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.
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.