The idea that the internet was at some previous point a free-for-all has never been true. Even before the web was a thing SysAdmins would regularly block NNTP newgroups from being available on their servers.
It doesn't surprise me that a site that taunts people about reposting the Christchurch shooter's livestream should have trouble getting service. The fact I'm writing this from a throwaway shows the reality of the harrassment some people I know have suffered from this group.
Censorship is bad. But battles should be fought for people who need protection against it, not for people who try to exploit tolerant societies' carve-outs for free speech.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Remember, it's about the freedom to listen, not the freedom to speak. The censors in this case are wanting to stop anyone being able to read/see certain things.
If I wanted to see Islamist/white supremacist/Russian state/anti-trans propaganda in 2006 this was possible. It is now much much harder.
The Christchurch shooting is actually a good example about the type of thing that should be available on the internet but isn't. It shows people the brutal reality and actually gives a few clues as to how to most effectively fight a mass shooter.
There's a cogent argument which would claim that proliferation of the Christchurch shooter's footage would serve as a specific causal factor for future mass shootings, especially because part of the motivation of that shooting was exactly the proliferation of that manifesto. In that sense it's almost a memetic threat because any proliferation of the video locks in the reward structure for future copycats. In terms of discourse about what should/shouldn't be generally exposed to people with only a passing interest (external to any discussion about how that moral imperative aught to be enforced), the Christchurch footage would be pretty close to the top of my blacklist.
Moreover - I'm pretty sure anyone with a modicum of net-literacy could find that video with relative ease if they really wanted to. It's clearly not a binary of proliferation and censorship, but a complex gradient where different mediums of curation have different thresholds for that kind of exposure.
Saying we need to censor because free speech benefits mass shooters is wrong for the same reason that saying we need to backdoor encryption because privacy benefits terrorists and pedophiles is.
The discriminant between the two positions is that 'free speech' (as constructed here, I probably disagree with the conclusion) need not be a binary. Where backdooring encryption is clearly a binary policy that once triggered can't be revoked, this is only because it pertains to hidden information. Mitigating the proliferation of specific classes of content can be done with specific intent because you know what types of content you're mitigating - fundamentally this is no different than a website (like this one) deciding not to contend with certain types of content (as the rules imply). This means that you break out of the 'slippery slope' argument pretty easily and can get access to 'not negotiating with domestic terrorists' without the negative externalities of suppressing open discourse.
This is a crap reframing, such that I honestly have a hard time taking your post in good faith. The censors aren't wanting to stop anyone being able to read/see certain things. The fiction and history isles in most any setting are still highly available.
No, they want to make sure they are not fostering the market for the things you mention. Such that, yes, they are, in effect, limiting the veracity and effectiveness with which you can say and spread these things. That it makes it a little harder for you to see them, is a side show, at best. It is also harder for you to see illicit pictures of people, but we don't see that as an attack on freedom.
The site in question has regularly been used as a place to coordinate doxxing and serious harassment. AFAIK no measures have been taken by the owners to remedy this, and thus they've forfeited their rights to run a website.
Doxxing and serious harassment (probably depending on how "serious" it is, IANAL) are crimes though? Why isn't there a court order to shut down the site? Why did the site die at the hands of Internet vigilantes instead of being properly executed after a trial? Is law enforcement inept enough that it needs help from random activists, coordinating a Twitter/Facebook/WhatHaveYou campaign to convince some influential people to act? Why the same influential people were not told to act by a court? There's something wrong here...
> The site in question has regularly been used as a place to coordinate doxxing and serious harassment.
I have no way of verifying this and I suspect neither do you.
What I have seen is that the owners have explicit rules laid down that state that coordinating harassment is not allowed, which seems very much like a measure taken.
Posting publicly, self-posted in many cases, information hardly counts as doxxing.
and as for harassment, let alone "serious harassment", 100% utterly false.. Even talking about interacting with people talked about is and has always been banned! Users downvote attempts as well. It's a gossip and documentation site, not a place for calls to action. "Look but never touch"
> ...and thus they've forfeited their rights to run a website.
You cannot forfeit a right. The right either exists or it doesn't exist. Anything that can be forfeited is a privilege. Free speech is a right, but using other people's hardware to do so (via hosting/CDN services) is a privilege.
Of course you can forfeit a right. If I commit a felony in the US as a US citizen I forfeit my right to vote. If I sell a copyright I've forfeited the right to monopolize that work.
Nevertheless, you have the right to free speech, just not a platform. The government hasn't made it illegal for Kiwifarms to have a website, it's just that nobody wants to be a part of hosting or distributing it. That's literally the right of free association at work.
> If I commit a felony in the US as a US citizen I forfeit my right to vote.
Many hold the opinion, as do I, that a felon serving their time and then being left unable to vote is a violation of their civil rights.
> If I sell a copyright I've forfeited the right to monopolize that work.
You haven't forfeighted anything. You've sold a commodity. That's not the same thing.
> Nevertheless, you have the right to free speech, just not a platform. The government hasn't made it illegal for Kiwifarms to have a website, it's just that nobody wants to be a part of hosting or distributing it. That's literally the right of free association at work.
A platform is a privilege (e.g. a VPS), but they do have a right to common carrier infrastructure. The author talks about their ISP dropping them, which ISPs in the U.S. are considered common carriers (not sure about Paris). A common carrier cannot discriminate on it's clientele short of direct government action regarding criminal or national security issues. Neither of those is the case with KiwiFarms. Distasteful? Sure, but not criminal.
> In most (all?) societies that I am aware of you can forfeit your right to personal autonomy and/or life by committing a crime.
Criminals still have rights, some specifically regarding the criminal justice system. Society has agreed after a conviction to not allow criminals to exercise some of their rights to protect the rights of their victims. For example, in order to protect others' right to life we have decided to infringe a murderer's right to liberty.
> Is your argument that we should not punish crimes with imprisonment or is it that people do not have a right to personal autonomy?
No, my argument is that even when imprisoned criminals' rights don't go anywhere. Society has decided it's better to violate criminals' rights to prevent the infringement of innocents' rights.
Did they break the law? If not, then they didn't forfeit any rights, since you don't forfeit rights by exercising them. If so, then they should have been shut down by the legal system, not via extrajudicial punishment.
