be stifling to the free speech of their targets. Which, of course, they were, just as the anti-KF campaign made KF unhappier and more aggressive. Words have real physical consequences. Often they’re predictable.
They muffed it. They were proving to the world how reliable they could be and repairing the damage from the Stormfront debacle, and again they just showed how prone to caving to pressure they can be. What a joke.
I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.
I was referring to Stormfront there and how you called that situation "the Stormfront debacle", as if the bad thing about the situation was CF stopping working with them.
Actually, somewhat related: it turns out that the owner of KF was also hosting a literal neonazi website in addition to KF. (https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566335693663731712) If I did seem to call KF or its owner neonazi, I don't think it would be completely in the wrong to do so.
It makes sense if you're worried about the US becoming nazi itself. If a company will bow to the prevailing narrative, and naziism becomes popular in the US, won't cloudflare bow to that group also? Or, let's imagine a world where 90% of Americans are anti-abortion. Will Cloudflare host pro-choice sites, or will it bow to pressure from religious group and shut those down also? Having a backbone is kind of the Cloudflare business model. Of course there are limits to that, and banning nazis is one that most people can agree with. But I think if you're trying to stand up to, say, the CCP, Cloudflare isn't going to be very appealing.
I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman (albeit a controversial one) was probably the straw the broke the camel's back. Hard to lobby congress (Which Cloudflare does) when you protect a forum actively swats its members.
Prove your accusation, please. That the person that made that call not only said they were KF, but a certain user from KF and gave their account name, should be evidence to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds that that was almost certainly a false flag.
>I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman
This never happened. It was just blamed on KF by the people currently criminally DDoSing it.
I'm amazed by the credulity and lack of critical thinking in this whole discussion. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in hearing from KF's point of view ... which is now at any rate impossible because they've been banished from the internet. There are two sides to this conflict and you aren't allowed to hear from one side, so the other side can just relentlessly make shit up, exaggerate, take things out of context, and it will be taken as gospel.
So many comments like "I've never heard of KF before but I looked at this hysterical out of context twitter thread and wow I guess it does need to be censored-via-DDOS".
I agree that MTG almost certainly wasn’t swatted by KF.
I have, however, spent time reading Kiwifarms well before this controversy. I have zero interest in arguing about the conclusions I reached: I just want to put down a marker and say that you’re wrong. Many people who disagree with you have taken the time to read the site.
Neither KF nor its members swatted MTG. It was absolutely done to place blame on KF and doesn’t even comport with the image those who dislike the site paint - that KF is a radical, right wing forum designed to harass minorities and political opponents.
Both times, people organized a social media campaign to try to get CF to drop services for a site they disliked, and both times CF first refused in the interest of free speech, safe harbor, let law enforcement handle it, etc, then flipped like a switch and dropped their services when the mob didn't go away fast enough.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
And it's a huge strawman to imply I said people just wanted SF gone for aesthetic reasons.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It is not possible for violence to occur via the internet. And if you believe that posts on the site somehow constitutes harassment to an illegal degree, contact law enforcement.
Now that KF is back up (good job, CF), please find me one post on KF that involves the planning of violence which wasn't either deleted or ridiculed into oblivion by the other posters there. If it's so common, this should be an easy task, right?
Exactly. You can go on Reddit right now and find calls for violence, extermination of various groups, etc etc etc, but you’ll never see cloudfare take action then.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
Generally in agreement with you here, but are you aware the specifics around why CF dropped services for Stormfront?
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
I guess what makes it difficult in this case is that the amount of power CF has is so great that any use of that power is immediately troubling.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
But there are alternatives, cloudflare isn’t the government, they don’t even have a monopoly.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
>”wow, if they could do that to nazis they could do that to me (not a nazi)!”
Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.
So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.
”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”
personally, i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.
Your perspective leads to radical polarization between two alternate extremes--what we're seeing happening to political discourse across the entire Western world--and, eventually, war and death.
Do you not understand just how dystopian this is? This refrain to be enthusiastically anti-X reminds me of 1984 and the two minutes hate.
I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.
I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?
>”i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.”
“Anyone who isn’t performatively anti things-I-disagree with is thing-I-disagree-with”
I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.
Correct, if you aren't vocally against hate speech, homophobia, transphobia, etc, you may as well be on the side of it. "the only thing it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" blah blah blah, you get it nazi.
Can I ever have time to do something else, though? Like, can I ever get some work done, or go for a walk outside, or have a conversation with friends or strangers about some non-political topic without constantly have to perform a "I'm against bigotry" dance?
It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.
So would you argue then anyone against mass surveillance supports terrorism? That if you don’t support NSA hardware back doors you might as well fly the planes into the towers yourself?
I’m starting to think this person we are responding to is either a troll or such a one dimensional thinker that they are, in the literal definition of the word, a bigot.
“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”
Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.
Would I argue the same way in a completely different scenario that has nothing to do with what I said about standing against racism and transphobia? No, i wouldn't
This is a serious suggestion: if you are concerned about blanket accusations, it’s helpful to avoid blanket statements like “Activists hurl around the Nazi label…”
Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.
I think this might be a case of language being interpreted in an unintended way.
I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.
In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.
Hope the tech elite who naysay journalism take note that it wasn't the 3 suicides, or the swatting, or the death threats or the stalking or the harassment that compelled Matthew Prince to stop hosting kiwifarms.
The heat, they were clearly prepared to weather. However, if one or many of their high-profile clients threatened to pull out, that would have been very difficult to sell to their investors as a good thing.
I agree that what you are saying is literally correct, but I don't think it's really a good thing that it's this obvious. They should have either caved much earlier, not at all.
Typical weasel word announcement from a big company bending over backwards to satisfy the prevailing voices of a political narrative. This has nothing to do with 'free speech' or 'due process'. It is about ensuring a brand stays appealing. I say this because they weren't specific about the credibility of any 'threats' made. They invented an enemy and then used it to justify suppressing Kiwifarms --as a whole--. Very convenient since it allows them to dismiss ignoring their supposed values while satisfying the legions of mad people who want them to act a certain way.
I also want to point out that Kiwifarms is not an organization. As far as I'm aware: they are a simple, public forum. This means that talking about what 'Kiwifarms' has done is misleading since it only applies to what some users are posting. It would be like saying Facebook are terrorists because sometimes terrorist groups try to use the site for propaganda and recruiting. You need to differentiate between the actions of a user/s and the site. In the case of Facebook they are allowed to stay up and remove offending content on the basis that this is the nature of public communities. This is actually standard practice for websites who may also receive copyrighted material. Otherwise someone could easily take down a website by posting copyrighted material.
If there really was a 'life threatening situation' Kiwifarms should have been allowed to handle this themselves. By either removing the content or taking whatever action they felt necessary. But Cloudflare didn't do this. They provide a service that fundamentally undermines the integrity of the Internet. Makes it less resilient. And now the hens have come home to roast: they are dictating how others should run their sites. Eat a massive bag of dicks, cloudflare.
His descent into insanity and elder abuse? Given that both were already well underway before the internet took notice of Sonichu, I don't think it mattered an iota; though it probably wouldn't have been noticed.
* “If there really was a ‘life threatening situation’ Kiwifarms should have been allowed to handle this themselves.” *
By bullying more mentally ill people into suicide and forcing people to flee from their homes out of fear for their lives?
You sound like you’d fit right into that website. I hope you’re just 10 years old or something or have some valid excuse to genuinely not understand yet, because if you don’t then you need to go outside and interact with society for a change.
I don't understand where the myth of a "free" Internet comes from. Since privatization in 1993, you've always been held to _someone's_ terms of service. Even if you become your own ISP--get an ASN, IP space, a place to rack equipment--you still have to find someone to peer with, and if you bring enough heat you'll find yourself dropped.
Not to mention DNS which is subject to the laws of the country of registrar; plenty of pirate sites have had their domains have been seized by the US gov't.
There's a difference between literal freedom and de facto freedom. If there's an abandoned factory that kids like to graffiti, is it free for their grafitti use? It de facto is. If the owner puts a security guard there, then it is no longer de facto free.
Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one hand, yes, this specific site is terrible. But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible, and I respect them for that.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
> They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
My reading of that blog post and this one is that they now think that cutting off service to the Daily Stormer and 8chan was the wrong call.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I mostly agree that is the claim that they are making. I already quoted the relevant part of the earlier blog, so here's the part from today's:
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
If they think those earlier decisions were the wrong call, then why haven't they rescinded them? There's no law that says that after you kick someone off your service, you can never invite them back on.
Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.
If rapists and terrorists used their water or electrical service as a primary means to rape and terrorize, then those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct, and to cut off the rapists and terrorists who violated those terms.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many sites that violate FOSTA. They only cared when Switter made the press.
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
Perhaps “making the press” is one limit that legal council use to decide whether CloudFlare is knowingly (according to internal legal theory) breaking the FOSTA laws: i.e. that the legal liability exceeds their appetite for risk. Their exact internal rules for deciding to terminate a sex-worker site are unlikely to be published by CloudFlare, and it could depend on non-public correspondence sent to CloudFlare. “Knowingly” is very legally vague as per this article: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-politics-of-section-2...
Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?
I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
I think what you’re saying is true for water and electricity, but if you were to talk about phone lines I’m not sure that argument holds anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of phone numbers being disconnected for abusive behaviour.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence.
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
It is so disappointing seeing you be downvoted for sentiments like this. The neurodivergent and unempathetic nature of this forum really rears its head from time to time.
You've picked a very specific time period here (1933-1945). I presume this is because that is the period where the Nazis were in control of Germany.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
It’s unsavory to me insofar that it completely ignores the comment being replied to which doesn’t mention revolutions at all, doesn’t refute or even acknowledge any of the points, and the lack of anything other than the quote comes across as very smarmy with a touch of “destroying X with facts and logic”/“lol gottem!”.
> Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise.
Stupid thing to say, your countries Supreme Court constantly have thousands of lawyers arguing over the distinctions, definitions and interpretation of the 1A.
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
The difference between fraud and a bad investment or a foolish purchase consists entirely in the worlds spoken/text written.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
“the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
"Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed.
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
So that's not cool, I don't see anyone saying "go to their home" in those screenshots but I get the implication. So my question is, when will there be criminal charges? If this is directed incitement it's criminal, has anyone been charged or convicted for it from kiwi farms?
Even if KF was cooperating with law enforcement(I think they were, or said they would comply): how long should some company choose to help KF continue though? Is it when criminal charges get filed? After someone is hurt? After someone is arrested? How many people being hurt or arrested is enough?
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
I read comments like this and it reminds me just how much critical thinking has been stripped away from people via their social media over consumption.
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier.
I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.
> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1]
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server?
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
"Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
Correct. There is a status quo bias that infects people's thinking, as if deciding not to deplatform somebody isn't itself a decision. Similar fallacy that people bring to the Trolley Problem which can maximize the number of dead people.
The problem with cases like this one is that they really show the inadequacy of the geographic government model in the age of the internet.
If a Czech citizen, currently living in Slovakia, doxxx a British person resident in Canada on a site hosted in the Maldives and managed by a Japanese citizen, protected by a German server owned by an American security company, which government has the right to order the content to be taken down?
All of the above countries, including countries not mentioned in your example, have the right to order the content to be taken down, following their own country's regulations.
"Taking down content" can range from blocking the site from being accessible from inside the country, to organising measures together with other countries where the site is actually hosted to take down the site at its roots, should the country allow it.
North Korea, China, Russia are prime examples of blocking being heavily used to control the Internet.
A government's model will never be "inadequate" as long as people live there and abide by the country's law because of various incentives (economical, sociological, familial, ...).
This is a bit unsettling, I thought that the emergency threat was moderated off the site (as mentionned by the main [1]).
I know that place is horrendous, but it feels like CF blocked it because of the media attention instead of the threat itself. There is plenty of content online that actively partakes in stochastic terrorism as well as direct threats that are serviced by Cloudflare.
The question of what makes content worth dropping, without the involvement of law enforcement, from such low level infrastructure services is a scary prospect, especially when you consider the issues that current internet has[2].
