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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

> the latter makes me more hopeful as someone in that specific minority community.

I'm curious what you think the "balancing" donation/action/whatever cloudflare could do to counteract the very real harms kf causes are?

This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it.

I think this kind of "but we donate!" approach is both an admission that they enable harm, and a completely inadequate to the situation here.

Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.

So how is cloudflare going to make this one right to their ERG?

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> This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it.

I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan.

> Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.

This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid. It feels incredibly odd to me to look at a coordinated campaign of harassers and think "it should be easier for organized groups of people to control the conversation". You can look at my comments in this thread or in others, I'm totally cool every time hateful shitbags are taken off the internet and I fight back when they're defended. I'm just not in favor of any broad policy that puts one organization in control of speech.

> I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan.

I didn't say it was? I don't see why the fact that cf is paying for their ddos protection instead of kf paying for it themselves is really relevant to the enablement of harm.

Honestly that makes it even worse: in the other situation, cf is taking money from a bad actor and funneling it towards a good one (both allegedly). Here cf is paying expenses (probably in the marketing line of their expense sheet) to keep kf accessible, including storing, replicating, and distributing their content, doxes and all.

> This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid.

I think this is a contradiction of your own making? The problem people have isn't that the targets of kf are being "silenced" in some Renaissance ideal sort of way. It's that they are put in a position of fearing for their own lives and the lives of the people around them. There's no contradiction here unless you think the people who want the site to stop are secret free speech absolutists.

Anyways, while we're talking about perfect worlds where police actually do anything about stuff like this and no one has to resort, in my perfect world the internet doesn't break because cf does, and cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech. But we can't always get what we want.

> in my perfect world (...) cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech

This is literally the only thing I'm advocating for. I'm a trans woman that openly speaks about my and others' experiences. Trust me when I say, codified systems for reporting abuse are themselves the target of the same abuse. I've gotten the "Sorry, we're leaving this up" from reporting anti trans content on Facebook. I've had comments saying sex != gender reported/removed so many times, a Reddit account I used straight up isn't allowed to comment anywhere anymore. All the YouTube shit you hear conservatives whine about straight up just scans the autogenerated transcript for any mention of political phrases like "LGBT" or sexually explicit language like might come up in discussing my transition. All these reasons are why I'm fine with Kiwi Farms coming down but I don't think Cloudflare should change their stance on avoiding it in almost all situations.

The donation thing is that Cloudflare refuses to profit off of this and is therefore incentivized to avoid such customers. Companies are always going to pick the path of greatest profit so engraining morality in that path is better than not doing it.

> Trust me

Trust me when I say I'm aware and that I have very specific reasons to feel the way I do.

But the thing is that cf absolutely is profiting off this. They provide this service to make themselves indispensable, to make themselves an attractive product for people to use. By holding the line here, they will drum up plenty of business that's really happy about their stance, even if it only toes the line kf crosses with impunity.

The goal of the campaign against cf (and anyone else providing them services) is to make it less profitable to provide services to kf. This is the only tool left in the capitalist world we live in.

What cf is doing here is less like advocating for free speech and more like the social version of providing a free open smtp relay. They obscure the true cost of doing something reprehensible.

And they do it at great financial expense completely by choice, because it likely drums up more business for them than it costs.

Just a hunch but if you want a less public place to discuss this I have contact info on my profile.

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