> It doesn't surprise me that a site that taunts people about reposting the Christchurch shooter's livestream should have trouble getting service. The fact I'm writing this from a throwaway shows the reality of the harrassment some people I know have suffered from this group.
This is extremely disingenuous. The request to take the video down came attached with a request to give them all the IPs of people from NZ, when the people in NZ were being liable for jailing by simply having the video in their possesion[0], i quote:
>While he said that those who spread the video in New Zealand risked arrest and imprisonment, he warned all New Zealanders that even innocent possession of the video was a crime.
“If you have a record of it, you must delete it,” he said. “If you see it, you should report it. Possessing or distributing it is illegal and only supports a criminal agenda.”
The response to new zealand was great and deserved, and i'll cheer for it the same way i'd cheer for someone denying a request from saudi arabia or china or whatever other more authoritarian government trying to take shit down across borders
The article is a case of the worst person you know making an excellent point.
> Despite all that, the Internet has one more weak point: Denial of Service Attacks. These attacks use compromised computers to send massive amounts of junk data to a single point, blotting out legitimate traffic and potentially overwhelming target devices.
Note Popper's definition of the intolerant in this context: those who do not engage in rational argument, and those who forbid their followers to listen to rational argument. Neither applies here.
I think Kiwi Farms' users harassed several people in retaliation for their speech until they killed themselves, rather than engaging in rational argument with them, defending their rights to speak their unpopular opinions, or even just leaving them alone. We're not talking about acrimonious ideological debate; we're talking about stalking and SWATting.
No, they didn't. This has been debunked numerous times. The evidence for that is on KF itself. The people who perpetuate this narrative are people actually engaged in harassment against others whose activities are documented on KF using their own words which, oddly enough, they really don't like... leading them to attempt mass deplatforming. Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with this situation knows the score, and no one is fooled.
> Clara Sorrenti, a transgender activist and Twitch streamer under the name "Keffals", was doxxed on Kiwi Farms in a thread dedicated to discussing her. Users on the site posted personal information about her (e.g. addresses, phone numbers) as well as that of her friends and family. Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her and made death threats.[34][35] She was later swatted, arrested, and detained for over ten hours in August 2022 when someone stole her identity and sent fake emails to local politicians threatening mass violence. She was later cleared of any wrongdoing, and police acknowledged the incident as a swatting attempt. Users also posted the address of an unrelated man who lives in the same city and shares her last name, and police were also sent to his residence. After the swatting incident, Sorrenti said she moved out of her home and into a hotel for her safety.[36][37] After she posted a photograph of her cat on the hotel bed, Kiwi Farms users identified the hotel from the bedsheets in the photograph, and sent multiple pizza orders to the hotel under her deadname. "Obviously, the pizza itself isn't the problem. It's the threat they send by telling me they know where I live and are willing to act on it in the real world," she said in a video after the incident.[36][37][38] Sorrenti later fled the country after her location was identified again, reportedly by someone who hacked her Uber account.[39] The incidents are being investigated as criminal harassment, and Sorrenti stated she intended to pursue legal action.[37][40][41]
I don't want to stand on any side of the argument since I'm not very informed about KiwiFarm incident, but Wikipedia in general is not really a reliable source of truth.
Skimming the references, almost all of them seem to point to news pages created after the CloudFlare ban, none of which seems to provide sources for their claims themselves.
Wikipedia does get things wrong sometimes, but I'm not sure where to find more reliable information. Wikipedia does have a pretty good history of handling controversial topics like the Armenian genocide, the killing of Michael Brown, and lampshades made of Holocaust victims' skin.
I agree that Wikipedia eventually converges to something close to truth. However, that takes time. Since the event in question is fairly recent, I'd still take everything written about it on Wikipedia with a grain of salt.
The hotel where she was doxed by the sheets nothing was delivered, the second hotel was where the uber hack happenned and things were ordered thru ubereats, this was all done by doxbin[0], both the dox and the hack.I'm pretty sure kf was actually down during that whole thing due to a ddos attack but I may be misremembering.
Wikipedia doesnt post the truth(it's impossible, really), they post things backed up by secondary sources, when the secondary sources are knowingly lying[1] at keffals request to not mention doxbin it's pretty hard to trust them.
Chloe Sagal was left alone for 8 months (not a single post in her thread) until she killed herself. If you are interested I recommend reading https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/06/woman_who_set_se... It starts with her friends blaming Kiwi Farms but then goes deeper in to the issues.
EDIT: The "sexually explicit photos" are a video she did for a porn website. I'm not sure how this qualifies as "leaked" or "revenge porn".
And yet there is no evidence an American died overseas in Japan during the time he supposedly killed himself. None. Just one guy's assertion and everyone else believing him.
...you mean the encyclopedia that anyone can edit? The one which has been edited to support a viewpoint whose sole source is Keffals herself? That one?
I'm not impressed.
There is no evidence that Keffals was ever contacted by anybody other than her own assertion. Meanwhile, however, there is plenty of evidence that Keffals was part of a group that tried to get troubled teens access to hormones without the knowledge of their parents or physicians. That's all documented at KF. [1]
> Sorrenti later fled the country after her location was identified again
...conveniently omitting the fact that she was raided by the RCMP who seized evidence. It was after that raid she fled the country.
Honestly, you should never cite Wikipedia for anything.
And not one bit of even evidence that the site had anything to do with that.. Keffals wasn't even doxxed on the site, it was on another site. Plus the person in question just got done fighting and de-platforming another internet personality with a huge following and then gloating about taking away their livelihood. They didn't leak photos of Keffals, they found self posted porn from the past.
I saw it with my own eyes as a user of the site. Yes, KF was used to document awful things by awful people, but it was also used to encourage harassment of people who were just existing (well, existing while trans mostly). A few of those people took their own lives and blamed the harassment that KF enabled.
> Yes, KF was used to document awful things by awful people, but it was also used to encourage harassment of people who were just existing (well, existing while trans mostly)
No they didn't. Null and the mods are very, very emphatic that harassment is unacceptable (hence the phrase he loves to hate, "Don't touch the poop"). Further, nobody was ever nominated as a lolcow simply for being trans. There's nothing particularly funny about that. OTOH, people falsely accusing streamers of rape and trying to get hormones to minors all while holding yourself out as some kind of moral person? Yeah, that's pretty funny.