The moment they caved in, Cloudflare stopped being a simple infrastructure provider, and we can be sure that there will be actors, big and small, that will pull levers to make this happen again.
The silver lining is that a hateful forum will probably cease to operate for good.
Boy, this sure would have been a lot easier if they just dropped Kiwi Farms with little fanfare the instant it was clear they were using CF. I bet they'd have been able to even keep the perception that they're a super neutral platform, too.
This is probably a worst case scenario for Cloudflare here. I'm generally in favor of them and I agree with their abuse policy they posted the other day.
But now twice Cloudflare has posted they won't moderate content, and then two days later done... exactly that while posting that they don't like doing it.
For folks concerned about abusive and harmful internet behavior, Prince has made it clear he doesn't feel responsible to take action and will avoid doing so as much as possible. And for folks concerned about free speech and censorship, Prince has made it clear he can be pushed around with enough pressure (regardless what the post says, it's how it will be read).
Cloudflare could've arguably taken either position with some level of righteousness, but by essentially caving to both, he proves himself to neither.
>Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online, as the Daily Stormer and 8chan did themselves after we terminated them. And, even if they don't, the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.
Yeah no shit, of course this is going to happen. It's clearly just a way to save face from Cloudflare - though they definitely needed to do it as this problem was never going to go away for them if they didn't. The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable, and that's not going to change with them dropping KiwiFarms. As terrible of a website as it is, it's just going to come back up with a provider that has even lower moral standards than Cloudflare.
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
That isn't the point, the internet protocol is designed as a distributed networking system that was adopted by corporations; if you want censorship resistance or privacy that isn't part of that specific protocol. (For example check alternatives such a CJDNS, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc; or application-layer protocols such as I2P/IPFS/TOR)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
I find this interesting, is this the point of the internet, Or is this a personal value or feature people overlay on the internet? At a history/protocol level I’d be pressed to say the internet was designed to be uncensorsble, fault tolerant perhaps at best
There was more time between Cloudflare dropping 8chan and KF than between Cloudflare dropping Stormfront and 8chan. By the (very dubious and limited, but) only metric we have, the rate of Cloudflare's "bad site" removals is slowing, and its a factor of 20 or 30x from monthly like you're claiming.
The sky isn't falling, and the slippery slope is demonstrably not there in this case.
I'm new here, and I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged. Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment and the few obvious supporting comments from actual women and Europeans in question were flagged, despite that safety from assault is the basic existential underpinning of being naked and women's key fear.
If hackernews won't allow cultural topics at all, great. But when it does, it's morally repulsive to flag and target and mute the voices from the key subjects.
Direct "lived experience" by actual women on any topic takes second fiddle to the neoliberal narratives of nerdy men running these echo chambers?
Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as the r/twoxchromosomes clown world, where women's voices on their political and social interests get moderated by those without two x chromosomes?
Guess we're back to the false feminism of "only nice girls allowed" where nice girls only do and think what men let them.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here
HN as a website allows many unpopular opinions to be expressed, but a minority of users will flag just about any unpopular opinion. If two (three?) people flag the same comment, it disappears for most users and is marked [flagged] [dead]. Some small population of HN users browse with "showdead: yes" (apparently you've already done this?). If you have enough "karma" (500?) you can "vouch" to revive a topic that has been flagged. Some users regularly do this, and over time, most (but not all) polite and constructive comments end up revived.
As a new user, there's not a lot you can do about this, other than posting your own polite and constructive comments, even if they go against the dominent narrative. If you come across a particularly good comment you think was unfairly flagged that isn't revived soon after, you can quote it and repost to call attention to it. Or you can email Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and point it out to him. He can be slow to respond, and won't always do what you want, but he'll usually give you an honest answer if he doesn't.
> I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged
Which comment is that? I tried but couldn't find it.
> Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32672721, users flagged that comment—correctly, because it broke the rules of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We're trying to have a particular type of internet forum here—one oriented around intellectual curiosity, not snarky flamewar or ideological battle. Since the latter end-states are what the internet seems to default to, it takes energy and work to try to avoid them. We do what we can as mods, but above all we need commenters to participate in the intended spirit.
Direct lived experience is certainly compatible with curiosity, and therefore highly welcome here. It needs to come without snarky attacks, ideological talking points and the like, because those things destroy curiosity and set a thread into flamewar mode. They're also the opposite of direct lived experience.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as
I can give you the defactos wink-free! The answer is definitely not, and there is no enforced narrative. What we want is a space where people have respectful, curious conversation across differences, and above all learn from each other. Trying to enforce any one narrative would destroy that possibility, so we need multiple narratives, multiple voices, multiple views. The trick is to have them without bursting into flames. On divisive topics, that is not so easy.
I vouched for quite a number of comments yesterday that I felt were constructive and respectful, but were nonetheless flagged. I didn't keep track of the comments and don't know if they got flagged again; I don't know if you can see what I "vouched" for in some sort of admin UI? From what I recall this wasn't isolated to one particular viewpoint or "side" by the way, there are, ehm, strong emotions all around.
Yes, we can track vouches in admin software. I took a quick look. Most of the comments you vouched for seem not to have ended up in a flagged state; a few did. I'd probably have left a few more of them [flagged], but I didn't see anything too egregious, other than one comment were a user pointedly included someone's personal details.
> other than one comment were a user pointedly included someone's personal details
I must've missed that, sorry. I was a tad annoyed and maybe I got a bit carried away. At any rate, at least some people, IMHO, misused the [flag] feature. I've seen it on a few other occasions too (and happened to a story from my blog, which was entirely unflagworthy but got flagged due to sour grapes) which is why I have showdead on in the first place.
Hardly. They are both designed to evoke an ultimate position of unassailable moral superiority. No discourse, dissent, or discussion is permitted with such obvious moral correctness.
Just remember everyone, the precedence this sets.. All you have to do to get a site taken down is create an account and make a ridiculous threat, even if the post is taken down in less than 30 minutes and the user banned, the site is still guilty.
And never forget that keffals has gone on record saying that their enemies (KF) is irredeemably evil because of the mean things they say, and thus no tactic against them is going "too far" (something that could be easily taken as a threat in itself I might add) And then suddenly threats and swattings start happening where the perpetrator literally goes out of their way to put blame on KF.
Also a reminder that this all suddenly happened just as things were calming down. (and the hate campaign to shut down the site beginning to run out of gas)
>Just remember everyone, the precedence this sets.. All you have to do to get a site taken down is create an account and make a ridiculous threat, even if the post is taken down in less than 30 minutes and the user banned, the site is still guilty.
AgainstHateSubreddits has been doing this to subreddits they don't like for years, except they were posting child porn, not threats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG8xWJaJO-c
Grass roots agent provocateurs who believe that there is no such thing as wrong actions, only wrong targets.
All you have to do to is…use other providers, you are not entitled nor required to work with this service.
Remember, all you have to do to get kicked out a wendys is to take your shirt off, wave it around your head like a helicopter and start shouting - the humanity!
Or was it was it multiple groups harassing and threatening each other, and now one group has lost the protection service from a private service provider?
Additionally, a single deleted post (or even a handful of them) being a cause for attempted removal from the internet seems like a precedent that would kill every host of user generated content, including hackernews and twitter.
it has just moved and they are already complaining about intermittent access issues. and now former fbi director is saying that their desperate move to russian servers elevates their risk of US marking them as domestic terrorists. so the campaign does appear to be having some impact, and is not over.
This is your daily reminder that the last time Cloudfare did this, they left up ISIS murdersites, featuring videos of people being murdered by ISIS (gunshots to the face, decaptitation via detcord, setting people on fire in a cage).
The only conclusion one can come to is that it was a PR move as they caved under pressure.
Seems to me it would be better for Cloudflare to keep serving Kiwifarms, and cooperate with government requests for access logs / etc. Then at least our law enforcement would have data to help with finding threat actors.
The forum already deletes anything illegal (in the US) and hands out info to law-enforcement when asked.
The operator posted this on their Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
That hints at the biggest problem with the oligopoly on public discourse.
If you have the power to remove someone's speech, only your side gets heard so you can make them look as bad as you want and they have little to no recourse.
Not going against your point, just that there is no need for Cloudflare to provide the government info on a site that already provides the government with info.
they did, but law enforcement were simply too slow.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> Legal process
> While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
According to whom? Cloudflare? What would be an appropriate time for Cloudflare for law enforcement to respond? And to what threats?
You say "simply" but these are not simple questions.
Cloudflare can shut off service to anyone, sure, but in any other industry there would be some termination notice, right? Unless its something like terrorism, where LAW ENFORCEMENT sets the boundary, not the private company.
The obligation for a termination notice, time to cure any violations of terms, etc is something that would be in a contract you agree to. A service provider is able to have terms that allow them to cut you off instantly if they decide to put that in their terms - apparently, CloudFlare has terms like that.
Would I want my ISP or CDN to cut me off without notice? No. Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond. But also, I wouldn't operate a site like KiwiFarms, so I'm not terribly concerned about my CDN cutting me off for the same reason. If it became more of a widespread pattern with CF I would understand their customers getting nervous.
> Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond.
From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
I hope we can all join hands and say "DDOS'ing is a crime and we all hope that the FBI finds people participating in DDOS attacks and put them in jail."
An exclusive focus on getting legal repercussions for the people who acted against KF and not any focus on legal repercussions for KF is some false neutrality.
>We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign.
Haven't been following this story, but it seems they haven't considered that whatever antagonists the site has could have posted the putatively objectionable content there themselves, due to the website's nature as a forum for user-generated content. Furthermore, the article throughout seems to suffer from the "anthropomorphic fallacy", in failing to acknowledge that it is speaking about a web service rather than person, and falsely attributing to it emotions and intentions.
>However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
If this is true, couldn't they be a little more descriptive? What happened in the last 48 hours that hasn't been happening for the last eight years?
Cloudflare would do better to simply stop making posts every time they do something. Every other company bans users every day and have learned to stop talking about it. Or the inverse. Regardless of what cloudflare does, right or wrong, there will be mobs of people responding negatively and positively to it. People love drama.
If their policy was "we'll ban anyone we want for whatever reason." I'd respect that more because that's the truth.
Further troubling is how this is over what they believe to be illigal conduct. It may very well be, but now they're creating a precedent that they are capable of detecting and stopping it themselves outside the justice system.
This also doesn't stop kiwifarms or it's organizers. If there's illigal conduct, or even civil discovery, CF has to give up those details. All stopping Ddos support does is allows kiwifarms to receive Ddos.
No doubt they'll eventually take to tor and that doesn't have a good physical address to serve warrants to.
Their transparency actually makes me sympathetic to the weight of the decisions they're making. Their acknowledgement that it could make things worse is also very honest and refreshing. I hope they continue making these posts especially since they control such a massive percentage of internet infrastructure.
With the amount of illigal content on the net, CF is not making blog posts every time they stop service. They're doing it in this case because kiwifarms is popular. And now it's causing dozens of posts stirring drama and steering users towards it.
The justifications are also weak, and put CF in a bad light because they believe themselves to be justice. A simple "we don't like what they're doing so we won't service it" is an honest answer.
Meta, but: Hoping the moderators on HN are doing good this evening as I can't begin to imagine the amount of sock-puppetry they're dealing with right now
They should ban green accounts on anything that relates to gender, queerness, harassment, discrimination, race, etc.
Basically non-tech things that stir up a lot of gross opinions masked behind sock puppets and throwaway accounts.
HN is becoming painful for me to read. Just so much hate, which is especially disconcerting to see it on a forum like this one. Which is supposed to be a place for smart discussion.
I find it utterly bizarre that CloudFlare considers itself some paragon of free speech whilst they have been caught red handed arbitrarily shutting peoples domain names down in their registrar service, even going so far as to prevent people from transfering their domains to other registers and accelerating domain expiry dates. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353
There's a difference in that the termination procedure this thread and the one its derived from talks about is about fraud, which is defined by law and prosecuted, rather than an opinion. When you learn about fraudsters using your service you can either GTFO as soon as possible or get involved with the police unless you want to risk criminal liability for being complicit.
