Blocking Kiwifarms
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.
If this is going to eventually become precedent (despite what is said this is now the new basis from which other decisions are made) other site owners and future one’s should have an idea of what exactly wasn’t dealt with. Cloudflare’s reach is extensive and becoming a critical part the internet so there’s plenty at stake here.
The lack of transparency by Google, Facebook, etc is the worst part of this whole top-level internet moderation trend.
> Officials said they received a second call from the suspect, using a computer-generated voice, saying they were upset about Greene’s view on transgender youth rights.
Posters in the Keffals thread believe the fake bomb threat was to blame for Cloudflare’s reaction. The account which made the post barely had any other activity on the site. The post itself was removed quickly by moderators. If it’s true that an obvious fake bomb threat which was swiftly removed was the cause for this action, Cloudflare has some hard explaining to do to its remaining customers. Fake anonymous posts and an ideological Twitter mob can apparently DoS your entire operation with Cloudflare.
If the threat was something else, I and other customers would love to learn exactly what it was.
This is a question for the law, not for the mob. The internet, thanks to a completely fucked up legal regime (section 230), is currently very gray.
Facebook and Twitter, which are commonly used to facilitate large-scale violent riots and play host to far more doxxing and cyberbullying than kiwifarms could ever hope to, get a pass despite being the main facilitator of that communication. In contrast, infrastructure services like Cloudflare (and even AWS) have been subject to intense pressure to drop other sites where people say bad things.
Under this theory, we need to be taking Facebook and Twitter offline immediately. And maybe also the phone company too.
Mainstream social media also largely does not moderate nearly well enough to uphold the standard that you are applying to Cloudflare.
I don't think that's right? Legally we've set things up so that no matter how despicable your site is, your telco or ISP can't decide on their own shut you off. They're regulated as infrastructure, and are required to keep doing business with you. They'll shut you off if they receive a court order, but not on their own judgement.
In contrast, nothing prevents Cloudflare from looking at a company's public-facing website (ie as an unprivileged visitor just going to the domain) and deciding whether or not one wants to do business with that company.
If one patron starts beating another to a pulp, the bartender breaking up the fight does not signify a failure of the rule of law or law enforcement. You stepped in to help. It would be nice if you were given official air cover to do so. But I and most Americans prefer a system where the government has extra hoops to jump through to halt even dangerous speech.
Giving in to them is allowing domestic terrorism.
What really happens is that the bartender signals the cooler to throw out said patrons to settle it some place where it isn't their liability. It goes to the street, who knows where and what they'll do to each other.
And that's pretty much what cloudflare is doing here, saying "you can't do this in here" and now we get to see where the chips fall.
This is more accurate, thank you. Either way, not a failure of law enforcement. (It is if the bartender calls the cops, they do nothing, and the victim turns up the next day in a hand basket.)
After many sales emails that we ignored, your sales guy found and called me on my personal cell when I was on vacations in Mexico City, trying to push a 5000/mo DDoS mitigation contract, and i explained to him that we are happier paying 100k/year to a net neutral company VeriSign (now down to 27k), than offloading the legal liability decisions on our behalf to your Majesty Matthew Prince.
While it makes sense to use CF for a booter DDoS-for-hire outfit accepting Monero, any legitimate company that has real money and jobs at stake should not use CF.
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.
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.
I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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'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.
All in all, it's hard.
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 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.
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.
Is that the case?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712819
Concentrated power in the path of speech or commerce is dangerous, whether it's governmental or private.
Many parties deciding independently whether to "entertain my nonsense" is good. One critical party in the path (governmental or commercial) is bad.
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.
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.
> > > Many parties deciding independently whether to "entertain my nonsense" is good. One critical party in the path (governmental or commercial) is bad.
Have a nice rest of your day; I'm done.
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.
(Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR.)
https://reclaimthenet.org/emails-facebook-coordinating-with-...
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-50-biden-administra...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
> 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.
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.
They can't, because we have laws against monopolies.
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?
If this is true, explain police protection. Or restraining order.
Because it is unacceptably lax to say the least. And way too many people have died because of it.
It is, very explicitly according to the SCOTUS, not actually their job.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
Laws aren't about what's moral or not.
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
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.
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.
I will not allow it.
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.
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.
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.
Doxxing isn't illegal.
> harassing people with threats of violence
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.
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.
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.
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.
defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
TDLR: "Free Speech only for the Speech I like"
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
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.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/anti...
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.
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.
Of course actual violence is a different case altogether.
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.
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.
You're obviously correct here, and I'm still trying to figure out how the above poster didn't realize what they were saying as they were saying it.
Am I wrong here?
“There seems to be a double standard with who can partake in intimidation campaigns.”
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.
This seems like a fundamentally different scenario than the OP I was responding to, glad I asked for specifics ;)
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)
Are there not death threats posted on Twitter and Facebook all the time?
Oh and the journalist who threatened those schoolboys with violence.
Of course those aren’t real threats of violence apparently. Only the right threatens actual violence. The left only does rhetoric. /s
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.
Your post is dangerous misinformation.
They posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with their response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove it.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
They clearly want to keep this content up.
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.
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 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.
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.
What harassment campaigns? Talking about someone and pointing out what publicly say is not harassment.
"free speech is certain types of people not having anything they don't like spoken anywhere"
Not to say there shouldn't be a place for official responses, just that it's kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
(The counterargument would be that the status quo provides unparalleled public access to top-level staff, I'll leave that angle for someone else to explore ;)
Companies in this position are damned if they do, damned if they don't. I for one at least appreciate thoughtful, substantive responses from company leadership in company-specific threads, and I'm happy that at least on HN we are more likely to be given a real, substantive response than the corporate drivel that is shoveled to most other media outlets.
People must be allowed to change their minds without being stigmatized or judged for it.
> ...displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
Well, why should one look for additional (potentially irrelevant) context [0] when there's debate that could be had on its resolution? I mean, it is a struggle to get everyone to agree even when they are on the same page [1].
[0] https://youtu.be/bjD3PcULhJg?t=369 / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/bjD3PcULhJg
[1] https://nitter.net/visualizevalue/status/1565797227527868417
When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.
The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.
I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.
That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.
It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence
As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.
Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.
You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.
We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.
I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.
People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.
I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.
It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.
In your examples, you get it right at the end: we seek to contextualize actions and use peoples words as evidence of context. It is the context of the acts that matter, not the words said.
People who say that are trying to use their words to force you to not have the right to use your words.
I don't think it's as lopsided as you think. I think HN has a very strong, and fairly rigid, view on free speech.
And I think a much larger % than you imply see a grey area that is causing real, physical IRL harm.
It's hard to write down what I'm talking about. But it's pretty easy to see it.
Bullying has always caused physical harm. Both the kinetic type of pushing and this transitive type we are talking about.
This is literally what they do though. They harass them with the message that they will never stop until they do it. It's not just random bullying that then pushes people over the edge. It's commands that you need to commit suicide. It's calling your family and workplace and telling them you've committed suicide. The "joke" there being that not only do you initially shock the family, but when your target does commit suicide, the family doesn't believe the real call.
Again, my stance is as follows: KF is filled with despicable behavior and people. However we absolutely must be accurate and precise when it comes to what happens there and why certain people would rather the site not exist.
Source please?
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.
It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.
Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.
> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
> I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry
-Byuu
Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.
Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.
Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.
> Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.
https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...
Furthermore, do you believe that someone who is issuing a threat on a public platform is going to not act it out because you took it away? If anything it just sounds like it would make them even more incensed to do it, just makes absolutely no sense to frame it as some immediacy issue.
> Just rang up a couple of lads down in Belfast and asked them to plant bombs in all of those places. also, 3 armed men will be at each place, waiting.
Seems to have been moderated/scrubbed from the keffals thread but I do see replies referencing it.
The post was screenshotted and posted to Twitter almost instantly and it seems that the post itself was quickly moderated and the user banned.
Seems like a straw that broke the camel’s back situation, but it’s very odd how CloudFlare is talking about “moderation” when it seems as though KiwiFarms quickly took care of moderating it themselves.
And fwiw, I had no idea what KiwiFarms was before this week.
No. The post alludes to active investigations concerning, among other things, bomb threats. One doesn’t air evidence in that situation.
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/2022-alleged-kiwi-...
When I went on, on the forum’s official home page put front and center there was a link to a post written by an admin/moderator (which was also pinned by moderators) doxxing some trans woman with her address and last known location and the need to bring her to “justice”, whatever that meant.
Frankly it was appalling and I felt like from that one post alone (there were hundreds of posts) I had seen enough
Trying to make sense of this whole thing just makes me feel like i'm going mad, everyone supposedly knows that is common sense that they are guilty of several swattings, harassment, etc, but not a single person can show anything even close to resembling action, or even non-absurd obvious joke threats, while the archives do show rules against it(for whatever that's worth) and reportedly even by the detractors those threats had been deleted. How can something gain this much notoriety, show up in so many articles being blamed for those things and not a single source can give something backing it up that isn't wild speculation?
Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.
Maybe I should just stop trying to make sense of it at this point and go to bed.
> Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.
So you know where crimes are currently being committed? Have you reported them to the authorities?
This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
You provide a service and like every service provider you have a TOS/AUP. The issue is the Acceptable Use Paragraph is clear as long as the content isn’t Copyright or CSE then it’s fine as you will absolve yourself of any responsibility.
No other CDN/WAF tolerates nationalists who threaten people, Cloudflare does. No other CDN/WAF makes the reporting process essentially doxing yourself to the threatening website. Cloudflare does. No other CDN/WAF intentionally puts all the most vile sites on dedicated CDN hosts so they get DDoSed while the normal customers don’t.
It’s purely so then when the vile sites get DDoSes then they use those learnings to improve the controls for all customers.