> A few of those people took their own lives and blamed the harassment that KF enabled.
There are exactly three people alleged to have offed themselves, and not one of them ever actually did it because of KF. That too is documented at KF since it's a lie that comes up so often. Since you're familiar with this, though, I'm sure you can name them. I'll wait.
"Stinkditch" is the category for lolcows who happen to be trans. There's also the Beauty Parlor for the beauty-adjacent, or the Internationale Clique for foreign lolcows. In no case is anyone in there simply for being trans, beautiful, or a foreigner. They are, however, there for engaging in horrendously unethical behavior which is documented using their own words.
Oh, and look at that... KF is back on the clearnet... so you can verify all this yourself.
Help me out - your favorite hate site is getting trash talked and doxxed. Please fill out this questionnaire.
Are you:
Upset that people can spread rumors you think are false?
Upset that there are real world consequences to the stuff that's being said about you, independent of the truth of it?
Angry that you are labeled as nazi sympathizer because you hang out on a site that has a lot of nazis?
Embarassed that you subscribe to a belief summarized as "why are you upset? free speech!", and now you find yourself not championing the free speech of those attacking you?
Ah, very good sir. While we're filling out questionnaires, perhaps you could indulge us in answering a few questions yourself:
1. Why are you defending someone who tries to get children access to hormones without the knowledge of their parents or doctors?
2. Can you name one person who demonstrably offed themselves because of what goes on at KF? Please provide evidence.
3. Is it 'hate' to document peoples' horrible activities using their own words?
4. Would you be this snarky if someone was saying these sorts of things about, say, HN?
5. Are you upset that there are people in this world who don't blithely accept the word of Wikipedia and journalists but rather engage in investigative journalism themselves?
I see, afraid or unable to answer.... redirecting in seeming bad faith.
I'll go ahead and mark you down in the "cowardly kiwifool" column - that seems to be most of you. Strange.
Anyway, if you want to engage my questions I'll consider engaging in yours. (I use the same policy with you lot that I use with drug dealers, car salespeople and other unsavory hucksters - show me the goods then I'll give you what you're asking for if it's a reasonable exchange.)
> Help me out - your favorite hate site is getting trash talked and doxxed. Please fill out this questionnaire.
Is TMZ a hate site? Is anything a hate site just because people assert it without proof? Do you believe everything you are told by journalists?
> Upset that people can spread rumors you think are false?
Is it really spreading rumors when they're using your own posts?
> Upset that there are real world consequences to the stuff that's being said about you, independent of the truth of it?
So are you suggesting that nobody should ever say anything at all because someone might take it the wrong way? That sure sounds like giving in the to the Heckler's Veto. Perhaps you mean that there should be some forum for adjudicating disputes of fact about a person's reputation? In that case there is in fact just such a forum: It's called a court of law. If KF posters have said anything defamatory then feel free to try to sue them. Go ahead.
> Angry that you are labeled as nazi sympathizer because you hang out on a site that has a lot of nazis?
OBJECTION! Asserts facts not in evidence. Just because you assert a place has X in it does not mean that it has X in it. I mean, if we're going by that standard, I can point out that anyone who hangs out on Discord must be a furry and a pedophile because of... oh wait.
> Embarassed that you subscribe to a belief summarized as "why are you upset? free speech!", and now you find yourself not championing the free speech of those attacking you?
It is not "free speech" to engage in tortious interference. Do you understand the difference?
This is why I demand to see the goods up front. If you don't want to answer my questions, that's cool, but there's no reason to answer yours then.
I'm sure you are aware of this, but I never said anything about legality, or even talked about it. Looks like you're going with the classic scumbag fallback of "its not illegal" before I even suggested you did anything wrong. Kinda sad that your default position isn't that you're in the right, just that you aren't breaking the law.
I'll leave you to your day with this: it might be worth your time to consider activities that benefit the world rather than just plodding from one technically legal trollfarm to the next - most people find the rewards of being useful quite nice. Cheers and good luck!
> the classic scumbag fallback of "its not illegal"
What's so "scumbag" in trying to rely on the law and law enforcement for getting rid of bad and harmful things? I'm a normal citizen, I'm perfectly happy to leave the judgement to the courts. Am I a scumbag because of this?
...because you want to steer the conversation to predetermined conclusions and are incensed that other people won't play along?
The era of the proletariat blindly believing whatever the petit bourgeoisie tell them is dead and gone, and attempts to silence the proletariat when petit bourgeoisie are caught doing unethical things doubly so. Information wants to be free.
> ...because you want to steer the conversation to predetermined conclusions and are incensed that other people won't play along?
Lol no silly. Because I want to have answers to my questions and an actual conversation, not sit around and play mental patty cake with someone incapable of participating in actual conversion. When your only response is to ask a bunch of nonsense questions that aren't in any way related to what I'm asking or saying, you aren't conversing, it's just some childish game of avoidance.
Dismissing my answers does not make them any less answers. Also, I'm not the one refusing to have an actual conversation. That's you. You said you wouldn't answer my questions until I answered yours... so I did, and now here we are with you continuing to avoid those very uncomfortable questions.
Maybe you should just admit that you just hate KF and don't care if they're silenced or not. That at least would be honest.
"Has a lot of nazis"?? Do you have proof of this? (I mean I don't doubt that there is someone who does since the site has a pretty big user base and doesn't censor speech, let alone speakers for opinions but...)
How so? The harassment campaigns launched from Kiwifarms seem like the opposite of rational argument. Do you imagine that going into Kiwifarms and engaging the users in rational debate about the basic humanity and dignity of their targets would be a fruitful endeavor?
The harrassment campaigns that have no* paper trail back to kiwifarms, the forum that is public and anyone can archive at any time?
Ever since i've started to pay attention to kiwifarms from cloudflare dropping them i've been trying to get the evidence of any harassment coming from there and not being extremely looked down upon/banned and have come out almost empty handed. The scraps i've got are from chris chan in like 2013/2014?
This is the kind of dangerous "everyone knows that it is clear they do X thing hence there is no need for evidence".