Make whatever Kiwifarms does illegal and Cloudflare will probably drop them through their magical detection algorithms alone.
Terminating service to someone suspected of fraud is one thing. This is normal.
Preventing someone from transferring their domain to another registrar + accelerating it's expiration/cancellation date + stonewalling appeals is another thing entirely. That is going above and beyond. Domain cancellation is absolutely relevant to the conversation on free speech.
The way I see it, transferring a domain is still a business transaction. The ownership situation of domains are weird and complicated because of the intermediate registrars that are necessary for delegation reasons.
The only way I can think of to stop and drop fraudulent customers is to give them a time window to counter the claims and then drop the domain the second that window expires. Helping the customer move registrars after they've been caught is not a great look.
Preferably you'd have a human verify the situation before marking a domain as fraudulent but the automated nature of digital fraud can make this untenable and people would be more pissed off if Cloudflare wouldn't do something about the fraud they're able to identify automatically.
The procedures themselves are what I'm fine with butI have trouble with the lack of support American tech giants will give you once an automated system flags your account. They stop answering the phone, stop taking emails, and will do nothing until your appeal date expires, knowing that you don't have the resources to sue them.
Stripe and Cloudflare are commonly mentioned here for their lacking support and transparency once an account gets flagged (though relatively often the Stripe people get flagged for good reason, but still) because this place is the only way people can get support. These companies treat you like they treat the rest of the web, as a threat needed to be screened and monitored, blocked at the earliest sign of caution.
I hope people learn to not trust these huge cloud providers with tiny or unwilling support staff instead of ignoring their better judgement and posting here once they get blocked. We're all perpetuating a system of failure because we want the cheap speediness of fully automated systems and accept the risk of random bans. You can get a domain and a server provisioned in minutes or even seconds at the risk of losing your business down the line and because this rarely ever happens to innocent people we pretend to think it's fine.
Perhaps my perspective on this is a little skewed because HN is a place where many people dream of setting up a company to do the exact same thing, calling it "disrupting the market" and making bank rather than setting up a sustainable business with customer service at the forefront.
And, just like that, the internet lost one of its most staunch defenders. I don't care for KF nor did I used to care about 8chan or stormfront, but it just shows that all the grandstanding from Matthew Prince was for show all along. and the worst of all? its fro nothing, the people doing whatever they were being accused of, which i'm still trying to piece together, are just gonna be in discords or the nth-chan that shows up to host it.
Well I hope he enjoys suddenly having his huge customers from saudi arabia or whatever else start calling things worrysome and prey on that weakness.
Sure it does. If you make it more expensive (in terms of money, or time, or effort) for bad actors to be bad actors, you end up with fewer bad actors, because they'll just go do something else with their lives. That's the ethos of all security and defense. The expectation isn't perfection.
Doesn’t this decision to arbitrarily moderate content compromise the possibility of CloudFlare being legally classified a common carrier?
I also find it hilarious CloudFlare pretends to care about free speech here when they have been caught red handed arbitrarily canceling peoples services and domains + even going so far as to prevent people from transferring their domains to other registrars¹
Well functioning adults would have just given the boot to kiwifarms as soon as they discovered they were using their service. No childish discussions about free speech needed, who has time for this?
Regardless, Cloudflare with their first response has shown its true colors, joke of a company managed by kids.
> This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with.
"We'll keep doing it of course, even after we said we wouldn't do it any more."
After all, it's been all of 3 days since they wrote,
> Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.
Edit: And to be fair, they do link to that post: "As we outlined last Wednesday, we do not believe that terminating security services is appropriate, even to revolting content.", "The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy." - did I miss the part of that post where they tack on "well, except for the times when it's really bad"? I went and skimmed over it just now to see if they left themselves a loophole that they're using today and I'm not seeing it.
If you take your phone line and start making a lot of harassing calls with that phone, they will cut you off and tell the police. It does not seem that KF posters wanted the speech there to stay private.
That's besides the point; I'm not personally arguing (here) that CF shouldn't cut people off, I'm pointing out that CF just said that they didn't think they should cut people off, and proceeded to turn around and do that while still saying they shouldn't do it. You can be for or against CF cutting people off, but either way you can be unhappy with them saying one thing and doing another.
Yeah that’s true. And it was true the first time they co planned about it and did it. Some years ago. I guess their decision would be made easier with some modern regulations, but our (US) current political system seems to be DDOSed for modern regulation.
A shameful decision was made. It had to be justified obviously but still not any more or less terrible.
BTW Cloudflare is effectively hijacking kiwifarms.net by re-directing visitors to their blog page.
When government agencies bust websites associated with criminal activity the most they do after taking control of the homepage is put up a jpeg of the taskforce responsible and a few notes then call it day.
Many people appear to be missing the point here. Cloudflare claims there was an imminent threat to life created by KF. That's a factual assertion that's either true or false (and well probably find out which.)
If true, free speech is not applicable. Blocking the walkie-talkies of terrorists coordinating
a bombing does not restrict "free speech" under any reasonable definition.
This level of tactical coordination to commit violence appears to be what they are hinting at in their post, and I take them at their word .
It may be they are lying and caved to pressure in regards to KF being generally heinous, but until we find out the specific information that caused them to assess an imminent threat to life, we can't really judge the wisdom of their decision.
> Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent.
OK, but you should be clear about the definition of hard cases.
What exactly constitutes "an emergency threat to human life"?
Hypothetical example: Suppose you're providing DDOS protection for a website belonging to country X, that acts against the interests of your country. War erupts between the two countries, and the website plays an important role in the information warfare by propagating fake news.
Would that constitute an emergency threat to human life since it helps perpetuate the war?
Not surprising at all that Cloudflare went through with its plan to terminate its contract with Kiwifarms. Reddit had the exact same process happen back in 2021 with r/NoNewNormal. People cried and whined on the site for the subreddit to be banned, Spez wrote an official post defending the subreddits existence by pointing out its freedom of speech, and not long after crumbled and banned the subreddit (And still banned to this day). Corporations do not care about freedom of speech, especially when certain types of speech threaten their health.
These flowery corporate blog posts are close to worthless, and I am glad that this step has been taken, as Kiwifarms will reinforce itself further as it has numerous times in the past in response to external threats and will become even more difficult to take down. At the time of Cloudflares decision earlier, Cloudflare had been the weakest link in the infrastructure of the site. Any solution implemented now will certainly be more resilient and reliable.
The argument is that companies aren't police. Companies, especially infrastructure companies, should not have a personal view of things like these.
What Kiwifarms is doing is either illegal already or should be made illegal. Law enforcement should be the one deplatforming them and taking action against the human drivel that drives people to suicide, it shouldn't be an ISP deciding what is or isn't acceptable.
ISPs should not be filtering out LGBT+ content even if that content is considered undesirable by the general population and that argument goes both ways. With the way things are turning in large areas of the USA, I expect state-wide LGBT+ content bans to be up for debate in less than five or ten years, despite the USA's extremely liberal free speech laws. I think most of us here agree that such bans should not happen and ISPs should be dumb pipes in terms of content selection.
However, if this holds for your Verizons and Amazons, it should probably also hold for DDoS-protection platforms like Cloudflare. Cloudflare is setting out to be in a similar position to your ISP, a piece of infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks rather than a hosting company where you put your content. I think there's a perfectly fair argument to be made that net neutrality should also apply to companies like Cloudflare, especially in a position of this much power. A company should be able to host anything that's not illegal if it chooses to be infrastructure rather than a hosting provider.
In practice, law enforcement doesn't really give a damn about sites like these unless a big story hits the news. The lack of regulation and enforcement is the problem and the burden of combating these societal problems is shifting from the police to companies. Rather than forcing companies to decide what is or isn't right, concrete steps should be taken by the people that are supposed to protect and serve our communities.
What is happening to Kiwifarms will soon be happen to content other people get mad about; be it reproductive rights, gay marriage, or any other civil liberty at risk because of conservative outrage.
The benefits of Kiwifarms existence outweigh its cons, and I say this as someone who greatly dislikes the site after having used it for an extended amount of time. The site has and still discovers, documents, and reports criminal and disgusting activity, from bestiality to the grooming of children online by extremely predatory, mentally ill individuals, and it provides a platform for uncensored speech as well as the dissemination of media that had and continues to be censored on mainstream websites.
NoNewNormal was not wholly misinformation, and in fact had very little of it, and even if a particularly high percentage of the threads were misinformation, why does that justify censoring it? Who gets to decide what is and isn't valid information and what discussions should and shouldn't occur?
For the time I used it, I did not see anyone confuse mRNA and DNA. You are either completely fabricating evidence or disingenuously cherry-picking individual threads/posts to represent the entire community.
I have to wonder if everyone calling this site a cess pool has actually visited it. It was, in general, more civil and better moderated than, say, Twitter or Reddit which regularly generate a circlejerk of hatred and violent rhetoric. The subject matter may be distasteful, but the website was not at all what you everyone seems to be making it out to be.
Are you for real? It takes 30s on KF to realize that the whole purpose is harassment. It has entire subforums targeting individuals. The quality of the moderation is not the issue here.
I wasn’t familiar with Kiwifarms, so I read up about it - and oh, boy. The fact that something like Kiwifarms can exist in the United States without legal or civil liabilities is really problematic.
I've only recently learned of this site, and being a NZer, with the name Kiwi in the title I assumed some sort of connection to NZ.
But it looks like there isn't? It's American based, and when the NZ govt made a request related to the Christchurch mosque massacre, the admin told them to pound sand.
It's a corruption of the old name of the site, which is a reference to another site, which is named after the first and possibly most famous victim of that community's stalking. See the History section of its Wikipedia article. It has nothing to do with New Zealand or kiwis, indeed.
Woah.
I personally wish that Cloudflare had taken action sooner, but I understood the position. I disagreed with it, because as a free and private entity, Cloudflare can choose to serve whoever they wish (so long as they do not discriminate against legally "protected classes"), and as such, I'd prefer to see them refuse a customer that blatantly courts hate speech, but I understood their commitment to free speech.
This decision seems hard. Crime prevention forces should have stepped in already to protect people. But cops protect and serve capital, not people, so the police response will be weak and ineffective until capital becomes upset. Like Cloudflare, I'm also not comfortable with decisions of public safety being handled by corporations, but the police aren't interested, so here we are.
Technical question: Cloudflare says they are currently intercepting requests for Kiwifarms and redirecting them to the linked blog post. What does Kiwifarms need to do to remove their dependency on Cloudflare and make their forum visible again [edit: at the original address]? Can they do it unilaterally by changing an DNS address and waiting for it to propagate? Or do they need Cloudflare's cooperation?
When you set up a Cloudflare account, you tell your domain provider (Namecheap, Godaddy, Google etc.) that you want Cloudflare to have complete control over your domain by setting the domain's nameservers to Cloudflare's.
If you want to get off of Cloudflare, you just go to your domain registrar and set your nameservers to some other DNS host, whether it be DDOS-Guard (which is what kiwifarms did with their .ru domain), the domain registrar's own, or any other. It will take a bit to propagate but should be pretty quick. Of course if you bought your domain on Cloudflare you may be kind of screwed, but I don't think that was so in this case.
EDIT: It was https://who.is/whois/kiwifarms.net so they might be screwed. Depends on if Cloudflare still lets them access the dashboard and transfer the domain to another registrar.
CF is incapable of "taking" any website offline - the only "power" they have, is the choice to not providing free DDoS protection, and/or to stop resolving the site's URL
Unless law enforcement was actively telling you to do this, you really dropped ther ball.
So people post info they find via a Google search. Them not posting it on Kiwifarms isn't going to make the information any less readily available.
Pulling screens of random users posting threats is disingenuous. Other users actively discourage such activities constantly.
This all started because people wanted to laugh at someone being ridiculous on Twitter, but then they kept digging and found more and more deplorable stuff. The only reason the campaign to drop the farms exists is to cover up the activities a narcissist openly talked about on social media.
The site is no more dangerous or racist than Jaime Cochran was.