Much like providing security guards for a Proud Boys rally. It’s an intentional business decision to provide those services. You could chose not to. But you don’t.
>This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
Exactly.
I didn't know KiwiFarms existed before it was in the news and trending everywhere, so I don't know a lot about what really went on there in the past years. What concerns me more general with this situation. There is a lot of power in the hands of people able to rile up the mob to de-platform whoever the current very-bad-person of the day is. With the outrage on social media platforms, and then the media pressure from those reporting on the outrage, companies just do the safe, self-interested thing and acquiesce, branding it as some noble act.
It's wrong that whether someone can have a platform, or use a service, or hold a job, is determined not by some kind of objective TOS, but rather whether or not an online mob is demanding their scalp. It's arbitrary, unjust, and has and will harm harmless people.
So, in this case, you're worried about vigilante mobs deplatforming a platform, and the slippery slope involved, but the folks being deplatformed are a worse form of what you're arguing against.
It's hard to understand what you're standing up for here, because there's no way to argue for the existence of this site without contradicting yourself, and negating your own argument.
Actually, if they processed data from any European person they would be required to follow GDPR. And if they processed data from any Brazilian they would be required to follow LGPD.
Any significant deliberate blindness towards privacy, defamation, and hate speech laws are unlawful acts that must be punished according to the Law. Idealy by extraditing the website administrators so they can they can face criminal charges over their misconduct.
By making that call regardless, I don’t think you’ve increased the likelihood of law enforcement (or other appropriate parties) stepping up to deal with such cases in a timely manner in the future. Maybe rather the opposite, which would be unfortunate.
I'd compare it to a website shutting down someone's account because they send a meme where they might not have the rights, which is illegal, which also isn't usually resulting in a ban.
Now where you draw the line is a philosophical question.
Your decision today. You took ownership before for the arbitrary decisions to remove DS and 8Chan, take ownership now and do not try to backpedal. You are Cloudflare's leader.
>That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
You failed to take ownership of this issue either way. Your response suggests you can't understand the responsibility that you continue to have and are trying to shirk it. My suggestion is, find someone who is willing to be compensated to have this responsibility if it burdens you so. That's part of a leader's job.
That is a dangerous place to get to. Due process has incredible value. It allows us to live free lives while also punishing and preventing crimes.
Also, considering people doxxed her address and kept showing up / swatting her, I doubt that would even be a short term solution at all, other than emboldening the harassers.
If there's actual violence being organized here I'm wondering why nobody has been charged with a crime.
There was a lot of compromising and embarrassing information on KF about the activist who started this campaign (a streamer called Keffals). It looks like the whole feud actually started when Keffals wanted to take down this site to remove the embarrassing information, solicit donations, and gain some activist street cred. Users of KF did not respond well to the initial calls to take it down, and things escalated from there.
It doesn't really change the situation. CF isn't a public utility, there are no sorts of 'due process' that they need to follow on cases like this, especially in extraordinary circumstances. Advertisers pull campaigns all the time due to public perception changing.
My critique isn't on Mr. Prince deciding to keep KF up or not, it's specifically on his trying to walk away from the responsibility of making a choice either way. If he does not like the unwanted attention received from having to make these difficult choices nobody is forcing him to be in that position where he's expected to.
Similarly, if KF's owner doesn't want to get banned from using companies services they can work on their moderation and public perception.
If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
Additionally Mr. Prince had options at his disposal after the first time this happened. Cloudflare's a large valuable company. He could have retained a 'Director of Enforcement' after that event and told the world "their word is final on enforcement actions, I am removing myself from the moderation pipeline to focus on growing the business". Then if one of their decisions backfired, dismiss them. There's plenty of talented people willing to accept a large compensation package for that risk.
>If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
Probably also something to consider: this is a public company. The latter option is maybe not tenable for a large public corporation subject to the whims of shareholders. By that I mean times and beliefs change over time and a public company has to adjust to that in order to continue to attract investors. Private companies can work with whomever they feel and if it's their niche to work with 'high risk' clients, nobody is stopping them.
If I were trying to get a website deplatformed at least the approach is clear and easy.
The entire history/founding of KF is predicated around violence perpetrated against trans people.
They actively stock, harass, and cause harm IRL. Even far-right anti-trans people like MTG allege they were behind the SWATs against her - and that is not the first accusation.
This has resulted in deaths.
They recently followed a women into a different country, after they chased her from their home.
They tracker her down and someone posted a photo outside of her new residence.
like a cartel hostage sign. A not so implicit threat that they can find you no matter where you hide and are an IRL person is literally a hundred feet away.
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369... https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman...
This also is how authoritarian governments create cause to neutralize groups.
Do I have to wait for law enforcement to stop me from displaying their content? Or can I, as a private company, make a judgement call and decline their business?
I think the answer here is pretty obvious and your attempt at passing the buck is pathetically weak.
Does Cloudflare wait for a court order before taking action when it detects a DDoS attack or when it suspects that a client is malicious?
The law is by design reactionary. In this case, I don't mean that in a bad way; what I mean is that the law is designed to respond to criminals, not to preempt them. If all of your moderation decisions, even in cases that go beyond hate speech or bigoted content into straight-up abuse of infrastructure and direct targeting of individuals -- if you need that to be reliant on a court then you are giving up the ability to prevent abuse and you can only respond to that abuse.
Do you worry about due process when someone's site is getting knocked offline by automated requests, or is your primary worry about protecting your customers?
What's even worse is that by abjugating your responsibility to protect your customers even in cases where there are clear threats, and by encouraging the law to become even faster and more trigger-happy to compensate, you encourage the creation of censorship engines that are even more dangerous than the ones that you are in charge of. We should have better laws around doxing and threatening people online, but even once we get better laws, Cloudflare is still going to have a part to play in detecting targeted attacks. No just law is going to be fast enough or nuanced enough to make these decisions for you.
You can't get rid of your responsibility to such a degree that you won't need to make moderation decisions even about non-ideological and purely abusive content like doxing forums. And by refusing to recognize your role in that process, you allow people to be completely driven offline and censored in the exact same ways that your company is dedicated to preventing. It's no different than allowing a DDoS attack on one of your clients to continue because you haven't specifically heard from a judge yet that you should stop it.
This in turn drastically shapes incentives, because of the cost of litigation and highly variable access to legal infrastructure: as we all know, police have no formal duty to protect despite having vast levels of legal immunity from consequences when they make bad decisions.
Hence the pressure campaign on your firm, because exerting leverage through market forces and PR strategies is simply more effective than begging some state authority to intervene. Of course, it hurts you somewhat insofar as it's harder for you to sell a service to anyone and everyone when people see that you're willing to revoke access in some cases. but then you were willing to do that already, eg to pre-empt perceived legal risks from FOSTA/SESTA.
I think sites like Kiwifarms have a right to exist, but on the other hand they don't have any particular right to DDOS protection. If a site is so chronically unpopular that it's constantly getting kicked out of nice infrastructure perhaps the operators need to reconsider their security stance or reflect on the basis of said unpopularity.
Of course, DDOS attacks can be engineered rather than being an expression of organic network sentiment, but then so can mitigation strategies.
I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?
There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.
When you pull your crypto driven system out of the light, you are going to have to fight what lives in the dark. If you screwed up the protocol of your system and it's taken over, well it's gone, you exist outside the law and there are no means to get it back. Do a bunch of trolls with stolen crypto generation means exist on your network and flood out all the legitimate users, well too bad.
Civil society exists between the authoritarians that want dominion over everything and those that embrace chaos and would leave the world in ruin. It is a delicate and imperfect balance, but where it exists allows humanity to flourish.
Merely improving the tor network's name resolution has nothing to do with your grand philosophical argument against internet freedom.
A rare win/win.
"civil society tends to operate in the open"
... Some of us aren't up to your standards of civility and propriety, and we're going to find ways to get on without your permission.
Especially when you can make the case that doing so will help their bottom line and legal footing.
Successive governments have undermined the authority of judicial review and I'd support anyone campaigning to change that. But, the solution isn't to try and build a system that prevents the government from ever piercing the privacy of citizens. That's just a recipe for anarchy.
Honestly, maybe a few years ago I might have been on your side. But, this whole cryptocurrency saga has just soured me on techno-libertarianism. A society needs an effective government (accountable to the people) that can enforce the law.
I agree it presents a lot of problems, crypto has harmed millions of people, and the people who presented crypto as investments should be held accountable by standard government rules.
But yes, these are indeed complicated problems. All I really know is that I sleep much better at night knowing I've never aided this movement in any way.
> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
This is the logic of vigilantes. I'm not saying what you have done is on the same level as vigilante murder or anything, but don't try to justify it as something high-and-mighty. You've once again terminated a customer on a whim. And that's your right, but stop trying to make this out to be anything more than that.
It’s also in Cloudflare’s very own terms of service that KF agreed to when they signed up
“…You intended to cause that person to reasonably fear for their or their family’s safety.” [1]
Regardless, federally in the US, doxxing can be considered a form of harassment, which is generally illegal.
[1] https://www.aerlawgroup.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-doxing-some...
I would argue California DoJ set the example that even releasing personal information in what appears as retaliation to an event seems to be lawful in their eyes. When California DoJ started doxxing they did it right after Bruen Supreme Court case was released.... but hey I can't prove their intent.
There also seems to be a double standard where dropkiwifarms.net has a link to a google drive that seems to be somewhat similar to the content that might appear on a lolcow thread and could be interpreted as 'doxxing'. For example it has a copy of Joshua Moon's resume and a legal document showing his name change.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-sFPWY4HXOxvIUzkyyHV...
A business terminating their relationship with a problematic customer is not "vigilantism".