Now to be fair I don't doubt harassment comes from individual kiwifarms users, maybe even organizing with other people somewhere else, but taking down the website will not change that, and guilt by association is a dangerous thing.
*none that I could find in the previous threads/most articles about it that is. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
The distance between kiwifarms threads and direct harassment is a thin veneer more meant to shield the site from criticism than anything meaningful. The relationship between the site and the people it stalks is slightly more complicated than appears on the surface. In practice the threads serve largely as a rallying place and public archives of exploits. The actual "touching the poo" occurs in discord servers populated by the very same people posting on the site who initially met in the threads. They will privately coordinate actions on discord, then publicly post them on the site, it is one extra step of laundering that serves only as a layer of plausible deniability.
The threads are the central nexus for the harassment, the site rules simply stipulate that the dirtiest work must happen in slightly more private venues. Please understand however, that the threads themselves are essential to this process, they are where the harassment starts and all actions on discord are done specifically to then be posted on the site.
This is of course kept as quiet as possible, but an example where the curtain was drawn back would be the behavior of power user SpookyBones. I wont name the person being targeted in particular, but by reading their subforum it is clear to see that kiwifarms users had private discords where they would directly contact the person in question and their friends, and then post the findings back on threads.
The distance between kiwifarms itself and direct harassment is mere obfuscation, not a substantive separation. The very people doing the harassment meet on kiwifarms, and then commit their acts purposefully to post on the site. The slight detour offsite for the actual action hardly matters in practice.
In the quote we were discussing, Popper is not concerned with any particular resolution of the argument, but only with whether words are being answered with more words or with fists.
As far as I've been able to tell, Moon allows anyone to express any viewpoint on his forum.
> Censorship is bad. But battles should be fought for people who need protection against it, not for people who try to exploit tolerant societies' carve-outs for free speech.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
― H.L. Mencken
Granting someone the power to decide who does and doesn't get to speak never ends well. It's that "power corrupts" thing.
.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
Answering fists with words doesn't always work (it can sometimes if the people using fists are subject to public opinion that you can influence, but that's fairly limited circumstances).
But pretending that words are fists in order to manufacture an excuse to respond with fists is something else, and is a misreading of that footnote you referenced to ignore the thing it's a footnote to.
It should be noted that the kiwifarms dude has spent 15 years trying and trying to be such a shitfuck that the rest of society stops giving him the benefit of the doubt, and has only recently succeeded. It may be possible to get kicked off the internet accidentally by saying the wrong things to power, but in this case he got kicked off by intentionally and personally pissing off every person and organization connecting him and the web.
> intentionally and personally pissing off every person and organization connecting him and the web.
I thought the whole "#dropkiwifarms" thing was more shaped like an organized pressure campaign, rather than every new provider he signs on with organically deciding within days that his interactions with them are deliberately obnoxious.
It is terrifying how poorly educated people are today in terms of critical thinking or even basic logical reasoning. "only good speech that enough people agree with needs to be protected by freedom of speech"
Either "censorship is (in general) bad", or "only a select few should be able to fight against it". That's one thing.
Another: there's law that already prohibits publishing some of the content deemed harmful. Like that law or not, it's there. The OP stresses that his web sites do not break the law. I'm not a lawyer nor KF user, so I wouldn't know, but what's so wrong with letting the courts decide? I'm sure that law enforcement and judiciary are capable enough to handle complaints about the content. They sure do when the content is copyrighted...
The paradox you're mentioning hinges on the assumption that KiwiFarms & similar are actually intolerant, or rather, their continued existence is a threat to the tolerant society/tolerance in the society. Is that really true? I don't know, but I don't think so. How can a tiny community of maybe a few thousands (or tens of thousands?) ever be any kind of threat to the tolerance of a society of hundreds of millions of people? They can be a threat to individuals, but then we're back to previous point: such threats are best dealt with by the courts and police.
One tweet from former US President - just one, maybe even any one, out of hundreds of thousands - would be a much bigger threat to tolerant society than all the KiwiFarms of the Internet taken together. That person had literally tens of millions of followers, and what he published incited riots not seen in a long time. Did KF ever cause anything close to that scale? If not, how exactly are they a threat to "tolerant society"?
Again: not a user, never seen KF before the recent KF vs. Keffars (IIRC), didn't read or see anything else on the site. I'm just reacting to you essentially saying that people should be unable to host and publish things you, personally, find offending and harmful. I don't like that content either, but I exercise my right to not look at it. If it's really harmful enough to the society to warrant "deplatforming" (or whatever you want to call it) then it's OK to bring their case to the court. The judge or jury will decide, and if they find the content actually harmful and against the law, they will issue a warrant and make the content disappear.
That "paradox" Is flawed a "balanced" society will not be in a position where bad ideas stand unchallenged and remain reputable after being challenged. The tools of censorship are more dangerous existing (meaning they'll eventually be corrupted), than allowing a bad idea to exist and challenged again by society.
Basically to believe the Paradox of Intolerance, you need to be of the belief that society has fallen so much that it cannot be trusted to keep itself free, or that the censors you pick will always be uncorrupted for their entire existence.
"That concept doesn't mean what you think it does, in more ways than one!
First off, that was not a defense of censorship. It was meant as a last ditch effort for an extreme, dire situation. (centering especially on groups who, you guessed it, advocate for overt censorship and oppression) The person who made it popular/created it made it clear that it was not an argument against free speech and tolerance, even for so-called "reactionaries" or normal political extremists.
Secondly, it is a paradox, not a logical point freeing intolerant actions from the logical, moral or ethical concept of intolerance! Being intolerant of the intolerant makes one intolerant. That's what makes it a paradox! Modern wannabe intellectuals and ideologues have no idea what they are talking about when they invoke it today and come the CLOSEST to actually meeting the criteria for its invocation!"
> The Internet is also very fragile. It has many moving parts and drives the politics of our world today. For this reason, it will die, and it will die very soon.
Hah, another doomsdayer to add to the bucket which has been growing since basically the internet came into existance.
Those who tread on the values, interests, or safety of enough people will find certain kinds of cooperation are withdrawn. Technical solutions to this problem are difficult if not impossible, and it's quite possible they should be, because they'd likely involve the privilege to tread on the values, interests, or safety of enough people and/or compelling the cooperation of people who don't want to cooperate. And "Free speech" is not the right to compel people to repeat or carry someone else's speech.