One thing I wish CF would address is their hand-waving about what "security services" actually means. Based on the original post from Wednesday, this seems to include caching services (though it is only mentioned once in the post). Despite saying they're not the host, providing caching services is effectively hosting. Consider, for instance, the "always online" feature, which literally makes sure your site stays online even when your hosting is down.
Yes, caching is also (in some ways) a security service, in that "security" can mean protection from resource utilization attacks. But that very feature also necessarily makes the cache the source for the content in the overwhelming majority of cases.
It doesn't irk me that Cloudflare provides security services to kiwifarms. I don't think, for instance, McAfee should withhold virus protection from 8chan, or clinics withholding vaccines from people they're ideologically opposed to. But it does irk me that they essentially provide hosting but wiggle out of the repercussions of providing hosting through some corporate doublespeak. It's one thing to have morals, but it's another thing to use loopholes in your own morals to (try to) avoid the consequences of those morals.
They're type of caching is definitely hosting, to the point that I would argue that it's not (just) caching.
They're providing the HTTP servers that serve the client requests.
IMO they're both hosts that work together. Want to prove that the downstream server is the real host and isn't just part of the hosting? Okay, point the DNS directly to the downstream server.
We (the US) need a build global infrastructure which will provide basic security and DoS protection for any website hosted in US: 100% free and public. Website might choose not use it.
Sure it will be run by government but the internet is run by the government anyway.
I'm sorry, I'm generally Mr. "Raw raw free speech", but let's not kid ourselves; by all accounts KiwiFarms is (and always has been) a cesspool of horrible people. It's not like 4chan or something, where it might have started with reasonable intentions and just became horrible; KiwiFarms was started for the specific purpose of bullying Chris-Chan, hence why it was initially called Cwcki Farms. KiwiFarms has been implicated in multiple suicides, and countless cases of bullying (and possibly doxing), and Null's response to all of these allegations has been almost entirely ambivalent.
At some point, we have to ask: is this the world we actually want to live it? I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron, but even I think that the doxing and SWATing campaigns against her lead to a really bad world to live in, and that's not even getting into people I actually like.
I'm just some idiot on the internet, but I think that the world is a better place without KiwiFarms.
Didn’t the swat call announce they were a kf user? Seems a little odd. Moreover, are home addresses of congress people public info? It seems like a lot of people were fine with posting the addresses of Supreme Court members.
> It seems like a lot of people were fine with posting the addresses of Supreme Court members.
Even if you think that kind of protest is a step too far (I do), you surely agree that there's a fundamental difference between peaceful protest at the home of a public figure (which is quite clearly what happened) and the practice of SWATing, which even in its least dangerous form is a perjurious accusation of a serious crime.
>Everybody has a right to feel safe in their own home.
Bit of a devil's advocate here: I think private ordinary citizens should have this right. I think a lot of public figures have forgotten they're meant to be servants, not rulers. And I don't mean the supreme court, but congress and the senate. They fought and machinated and put great effort into attaining that position of power which they can abdicate at will any time they don't like the downsides. The fact that they don't says quite a lot. When you've built up all sorts of protective layers and alliances to protect yourself from any real accountability, it's invariably to the detriment of the people at large.
The People's History of the United States by Zinn is full of incidents of the people taking up arms en masse and getting what I would call justice for the little guy. Things like that are denigrated in the harshest possible terms and slandered and libelled with religious fervor these days. But I've read about Ruby Ridge, and Waco. The government was clearly the bad guy in those cases. But where was the accountability? One of the perpetrators at Waco was nearly nominated the head of the ATF instead of facing life in prison for killing children.
I don’t think Whataboutisms are a good arguing tactic. I am against the doxing of anyone, even if I don’t like them. Hence why I mentioned that I think MTG is a moron, but I’m still against her being doxxed.
I couldn’t find anything about home addresses of congresspeople being public. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if that was public info. I could be wrong.
IMO it's more likely that one member of the anti-KF crew was responsible for the false flag. Most of them are also far to the left, and MTG is a fun target for them.
Aren't far left people generally against police? Sure they'll call the police when they need them, but they wouldn't go out of their way to contact the police unless they themselves had been harmed.
Far left activists are often against police, but it appears that they like the SWAT teams (ironically). MTG herself has had at least 3 SWAT calls on her. Many other public right-wing figures have also had a lot of SWAT calls.
The part that’s missing here is that the people KF are fighting are on the exact same level. Keffals doxed the KF owner’s mom, lied about the mom being an active KF user and called for her firing:
Do you really think a KF user would SWAT a GOP Congresswoman in the middle of this fight over their DDoS protection, and the call the cops to identify themselves as a specific Kiwi Farms user (moderator “AltisticRight”), one who denies any involvement in this? To me that sounds highly suspect. We will likely never know the truth.
And here’s a box of the Internet pharmacy hormones Keffals instructs kids to buy and self-dose in secret, without medical evaluation or parental knowledge:
I don’t recall defending Keffals as I do not know who that is, so I have no intention of addressing the first half of your post.
In regards to your second point, I don’t know. If it is the case that someone from KiwiFarms is SWATing people, and Null is ambivalent about it, then a world where KiwiFarms is tolerated is not one that I would like.
Considering how much of a jackass Null was in regards to Byuu/Near’s suicide, it really doesn’t seem out of character.
Let me clarify; I don't know who Keffals is, but I also don't care who she is either. Even if you proved that she was literally reincarnated Hitler, it would change nothing about my opinion on KiwiFarms. Destroying her credibility would serve no purpose to me, because my concerns in regards to the forum are unrelated to her.
I've been lightly following KiwiFarms for years now, have seen the level of bizarrely "proud ambivalence" exuded by Null for the actions of the forum members, and have thought that the site was a skidmark on society for most of that time.
That guide is a useful resource for trans people of all ages.
If your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health and your parents will send you to torture camp for being on hormones, then taking hormones in secret is the moral thing to do.
Doctors not performing tubal ligations on women and other afab people under 30 is pure, unadulterated misogyny.
Oh, and also, if your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health then focusing on fertility is just patriarchy. At the individual level, reproduction is a morally neutral act. Improving your mental health is a morally good act, so it clearly takes priority.
Give it 5 years. The internet will be divided along political lines and private companies will decide who's political message is true, and what is legal and not.
So even when Cloudflare bended the knee, nothing has changed and Kiwifarms is still in service via Tor, .ru and have become even more uncensorable, just like 8kun, 4chan, Gab, etc.
This sounds like a total failure to bring them down, even Cloudflare knows it.
Noone actually expected them to stay offline. I guess people expect DDoS Guard to be substantially less resilient again DoS than Cloudflare.
> On 1 June 2021, cyber-intelligence company Group-IB reported that they had found DDoS-Guard's database, containing site IP addresses, names, and payment information along with its full source code, for purchase on a cybercrime black market forum. The authenticity of the allegedly stolen data was unverified.[6][7]
The joke is still on you since after less than 13 days after all that chaos, outrage, etc the original domain "kiwifarms.net" is still accessible online.
A complete and total failure of a campaign to deplatform and block Kiwifarms.
Something I am curious about is why these things (de-platforming of websites for example) are so US-centric.
What I'm wondering is whether it is because:
1. Only US-based websites and forums get to that level of extremism that is cause for de-platforming. I find this option the hardest to believe (pretty sure there are hideous things in other countries as well).
2. The infra is mostly US-based (Cloudflare, cloud providers, etc.), they are focused or getting their attention drawn specifically to US-centric topics.
3. It happens in other counties as well, but because HN is US-centric I am hearing about the instances that are dealing with US topics.
And specifically I'm currently focusing on democratic countries, where free speech is upheld in some form (obviously government based censorship is happening in authoritarian countries all the time).
So which is it? Why am I not hearing of these cases happening to EU-based, Canada-based, Australia-based or Israel-based forums/websites (mentioning Israel specifically as I'd expect to hear about those in my local echo-chamber)?
Would love to learn about similar cases from other countries.
In Facebook's case in relation to genocides they enabled and promoted, they said that their have to prioritize their attention and don't have the resources to give the same level of care to all nations globally. They produced a list of economic powers that they are primarily monitoring. This was in part responsible for unchecked flagrant abuse in countries outside the global north.
> 1. Only US-based websites and forums get to that level of extremism that is cause for de-platforming. I find this option the hardest to believe (pretty sure there are hideous things in other countries as well).
Because in places like Brazil racists and bigots can be easily-ish arrested long before they reach that level of extremism. For example, throwing racist insults at another person in Brazil is a literal crime for which you can be arested by anyone.
Also, places like Brazil make website owner legally liable for user content if the website does not comply with court orders.
> 2. The infra is mostly US-based (Cloudflare, cloud providers, etc.), they are focused or getting their attention drawn specifically to US-centric topics.
> 3. It happens in other counties as well, but because HN is US-centric I am hearing about the instances that are dealing with US topics.
I think that's partially true. However, the big issue is that the US has an absurd view of free speech that doesn't line with anyone else and as such the US hasn't really ratified the ICCPR nor does the US enforce foriegn court orders on matters related to free speech (see the SPEECH act). So anytime anything bad happens anywhere in the world people are forced to go to the media instead of the US government for help.
> Would love to learn about similar cases from other countries.
In Brazil, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the arrest of congressman Daniel Silveira for his antidemocratic activities. Because congresspeople can only be arested _in flagrante delicto_, that justice came up with the novel legal theory that everytime a person watches a video you posted it's like if you were speaking the same words again and thus if there's any crime there, you can be arrested at any time so long as the video is still up.
I'm of course simplyfing. Daniel Silveira, if I recall correctly, was involved in groups making physical threats against the Supreme Court Justices among other stuff.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
I’m sorry, but what?
Few thoughts:
1. Couldn’t people be joining Kiwifarms and acting aggressive to get it banned?
2. Why is cloudflare reporting anything to police? That’s effectively implying they are regularly reviewing content… which is weird if your providing DDoS protection.
The main issue I take is that cloudflare isn’t hosting the content… it’s providing protection from DDoS. So kiwifarms is literally having their security turned on them.
That is imo a breach of contract. It’s one thing to just drop them as a customer it’s another to:
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
You’re hijacking their website and saying “read our content” instead.
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
It’s clear they can cancel service; it’s not clear from the cloudflare TOS they can redirect you to their own content.
That doesn’t mean a judge would necessarily rule in kiwifarms favor or anything, but it seems obvious to me litigation could work sue to ambiguity.
Further, cloudflare could open itself to a lawsuit from police. If they already notified law enforcement then they are probably interfering in an investigation by letting the world know AND shutting down the source of said investigation.
I’m sure cloudflare complies with all lawful orders to police and any unlawful activity reported to them that’s verifiable. It’s standard cover your ass policy. You can’t expect a corporation to put its own politics in front of its shareholders
Well I run a service with 100 million registered users and this is why we don't use Cloudflare. We use VeriSign BGP DDoS mitigation which is more expensive than Cloudflare (about 27k per year with our traffic) but i don't have the luxury of losing the business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor, their lawyer or even his Majesty Matthew Prince Himself making a preemptive liability decision on behalf of my own business.
I know that Google takes those deplatforming decisions with ease, because they have billions of users but with Cloudflare's much more finite enterprise userbase, I would be careful to aspire to Google's heavy handed approach: for Cloudflare's customers, real money and real jobs are at stake.
I sort of have the same thought. Cloudflare isn't really public facing so they don't have the same pressure to ban people, and any time you start banning sites you risk scaring off business. I don't have a large website, but I do have my own project/personal sites and with those I specifically use hosts that have a reputation for high uptimes even in the face of censorship (like Epik domains or terrahost)
It seems especially weird too considering how they just made a blog post promising not to do this (https://archive.ph/gJXgF), and then not only did it but used broad, over the top language which sounds, if I'm honest, a bit disingenuous. Like if someone's life is in imminent danger, you shouldn't be playing games on the internet you should be calling the cops
You don't use Cloudflare because you're afraid of them de-platforming you due to social pressure? Are you hosting content that encourages and/or facilitates harassment, violence, suicide, swatting and other illegal activity? Then you should be afraid of being de-platformed, Cloudflare or not.