He’s also pro-active in both deleting and reporting any posts that advocate violence, whether that’s a bombing, shooting or stalking.
There is no credible evidence of any physical violence or deaths resulting from KiwiFarms.
Chloe Sagal stated in her farewell messages that her pain came from negative comments made about, and to, her by fellow members of the broader LBGTQIA+ community.
Byuu/Near faked his death, as he did not appear on any Japanese or US death lists. He also has been seen by other developer expats in the time that has passed since his purported suicide.
There is no evidence for the claims being made in the drive to cancel this website. I say this as someone who has never posted there and personally find much of it reprehensible to my ethics and politics.
If you would like Cloudflare to be legally obliged to act like a utility or public infrastructure, lobby for actual laws to regulate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota
> CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare
I’d like to see equal treatment, that’s the least worst option.
I want extreme objectivity at the highest level.
Edit: I’m questioning OBJECTIVITY and Andy Ngo is just a fucking example. Find some hypothetical antifa forum, the point is about standards.
The details of this is irrelevant IMO, let me repeat the argument I’m posing: Is there an objective standard that can be applied across the political spectrum?
We should be concerned that there is a political hijacking. That sits extremely unwell with me. We need to condemn all violence otherwise any actions by Cloudflare are just politics and frankly, terrifying.
Arguing pure hypotheticals is rarely productive.
Posing hypotheticals is exactly how to test the limits of the system. It is a key component of the legislative and law making process. The entire field of law, millions of lawyers think about hypotheticals on a daily basis to analyze, write and interpret the law. Humans have evolved to have a dedicated frontal lobe whose job is to predict hypothetical scenarios and conduct cost/benefit/planning analysis. As a software engineer, I write hypothetical inputs to create unit tests so my system doesn't break. Thinking about hypotheticals is basically fundamental to all things in life and the universe.
I don't dispute that a life was threatened and murder may have been imminent, I'm taking that for granted. I just don't understand how this action could have any effect upon that course of events. Murder is a physical-world thing, not an online content thing.
Further explanation would be appreciated.
(the next paragraph is an example and not real, do not take any intent from it, which in itself may be ironic considering the argument I'm making).
If I call out "We should kill assetlabel because I do not like their politics", in itself it is not a serious threat, as I don't know you and cannot act on it. But it would be a mistake to tolerate the statement, even in a 'joking' manner (you can see in my previous post the 'joking' manner is commonly used by fascists to downplay serious threats). Again, the issue with allowing this behavior is it normalizes it. Now we step it up, what if 4 people repeat this same threat, 10, 20, 100? With each person repeating the line the chances of someone knowing you and acting on this behavior increases greatly. Any such threat must be moderated, and sites must have a history moderating such behaviors and not tolerating them.
In the early days of the internet being anonymous was somewhat easy, and in the later days of the internet it is nearly impossible, and more worryingly you must continue to remain anonymous in the future after such threats are made against you as you have no idea how long someone may harbor aggression over the situation. Based the early days of the internet we've normalized violence and threats and carried it on much too long as it has consequences in the real world.
What risk? Can you please share details? From my perspective, it seems like this is a thin excuse, and there was not actually a credible risk that you were mitigating.
Post the screenshot then. Show us what changed between when CF said "KF is acting within the bounds of the law and will remain online" and today.
Refusing service to customers you find contemptible is completely reasonable. Continuing to service customers out of a sense of fairness even though you find them contemptible is also reasonable. Pretending that you have a sense of fairness that keeps all legal entities online and abandoning it to protect your bottom line is hypocritical and cowardly.
Being a company that protects the vulnerable is every bit as honorable as being a company that stands for freedom of expression. Today Cloudflare proves it is neither.
https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1566188237986893824
Just shows how the activists are hammering Cloudflare CEO into submission. These people want complete abandonment of Freedom of Speech/Expression despite of what CEO is saying in this thread that it isn't about FoS/FoE.
I am just terrified of what holds for our future. We used to celebrate speech as progressives back in the 90's and used to defend it with fierce opposition to any supression. They say, freedom and liberty are one generation away, if the newer generation wants CCP-style authoritarianism, they will get it.
Consider this next time you consider Cloudflare. Not because of what decision they made, but because they are trying to make themselves the pipe that connects any two points on the internet.
On other note, I expect ICANN to become political in a few years, observing the way our institutions are failing, both domestic and international.
I don't know what you're trying to say.
> The other half want to abolish SCOTUS
Sorry, who are these people? I don't know any.
Ever think the feds have half a brain among them, and know there's no threat?
I know how gullible people are in these culture-warish times, but I still hope you've lost credibility with some significant fraction of us. Maybe those of us old enough to remember when the average techy was libertarian and opposed censorship. The Farms is right back up, by the way. But at least now you can wash your hands of it. Don't think Twitter will stop coming at you though. You need to understand those people want to punish and teach.
What you're saying is you're fine hosting harassment until it gets bad enough for a court to finally intervene and order it offline. But Kiwifarms was already banned in New Zealand for hosting a snuff film showing innocent people getting slaughtered for their religion. I'm not sure what exactly you wanted: a US court issuing an order that would almost certainly be unconsitutional prior restraint? An obscenity prosecution?
Society has decided that it's your choice what kinds of speech the company you control enables, and you've decide to tell us that you're going to pretend it isn't. Well, it is. Those sites are up on Cloudflare, because you want them to be, and nothing you say is going to change that reality.
sure, but I presume CF makes the decision of whether or not to facilitate access to/sell services to other undesirable bits of the internet all the time without requiring law enforcement intervention.
* Does CF wait for LE or a court case to block or drop malware distribution or command&control channels from their cache/NS/1.1.1.{2+} resolvers?
* Would CF wait until LE intervenes to drop a known, demonstrated CP host?
* Would CF continue to cache pirated material until a court stepped in even if approached by an alleged copyright holder?
* Would any of the above actors have a right of appeal with CF?It is not your job to be the police. You should let the authorities do their job.
I have no faith in your principles. From my perspective, the only principle you have is your share price. That's fine, of course. I don't expect you to stick your neck out or risk your business. But don't pretend like this is some principled stand.
I don't believe in cloudflare principles either. Seems like they only grew "responsible" when it attracted negative public attention in the last days/weeks.
this looks like PR, damage/image control to me.
we do not have a good solution for partial censorship on the internet right now (always the same issues, who can decide to take out a website who implement it, due process, vpn moderation etc)
for me, having principles regarding content removal at this point is pretty much black and white, either you are totally against censorship (without due process), or you are ok with it.
Cloudflare actions denote they don't hold any of the principles above even if they know all about the selective content removal complexities.
P.S: Interrestingly, the Department of Homeland Security seems to be able to seize various domains quite easily.
> traditional rule of law systems.
As opposed to what, "modern and innovative corporate rule of law systems"?
INAL but I am pretty sure there are all sort of legal actions that can be taken before the entire "due process" is completed.
You are aware, Mr. Prince, that people can be arrested and put in jail ("Rule of Law") and have a court date at a much later date ("Due Process")?
[p.s. for hn]: It's not that I give a fig about wikifarms (which was TIL for me). But this posturing by Cloudflare and framing this as a responsible action in context of 'a broken legal system' (aka "traditional") is too much.
Yes, let's have CEOs of SV companies apply the "Rule of Law" for us. While you are at it, why don't you 'edit' the content that you are 'fronting'? "Traditional editorial systems" are also desperately in need of the wise guidance of CEOs and corporations! /s
Banning them creates a hazard, since now to get an opponent banned from the service, they can create content that reaches to this level.
It's a Layer 8 DDOS.
Everyone knows what you are saying is possible but nooone will admit it.
That's a clever way of spinning the issue. But no amount of spinning can change the fact that you are clearly using doublespeak. Contrary to what you say in the post, this clearly isn't in the spirit of the policy you had promised [1], or even had advertised just a few days ago. [2]
You are mostly just giving in to pressure. I can't blame you for that, given that I have to use a pseudonym here myself.
Otherwise, if this was just a matter of different principles, you would also kick out media websites who regularly dox people, or publish dumps of hacked websites, etc.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
[2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
- every evil person ever
Well, who should? Is anything with the authority going to or even inclined to in the slightest?
Cloudflare has maintained a lobbying/policy department since quite early on, but I'd argue that the post from the 31st wasn't so much that there _should_ be policy against this than that there simply isn't. Given the coming EU DSA or, hell, the comical farce that is/was Texas HB20, it seems clear that further government regulation of online speech is coming in some capacity. How is Cloudflare discussing these issues with lawmakers? Are they taking the approach that existing law and enforcement mechanisms are fully sufficient, or are they arguing that there is a common strain between KiwiFarms, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer that has demonstrated a known pathway between speech and violence that needs some sort of updated legal framework?
So you believe that your company shouldn’t be constrained by morality? This is why I look skeptically at hiring any engineering and product leaders from Cloudflare at any company in which I work
Cloudflare's post the other day seemed like a very reasonable framework for making decisions on issues like this, but Cloudflare's actions today just severely undercut your credibility on this issue.
I wonder that KiwiFarms worked for so long and that Gab.com is still on CF.
Moreover, I cannot help but notice the double standard you've created. You still provide services to godhatesfags.com. Hell, cloudflare provides DDoS protection for ISIS content. How can you say that kiwifarms is too dangerous when you're ensuring that copies of Inspire and Dabiq are available for extremists to read? If you want to talk about dangerous content, go after the people who claim that they want to murder innocent people and have done so many times in the past.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Télévision_Libre_des_Mil...
You talk as if hate is a kind of mind-virus which must be defeated with quarantine.
For one thing, this is illiberal. You're not respecting people as your equals if you want to stop hatred by preventing them from reading things that can make them hate.