I just finished _Kingdom of Nauvoo_, which is about an early Mormon civic experiment in 19th century Illinois. Mormon history in the US is interesting; you can read it as it's regularly presented in the LDS church, a narrative of a persecuted religious minority hounded at every attempt to settle somewhere. Nauvoo was the "well, we'll build our own city, where we'll use municipal law + state politics to make sure we're self-governed and don't have to answer to other people" stage (before moving on to the "well, we'll build our own state far enough away from anybody else we won't have answer to other people" stage and settling the US mountain west).
You can also read in Mormon history a kind of tragic insistence on supremacy of values and interests. You might make your neighbors mildly nervous by saying "the kingdom of God is at hand and our faith will inherit/run everything." You'll make your neighbors more nervous and upset if you do that and vote as a bloc under religious direction, granting the religious leaders enormous political power / influence. You'll make your neighbors very upset indeed if you wield municipal courts you created to rule that no other court proceedings can hold you accountable when you're charged with a crime.
What human being doesn't insist their values (and sometimes even interests) are supreme? Most of us naturally believe our value systems are superior, for Reasons™, some better examined than others, but all founded in the naturally self-confident convictions arising from places difficult to introspect about. But every value system that insists it shouldn't have to deal with the trouble of encountering or accounting for tension with others carries with it inevitable conflict.
The modern period of democratic nation states have afforded an unusual amount of peace and freedom because we've tried to carve out maximal personal autonomy while providing institutions for mediating conflict. In this situation, individual rights and autonomy are maintained in part because no individual rights and autonomy are absolute. It's a balance, not a simple banner.
The Internet is people, and cooperation with people. Certain kinds of non-cooperation -- no matter how burning the conviction behind them, and in fact often magnified by the conviction -- will call forth non-cooperation in response.
This is a very interesting analysis of the situation. I wish I had a clear answer to how to handle situations of organized violence like these.
One quibble, though: I would argue that by their nature, nation-states cannot be democratic. Plurinational states like the United States might have a chance, but, by their nature, nation-states privilege the interests of their favored ethnicity over those of other people who might happen to inhabit their territory. Nationalism is an inherently anti-egalitarian ideology.
We're at the point where phone providers deny the author services, despite being a common carrier.
There is a very strong case for not letting this happen. Internet access, including access to hosting and ISP, should be classed as a human right, deniable only with due process.
> But every value system that insists it shouldn't have to deal with the trouble of encountering or accounting for tension with others carries with it inevitable conflict.
> ColoCrossing in Buffalo physically unplugged my servers in 2019 for hosting the Kiwi Farms and Encyclopedia Dramatica.
I stopped reading the article after reading this sentence - and I agreed with everything the author stated until then.
Mass shootings, suicides and rapes have happened because of the content of KF and ED.
If you provide shelter for the racist, misogynist, homophobic, Nazi and automated weapons fanatic, then you deserve to be censored. Let's not forget that the explicit purpose of KF is to run harassment and doxxing campaigns.
I believe that, as a society, we need to deal with people that, for a variety of reasons, have been isolated and pushed to the extremes, instead of further isolating them. But handing them a loudhailer to spread their hate and misanthropy isn't the right way of dealing with them. Your freedom of speech ends when your words cause the murder, rape, beating or harassment of another human being. And, more generally, your freedom ends when it harms somebody else's freedom. If we lose this principle, then we have lost civilization.
Building communities around ideas that damage the society as a whole and justify people's most extreme beliefs is just wrong. When too much momentum builds around these ideas, they stop being a virtual pastime for trolls with plenty of time to waste and they spill into the real world. Real people die. Real lives are ruined. And a civilized society ought to draw a clear boundary to prevent these things from happening. We have to deal with the marginalized and the mentally shaky by including them back into society. Not by providing them with a platform to connect with others in the same state, consolidate their extremism, and create individuals that are even more unsuitable for being reintegrated into society than they were before.
Granted, it's not always easy for regulators to draw this line, there are a lot of shades of gray, and we need to keep those in charge accountable for unfair censorship. But there's really no gray area for KF and ED. If you host them, then you deserve to be unplugged.
> Mass shootings, suicides and rapes have happened because of the content of KF and ED
I disagree. It is not possible for the content of a website to be responsible for heinous acts committed IRL. That autonomy can only be utilized by human beings.
I also don't see where it's written that KF's mission is to buttress harassment campaigns. If memory serves, there's a banner on the site which explicitly condemns such actions. It doesn't really matter either way though because websites don't harass people, people harass people.
I urge caution here - calling for the silence of an entire community due to the actions of a few (or more realistically - due to recent mass hysteria and subsequent media coverage) will make it hard to form a moderated viewpoint.
As others have pointed out, this is about the right to read as well. Even if we pat ourselves on the back thinking we've put a hard stop to all online harassment campaigns forever, the knowledge and art (yes - prose is art!) we'll have lost along the way means the victory will ring hollow for some who value unfettered speech.
If you took the above motif and applied it to a site that hosted child pornography, most people would be horrified.
"It is not possible for the content of a website to be responsible for child pornography filmed IRL. That autonomy can only be utilized by human beings."
"It doesn't really matter either way though because websites don't make kiddie porn, people make kiddie porn."
Etc.
Whether Mr. Moon knows it or not, this is a different case then his "free speech" arguments. The case against Kiwi Farms is thus: A) a website hosts illegal material or activity of some kind, and B) the moderation is not particularly pro-active about getting rid of said illegal material. Not all of KF is illegal -- Kiwi Farms is in safe territory simply making shitposts about LOLCows, there is no problem about that. But once members of the community crossed the line into coordinated harassment, they were engaging in illegal activity, plain and simple.
Due to Section 230 etc., there is, at present, no real legal obligation for Mr. Moon to take action and moderate against harassment campaigns. However, it is my opinion that Mr. Moon's casual gaslighting of the illegal activity stemming from his board (in fact, as I see it, his statements on transsexuals have amounted to coy support) make it ''more'' likely that the current protections offered by Section 230 will come to an end. The reaction in much "common media" really is "why is a site like Kiwi Farms legal?". It just fuels energy on certain sides of American politics that Section 230 allows too much lawless activity (and with the other side of American politics complaining that Section 230 "censors", it'll probably be gone before you know it.)