If you said you're not using Cloudflare because Cloudflare is attempting to become a monopoly that can mix good with bad and prevent anyone from blocking whoever they choose to host, that'd make sense.
But it sounds like you're just bullshitting. Anyone who'd stretch this event to the possibility of "losing business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor" is just absolutely bullshitting. You, cft, are full of shit.
I think your assertion that "losing business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor" is a legitimate concern is pure straw man - you're positing that there's this new censorship thing going on, and not only that but that it's so arbitrary that an "anonymous Cloudflare censor" could just take you offline.
That is why I'm saying you're full of shit.
Do real adults make ridiculous assertions about imaginary things and expect to be taken seriously?
It's telling that you're not all that secure about being believed about spending all that money with Verisign (which, personally, I think is a very bad choice, but you do you).
I think a downside of their CEO & C-level spending so much time on Twitter and HN (spending any time there at all is already "a lot" for C-suite) is that they might overestimate the size and importance of social media mobs. Practically every hashtag is botted these days, especially ones people feel passionate about.
The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.
I agree, I think in his attempt to be overly transparent he's made himself a target for these social media mobs. At the end of the day he's a businessman and if his business' financial needs require it to shut websites down then that's unfortunate but that's life as a business. But to air out all their thoughts and deliberations makes them seem vulnerable to persuasion efforts.
I actually think the other half of the reason why Cloudflare became such a target is because of their 404 cloudflare site that displays when the origin host goes offline. It's essentially an ad for cloudflare, there is no technical need for them to show this. Only: if my site protected by akamai goes down, I dont believe my users will see that it was protected by akamai. It's just offline.
The best protection cloudflare has is to stop making it so easy to see who is protected by them. In fact, they should even stop giving out information on who they are protecting and put it into their TOS that social media sites are not allowed to broadcast the fact that they are protected by cloudflare.
These would be practical steps to massively help Cloudflare mitigate further risks.
The law, at least in the US of A, puts freedom of speech in a sacred position. There is a reason for the Bill of Rights amendments, and the way they are written. You are claiming "rule of law" to act in a way the law would not allow were you government instead of a private entity. Your claims here, like in the past cases where Cloudflare has committed vigilante censorship, are disingenuous at best. While you strike at the things you hate, you cry that /you/ are the one wounded! Your hypocrisy is disgusting. You and your company do not deserve the position you now hold in the infrastructure of the internet.
Finally after trending on Twitter for days they do the right thing. This forum kiwifarms was outright attacking doxxing harassing people and yet were defended by CF over and over again.
I agree with CloudFlare's stance about security tooling
I agree with this decision
I agree with their hesitance to consider this their privilege
Frankly I am impressed with how CF handled this
That being said, timing is a bit sus with their stock price. Although I think I believe they are standing on principal, it's easy to make a case that they are just watching the market and responding.
so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?
how could Cloudflare write that entire justification without giving an example to someone that wasn't following the drama? To me it looks like Cloudflare arbitrarily took someone down specifically after writing that they wouldn't, in the same blog entry.
>so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?
We dont know.
Being that Kiwifarms is an open forum, and I assume Cloudflare has computers, they could show us the proof, but it is actually in their best interest not to. Now anyone can make their own fantasy what "dangerous content" is.
> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users. Harassment stemming from Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.
>We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign
Thats believable /s
But even if they were speaking the truth, this is just throwing more bait to the pressure campaigns. As the post says this does not make these issues go away, just as putting paint over mold just hides the issue.
It sucks the legal system can’t move fast enough. We really need a way for the fbi to arrest the site operators more quickly. Of course, This is revolting content of the highest order but that really shouldn’t and doesn’t figure into the calculas.
This move was correct because it protects cloudflare shareholders. Taking the site down has serious downsides. It puts all of society at risk. Law enforcement now loses transparency on what is going on with these forums, whose connecting to it, how users are interacting with it. Driving these sites underground means they are more difficult to interdict and may ultimately increase danger and death.
Seems kiwifarms was prepared for this and already transferred to new infra at another dns I won’t name
Attempted murder, I only wished that sites were brave enough to keep them up and work with law enforcement rather than take them down out of fear of legal risk
I spend 30 mins on kw (through archive.org). It is a very pathetic forum with low value. I don't have any problems with cf disabling them. Free speech does not include assistance from others.
An edge service having problems about edgelords. Almost poetic.
I don't believe rhetoric is ever a threat to human life so I disagree with this move by cloudflare. Even if illegal credible targeted threats are made, the threat to human life is the threatener, not the content of the speech.
So let me get this straight. 1. People were trying to cancel kiwi farms
2. Kiwifarms users got mad, I’d argue rightfully, because they were being attacked.
3. Cloudflare doesn’t like Kiwifarms politically so they gave into the mob.
4. Blame the victims because we don’t like them.
Ignoring the fact that cloudflare provides we security services and they decided to just give up on it, this leaves a very sour taste in my month. I won’t be giving cloudflare my business anymore. If Kiwifarms users were engaging in illegal activity then just let enforcement do their job.
They really don't. Keffals, who has been spearheading this effort, has effectively been the target of hate from this one site which has stalked her across two continents. As far as I can tell she just wants to be able to live a normal life without worrying that taking a picture or posting a tweet could be used by this organized mob to figure out where she is and fuck with her life.
It's worth noting that she's based in the UK where it is really mainstream to be a TERF, it's the default position in most tabloids and magazines and plenty of TERF columnists get a lot of column inches to complain to their hearts' content. The likely next Prime Minister recently shouted "A woman is a woman" to screams of delight from a crowd - TERFs are not an oppressed, downtrodden minority there.
I very much doubt someone looking to get on with a normal life would gloat about supplying drugs to children without parental consent, lie about how officers treated them in jail on television, tweet they are hopeful a specific person gets swatted or parade around on social media when their harassment campaign gets users like Destiny banned from platforms.
I’d provide screenshots but documenting the escapades of public figures must be relegated to the memory hole these days.
They really don't? They really really don't? So people involved in this campaign have hit their goal by getting CF to drop KF, and they won't do any more of these sorts of campaigns in the future against any other targets?
This is not a slippery slope leading to suppression of all dissent, 1984-style, if that's what you're asking. If another site starts up to dox and harass trans people, I could see a similar campaign against them.
Okay, so you are saying that these people are no longer going to campaign to take any sites which stop short of criticizing trans people. Let's just wait and see about that.
Is this a new buzzword to blanket a group and opinions? Something like "I dont think transgenders should compete in elite sports" would now label me a TERF. All these defenitions are made up on one side and can change on a whim.
TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Basically any feminist who doesn't believe in trans woman being in woman locker rooms or competing in women's sports or similar things.
Keffals decided to leave North America after one SWATing of unknown attacker provenance. Josh Moon, owner of Kiwi Farms, has been SWATed numerous times (as have been many larger Twitch streamers) and even had trans activists show up at his house with weapons.
What's interesting about their SWATing is that the police took them in for questioning and confiscated their phone and hard-drives. Can anyone think of a single SWATing where the police showed up, noticed that there was no hostage/slaughter, and started collecting evidence / detained the victim? A victim that then raised $100K to flee the country and 'go into hiding' while Tweeting about their current location, planned future locations (never going back to the country that detained them though for some reason)..
Keffals openly admits and is proud of their connection to providing children with hormones-blockers outside the supervision of parents. The police need to be involved in all of this
>The people who pushed for this have a list of the next sites they are going to get taken down. In particular any place TERFs have discussions.
At this point, expect everything that doesn't agree with their ideology to be taken down or thwarted through their theatrical pressure campaigns on the blue bird app.
Actually, the fascists are the ones terrorising minorities - as Hitler and Mussolini's brownshirts once did. Cloudflare not allowing them to organise those activities, which include "swatting" people and hacking their accounts, is entirely reasonable. Terror and organised crime aren't protected speech anywhere. Not even America is that crazy.
I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now. It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right?
Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time.
"Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink"
Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts.
"It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod"
All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who are now claiming that they want some sort of "reasonable" policy from infrastructure providers. It has been demonstrated time and time again that people who don't oppose deplatforming on principle are actually fine with it whenever it suits them.
1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;
2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.
However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.
Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.
The scary part is this whole thing right here is very much about preventing the last part of your post.. Or at the very least asserting dominion over what a newly re-decentralized net would permit. (i.e. a decentralized system forcing the same rules and standards as now) I mean look at how cries of "disinformation" and "hate" are treated already. Look at what the owner of KF was willing to do to keep the site up.. creating his own internet infrastructure. And look how this is turning out. people literally melting down because an infrastructure company won't leave the site open to criminal (DDoS) attacks. A few hundred people are all that it takes to create a shit storm that leads to enforcement of their standards on the rest of society.
I find this sad, and perhaps this comment will die amongst the rest, but there really is a misunderstanding on what KiwiFarms is/was.
The website was one created by a lunatic who wanted to say whatever he wanted amongst other people who felt the same. A true free speech advocate, who abided by every law the US has regarding content moderation but did nothing additional.
The bulk of KiwiFarm users were not Nazis, they were just people. Everyone is a bit fucked, and some people like being able to say anything about odd people on the internet. The downside to that, is you will get genuinely harmful or crazy people who take it too far.
But that's nothing new, Facebook has hosted live massacres, snapchat is a vector for nude stealing and distribution, Pornhub hosted child or underage porn and probably still does.
The point is, KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, it was the small minority causing huge problems as they always do. What will change now that it's gone? Nothing.
You'll still have the same people who take it too far, you'll still have the regular people who just want to be able to talk without having to care how other people feel, you'll still have the oddities on the internet, they'll just disperse somewhere else. No issues have been fixed, no problems addressed, but everyone will pat themselves on the back and feel good. Another pillar of the internet gone, and we'll see what is the next to go.
KiwiFarms going down changes nothing, but the act of it being taken down by such a formerly neutral, and vital part of internet infrastructure is a terrible precedent. When everything is political, when everything is responsible for everything else, then only the most milktoast, party-line response will be allowed, and since politics is pendulum shaped, everyone celebrating this now will unfortunately reap the rewards when it swings again.
I think the "neutrality" framing is pretty interesting, because this basically confirms that the CF policy is not actually ideological, but instead a direct reflection of what they think the worst-case scenarios are.
Broadly, to the left, the worst-case scenario is that this policy terminates with a part 2 of Black's _IBM and the Holocaust_. That is: a scenario where eventually the public _believes_ the company to be materially responsible for a terrible outcome, even if it was legal at the time. They think these harms are both on the table and imminent, and they are willing to deplatform KF/Stormfront/_etc_. as a result.
I think CF believes this is not plausible, and is instead worried about a worst-case scenario where (I'm guessing) an audience like Trump voters are not allowed to host websites.
I think this issues is unlikely to make real progress until both camps can find a way to talk about these material outcomes, and get aligned on which are plausible.
Thank you Cloudflare for introducing me to this corner of the internet I was blissfully unaware of despite living half of my life on the internet for the last decade.
I am a free speech absolutist, but I read the Wikipedia page on this site and it seems bad. "Crimes were committed," "People lost their lives" bad. Unjustifiably bad.
That said, is anyone willing to steelman this website? Could this possibly be construed as just a big misunderstanding?
A majority of laws were written before the Internet existed. Be careful what you advocate for, because if you want police to be able to take down a domain via the registrar due to a possibly security threat, then that is what you'll get.
Hi debacle, I was not a user but I perused the site and was fascinated with it. It appeared to be a big 'mumsnet', or a Facebook, but the only rules were to gossip about people others found interesting, to not interact with them directly, and of course, no child pornography. The website is cited I think for killing 3 people, a transgender male to female by the name of Chloe Segal who blamed KiwiFarms in her suicide note, but it is noted that her partner stated there were major issues with Chloe way before KiwiFarms and that she struggled with a lot prior to her death. I cannot remember the second, but the third was a fella in Japan who is cited as killing himself by a friend of his. I think the Kiwis gathered Japanese data from the police of deaths of foreign nationals and there were no American deaths for the timeframe the guy was meant to have died. It appears he may not be dead.