But more importantly, if it's that way, we have lost already. The tools you want to fight these evils with, work just as well in the enemy's hands, if not better.
We need a way to fight propaganda which works better for us than for them.
Absolutely. If the status quo sees ideas as a risk to reduce, clearly it's fragile.
It is kind of funny that your latest argument / blog was your best and just a week ago…
So thank you. Anyone capable of reading between the lines here doesn’t fault you or believe the “new threats story”.
But that’s okay. Media pressure, bad PR, ESG scores, losing customers, and the bigger HR problem of employees/ engineers becoming deranged and unfocused is not worth the trade off. It casts a pretty shadow over the real and good company stuff.
Thanks for being reasonable and understanding this is just not the way things should be.
Hopefully you can quietly lobby for clearer legal guidance or a better measured shift in the public conversation.
Until then… here’s to the next one! See you back here in 6-12 months all over again, haha.
Indeed it’s not - you have no problems with censoring your critics. It’s about you being bad actors (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32705613) but now pretending not to, because share prices started to tank.
You are right, the simple idea of vigilante corporations makes my skin crawl. The double standards, of sort, are pretty logically inconsistent and frustrating. You’re saying, “Cloudflare acknowledges that policing the internet is not an appropriate responsibility for a platform provider, but we’re gonna do it anyway because the rest of society doesn't have its act together.” I guess I am to some extent expecting a citation on that last part so I can verify your claims are serious and not just corporate knee jerk.
Finally, let’s assuming there is indeed an emergency and the you are 100% spot on with your mitigation strategy. Crisis averted. Then what happens? Is this permanent? Once the immediate emergency is over, would you be comfortable reinstating Kiwifarms as a customer? There are some “don’t be Google” vibes here that make me uncomfortable too.
In a fair environment, once an emergency is dealt with and justice served, we go back to normal. I find it hard to believe you’d be amenable to that type of resolution because I’m used to corporate decisions being final and essentially unable to be appealed. Or, at least they’re final until Twitter starts griping about the new injustice such a final outcome has caused.
You may not want the mantle but, by choosing to act, you are, at least for now, picking it up. Yes, this is way more nuanced than “free speech”. I hope you’re ready…
People have died. Byuu/Near comitted suicide after an harassment campaign that lasted years and included death threats, doxing, and harassment both online and irl.
Free speech in my book is about protecting people like Near from being harassed into silence or death, more than it is about enabling said harassment campaigns.
So you are fine to bypass the laws on your own? How practical.
I have no idea why and this piecemeal information leak looks bad
You’re just going to wind up like Facebook where their content moderation completely missed the fanning of genocide in Myanmar and that actual outcome, all the “immediate threats” not just one person getting doxxed
Rule of law? I have no clue what distinction you’re making, as it is neither a legal free speech or rule of law issue. Leave the communication to the lawyers?
To get this straight: your position is that this is not about free speech because something clearly illegal happened and you acted purely to expedite matters since law enforcement was too slow to react and there was material danger.
So you are then tying your reputation to there being eventual legal consequences for what happened in recent days on Kiwi Farms?
Is it just that the company feels unconfortable providing them any kind of service given the nature of the currently posted content?
Because banning them should have no effect on their ability to generate/serve that content, maybe make it a bit more expensive (though I see that their site is still blocked, so maybe immediately disabling Cloudflare isn’t an option for them either)
There is already US case law prohibiting this. At scale, governments prefer to act through "private" enterprise. Such enterprises are "state actors" suppressing speech. That is why government prefers monopoly capitalism. Who wouldn't rather have just one or a few partners to manage?
Of course this is a free speech issue, but it's much more. Cloudflare's volte face is super sus. Even if it's the case that no direct government agents were involved this time, the astroturfed pressure campaigns run by state sponsored NGO money are just the privatized surveillance and secret police state hard at work.
The deep issue is that US politicians and citizens are abandoning "rule of law" expectations in domestic politics. These free speech issues are the visible manifestation of a shift in the structure of power in US politics to an unapologetic administrative uni-party, accelerating in real time. Arguing the ludicrous details of this Kiwifarms blocking is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Says the people blocking access.
>the risk created by the content
What risk? Fearmongering is always the first defense of those who wish to limit free speech. "Something will happen if we don't." Can I get a crystal ball like yours from amazon?
>no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
What threat?
>Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech,
Free speech should trump the rule of law. When it doesn't you end up with tyranny.
Do you not see how concerning (not to mention arrogant) it is when a corporation decides to act because it believes the law is inadequate. When individuals do this, we call it vigilantism.
Given kiwifarms most definitely remains up[1] (all your action did was let them be DDOSed for an hour or two) and this imminent dealy threat has not materialized, will you invite them back to your infrastructure? Or was this just an excuse and you were unhappy about the bad PR?
[1] https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/
The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.
The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
Yes he does - the activity of KF posters is public.
The amount of bullshitting going on here is insane. People are just making things up wholesale.
This doesn't take a lot of intuition to think that they have a better idea than a random person on the internet.
>realtime tools what is being done on their network.
That inspects every post? That sees some hidden forums for ultra doxxing and crime?
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.
I don't think there's a simple way to stop swatting, though if a streamer/someone else who is a likely swatting target phones ahead of time and asks to be put on a "likely to get swatted, please disregard suspicious calls" list then the police should honour that list (AFAIK there is something like this but it often doesn't help).
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
Not without an invite to the private Discord / Google doc / telegram group / whatever.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.
There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?
Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.
Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:
You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”
Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.
After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.
You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.
If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.
But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
I have personally seen more left wing calls for violence against their politcal opponents than right wing ones. By a factor of about four.
As far as I can tell your assertion is baseless.
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
CloudFlare says so too. Wikipedia has a whole "harassment" section in their page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.
That's not the internet I signed up for, and I don't agree with or support it. Very sad state of affairs.
They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?
Several hit-pieces in the media? Saw nothing out of the ordinary in the thread about Keffals a couple hours ago.
https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885
I understand that it's since been deleted.
Until now.
When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.
Until now.
I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).
the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.
remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
It is a forum.
Should sites have to have a "purpose" and does this need to be vetted by some authority or the hosting provider?
What is the "purpose" of Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Signal, 4chan or Discord?
>by sharing their personal information
I mostly saw public Twitter screenshots being reposted. I swear some people dont seem to understand that Twitter is public and not all DMs.
The only reason anyone would give KF the benefit of the doubt is because they willfully are ignoring the activity going on in KF.
A hypothetical court. I was just using it as an example of how the argument wouldn't hold muster in situations where it would really need to.
> What lack of evidence?
You posted this:
> No one is answering you because it's obvious to even the most intermediate observer where this work is coming from.
Again, "well, it's just obvious, dude" is not evidence. It's similar to a "god of the gaps" argument. If there's evidence Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms did it, and if there's not evidence that Kiwi Farms did it, then Kiwi Farms still did it. That makes no sense.
I love when non-lawyers think they have any idea on what holds muster in the court of law.
This isn't recent either, the same reporter wrote on the site back in 2016: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman... (linked to from his Twitter thread).
I personally witnessed Near's live-tweeted descent into despair, culminating in their suicide (https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1409230358977998851?lang=en, https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986839743037448), all driven by KF.
As Near described it:
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].
One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/zero-trust/email-securit...
I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.
Also, KF's admin directly mentioned that those on the site are using it for swatting (see https://www.sinseer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/FaveAhKVE..., taken from a page posted by a different victim of KF-sourced harassment).
> the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one
You mean the note literally saying "KiwiFarms all Troons"?? https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369...
Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.
And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?
The admin explicitly saying for people to stop "encouraging SWAT pranks" when speaking apparently(?) about two other elements is a bit closer but still quite weak, its an open forum from what I gathered so far surely there would be archives or some screenshot or something for said "pranks" towards the streamer being discussed right? especially if there is mention of him actually having to deal with the FBI in previous times.
I didn't overlook the tweets, I just couldn't find a single mention of swatting there.
And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
>discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
what is this proximal link? and if that link is something like 3 days or a week or something, on an open forum, i'm not sure it's that relevant, literally anyone can watch the website without participating for what I understand.
>And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
I saw the bedsheet investigation, but what harrassment did they engage in? the situation where the orders happenned was in a second hotel, and after a big of digging it wasn't even kiwifarms that got the dox on that one, it was Vile on doxbin[0], and he also admitted to being the one making the orders.
> There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
what is the evidence for this unlawful harassment, and what is the moderate evidence for the swatting? if all you have is what was posted above for the swatting then we'll agree to disagree, which is fine, what is however the plenty of evidence for the former? And no, that twitter thread really doesn't cut it afaic.
> I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
Well, here's the thing, I know little about kiwifarms in particular and everyone is saying that there is extensive evidence of other crimes, articles are being written saying that they were the one responsible for swatting people and a thousand other things, and the citation/source rabbit hole just leads to a dead end, or ends up circular, so yes i'm going to have my doubts and at least want to see some of this extensive documented harassment trove, archiving things on the internet is but a couple clicks away.
I'll leave the thread for today for it is getting too late, have a good one.
- Moderators on KF felt the need to address the topic of swatting.
- People dox'd on KF were definitely swatted-- the missing evidence is to what degree the actual swatting was coordinated on KF. It's relatively indisputable that KF was in the causal chain.
- Harassment occurred, coordinated on KF to someone immediately after relocating from a swatting.
I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
(copied from https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/x56mot/cloudfla...)
the post was deleted within a few mins, so extremely sus. violent threats are posted on all major websites, idk why this one is so exceptional.
doesn't even look real, smells entirely like bait. or someone trying to get KF taken down.
Is there more?
No. Just no.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.
The content on the Kiwi Farms is legal.