Mr. Moon can cry "free speech on the Internet" all he wants, in other words, but his site is doing its damn best to end it.
Is it? The problem I have is that this deplatforming campaign uses dubious media reports and Wikipedia to create this "It's the worst site ever and you absolutely have to drop it" narrative. e.g. The "The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide" is sourced from the Book "Gaming the Dynamics of
Online Harassment" which itself links to some random forum with a post saying that. Somehow this is enough to post everywhere that it's a forum with the sole goal to drive people to suicide.
I think that something people often forget in "free speech" discussions about hateful and dangerous people like Kiwi Farms is that while deplatforming someone can be seen as an evil, killing or imprisoning them certainly would be worse. When you have an organization that promotes violence like the Christchurch shooter, when they begin to use violence in the real world, you will have to (a) kill or imprison them to stop them from hurting others, and/or (b) allow them to kill and injure others.
If you see deplatforming people as a preventative measure to keep from having to kill and imprison them (not to mention the harm they will do before you can stop them), then it seems like the morally best thing you can do for these haters.
Sadly our culture loves cleaning up things after the fact instead of deploying an ounce of prevention. This is how you end up trying to "harden" every possible target, like schools, installing metal detectors and buying children bulletproof backpacks, instead of just limiting guns. Not only is this expensive, impossible and ineffective, it makes everyone's life worse in innumerable ways.
Even before a killer is radicalized by KF, or a SWAT team is sent to someone's house, allowing this harassment to spread just makes the world a worse place to live. Everyone believes in some moderation, otherwise they would be fighting for the right of spammers to spam, and burying any platform they control under mountains of junk. Once we've established that everyone allows moderation in order for communications to function at all, we're just haggling over how many people we're willing to kill with lax moderation, and how nightmarish we're willing to let our "public squares" get before doing something.
tarrant was widely mocked on the website, im not sure what makes you think someone would be radicalized to become another version of him there, everyone was mocked there actually.
> Building communities around ideas that damage the society as a whole and justify people's most extreme beliefs is just wrong.
The issue is that determining what is wrong isn't something we know how to do.
Capitalism and communism have both killed many many orders of magnitude more people than incels or trans hate, but we don't censor groups that advocate for communism even though it lead to tens of millions of deaths.
Sure, if we let them continue to speak they may convince everyone to stage a communist revolution and mass death results... But letting them speak is required to be able to tell whether actually they've finally figured out how to safely do communism and by banning them we may be causing needless suffering when we could be in the workers paradise!
One of the things so many fail to grasp is that speech and politics is actually really high stakes! Any given question like what the central bank interest rates should be for 2023 will lead to thousands of deaths at the scale of a big country! And yes, if you're completely convinced that they should definitely be 1.4% then censoring everyone who disagrees may save many lives... but implementing a mass censorship scheme on all high stakes conversation prevents you finding out the true and counterintuitive ideas.
Capitalism and communism don't directly invite people to murder or harass who identifies with a different race, creed, gender or political idea (or, at least, they don't do so directly).
The white supremacist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic and homophobic, on the other hand, does. And that's the core problem.
As a tolerant society, we have the obligation to push back on the ideas that are EXPLICITLY violent and intolerant. That's where we draw the line. Everything behind that line is in the gray/white area, but we shouldn't compromise on what is beyond the line.
Civilized societies are held together by tolerance and mutual respect. If we start compromising on this founding principle, and legitimize the spread of racially or ideologically motivated hate, and the harassment of people that did nothing wrong to us, then we have lost civilization.
Both capitalism and communism do lead to murder, this has been empirically shown.
Both white supremacism and communism can lead to harassment and murder, but they won't necessarily do so.
Homophobia, for example, is not always explicitly violent (e.g. saying that children should not be raised by gay guys is not an explicit call for violence).
Btw: Could you be more precise in your meanings and terminology? "Hate" for example is understood in a few different ways by different people.
Saying "wealth needs to be redistributed, private property shouldn't exist and the greedy rich shouldn't exist" is not something that should be censored (same goes for "all property should be private, no regulations should exist, and the State shouldn't help those with no means to help themselves").
We can agree or disagree with these statements, they may push small minority towards violence (e.g. against the rich or the "dangerous" communist), but they don't directly convey actionable hate towards somebody else. They don't invite you to slaughter the rich, or the liberal.
Saying "all Jews/n*ggers are bastards who deserve to die", instead, and organizing harassment campaigns against them, and publishing content that puts everyone in the same bucket on the basis of whichever arbitrary segmentation of society that we've come up with, is something worth censoring.
That's where I draw the line. If your words invite people to direct hate at someone not because of his/her actions or words, but because of their ideology, race or gender, and you even invite people to be abusive towards that person or group of people, then we are weakening the principle of mutual respect on top of which our civilization is built.
And if a platform fails to moderate prejudice and invites to being abusive against other human beings, then that platform has failed in its role as a reliable mean of communication in a modern society.
Intolerance and violent speech can only escalate on platforms that are tolerant against them. We've seen it with a lot of content posted on 4chan, 9chan and Parler. If people are left free to speculate on hate-fueled conspiracies, then you start with some vanilla conspiracy theories around the Jews controlling the world, and then a coulpe of weeks later you have a mass shooting in a synagogue. Or you start with a stale fantasy about Dems raping kids in a pizza shop, and next thing you know is that somebody turned up full armed into a pizzeria in Washington to slaughter the paedophile.
Tolerating prejudice and abusiveness empowers those with violent tendencies who would normally be too ashamed to share their ideas publicly, amid fears of being judged by "normal" people.
If a platform puts enough of these people in contact, and it closes both eyes on their dangerous content, then that platform is removing the societal inhibitory brakes that would normally prevent potential jerks and sociopaths from becoming actual jerks and criminals. And it shouldn't be a surprise if at some point one of them picks a rifle and starts putting their words into actions. The seeds of ALL of the mass shootings and terror acts that have happened in the West in the past decade can be traced back to online communities with extremist tendencies that have been left free to radicalize, until at some point somebody stopped being a troll and became a murderer.