In terms of crimes, I think there were people who did make threats, there were two users if I remember who went on to commit shootings, but my counter to that is that Facebook too has had users who committed mass shootings. I believe the KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, more the actual users who did the crimes.
Good. Now that we've finally established that Cloudflare isn't impotent after all, it's time to go down the list. No more faux "conversations." This isn't the only site they already know they need to drop.
Anyone willing to stick their neck out with a HN-undeletable prediction of who'll be the target of the next pressure campaign? (which of course wasn't the reason for blocking...)
The rumblings I'm detecting now seem to be related to misinformation.
Ovarit took part in the harassment campaign, so hopefully they go next. Don't know if Cloudflare hosts them though.
Edit:
And 4chan is always bigger but more diffuse. Hard to say who's more of a pest.
Edit edit:
I think the important lesson here is that direct targeting of fascist employees and ex-employees of enablers is very much a live tactic. It worked, it works, it will continue to work.
How can you be against harassment campaigns while at the same time inciting harassment campaigns? Do you ever notice your hypocrisy and just ignore it or?
I've followed this story loosely here from HN posts, but does anyone have a blog/TL:DR post around the chain of events that are discussed in this post? (the early events the bubbled this up to ppls attention, and then the new imminent threats?)
Wait, so just as everything was beginning to calm down, you step in and play internet police once again?
The excuses here are as pitiful as those of the misinformed hateful mobs trying to take the site down.
Since this mess all started I've been paying close attention to everything going on, including the site, and noting the major discrepancies between what the mob and media report about the site and the reality of the site itself. From allegations of being an alt-right site (the have an entire sub form dedicated to laughing at major alt-right and right-wing personalities, and have leftist members.. not to mention that the site is apolitical in nature to begin with) To claims that it has a history of supposed "intimidation campaigns" and "swatting". (which is not only against the rules but also goes against the core nature of the site to begin with. To document, look and laugh.. but never touch!)
Is it distasteful and vulgar, yes, but they (and not just the staff but most users as well) treat threats and attempts at off site harassment, swatting or interaction of any kind, as serious.
The site also seems to take dangerous and illegal stuff seriously as well. There is a whole board and a thread dedicated to documenting all the legal interactions and requests by law enforcement. The idea that they suddenly, now, stopped responding is hard to believe. This is why they have been so hard to shutdown in the past. Further more, from the sound of the statement here, not only was law enforcement not on board with this so called threat, but not even after CF reached out to them!
This is and has always been about perfectly legal speech that some people don't like and refuse to allow spoken. This is a case of literal misinformation. Much like all the claims of swatting and deaths. It's literally "if you say it enough times people start to believe it" in action. It doesn't matter that allegations have no proof or don't even attempt to provide any.. certain types of media just pick up the allegations are repeat as fact. And specifically here exact type of people complaining should give you a big hint at why this is all being taken so seriously.
I know what the response to this is going to be.. "right" minded people jumping in to yell about swatting and harassment etc. Pointing out that keffals was swatted. But ignoring that keffals themselves is the one who claims it was KF based only on... who knows. and before anyone asks who else could or would have done it, don't forget that keffals has a reputation, and is prideful in fact, of a history of attacking and de-platforming people for literal misunderstandings and personal grudges. This all started when the owner of the site commented on keffals gloating about getting Destiny banned and "deprived of his livelihood" for daring to make what amounted to a joke. And that's not even getting into all the messed up stuff they are connected to or directly responsible for. (grooming, abuse allegations, running an under age sexual forum, supporting a site that teaches children how to make homemade hormones in their bathtub secretly and more) This person is the hill so many seem to want to die on!
This has nothing to do with Kiwifarms, it's just same story all over again. It happened before and I bet it will happen again.
1. Some awful website uses Cloudflare.
2. Something ignites outrage that Cloudflare is protecting that awful website.
3. Cloudflare initially refuses to take it down, arguing that they are neutral infrastructure providers.
4. Twitter-amplified outrage keeps growing
5. Cloudflare caves in and kicks that site off, posting about that this is only due to very recent emergency (which is nonsense, they serviced these sites for years and nothing materially changed).
6. ???
7. No profit, go back to step 1.
My prediction: because they cannot stick to their stance, every cycle makes it more probable that next attempt will succeed, until nobody will believe in infrastructure provider interpretation and they will be forced to estabilish some moderation.
It always starts as a one off, "this was a special circumstance" type thing. I feel like I've read this post thousand times before at this point. I remember when it "just Alex Jones" getting deplatformed from social media. And it had to be done - he was just too dangerous! But then it expanded to a few more people, and from there a few more. And within the span of just a few years Twitter had gone from Alex Jones to banning the president of the United States.
I don't care what Kiwifarms did, this kind of thing has to be left to state. If Kiwifarms is doing something illegal law enforcement will deal with it. This move means Cloudflare is now a company that will remove content they find problematic. Or put another way, if they don't remove content we can now assume it's because they don't find it "dangerous" enough. So all those racist and transphobic blogs calling for race wars and celebrating trans suicides, well I guess Cloudflare just doesn't think they're that bad. And that's why these things always progresses, because turning a blind eye is no longer justifiable position. If you cast judgement on one piece of content, you must do so for everything. Now they've made this move the pressure to remove more content will only intensify. And it will be even harder to say no next time because now they've now lost the ability to say they're neutral.
But whatever. I have no hope of a free internet anymore. At this point I think if the West is ever to truly value free speech again we'll need to learn that lesson the hard way.
Twitter has the right to ban anyone for violating their ToS, including the (thankfully, ex) president of the United States. I don’t see any problem with that. You don’t have a _right_ to a space to promote your ideas from a private company, this is not how free speech works.
And no, the right to ban someone does not translate to an obligation.
What's regrettable isn't that twitter bans an ex-president, what's regrettable is that we've allowed corporations to capture the public square on the internet to the extent that they can de-facto ban the ex-president from discussion.
Where does twitter get all of its money from? Not directly from users, but instead from ads. They are not directly beholden to the interests of their customers but instead other corporations.
He was actually the sitting president at the time (during the "lame duck" period after he lost the election) and I think that matters for something. You might actually be saying this, but I wanted to inform anyone else reading.
Never heard of kiwifarms before but after having a quick read on it, I don't see any reasons why any provider of any sorts would deal with them. Not sure how screwed up in their heads people need to be to engage in this kind of shit.
I think those who are arguing against it either don't know quite how extreme KiwiFarms is, or strongly agree with the hatred, doxing and SWATting of minorities and vulnerable people that their members do.
I suppose you're right, and a bunch of them seem to be throwaways, or perhaps people who only made an account to defend their site (I'm basically on a throwaway too). Sad they fell into the same persecution complex thing people seem to get trapped in... like you're really defending the site where they welcomed the Christchurch shooter's manifesto? You really think you're doing something? That's what you want to fight for?
I've never understood the attitude that there should be zero nuance to free speech. That somehow we can't collectively look at the Christchurch manifesto and say, "that's over the line".
Yes, I believe there are laws that are unjustly applied, but this is a) not a law and b) so obviously different from any sort of edge case. The only people who think kiwifarms should exist are sociopaths.
It's a modern day witch-hunt. I grew up in an environment where thinking that deviates from what's commonly acceptable is deemed not worthy and such person should suffer the consequences. It takes time, maturity and probably most important seeing a lot of world to get it changed. I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life, so they end up focusing on extremely negative things as a way to justify their actions or escape their reality.
FYI people are interpreting this as saying the witch hunt is the KF users being targeted, and not what they did to other people (who FWIW might be bad people and do bad things, but this weird disconnected cyber-vigilantism teeming with "far-right" overtones is just not the way to deal with that...).
I read it that way too at first but it makes no sense in light of your OP.
By writing witch hunt, I've meant that KF users hunt down certain individuals they may not agree with, for whatever the reason. I definitely didn't mean that KF users are being hunted.
What kind of actions? I don't chase up people around the globe just because I disagree with them. I don't support in any shape or form doxxing or swatting anyone. People need to be mental to engage in this kind of nonsense.
Yeah, those comments are either extremely ignorant or disingenuous. It takes about 30s of browsing KF to realize that it is coordinated harassment - there are entire subforums devoted to harassing one individual person with thousands and thousands of messages each.
It's one of the most awful places I've ever seen on the internet, and I have zero respect for the people who try to launder large-scale harassment into "it's just free speech!"
I think you're going to need to define what you mean by harassing here. Because talking about people who make fools of themselves publicly is certainly not what most people, and certainly not the law, would consider "harassment"
I cannot think of a valid argument against taking KiwiFarms off of Cloudflare (unless the FBI finds it useful to have them on a domestic service, or something). The only troubling thing about this traces back to a question that sits in the backs of all of our minds: how much do we trust these companies to do good with the ridiculous amount of power they have over society? Even when Big Tech Megacorp™ does something good with that power, it can still be unsettling to see that power being used.
Your post is the perfect example of the no-effort no-info SM reply. How many different social media opinions did your understanding of the site come from?
Swatting is illegal on the site, harassing too, in fact it's against the rules to really try to interact with anyone at all. And they target everyone and anyone who publicly says or does stupid stuff regularly. Don't feel to bad, most people tend to easily fall for misinformation like this.
I have looked at the site and it's doesn't seem that extreme, unless there's a bunch of content not visible to guests. It looks like any anonymous IB from the early 2000s. The people who are calling it "extreme" seem to mostly be trusting other people's descriptions of the site.
> SWATting of minorities
As far as I can tell, the only people verifiably being swatted are KF site operators. I have yet to see a case of swatting with compelling evidence of attribution to KF.
If you anger certain members of the community - e.g. by being a vocal trans person - you'll be targetted by members who will attempt to find your personal information, your full name, your birth name, your phone number and address or other information that can be used to harrass you. An example from the "Main Character" on KF right now, Keffals, is this: https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885?s=20&...
I read the site sometimes, although my argument is that anything against US law is against the site rules and this whole thing is disingenuous. But it's also censorship whether or not you frequent the site.
I get how if you just read about it that KF sounds awful. Not sure how legit any of that is tho. Do the people you suspect of being readers of KF seem like awful degenerates to you?
Unfortunately internet discourse in the last 10 years has tended to descend into echo chambers. If you’ve managed to avoid interactions with the content being posted there and in other spaces like it, you have done quite well.
Worse than that, the mentality pushed forth in echo chambers like this seems to crystallise peoples thoughts, to the point that alternative thoughts to the zeitgeist therein these spaces are not tolerated or even heard without revulsion or aggression.
I’ve seen this in both the extremes of Right wing and Left wing politics in the last ten years.
Currently in my opinion, the extreme right wing seems to be the more dangerous of the two. In part due to the volume of adherents to the ideology and the secondly proportion of people within who are die-hard adherents, thirdly globally, the political centre appears to be a good bit further to the right of where it was 20 years ago, it seems that more extreme right wing political thought is more accepted now.
I hear people say this a lot these days, usually someone pushing some fringe cause from the left side of the divide. How has the center and right moved further to the right? I mean what issues have they moved on?
How so? Illegal activity and even interacting with people off site is against the rules. They have and do work with police when someone says/does something illegal. This whole issue is and always has been about the things certain people don't like knowing the site allows to be said and nothing more.. please keep up.
It hosts archives of terrible shit people have done and allows free discussion of their activities. That's why so many people want the site taken down. It has nothing to do with them killing, doxing, stalking and swatting hundreds of innocent trans people.
For example, the person that started #dropkiwifarms is a literal soviet worshipping communist, openly flirted with minors on twitter, hosted a discord server full of minors and sexual fetish content, and had a terminally embarrassing findom porn career, and talks frequently about sending minors illegally brewed HRT without their parents knowledge. This is all factual and documented, you can look it up if you want. So you can see why they would want the site taken down.
The admin of kiwifarms has posted the following in response:
>I am so full of hate for this situation. I try to write down my thoughts and I find myself unable to focus on one thing I hate the most. The person committing crimes to frame my community, or the sex pest who groom little boys, or the journalists who outright lie, or the corporate cowardice responsibility for the fragile state of the Internet.