Edit: Disregard this as I misinterpreted what I quoted.
What is this? Who is doing this and why?
Selling homemade hormones to underaged children
>who is doing it?
Mentally ill people
>and why?
Mental illness
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18981931/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/
Some older studies from the 80s and 90s that are even higher (well into the 90%), but they may not be the best representation of the modern trans situation.
"Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to DO NOTHING, THAN TO RISK CAUSING MORE HARM THAN GOOD." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit."
Here's the published criteria for such a recommendation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532313/
> Persistent and well-documented gender dysphoria
> Capacity to consent for the treatment
> Mental or medical underlying issues are in control
The gender dysphoria must be persistent. How is it possible to determine that without long term observation? The patient needs to consent after being informed of and understanding the risks. Can a child understand and consent to this?
It's absolutely insane that people think it's okay to just ignore all this and sell hormones to children. This is not help, this is drug dealing. Whoever is doing this is exposing children to significant risks.
Yes it's real and if you think making and distributing homemade hormones to children is vile and dangerous, you're apparently a transphobe nowadays.
What is this supposed to mean?
> That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously.
> trans people [...] choose to help people experiencing the same problem
Did I misinterpret this? Because it seriously sounds like there are trans people out there selling these "DIY trans" drugs. If they're knowingly selling to children in an attempt to help them as previously claimed, I'm sorry but that's extremely fucked up.
How do you know?
And to be specific, the claim was "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
What does that mean? What content was "dangerous" that the site admins of Kiwifarms could not be notified of and have removed instead?
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I haven't seen any evidence that they are significantly more dangerous than Facebook or Twitter. The "human lives in danger" is transparent bullshit. They are actually doing this due to a pressure campaign being carried out by a small number of activists looking to drive any speech they don't like out of existence. Thankfully it hasn't completely worked yet and they are still able to respond in their own defense, so we have something other than the unchallenged claims of Cloudfare etc to determine whether they've actually done something wrong.
Also:
> Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold.
Which government on Earth is going to enforce a principle of neutrality instead of its own particular censorship agenda?
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
How so?
On Wednesday they said they will block content "that ... incites ... violence against people".
Then now they're saying "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".
Seems perfectly consistent.
I say this as someone who occasionally browses there and gets some (admittedly sick) enjoyment from it: the main draw of the website is a place for people to get together and bully mentally ill "weirdos".
It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too.
While I'll personally miss watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout, this is a wise and fair decision by Cloudflare, and there's a good chance they may have saved Keffals' life.
That's exactly what you are doing right now.
They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
And gay children...
What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
Being queer is not a mental illness.
The site was set up to target Chris Chan in particular, but later shifted to "lolcows" in general - ie people that continue to give the bullies the bizarre reactions that they're looking for. They don't exclusively target trans people, nor do they even go to trans spaces looking for people to insult. After all, the average trans person would just block them and move on with their life and that makes for a boring thread.
>why do you feel the need to comment that you get off to 'watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout'
Because I'm on HN, and it's more important here to show that you know what you're talking about rather than show that you're a good, law-abiding citizen. If you seriously can't understand why people enjoy looking at trainwrecks, you need to speak to more people.
>They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
I don't know the Lizzy Waite saga, but Clara Sorrenti specifically had that whole Catboy Ranch thing going on, plus the constant drama with other streamers and just a general behavioural pattern of always feeding the trolls.
>What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
Yep, that shouldn't have happened. (But then again, neither should anything else on this site...)
>Being queer is not a mental illness.
Yes?
for what it's worth I have friends that have been harassed via this site and this is not the case. they don't stop if you block them. they keep finding ways around it and they make your life hell.
I think that's missed on a lot of these threads.
One of the more chilling is that after chasing someone out of their own home and into hiding, they tracked them down and someone posted a photo standing outside of their hotel.
Not so much reddit a AMA verification, more like a hostage situation.
Being gay isn't a mental illness, and it isn't the same thing as reality TV. The LGBT community is, at present, an easy target. There are also a large number of LGBT people who struggle with mental illness (shocking in a society where KiwiFarms exists, I know), and mentally ill people are also easy targets.
I've got to admit, it is a bit unsavory if it is true, and I think the author is probably not making it up, but it's not quite as scary as it's being made out to be IMO, and I've still seen no actual proof of the accusation, whether I believe it or not is irrelevant.
What's happened here is that they (and you'll see this has happened across a lot of the extreme right in America) have started to label trans people as "pedo" or "groomers", in an effort to make it seem like trans people are really child predators, which makes many people more tolerant of their attacks and more sympathetic of anti-trans policies such as bathroom bills.
I've googled it, and I can't seem to. I can find more accusations on google, but not any actual evidence of it. I'm not saying it's not true, I just want to see it. If you're asking me to hate a group of people because they're awful, you should at least be able to show me they're awful.
> The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy
seems clearly untrue. They changed mind and decided to proactively ban bad website (and yes, it was actually bad website).
Nevertheless it was censorship and immediate destruction of their earlier promise.
During the Black Lives Matter riots, we had a full summer of looting, destruction, violence and riots. The BLM ideas also "spread out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too". And they resulted in violence in a scale much, much larger than Kiwifarms.
Should DDoS-protecting companies have banned the BLM websites?
Kiwifarms on the other hand do indirectly endorse harassment, swatting and doxxing. In fact you do have people on that forum working day and night to dox people of interest.
A much better example would be: Reddit, with it indirectly supporting radical left wing causes, because they haven't been as active banning those hateful communities.
Consider developing some sort of moral or ethical sense.
Oh, and there is no official "Black Lives Matter" site. Someone registered one after the fact, but they have no official standing or really do much of anything.
Last I looked kiwifarms was still available on the url listed on their wiki page (not to mention posts viewable via the internet archive). Does this mean Keffals is going to die? I'll bet £100 of mine to $1 of yours she isn't killed by anyone this with a kiwifarm association in the next year.
Also, you have a very poor understanding of the frequency of internet shitposting if you're taking a random bomb threat on the internet seriously, those things happen thousands of times a day qnd amount to nothing 99.9999% of the time.
Cloudflare has to be in bed with the US government, otherwise it would have been shutdown for ignoring illegal activity (ddos-for-hire) that's been reported to them (aka ignoring complaints is meant to remove your S.230 protection).
Instead, they seem to have made the decision to do this in a way where they actually block access to KF, rather than in a way where they simply chose to stop doing business with KF. I could be wrong about this; maybe substantial notice was given, and CF reasonably believed that KF could have avoided service disruption. But given that they wrote a bunch of copy to go with this decision, including the copy for the redirect page, I'm inclined to think that this went off exactly as CF intended. They didn't give notice and attempt to prevent their customer from having service disruption because they wanted them to have service disruption, and they wanted everyone to know they wanted this.
CF should not do this. I don't care who KF is or what they've done. CF should either do right by their customers, or stop doing business with them in a responsible way. Not in a way designed to injure their customers. Especially after taking their money, but that's hardly the point.
No, Cloudflare isn't obligated to continue to provide services to support "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life". Perhaps if KiwiFarms had better moderated their content and discouraged such behavior this could have been avoided.
> Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
In other words, they had plenty of time to give KF notice and terminate the relationship. This didn't even have to stop them from contacting law enforcement. But they did something else instead.
Given their principled stand just two days ago, this sounds like a pretty weak "haha we totally don't cave to pressure, it's just coincidence, so don't think pressure campaigns work on us!"
Has Cloudflare proactively blocked any websites without a pressure campaign?
"Cloudflare has been made aware that your site is in violation of our published Terms of Service. Pursuant to our published policy, Cloudflare will terminate service to your website. Cloudflare will terminate your service for switter{.}at by disabling our authoritative DNS."
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
The question therefore becomes at root, are they lying? Is the company actually impartial infrastructure, or are they dishonest.
The past has shown that they are a little unstable in their impartiality.
Personally I'd like to see them making much more decisions to clean up the net but I'd need to see them being honest about it.
Private companies should not be
the de facto moderators
of free speech
“Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
Addresses aren't private information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
Kiwifarms is free to get another company that aligns with their goals.
I'm having trouble understanding how 1) everyone thinks Cloudflare is the singular hole through which the internet flows and 2) how a private company does not have the freedom to do what they want.
If you don't like what Cloudflare is doing, then speak with your wallet and don't use them, there are numerous other providers of ddos protection
See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.
Obviously no country has absolute freedom of speech, but for example the First Amendment has no hate speech exemptions.
Eliminationist rhetoric is a subset of hate speech overall, but it certainly exists and is trivially easy to discover. It's odd to me that none of the self-professed 'free speech absolutists' ever seems to engage with this point.
If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.
You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to repercussions, in specific when those actions are a call to harm.
If there's defamation, harassment, or incitement to violence, we should deal with that in an open court with juries of our peers, not in some dark board room.
That's a pretty easy litmus test.
As a colloary, it's akin to comparing "I don't like the president" vs "Let's go kill the president" (this is a comparison of allowed vs unallowed speech in the USA, not a call to).
Advocating voting against is 100% legal. Advocation of killing is 100% ILLEGAL.
Kiwifarms was doing the latter, up to and including actions threatening violence, "assisted" suicide, and murder.
Those were never 1fa protected actions.
Then a proceeding in open court will be simple and fast.
A proceeding where the accused has the right to cross examine and present evidence in their defense.
I prefer that to a corporate decision done in secrecy in response to bad PR.
Where I’m sure the disagreement lies is whether or not you find it morally okay to protect the current victims by less than ideal means.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
you're just using the words to act like you have a moral high ground you don't actually have.
Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
correct. most people don't hold a free speech philosophy. people just like taking a high moral ground they don't actually have.
> Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech
us govt can't prosecute death threats unless they can prove intent beyond you just saying it, they can't also arbitrarily prosecute for lying
> If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
if you said the same thing at a much lower volume, no one would care. the problem there is noise pollution, not the content of the speech said.
Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
Pretty sure calls for acts of violence is legal in the United States unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action.
Not entirely sure you’re correct on this one?
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1459/198236/202...
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
[1] https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885
[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/case.pdf
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
Which websites are you referring to, in what numbers are you talking about, and how are you determining that those calls for violence are imminent? Wouldn't that suggest that a lot of violence has already occurred stemming from those websites? (presumably not stopped by a slow legal system like Cloudflare implies would have happened in this case)
>Under Texas law, any threat of violence to either person or property can be the basis of a terroristic threat charge. However, that threat of violence must be accompanied with criminal intent to either follow through with the threat or terrify another into believing you may do so. There are six specific types of intent covered by Texas law, and the prosecutor only needs to prove you had one of them to obtain a conviction.
cause a reaction of any type to his threat by an official or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies;
place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, room, place of assembly, place to which the public has access, place of employment or occupation, aircraft, automobile, or other forms of conveyance, or other public places;
cause impairment or interruption of public communications, public transportation, public water, gas, or power supply or other public services;
place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury; or influence the conduct or activities of a branch or agency of the federal government, the state, or a political subdivision of the state.
So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
That makes so much sense, it seems like it would go without saying. If the violent act itself was legal (like a war, or an organized boxing match), why wouldn’t it be legal to solicit or petition for it?
No. It's fine to call for violence as long as your call is not designed to provoke and cause imminent lawless action. Brandenburg advocated for "revengeance" against the government if their demands were not met, and that was protected speech. Hess v. Indiana also affirms that advocating for lawless action is protected speech.
I suppose who ever put such a law in US court system is holding their breath for the guy who got on International TV / web streaming / a huge crowd of people in Ferguson (?) and said 'burn this bitch down' - burn this mutherfucker down.. [1]
I dunno, maybe he was arrested for this and it is a real thing, if so I missed the news about it.
Or maybe it's technically possible to have to go to court for such a thing, but maybe only a few ever have, and the outcome of such a thing is anyone's guess, even those really into speech law [2]
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/us/michael-brown-stepfather-v... [2] - Imminent lawless action test still being fleshed out - https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-...
I wonder if their evaluation of the "escalating risk" had anything to do with the legal standard of imminent action is. Probably not.
Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.
Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.
I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
Agreed!
False dichotomy. We have always punished some speech (e.g. fraud) while sanctifying others (political speech).
If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
Or host themselves. ISPs are common carriers. Their freedom of assembly is abridged in a way others' is not.
Nobody has been legislated to do anything here. Cloudflare is dumping Kiwifarms. There are other hosts. That's one middle ground: a diversity of opinions on what constitutes unacceptable speech. Here's another: the government has no right shutting down Kiwifarms in the absence of a true threat [1], but Cloudflare is free to.
If you look at the history of communication technologies, particularly public ones (e.g. the printing press and television), this pattern recapitulates. An idealistic explosion of creativity. Weaponisation. Scrambling alongside states over-reacting. Then a middle ground.
We don't have anything close to consensus on the Internet, save perhaps for X-rated content. So private actors are figuring things out. We'll probably see a government response carving out protections for both speech and platforms, though hopefully nothing as onerous as what was done with TV [2]. And then over decades an equilibrium will arise. An equilibrium between "de-shrining free speech" and "entrench[ing]hatred."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Most of us never enshrined free speech above all else. It was never controversial that free speech had limits, that sites had the right to moderate content and ban accounts, or that businesses could refuse service to anyone. Prior to 2016, something like this would not have even been newsworthy.
Painting this issue as black and white is just wrong. Both sides have immense ramifications for the world. Accountability for censoring bodies and people on these platforms is not easily solved.
But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?
The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.
Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.
The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
But CloudFlare doesn’t. That’s why they position themselves as a common carrier.
I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech.
What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals.
How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
They were showing up at peoples’ houses and SWATting them. This isn’t a problem technology can solve.
No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
A lack of moderation to remove hate. Hate breeds hate, and drives good people away. In a similar way that bullshit breeds more bullshit unless removed.
Let me try an analogy for technical people.
Say you're a person deeply knowledgeable about computers and technology, and you're posting in an audio related forum.
Somebody posts a glowing review of an expensive device that claims that shaving the edge of a CD and painting the border with a marker will give you a bigger soundstage, more clarity and make the audio sound crisper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-QxLAxwxkM
You can try to explain why it's bullshit, but it's hard. You have to go into details about how a CD actually works, why this BS about reflections has no effect on a CD mechanism, how error correction works... you'll have to write several pages of deeply technical information that you have to boil down to something understandable to mere humans. It's a tough job. Not only you need technical understanding, but you also need to be good with words, and good at explaining complex concepts simply. And you have to have the time and dedication to spend an hour or two writing about it for free. That's a lot of unusual characteristics for a single person to have.
Then somebody goes "shut up nerd, it sounds better!" in response. And they proceed to post more reviews of volume knobs that somehow improve the sound because the wood is special, gold plated optical cables, and other such junk.
It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit. So eventually the smart people will get fed up and leave. Especially because they can find places where they're appreciated -- they'll find a home on a more specialized home where their expertise is actually valued. Meanwhile the original forum will get even more BS.
Same happens with social topics. It's easy to spread conspiracy theories and hate. It's hard to explain complex social issues. Without moderation the first will trivially overwhelm the second.
"A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on."
Misattributed to Twain, Churchill, and others, but very accurate.
Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time.
Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.
The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-say...
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)
Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.
The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.
I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.
This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.
If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law.
>However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting.
Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied.
>If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare
It's accessible through TOR, IIRC.
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy!
And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
Report to law enforcement repeatedly hoping that they look at it and give them a legal reason to shut them down.
If they shut things down as a private company, so long as the customer is not in breach of the service contract and the content is not illegal, couldn’t they mount a defence?
This sounds like a reasonable strategy. I don’t understand this need for private justice.
It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.
This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.
But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.
And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.
I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
How, exactly?
You have made no public efforts, made no submissions to equally bad laws such as the Online Safety Bill in the UK and achieved nothing.
If you had put anywhere near as much effort in to critiquing SESTA as you have this your statement might be plausible. It is not.
Until you show evidence on your work to overturn/repeal SESTA, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many other sites that are clearly violating SESTA, so obviously you don't think it's that big of a liability as you claim to be.
Not to mention your Head of Sales reached out to us offering Cloudflare services a year after kicking Switter off when we mentioned we were dealing with DDOS attacks as an escort directory.
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.
It puts the company in the same position as Facebook in regards to moderation. It's endless, expensive, and your work is never good enough. Not a desirable position for most.
the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce.
FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists.
The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so.
Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
Can we collectively re-learn how to argue specific situations without comparing them to entirely different situations?
It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
If the illegal threats of violence aren’t being handled properly by law enforcement, that is not CF’s failure.
They feel forced to act because the FBI is incompetent.
the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here?
edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it.
the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right?
KF does not promote terrorism or violence.
Obviously they posed enough of a threat to human lives that a publicly traded company would distance them immediately.
Doesn't take much to figure this out. This is not some censorship or content moderation.
It appears people have trouble distinguishing between platforms that promote terrorism/violence vs free speech.
This weird extreme idealistic version of freedom of speech doesn't include harming humans or threatening peace.
A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Pretend for the sake of argument that Facebook did use Cloudflare, or that my example were about some other platform that does.
> A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Exactly my point. When someone does something banworthy on Facebook, we let Facebook ban just that one person, rather than banning all of Facebook.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-im...
That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation.
Hosting content, more moderation.
I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too.
“It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle.
And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
I do know if I would come up with the exact list they have.
I do generally agree with the approach of scaling moderation.
They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.
They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
There is already illegal speech, not all speech is protected.
If they broke the law, charge them with crimes.
If they didn’t, ignore them.
Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation.
In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people.
And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention.
Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them.
This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue.
If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say."
Moral repugnance is not synonymous with Nazism.
… you do know the holding company for kiwifarms is literally named “final solutions, LLC”, right?
https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/156374856392608973...
Josh doesn't anonymously run the site. The site is fully legal in the US so he isn't afraid of being associated with it.
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”.
It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset.
Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something.
It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
Should be done by whom? If you mean "done by the government," then in the US at least the answer is clear.
Nothing. It's words on the internet.
The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.
The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.
It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
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> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
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> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic.
A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site.
Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me.
It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.
Yes, of course it would be. The end result of litigating free speech in the court system, is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time.
The courts have extremely strong protections for speech. They are way way stronger than what private companies do.
Just adding the word "government" doesn't make something more scary. In this case, adding "government" to the enforcement mechanism for speech would mean that basically nothing gets banned.
This is kind of a run-around. Cloudflare's blogpost argues that it wants to get this content offline, it just wants courts to be in charge of that process. It acted because it believed the courts were too slow.
If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur. The actual argument in that case is whether you want this moderation to happen at all.
I take Cloudflare at their word that they actually wanted a court to tell them to deplatform this content. And because of that I take them at their word that they believe the government could feasibly pass laws that would censor the content people are asking them to deplatform.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
Yes. In direct response to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706780
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.
If I offered protection to a group of unreasonable actors and discovered they needed protection because they like to bully people into taking their own life for fun, the last thing I would want is to accept money from them, let alone offer them protection.
Sure, the law can do better too.
-- Louis Brandeis, "Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
It's not some tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech.
It's just a business, and business can decide to not provide service to assholes, just like your local restaurant.
It already decided it won't provide hosting service to the despicables, but somehow the security service is vital to freedom of speech? I don't buy it.