> Mass shootings, suicides and rapes have happened because of the content of KF and ED.
Mass shootings and rapes? Ever since the cloudflare campaign when I began to pay attention to kiwifarms the set of things they have been clearly guilty of has been growing and the amount of minimally credible evidence to back said claims have taken an inverse path. Maybe ED? must admit I don't know much about ED.
> If you provide shelter for the racist, misogynist, homophobic, Nazi and automated weapons fanatic, then you deserve to be censored.
The website had 2 entire subforums[0] dedicated to both a very right wing figure and the whole america fist movement, as well as threads running in the hundreds/thousands mocking trump supporters, Qanon lunatics, jan 6th rioters and the list goes on. I'm not going to question the sheltering, but to assume that they were not mocked as anyone else is not really true. You did not claim that by the way, but I felt that this was worth mentioning. /pol/ has an order of magnitude worse content and I'm yet to see people wanting to seriously take them down.
The same thing with misogynist, i'm not sure. Women seemed to be a huge part of the website's base and there was an incel thread that also ran to the thousands, and incel forums apparently hate kiwifarms becauses of it. I'm sorry for not providing sources but its pretty hard when the website is down, there is a subforum for communities I think and its there where most of incel threads are as well as the jan 6th, qanon, etc. I'll try to get them sourced later if the website goes back up and I find some time.
> Let's not forget that the explicit purpose of KF is to run harassment and doxxing campaigns.
This is blatantly false. We can argue that there is some behind the scenes secret agenda/group to do that and all but calling it explicit is a lie. It's(was?) a public forum with public rules and open to anyone without an account to read. Since the first cloudflare post here in HN when the website was blocked i've been personally trying to get some archives of this clear as day harassment being fostered on the public website without backlash/banning and I've come up with almost nothing, especially for a website running for almost a decade now.
They do dox people/host doxes, as in it is not against the rules and the biggest threads do seem to manage to get them, but then you look at for example byuu's thread and he was never doxed by kiwifarms. Again that is not its explicit purpose, they're not doxbin.
> But there's really no gray area for KF and ED.
And yet no actual legal investigation has concluded that they're guilty of any harassment(and several were attempted), the owner has made clear that he'll comply with US authority investigations and has actually done it in the case of an user SIGSEGV, there is a subforum for this kind of legal stuff and I believe that is there, or its forum discussion, the thread should be name FBI compliance or something when they go over it. There wasn't even something like a big incident somewhat linked to the website like christchurch with 8chan and jan 6th with gab(?).
This is as website that the detractors are effectively creating claims out of thin air and getting them parroted thru media with the sources being pretty much trust me, in a time where archiving something in a forum that doesn't even need an account is a couple clicks, while having the same journalists knowingly printing lies about it (all the outlets blaming kiwifarms for things that doxbin did at the request of a streamer). If this is what passes for no having a gray area we're doomed.
When I was younger I was part of a local community that was hit with accusations from another one that absolutely hated us for airing out problems with them, and we got cut off from a lot and eventually killed off because of frivolous accusations from them to the "authority". This was a community linked to a service, and in the grand scheme of things was very small and inconsequential, but I have seen the road where believing things being repeated non-stop leads when it comes to this stuff and I'm extremely scared of it reaching the levels that it reached with kiwifarms. And before anyone asks it had nothing to do with any of the current political zeitgeist, it had to do with cheating, not that it's relevant either way but things get heated in those discussions.
[0]: https://archive.ph/7WeyE
[1]: sorry for the other sources, will try to get more once the website is back up or I get more time
It's Liz Fong-Jones's internet now, we just use it when we can. Liz is perhaps the single most powerful person online right now. She is a talented network engineer with connections deep in many tech companies and network providers. And she's wealthy enough to not have to work, and devote her time to activism and campaigning.
And with a new ruler come new rules. To wit: the net is not neutral. It is not a dumb pipe or common carrier. If your intent is to spew hate, harassment, or misinformation, your provider is not obligated to relay hate, harassment, or misinformation. They will be asked, nicely, to not relay your packets or otherwise allow your hate, harassment, or misinformation to cross their network. And if they do not comply, their providers will be contacted, and those providers' providers, and so on, and so on.
Any provider in the chain who does not silence hate, harassment, or misinformation will be considered complicit in those activities, deemed a rogue provider, and put on a shitlist. They may be considered fair game -- no one will come to their aid if their infra is hacked or DDoSed. If you want to stay off the shitlist, block the hate content. Close their hosting accounts. Ban them from social media. Blackhole their IPs or delink their ASNs if they self-host. Do not provide them with ancillary services like VPN or DDoS protection.
Oh, and one more thing, the trans community is one you do NOT want to piss off.
Be nice, don't be a TERF, and watch what you say online -- everywhere online.
The author of this post runs kiwi farms. He has had just about every bit of infrastructure in existence deplatformed including his phone number. The end of the road is the ISPs stared blocking his site and when that happens it’s basically game over.
> Just as moving VPS companies kicked the can to the next VPS company. Just as getting my own IPs kicked the can to upstream. Just as getting a stable upstream kicked the can to DDoS mitigation.
Yeah, this is the way. There are still BBS’s out there with FidoNet coordinates. Granted, most are using the telnet protocol but there are some dial up boards still in existence. As far as I know you can still run at 56k over cell phone connections. I bet for ~$100 per month you could run a dial up BBS that supports 5 lines with a FidoNet address. It’s only good for text but the protocol and bandwidth are adequate for that and text is sufficient to distribute ideas. Also, because this is happening over VOIP I think the content is protected by common carrier laws.
Your ISP can stop you from doing that whenever they want.
Also: I really want to do this, but I have no idea how. The technical aspect is straight forward, the legal aspect is far beyond me. I have no Idea how I could legally host a website in my country.
What do I have to do to comply with the GDPR. Even if I have e.g. no user accounts, access logs probably count as "user data", do I have to preserve them in any way? Do I have to secure them? What can/can't I do with them?
Do I need to present a "cookie warning", how should that cookie warning be worded, what requirement does it need to fulfill, what cookies can I set under these circumstance? How does this change if I do not use cookies?