>It is all so rotten and unsalvageable. Each of these problems complement the other, in a strange and disjointed way, where trying to explain how they tie together is just exhausting. Multiple evils with their own completely independent and selfish objectives - each coincidentally involve wanting to stop people from talking to each other freely as they have been able to for the last 20 years.
-----
Here is an archive and a screenshot of the message:
Says the man who told the NZ police that their country is a shit hole because they asked him for details about the Christchurch terrorist, and he confirmed the he reposted the video and the "manifesto" of the terrorist.
1. Christchurch terrorist had no known account on the site so there was no information to give.
2. That Oceanic law enforcement were trying to arrest anybody who so clips of the shooting video or materials related to the shooting under the same laws as child porn.
Nope, they asked him to give all information about everyone who posted about the attack (after the fact) viewed the video or read the manifesto. This was right about the time that their government was tracking down people in the country who merely viewed the video and arresting them. (remember that people spent months and years in prison for just viewing the video)
The media, with the same disregard for the facts as they have now and here when talking about the site, simply made up their own narrative as they went along. Some reported the truth, others made it look ambiguous and other intentionally reported it to sound like the information was related to the killer, or even to sound like the killer was a member of the site. When in fact he was not, nor was the site ever even mentioned by him.
The great thing about transphobes such as yourself is your are UNABLE to correctly gender the trans person you are currently in a huff over. You just can't do it! Because dangit they can't be HER catboys! Shes a man! It makes your motives very easy to identify. Thank you.
> nowhere else in the mainstream is willing to allow their sacred cow transpeople to have their true (and absolutely disgusting) natures revealed
Sounds like you are intentionally misconstruing facts in order to reinforce your hatred towards trans people. I think it is safe to say the people pedo projecting towards trans are the ones you should watch out for.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
> Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Isn't Kiwifarms the site which uses their so-called 'lolcows' to 'milk entertainment'? Sounds like a prime example of people dreaming themselves masters.
This is really concerning. I feel like it’s easy to justify now because every major infrastructure provider is on the same side culturally, but what happens when services without competition become ideologically opposed? Imagine an ISP shutting down service to a Visa data centre because they allow cannabis purchases LOL.
If you're so worried about your ideological-divergent subject matter from being entirely unavailable in the future - why not start an ISP, hosting company, DNS provider, DDoS Protection Racket, Server Farm?
Then YOU could proudly serve the content of those poor under-served souls which you preemptively mourn
> The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy. We continue to believe that the best way to relegate cyberattacks to the dustbin of history is to give everyone the tools to prevent them.
This is just doublespeak. No matter the merits of this decision, clearly this not the policy they advertised they have on Wednesday.
Targeted harassment for the purpose of getting people to kill themselves is illegal. People have gone to jail for less than what KF gloats about. All the free speach absolutists crying about "censorship" just shows how ridiculous their ideology is. Instead of whining about cloudflare they should be looking for lawyers.
Where are these "escalations" and "agressive" contents? Why was law enforcement "too slow" and who judges what is an appropriate time frame for law enforcement? Does Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a private busniess and can refute service ofc, but should the owner not get some notice of the termination to move to another service in time?
The operator posted this on Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
If you want a termination notice you should work with a hosting provider that guarantees one in their terms. I wouldn't be surprised if most providers have special clauses that entitle them to cut you off instantly, though. There are probably cases where law enforcement would demand that they do it anyway.
Actually I think Cloudflare holds the DNS names for the .net name, as well as possibly others. The reason I think this is because they are DNSSEC validated, and the .ru name does not have DNSSEC.
The fact people here are defending KiwiFarms is very concerting.
"Escalating threats and the potential risk for human life has compelled Cloudflare to block Kiwifarms from being accessed through our infrastructure."
Because the post in question was removed by KiwiFarms moderators, in accordance with KiwiFarms's long-standing (and long-enforced) rules against threats of violence etc.
Which government? surely each country gets to choose for itself - the US 1st amendment is only a US law, it doesn't apply world-wide - the internet however is a world-wide entity and once a company like CF, or Google etc gets big enough it needs to obey the law everywhere
That doesn’t really solve the problem though because “inciting hatred” is subjective.
For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
Edit: Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
> That doesn’t really solve the problem though because “inciting hatred” is subjective.
Lots of laws are subjective to some degree (And the degree here is really not very high here), that is absolutely normal and not problematic. For example, in order to decide whether someone was acting negligent, something called the "reasonable person standard" is used in US jurisprudence.
> For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
That is a silly strawman. Because it really doesn't matter what some unspecified "people" on the internet say on Twitter. What matters is what a judge says after carefuly consideration of the specific circumstances and possibly precedence cases, and possibly other judges on appeal.
> Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
The line is not nearly as blurry as you make it out to be, nor is it difficult to stay well away from it.
> Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
"public peace" has been defined in case law and commentaries as the peaceful coexistence of the population, free of fear of violence or lawlessness. "capable of" (geeignet) is a recurring term in German jurisprudence and means that an action is realistically fit to achieve something, considering the concrete circumstances of the case.
Speech is far more political than a negligence case. You really can’t expect to apply the same methodology and have it work just as well. This is one of those cases where I think we just need to accept that bad people will say bad things sometimes. Free speech is way too important and if the law goes too far it’s very difficult to change it.
My example wasn’t meant to be a straw man. I just think defining hate speech is extremely difficult and sometimes unpopular things need to be said in order to improve society.
Also, it’s not just “people on twitter”. I’m so sick of people dismissing these things using that framing. No, these people have power. The woke mob has power. They don’t like free speech and I guarantee you that if we implemented hate speech laws people will fight to enshrine their ideologies into law.
> Speech is far more political than a negligence case. You really can’t expect to apply the same methodology and have it work just as well.
I really don't see why that would make a difference.
> I just think defining hate speech is extremely difficult
Well, I have given you a definition that has been working quite well in Germany for decades.
> and sometimes unpopular things need to be said in order to improve society.
Which is why nobody is proposing to ban "unpopular things".
> No, these people have power. The woke mob has power.
Can you name a single person that "woke mob" has killed? Because I can name dozens upon dozens of people killed by people radicalized on the internet through things that could be curbed by sensible laws such as the one I referred to.
> They don’t like free speech and I guarantee you that if we implemented hate speech laws people will fight to enshrine their ideologies into law.
Yeah, and others will fight to have the laws differently. That's called democracy.
The rate of male suicide is over 3x higher than women. In 2020 white males accounted for 70% of suicides.
Do you think that’s because white men just looooove to kill themselves? Or perhaps it’s at least partly because men receive zero support because the woke mob hates them?
Meanwhile we have woke individuals like yourself focusing on a small number of violent acts performed by the most extreme individuals.
Where’s your empathy for the vast, vast majority who don’t commit these violent acts?
Also, did it ever occur to you that male suicides and those violent acts you mentioned are linked? Call me crazy but perhaps we are seeing male pain and suffering expressed in different ways. Violence pointed inwards and some pointed outwards.
And your solution is to take these hateful ideologies and enshrine them into law? Because, again, that’s exactly what will happen.
Because all of the above criteria is subjective? The US Supreme Court has repeatedly denied the constitutionality of hate speech laws throughout history on the grounds of this and it violating the concept of free speech
Agreed. There should be (and I thought there was with Section 230) a very, very clear line between being a platform--"dumb pipe"--and a content provider with moderation and censoring capabilities. I agree with others that the law has a lot of catching up to do... but when it does catch up, that doesn't mean it will favor folks demanding censorship of this type of content no matter what.
Do you understand that regardless of the publication, documents obtained via FOIA request and recorded into the court docket are about as solid of a proof as it comes? Please go ahead and entice me on how these documents relate to your "QAnon/Falun Gong" theory.
Well put. This is what you get when all the major players in the IT space are based in the US/W EU. All I can say is let's hope other countries like Russia step up their game so not every major internet entity is beholden to people who think it's okay to ruin kids lives with hormone injections.
How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please. They are drawing the line at imminent threats to human life. The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...
Somehow it's Freedom when a company refuses to make a cake for a gay couple, but Tyranny if a company providing hosting and DDOS protection services decide not to work with a company who explicitly violates their terms of service.
I'm not saying they are equivalent. I'm saying that all the people screaming that this is tyranny hold very different views on denying other people services based on a protected class. I'm pointing out how silly it is to be okay with a baker refusing gay customers but thinking this is the end of freedom on the internet.
The subject of both is a business denying service. The difference is the motivation for denying the service. The folks who complain the most about denying services to bigots and trolls who violate terms of service are completely okay about denying service based off of innate characteristics. I'm not suggesting that if you support one you need to support the other, rather that it's very curious which things these people most vocally support and which things are unacceptable to them. Just like you'll literally never find them defending leftists who get kicked off of these services either.
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
Kiwifarms deserve no love, but this argument doesn't add up the slightest. Instagram was founded to make money from its users, so why would I allow it to operate if people kill themselves because of the peer pressure displayed in such social networks?
Is it really so hard to understand that it is still censorship even if it is legal?
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
>How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please.
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
No single company has "the ability to exercise total control" on the internet, otherwise Kiwifarms / DailyStormer / 8chan would all be offline. This is not censorship, it's cause and effect or consequences or the free market depending on your slant.
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
Drone strikes and domestic spying have always had huge literal and figurative blast radiuses. Ask someone who is on the no fly list because they have the exceedingly common name of Mohammad.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd put money on that. Your wager is "by September 2027, Cloudflare will remove sites critical of the imperial powers using hate speech as a cover for removing said critical content"?
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
> Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
That’s an idiotic saying which justifies criminalizing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people for something they have no control over. In none of the cases that I mentioned are these ideologies anything but an extremely fringe and non-influential minority.
Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.
There's a logical fallacy called the slippery slope. It's not an effective thinking strategy. Cloudflare simply chose not to protect a site full of bullies. As is their right. They hardly silenced anyone.
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
"Surely, we will see many more websites go down"
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.
I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
They’ve lost numerous hosts already. Very few companies want to be associated with this kind of thing. So as they were discovered they tend to get dropped.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
More importantly: they're not protected by a reverse proxy anymore. Behold, people can attack freely. Uptime will turn to shit, people will grow bored of trying to access it.
i too enjoy supporting fascist and right wing groups whose only goal is to spread hatred anarchy and violence.
CF is not the internet, nor is it a government. you can always found or find a provider for your hate speech, just like KF did with an .RU domain.
your viewpoint is the terrifying one, and quite frankly one that has been used over the decades to allow hateful bullshit in the name of "tolerance" and has caused undue harm and death.
your philosophical pure idea of freedom of speech is just that-- it does not work in the real world.
He/they is not dead. The person who claimed that Byuu/Near committed suicide claimed he confirmed it with the Japanese police. The Japanese have to report every American citizen who died to the US, which is then included in an online database here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
No US citizen died by unnatural causes in Japan in the entire second half of 2021, and not on the 28th of June. Byuu/Near was still alive and posting well after the 11th of May, the last time an American citizen died by suicide in Japan in 2021.
Did I say that? No. I said I was surprised to learn the other half of this story, and that the behavior of the specific people behind the campaign to have them removed is horrifying.
They stated they would commit suicide, a major news outlet and people close to the victim stated they committed suicide, and they haven't been heard from since then.
I dunno. Given that this is the only counter-argument people seem to have, maybe the police just forgot to update the database. It's certainly a lot more likely than whatever conspiracy theory Kiwi Farms is pushing about them faking their death and being in hiding for over a year now. Also, Near went by they/them.
Which is more likely, that the Japanese police failed to record the death of an American expat or that Near stopped posting under that username and got a friend to lie for them?
It's really incredible. All these people defending Kiwi Farms, accusing Keffals of various crimes, and claiming Near didn't commit suicide, genuinely seem incapable of correctly gendering trans people for long enough to accuse them. I even told you Near's pronouns! There's no way you don't realize how bad this makes you look to people who aren't transphobic, or how obvious it makes your motives.
When private companies start having so much power they can literally make or break voices from being heard at all, this argument of "private companies are private therefore they do what they want" becomes much harder to defend.
I'm eager to "educate" myself about how this kind of things, truly.