It's all about their legal exposure, and it looks like the heat's too much this time.
Their stock price has been falling since Thursday after all.
People are mostly not claiming they have no right to drop them, or an obligation to keep them up, but claiming one thing and then 3 days later buckling under pressure is extremely disappointing. Especially when the underlying implication is that the website would hopefully be taken down by actually illicit means, those being DDOS attacks.
Free speech absolutism which extends beyond legal protection, and which demands private organizations and individuals to materially protect and service all speech is hopelessly naive. Volunteering to do it is past the point of absurdity.
By engaging in that absurdity, they undermined the credibility of their motives making this decision today. They knew there’s a red line, and if at least two adults were in a room before the previous statement was issued it would be almost impossible to believe that they hadn’t discussed that red line. That knowledge should have guided them against making any statement at all, because even clarifying their red lines would create perverse incentives.
I don’t begrudge Cloudflare their principles, nor their decision to deviate from them in the face of reality. I also don’t doubt their motives as written in both statements, though I think they may wildly underestimate how much trust and good will that requires… and how little reason they have to assume it’s present. I do personally wish they’d reached this decision sooner, as a non-binary person who could certainly be targeted by KF campaigns. But I have a strong free expression instinct too, and a set of privileges of my own which sometimes delay my recognition of real present danger that I don’t experience directly.
If any Cloudflare staff is reading this comment: you made the right decision. Please try to use caution when such a decision is potentially on the horizon but hasn’t yet been made. Just as real human lives are at stake when you provide (or don’t provide) services to any particular customer, real human lives are at stake when you damage your credibility making that decision.
Oh, guess it's those one of those Cloudflare Coincidences (tm).
The problem here is that Cloudflare didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that the words on Kiwifarms might be stifling to the free speech of their targets. Which, of course, they were, just as the anti-KF campaign made KF unhappier and more aggressive. Words have real physical consequences. Often they’re predictable.
I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.
This never happened. It was just blamed on KF by the people currently criminally DDoSing it.
I'm amazed by the credulity and lack of critical thinking in this whole discussion. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in hearing from KF's point of view ... which is now at any rate impossible because they've been banished from the internet. There are two sides to this conflict and you aren't allowed to hear from one side, so the other side can just relentlessly make shit up, exaggerate, take things out of context, and it will be taken as gospel.
So many comments like "I've never heard of KF before but I looked at this hysterical out of context twitter thread and wow I guess it does need to be censored-via-DDOS".
I have, however, spent time reading Kiwifarms well before this controversy. I have zero interest in arguing about the conclusions I reached: I just want to put down a marker and say that you’re wrong. Many people who disagree with you have taken the time to read the site.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It's not just a message or speech. It involves IRL stocking, harassment, and violence against people they target based on hate and discrimination.
What you actually mean is that as long as its against people you personally dislike, then you're ok with that.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
There's a dril tweet for everything.
Stormfront was hosted using Cloudflare, and Cloudflare gave them the boot.
If you are not familiar with Stormfront, they actively promote violent white supremacy and Nazi ideologies.
Given the absolute state of modern American politics, I'm afraid it's the latter, but who knows.
Do you plan to build something like kiwifarms? Don't and grow up, focus on building useful projects.
It was the heat from negative PR that did it.
The heat, they were clearly prepared to weather. However, if one or many of their high-profile clients threatened to pull out, that would have been very difficult to sell to their investors as a good thing.
I also want to point out that Kiwifarms is not an organization. As far as I'm aware: they are a simple, public forum. This means that talking about what 'Kiwifarms' has done is misleading since it only applies to what some users are posting. It would be like saying Facebook are terrorists because sometimes terrorist groups try to use the site for propaganda and recruiting. You need to differentiate between the actions of a user/s and the site. In the case of Facebook they are allowed to stay up and remove offending content on the basis that this is the nature of public communities. This is actually standard practice for websites who may also receive copyrighted material. Otherwise someone could easily take down a website by posting copyrighted material.
If there really was a 'life threatening situation' Kiwifarms should have been allowed to handle this themselves. By either removing the content or taking whatever action they felt necessary. But Cloudflare didn't do this. They provide a service that fundamentally undermines the integrity of the Internet. Makes it less resilient. And now the hens have come home to roast: they are dictating how others should run their sites. Eat a massive bag of dicks, cloudflare.
You do realise that KF was started to bully an autistic sonic fan, right? Have you actually been there?
What kind of abuse was going on before the internet took notice?
By bullying more mentally ill people into suicide and forcing people to flee from their homes out of fear for their lives?
You sound like you’d fit right into that website. I hope you’re just 10 years old or something or have some valid excuse to genuinely not understand yet, because if you don’t then you need to go outside and interact with society for a change.
Not to mention DNS which is subject to the laws of the country of registrar; plenty of pirate sites have had their domains have been seized by the US gov't.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
Nazis need to be fought everywhere, otherwise their cancerous ideology just grows.
Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
- Engels, On Authority 1872
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
>>"communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
Sci-Hub link about the right thriving during economic recessions/depressions: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.03.006
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
This is literally the opposite of neutral.
I don't get this constant need for mental gymnastics. Just say you believe in censorship.
It's not black and white.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
Elaborate, please?
"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Law enforcement needs to intervene, period.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
They’re also private infrastructure unlike water/power, which is the position that cloudflare is in.
These services are not typically used in the act of raping or terrorising someone.
No, but it is (or was) used by kiwifarms which seems to be a platform dedicated to terrorising trans people.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
And even then, the concept of “origin server” is pretty vague.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
And if they ban me and I decide to use smoke signals to have this discussion is the sky hosting it?
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
If a Czech citizen, currently living in Slovakia, doxxx a British person resident in Canada on a site hosted in the Maldives and managed by a Japanese citizen, protected by a German server owned by an American security company, which government has the right to order the content to be taken down?
"Taking down content" can range from blocking the site from being accessible from inside the country, to organising measures together with other countries where the site is actually hosted to take down the site at its roots, should the country allow it.
North Korea, China, Russia are prime examples of blocking being heavily used to control the Internet.
A government's model will never be "inadequate" as long as people live there and abide by the country's law because of various incentives (economical, sociological, familial, ...).
1) Country of the victim's residency.
2) Country of the agressor's residency.
3) Country where the web site is legally headquartered.
4) Country where the web site administrators are residing.
5) Country where the physical servers are.
6) Any other country that somehow can claim some reasonable connection to the case.
Of course, the ideal thing would be to setup some sort of world-wide ECHR to sort out any jurisdictional issues and perhaps even rule in some cases.
I know that place is horrendous, but it feels like CF blocked it because of the media attention instead of the threat itself. There is plenty of content online that actively partakes in stochastic terrorism as well as direct threats that are serviced by Cloudflare.
The question of what makes content worth dropping, without the involvement of law enforcement, from such low level infrastructure services is a scary prospect, especially when you consider the issues that current internet has[2].
The moment they caved in, Cloudflare stopped being a simple infrastructure provider, and we can be sure that there will be actors, big and small, that will pull levers to make this happen again.
The silver lining is that a hateful forum will probably cease to operate for good.
[1] - https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566158393391423489
Don't they care about reputational damage? Who cares about some obscure forums for weirdos.
But now twice Cloudflare has posted they won't moderate content, and then two days later done... exactly that while posting that they don't like doing it.
For folks concerned about abusive and harmful internet behavior, Prince has made it clear he doesn't feel responsible to take action and will avoid doing so as much as possible. And for folks concerned about free speech and censorship, Prince has made it clear he can be pushed around with enough pressure (regardless what the post says, it's how it will be read).
Cloudflare could've arguably taken either position with some level of righteousness, but by essentially caving to both, he proves himself to neither.
Yeah no shit, of course this is going to happen. It's clearly just a way to save face from Cloudflare - though they definitely needed to do it as this problem was never going to go away for them if they didn't. The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable, and that's not going to change with them dropping KiwiFarms. As terrible of a website as it is, it's just going to come back up with a provider that has even lower moral standards than Cloudflare.
I find this interesting, is this the point of the internet, Or is this a personal value or feature people overlay on the internet? At a history/protocol level I’d be pressed to say the internet was designed to be uncensorsble, fault tolerant perhaps at best
That isn't the point, the internet protocol is designed as a distributed networking system that was adopted by corporations; if you want censorship resistance or privacy that isn't part of that specific protocol. (For example check alternatives such a CJDNS, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc; or application-layer protocols such as I2P/IPFS/TOR)
Additionally the Internet Protocol is not resistant to intermediation. (Or in the words of the P2P Foundiation: it is not counter-anti-desintermediation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
Sure it was. Another week or two and the angry people would have got bored and moved on to some other outrage.
Instead they have been shown that the infrastructure of the internet will bend to their will if they make enough noise.
Good job, CF.
The sky isn't falling, and the slippery slope is demonstrably not there in this case.
And never forget that keffals has gone on record saying that their enemies (KF) is irredeemably evil because of the mean things they say, and thus no tactic against them is going "too far" (something that could be easily taken as a threat in itself I might add) And then suddenly threats and swattings start happening where the perpetrator literally goes out of their way to put blame on KF.
Also a reminder that this all suddenly happened just as things were calming down. (and the hate campaign to shut down the site beginning to run out of gas)
All you have to do to is…use other providers, you are not entitled nor required to work with this service.
Remember, all you have to do to get kicked out a wendys is to take your shirt off, wave it around your head like a helicopter and start shouting - the humanity!
AgainstHateSubreddits has been doing this to subreddits they don't like for years, except they were posting child porn, not threats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG8xWJaJO-c
Grass roots agent provocateurs who believe that there is no such thing as wrong actions, only wrong targets.