What personal Information do I need to include, are real name+address+email enough? How do they need to be included? Do I have a legal requirement to respond to communications over that address, in what time frame?
Surely there are more things to consider here. Do I need to register this website, do I need to register it under a buisiness?
I really do not know. But to be honest the obligation to dox myself is pretty much enough for me not to give it a try.
This is before putting anything on the website. The concerns about speech restrictions are a completely different topic.
You are speculating quite a bit here from a position of ignorance. Googling can answer most of your questions in 5 minutes or so.
These are all questions that are VERY easy to answer. You do not need consent to place strictly necessary cookies (think a session id that identifies a shopping cart). Other cookies you do need consent for.
Access logs, don't 'probably count', they only count if they include information that could be used to identify a person, like an email address or ip address. Pretty easy to not log that info.
Do you need to 'register' a website as a business with your local authorities? Likely not, but I don't know where you live.
Easiest way is to not place any cookies and not keep any logs.
You don't have to show a cookie warning if you don't place any cookies and you're not processing any user data if you don't keep logs.
> Easiest way is to not place any cookies and not keep any logs. You don't have to show a cookie warning if you don't place any cookies and you're not processing any user data if you don't keep logs.
That was very much in my mind when making LokiList.
Since I made LokiList after FOSTA killed Craigslist personals, I also made sure that all user interactions occur offsite on a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted network to minimize reliance on Section 230 protections.
At least some organizations are legally required to archive certain information.
I could imagine that there are certain obligations towards law enforcement to keep certain data and make it accessable upon court order.
You might be thinking of "Know Your Customer" laws, which only apply to some industries and definitely not private persons for a blog. It applies to industries like financial, identification and certain types of commerce (eg: regulated products). Even then, only in some countries.
I don't know where you live but maybe just knowing of the concepts should be helpful. I think you should be totally fine to start a non-commercial website without consequence, but of course this isn't legal advice.
If you get a court order you have to hand over everything you have. But in most jurisdictions if "everything you have" is nothing there is nothing they can do about it.
>However, this Regulation applies to controllers or processors which provide the means for processing personal data for such personal or household activities.
But hosting a website means processing personal data. This very much reads to me like the user is exempt. But the moment I am hosting a blog, I am providing a service which processes personal data.
I fail to see how I would be exempt.
And even if, at what point am I not? If I am taking donations? If I have a comment section? If I have accounts?
All of these things are defined in the GDPR, even the on-the-face-of-it term "economic activity," which is what differentiates "enterprise" from "household and personal." You just have to keep reading. You can process all the personal data you want as long as you're not a business entity selling goods or services. The thresholds involved are also defined.
Why not go after, e.g., wiki.freifunk.net, www.fefe.de, https://weimarnetz.de/freifunk/vpn/ or a million other noncommercial websites with some of these questions. See how far that goes. This comment is pure nonsense. "Tech" companies, i.e., websites set up to collect personal data for commercial purposes, usually advertising, is a relatively new phenomenon on the internet.
Personal information about yourself which you have to include on your website, and how to register it, depends on the laws of the country you reside in (e.g. Germany has strict requirements on this), so I can't say anything about that in general, but I believe most countries have pretty lax rules here, which should make it totally fine to run your a personal website.
I can say something more sensible wrt your GDPR and "cookie" questions:
The GDPR has one overarching principle: "data minimalisation".
There are no requirements to preserve things like access logs, but rather the opposite: you should only retain personal information for as long as you _need_ it - and then once you no longer need it, you should remove it. And while you have the information, you should take meaningful steps to secure it, where the definition of that changes based on best practices over time.
The important thing here is that you think about what information you need, for what purpose (so something specific like "prevent abuse" rather than "it could come in handy at some point"), and then consider the tradeoff between privacy of your users and your own need for the information (and document this thinking in some way, so that you can later prove that you've done so).
So for those access logs, write down that you log e.g. ip address, timestamp, UA string, referer, visited page (possibly including querystring with search terms), that you retain this information for 2 weeks, maybe that you then aggregate it in some ways, and that you'll delete the information after this time. Your purposes for doing this are probably insight into usage patterns and detecting and fighting abuse. You're explicitly not connecting these logs to other data sources to identify specific visitors, nor sharing this information with any third party, so you believe the privacy impact for your visitors is minimal.
On your website, have a page (accessible from anywhere, so e.g. linked in the footer) that says the same. Specific wording effectively doesn't matter, but what does matter is that it's understandable by your average visitor.
As for cookies:
"Functional cookies" (shopping cart, "remember me" function etc) you can set without any permission.
"Tracking cookies" (advertising, analytics, etc), you can only set based on explicit and voluntary permission (visitors need to be able to say "no" as easily as you say "yes", without negative consequences, and if they say give permission, they need to be able to withdraw it just as easily at a later date, so one-click in the footer or somesuch - they also need complete and understandable information what they give permission for, so put that in the question, and link to a similar page as above for the GDPR).
I am in Germany, so the requirements definitely apply to me.
I appreciate the effort. Clearly there is quite a bit of effort involved to comply with just EU law. To me the legal aspect is the largest hurdle, it turns a fun weekend project into wading through unbearable legal requirements and in the end I still will not know if I am actually in compliance.
Sure. I can host illegally. And I suspect, many, many websites are knowingly or unknowingly doing this.
But this can not really be a real solution to the problem.
I never said anything about illegal, just front with VPN to your own physical hardware. But apparently he tried that and the VPN then shut him down, and ultimately he got DDoSed.
My take is distributed if not decentralized network.
The people attacking him have time to track down every single infrastructure host behind the site, bully the company, hack their stuff and ddos their network.
The attack on kiwifarms has shown the internet is no longer free.
For people who aren't aware, the author of this piece is the founder of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
The idea that the internet was at some previous point a free-for-all has never been true. Even before the web was a thing SysAdmins would regularly block NNTP newgroups from being available on their servers.
It doesn't surprise me that a site that taunts people about reposting the Christchurch shooter's livestream should have trouble getting service. The fact I'm writing this from a throwaway shows the reality of the harrassment some people I know have suffered from this group.
Censorship is bad. But battles should be fought for people who need protection against it, not for people who try to exploit tolerant societies' carve-outs for free speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance is important:
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.