Then work to get some laws passed outlining what private companies can and cannot do in the new internet age. Until there are legal guidelines, they are free to use their own discretion. If "Big Tech" doesn't want your content, you're free to set up your own server.
KF has their own server, own ISP/router boxes, own IPs, and their own colo hardware. The issue is that it's not that expensive on an absolute level (hundreds of dollars to take them out for a day) to just saturate their gigabit downlink. You get another gigabit downlink, they saturate that too. Ten gigabits, a bit harder, but still pretty easy. You need to have hundreds of gitabits of downlink on standby (at least, I assume Google has terabits of downlink and clever load balancing). That's not something even a well resourced city newspaper could set up at their headquarters without digging major fiber interconnects and hooking up to fiber lines going to the couple closest internet exchanges.
Edit: this assumes some level of BGP filtering and monitoring of what IPs send you packets, you really need cooperation from your upstream providers and your own BGP router to even survive this much.
I don't know anything about KF but they sound like a vigilante group and people are responding to them with vigilante tactics. The internet has some flaws that people take advantage of and I support ongoing research to mitigate these. The internet still seems like the Wild West in some ways.
Not at all. Rule number one of the site is basically "look but don't touch" Trying to even talk about harassment or "swatting" is banned. It goes against the whole point of the site.
> If "Big Tech" doesn't want your content, you're free to set up your own server.
People love to say this, but look at what happened to gab. There tried to exactly that and were deliberately singled out and blocked at nearly every turn. It's practically to the point that you have to set up a whole parallel society.
The fact is Big Tech has be come the de facto public square. And they all share the same bias: https://i.imgur.com/Si183zE.jpg
As a Green and former Democrat, my disappointment in Democrats' collusion and lying by omission exceeds that of my disappointment with the Republican Party.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. These comments are egregious even by the extremely low standards of this thread.
you are a 8 hour old account making comments that add absolutely nothing to the conversation other than snark, it would be weird to not be flagged by everyone.
It's a forum dedicated pretty much entirely to doxxing, swatting, stalking and harrassment. It's also where the Christchurch New Zealand mass shooter's live stream and manifesto were hosted.
Cloudflare doesn't just offer DDoS protection, though.
Websites like Kiwifarms play a cat and mouse game with hosting providers, who typically don't want to host them. Cloudflare's other services make it easier to conceal which hosting provider is involved, making it harder to (legally!) pressure them. DDoS isn't the only way to take a site down.
"Here's the personal info on this person that we all hate and constantly talk shit about. It includes their address and contact information. We're totally putting this out here for innocent reasons. We trust you guys won't go harass these people now because that's against our rules!"
This is nonsense. No man is an island. You are effectively saying that fame and peer pressure don't exist.
There's obvious motivations to take things "just one step further" with a community that eggs such behaviors on.
And that's true from a legal perspective as well. Tons of law deals with people who were not the individual to did the criminal deed, but instead offered the opportunity to do it or encouraged it.
We don't live in some libertarian fantasy where every individual operates wholly separate from one another. It's just not how we as a species are wired.
So just making sure I understand you correctly here.. You think that nobody is entitled to privacy or their own opinions unless certain other people approve?
swatting, stalking and harassment are banned on the site and always have been (look, don't touch) and there is not a single bit of evidence that the mass shooter you speak of even knew KF existed. You're thinking about mainstream social media.. That's where he streamed the shooting from.
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
It's obviously not the only place they was hosted, or the place they were originally posted (I think the manifesto originated from 4chan and the stream would have been Twitch or YT or some other live-streaming platform - no idea which).
cloudflare’s servers were hosting and redistributing abusive material and private information non-consensually leading to suicides?
KF is still on the internet, they’re free to handle their own traffic and find a cdn willing to take their (apparently blatantly neonazi named) operating company’s money
Kiwifarms is a site that is implicated in several deaths, several swattings, and had knowingly hosted videos of, for example, the Christchurch shooting.
It is a hotbed for stochastic terrorism. It should be welcome to exist online, but Cloudflare providing it protection undermines Cloudflare's own reputation.
Yes, KF hosted videos of the Christchurch shooting, as well as many others. That's unrelated to your assertion the site, which is of many thousands of people, are "implicated in several deaths". It is not. Nor is it a participant in swattings.
If there were a shred of credible evidence of those things, then you should be communicating with the FBI or any law enforcement agency you're able to engage with.
I hope KF's owner sues the absolute crap out of the media outlets and any personal not hiding behind a nym for defamation, as I think this level of speech has risen to it.
London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting. Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her. I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
> London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting.
Xcel energy in Colorado turned off people's thermostats recently. There was an article about it on KF. Are they related?
> Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her.
KF republished information he posted online. Aggregating public content isn't doxxing as it's typically defined, which is people who are actually trying to maintain privacy.
>I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
And yet, "anyone" would need to, to actually be implicated.
I don't suppose facts, like actually interacting with any of the zoo-fauna being documented on the Farm, was incontrovertibly prohibited and would result in an instant ban?
It's easy to connect "dots in your head" when there's already a conclusion you've reached.
well the shooter was wearing a shirt that said "kiwifarms sent me". He also left a sworn testimony at the scene of the crime that said "i'm doing this because of kiwifarms"
I've heard people claim this, but I've never seen any evidence which supports it. I've read threads on the forums there, and have never seen anyone trying to get anyone else to commit suicide. In fact, interacting or even promoting interacting with people whose actions are catalogued and talked about on the site, is heavily dissuaded.
Do you actually have any evidence to the contrary?
The Keffals thread documents her insanely misogynist tweets and inappropriate interactions with minors. It's plainly clear why she wanted KF deplatformed.
I don't trust any screenshot coming out of Kiwifarms since I've seen an edited screenshot tweeted with 10 thousand likes from a (now suspended) popular KF user.
You could only see it if you know what to look out for, there was a masking error on the overlayed image in one corner. And the tweet's text was most likely edited with dev tools.
Ok, well these things were posted publically on Twitter so there will be many first hand accounts and possibly backups from trusted 3rd parties. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out. I have personally seen some of these tweets as I watch Destiny from time to time and she comes up.
Maybe it's possible to game archive.ph, but seems more likely this person's humor has a consistent strongly misogynistic theme. Very happy to see a site causing actual suicides taken down, but the champion of the campaign doesn't come across as any kind of hero
It's also interesting to juxtapose comments here against the fact it was so easy to find the original thread on Google.
I do a lot of diligence before I believe anything. I have also seen this person doing targeted harassment with my own eyes on twitter. I am often skeptical of claims that wikipedia is obscuring information, and while this is a small creator, it is spooky to me.
That's not what I'm saying. I don't think anyone deserves any kind of violence or harassment. If they are engaging in such, vigilante justice is not the answer.
It’s a bit more complicated, as I’ve tried to understand and explain. This is a case of the worst people on the Internet fighting. Trans streamers who send sketchy hormones to underage kids behind parents’ backs vs. versus the very worst trolls from 4chan and 8chan. Doxing and SWATing has been practiced by both sides. The owner of KF and his mom have been doxed; two mentally unwell trans women with weapons showed up on his doorstep. Severe mental illness has contributed to suicides which one side wants to blame on the other, rightly or wrongly. I don’t fully understand the history, but what I’ve seen of the Keffals story has been alarming.
The point I’ve been trying to make is that KF as a platform at least has strong policies against offline harassment, and Keffals (their current nemesis) has an extensive documented history of child-endangering behavior, such as hooking minors up with life-altering drugs without involving parents or doctors. If KF users were really behind these SWATings in an organized way, I’m not sad to see the site gone. I am however worried that the point about Keffals will be lost, and that this was in some sense the purpose of the exercise. What this person was up to on their drug distribution website and Discord full of sexualized minors is monstrous.
All the data that was dug up on Keffals has been archived. I guess it’s up to real journalists to take that ball from here, if any will.
To be clear, "Drug Distribution Website" is a common resources list for sourcing HRT when you do not have supporting medical access to it. This is a far reach from "Distributing Drugs".
Telling underaged children to buy hormones made in a sketchy lab in Brazil that say “Hide from parents” on the anime loli-themed box art, all without medical evaluation or oversight, is reckless and monstrous. Children cannot consent to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
This is explicitly and exactly what Keffals and co-owner Bobposting do on the DIY HRT Directory. See “Homebrew Sourcing,” first vendor:
Isolated and confused children are sexually lobotomizing themselves to the encouragement of their favorite Twitch streamer. This is without even mentioning the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, now scrubbed, where a nearly 30-year-old Keffals charged sexually and shared photos privately with minors.
None of this has been include in NBC or anyone else’s reports, except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog. Now that Keffals can illegally DDoS KF, the archive links will be harder to find.
You can visit the archive links and live site yourself, the blog I mentioned adds nothing new. I mentioned them to illustrate the lack of attention paid to this point by the media; only such an obscure, relatively partisan blog has picked it up (so far).
Kiwifarms has a strict "do not interact with the people being discussed" policy. Anyone who does is immediately scorned for it and often banned. It's not uncommon for people outside of the forum to swat others and blame it on the forums, though.
Once again, these are all social media claims by people who, in many cases, weren't even connected to the dead person. And in most of the cases KF wasn't even mentioned by the victim at all. In fact one of them explicitly lists the mental health system and the fact that they were just made homeless as their reasons.. That didn't stop social media "allies" from ignoring their final comments and using their deaths to attack KFs.
Near stated they would commit suicide, a major news outlet and people close to the victim stated they committed suicide, and they haven't been heard from since then. They are almost certainly dead.
I don’t know, but since everybody here seems to favour the censorship, I assumed that some crimes were being committed. If nobody even broke the law, then what’s this all about?
My understanding was they were able to configure a simple page that was hosted by Cloudflare that was shown whenever the origin servers were not accessible. They put a joke about trans suicides on it.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
A CDN caches (= stores) the bits they provide. In other words, they are hosting contents on others behalf. I can't speak to a legal distinction, but if you torrent child pornography, I'm pretty sure you aren't going far with a claim that you were "just a CDN".
That is a very easy case to make in the US. ISPs have incredibility broad safe harbor laws (even more so when just providing transit instead of actually hosting like this case). They have very broad protection from the consequences of their users' actions.
They are not just providing transit. They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response. Transit is someone like AT&T or Sprint.
>They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response.
When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
> Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
In this case cloudflare isn't the host though. They have hosting services but kiwifarms only makes use of their ddos protection (which is a reverse proxy). That means they aren't the actual host.
I doubt anything would happen. At the end of the day it is a web forum it doesn't exactly cost many resources to host it (from archive.org most posts seems to just be text and outside links). I'd bet the benefit they get from using cloudflare has nothing to do with caching but only with ddos protection. Without cloudflare (or some other ddos protection) their servers are going to be offline from ddos attacks anyways.
In this case cloudflare was the ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from directly hosting the website. No backend servers in this case were ever hosted on clodflare's network.
You are still talking about proxies. You misunderstand what Cloudflare was providing, and you are instead talking about "backend servers hosted on clodflare's network" as if that was ever their offer.
I'm confused by your comment. The issue here is people were mad that cloudflare was providing ddos protection (via reverse proxy). What are you talking about?
> Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life
What are they talking about? From what I've seen, this is somewhere between grossly exaggerated and completely fictional. Did they see someone post the "300 confirmed kills" copypasta and think it was serious?
What the hell is this travesty. Now any old nobody can kill a site by larping drama on fucking twitter.
You should all think about the people dying in dictatorships before you give up a free and open Internet over some paedophile using twitter clout to ban a gossip forum
You’re deflecting and at the same time declaring yourself on the side of KiwiFarms. Fair enough, but I don’t think you realise how laws around discrimination work in the USA, you may want to look that up (hint just put “protected class” into Google, that’ll get ya started)
I understand law enforcement which is not on the side of anyone inherently other than ideally justice. You, apparently, are not. I suggest you look up "due process" to get a jump start on some crucial points.
It’s a basic matter of human decency. They’re hurting people every day. Cut off their fucking access. There is no business or humane reason Cloudflare _should_ be a morally neutral arbiter; it’s a weird fetish of their CEO.
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.