Additionally, a single deleted post (or even a handful of them) being a cause for attempted removal from the internet seems like a precedent that would kill every host of user generated content, including hackernews and twitter.
The only conclusion one can come to is that it was a PR move as they caved under pressure.
Now, ask yourself if this is a similar situation.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> Legal process > While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
"too slow"
According to whom? Cloudflare? What would be an appropriate time for Cloudflare for law enforcement to respond? And to what threats?
You say "simply" but these are not simple questions.
Cloudflare can shut off service to anyone, sure, but in any other industry there would be some termination notice, right? Unless its something like terrorism, where LAW ENFORCEMENT sets the boundary, not the private company.
Would I want my ISP or CDN to cut me off without notice? No. Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond. But also, I wouldn't operate a site like KiwiFarms, so I'm not terribly concerned about my CDN cutting me off for the same reason. If it became more of a widespread pattern with CF I would understand their customers getting nervous.
From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
The operator posted this on their Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
If you have the power to remove someone's speech, only your side gets heard so you can make them look as bad as you want and they have little to no recourse.
That shouldn't be controversial right?
Haven't been following this story, but it seems they haven't considered that whatever antagonists the site has could have posted the putatively objectionable content there themselves, due to the website's nature as a forum for user-generated content. Furthermore, the article throughout seems to suffer from the "anthropomorphic fallacy", in failing to acknowledge that it is speaking about a web service rather than person, and falsely attributing to it emotions and intentions.
If this is true, couldn't they be a little more descriptive? What happened in the last 48 hours that hasn't been happening for the last eight years?
No, I do, they are being vauge on purpouse.
Atleast with Kiwifarms, they had screenshots and archive.is links to everything a person has said.
Cloudflare only has vauge language.
If there was bad content on the site, report it to the mods/admins.
Facebook hosted the Christchurch livestream. Better kill FB next.
If their policy was "we'll ban anyone we want for whatever reason." I'd respect that more because that's the truth.
Further troubling is how this is over what they believe to be illigal conduct. It may very well be, but now they're creating a precedent that they are capable of detecting and stopping it themselves outside the justice system.
This also doesn't stop kiwifarms or it's organizers. If there's illigal conduct, or even civil discovery, CF has to give up those details. All stopping Ddos support does is allows kiwifarms to receive Ddos.
No doubt they'll eventually take to tor and that doesn't have a good physical address to serve warrants to.
The justifications are also weak, and put CF in a bad light because they believe themselves to be justice. A simple "we don't like what they're doing so we won't service it" is an honest answer.
Sorry, but we don't get to have our cake and eat it too. Precedents set precedents. I literally burst out laughing reading this wishful thinking.
Basically non-tech things that stir up a lot of gross opinions masked behind sock puppets and throwaway accounts.
HN is becoming painful for me to read. Just so much hate, which is especially disconcerting to see it on a forum like this one. Which is supposed to be a place for smart discussion.
Make whatever Kiwifarms does illegal and Cloudflare will probably drop them through their magical detection algorithms alone.
The only way I can think of to stop and drop fraudulent customers is to give them a time window to counter the claims and then drop the domain the second that window expires. Helping the customer move registrars after they've been caught is not a great look.
Preferably you'd have a human verify the situation before marking a domain as fraudulent but the automated nature of digital fraud can make this untenable and people would be more pissed off if Cloudflare wouldn't do something about the fraud they're able to identify automatically.
The procedures themselves are what I'm fine with butI have trouble with the lack of support American tech giants will give you once an automated system flags your account. They stop answering the phone, stop taking emails, and will do nothing until your appeal date expires, knowing that you don't have the resources to sue them.
Stripe and Cloudflare are commonly mentioned here for their lacking support and transparency once an account gets flagged (though relatively often the Stripe people get flagged for good reason, but still) because this place is the only way people can get support. These companies treat you like they treat the rest of the web, as a threat needed to be screened and monitored, blocked at the earliest sign of caution.
I hope people learn to not trust these huge cloud providers with tiny or unwilling support staff instead of ignoring their better judgement and posting here once they get blocked. We're all perpetuating a system of failure because we want the cheap speediness of fully automated systems and accept the risk of random bans. You can get a domain and a server provisioned in minutes or even seconds at the risk of losing your business down the line and because this rarely ever happens to innocent people we pretend to think it's fine.
Perhaps my perspective on this is a little skewed because HN is a place where many people dream of setting up a company to do the exact same thing, calling it "disrupting the market" and making bank rather than setting up a sustainable business with customer service at the forefront.
Well I hope he enjoys suddenly having his huge customers from saudi arabia or whatever else start calling things worrysome and prey on that weakness.
I also find it hilarious CloudFlare pretends to care about free speech here when they have been caught red handed arbitrarily canceling peoples services and domains + even going so far as to prevent people from transferring their domains to other registrars¹
I will give $100 to anyone who can convince me that they believe that.
Regardless, Cloudflare with their first response has shown its true colors, joke of a company managed by kids.
"We'll keep doing it of course, even after we said we wouldn't do it any more."
After all, it's been all of 3 days since they wrote,
> Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.
(https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...)
Edit: And to be fair, they do link to that post: "As we outlined last Wednesday, we do not believe that terminating security services is appropriate, even to revolting content.", "The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy." - did I miss the part of that post where they tack on "well, except for the times when it's really bad"? I went and skimmed over it just now to see if they left themselves a loophole that they're using today and I'm not seeing it.
BTW Cloudflare is effectively hijacking kiwifarms.net by re-directing visitors to their blog page.
When government agencies bust websites associated with criminal activity the most they do after taking control of the homepage is put up a jpeg of the taskforce responsible and a few notes then call it day.
If true, free speech is not applicable. Blocking the walkie-talkies of terrorists coordinating a bombing does not restrict "free speech" under any reasonable definition.
This level of tactical coordination to commit violence appears to be what they are hinting at in their post, and I take them at their word .
It may be they are lying and caved to pressure in regards to KF being generally heinous, but until we find out the specific information that caused them to assess an imminent threat to life, we can't really judge the wisdom of their decision.
OK, but you should be clear about the definition of hard cases. What exactly constitutes "an emergency threat to human life"?
Hypothetical example: Suppose you're providing DDOS protection for a website belonging to country X, that acts against the interests of your country. War erupts between the two countries, and the website plays an important role in the information warfare by propagating fake news. Would that constitute an emergency threat to human life since it helps perpetuate the war?
Your argument appears to be this: "Private companies should be forced by the government to host any content, no matter how horrifying and evil it is."
Your argument is morally horrifying, and legally indefensible.
What Kiwifarms is doing is either illegal already or should be made illegal. Law enforcement should be the one deplatforming them and taking action against the human drivel that drives people to suicide, it shouldn't be an ISP deciding what is or isn't acceptable.
ISPs should not be filtering out LGBT+ content even if that content is considered undesirable by the general population and that argument goes both ways. With the way things are turning in large areas of the USA, I expect state-wide LGBT+ content bans to be up for debate in less than five or ten years, despite the USA's extremely liberal free speech laws. I think most of us here agree that such bans should not happen and ISPs should be dumb pipes in terms of content selection.
However, if this holds for your Verizons and Amazons, it should probably also hold for DDoS-protection platforms like Cloudflare. Cloudflare is setting out to be in a similar position to your ISP, a piece of infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks rather than a hosting company where you put your content. I think there's a perfectly fair argument to be made that net neutrality should also apply to companies like Cloudflare, especially in a position of this much power. A company should be able to host anything that's not illegal if it chooses to be infrastructure rather than a hosting provider.
In practice, law enforcement doesn't really give a damn about sites like these unless a big story hits the news. The lack of regulation and enforcement is the problem and the burden of combating these societal problems is shifting from the police to companies. Rather than forcing companies to decide what is or isn't right, concrete steps should be taken by the people that are supposed to protect and serve our communities.
What is happening to Kiwifarms will soon be happen to content other people get mad about; be it reproductive rights, gay marriage, or any other civil liberty at risk because of conservative outrage.
NoNewNormal was a misinformation shitshow to the fullest, objectively. There is nothing subjective about confusing mRNA and DNA.
But it looks like there isn't? It's American based, and when the NZ govt made a request related to the Christchurch mosque massacre, the admin told them to pound sand.
So, why is it called Kiwifarms?
This decision seems hard. Crime prevention forces should have stepped in already to protect people. But cops protect and serve capital, not people, so the police response will be weak and ineffective until capital becomes upset. Like Cloudflare, I'm also not comfortable with decisions of public safety being handled by corporations, but the police aren't interested, so here we are.
If you want to get off of Cloudflare, you just go to your domain registrar and set your nameservers to some other DNS host, whether it be DDOS-Guard (which is what kiwifarms did with their .ru domain), the domain registrar's own, or any other. It will take a bit to propagate but should be pretty quick. Of course if you bought your domain on Cloudflare you may be kind of screwed, but I don't think that was so in this case.
EDIT: It was https://who.is/whois/kiwifarms.net so they might be screwed. Depends on if Cloudflare still lets them access the dashboard and transfer the domain to another registrar.
It's not rocket surgery.
CF is incapable of "taking" any website offline - the only "power" they have, is the choice to not providing free DDoS protection, and/or to stop resolving the site's URL
So people post info they find via a Google search. Them not posting it on Kiwifarms isn't going to make the information any less readily available.
Pulling screens of random users posting threats is disingenuous. Other users actively discourage such activities constantly.
This all started because people wanted to laugh at someone being ridiculous on Twitter, but then they kept digging and found more and more deplorable stuff. The only reason the campaign to drop the farms exists is to cover up the activities a narcissist openly talked about on social media.
The site is no more dangerous or racist than Jaime Cochran was.
Yes, caching is also (in some ways) a security service, in that "security" can mean protection from resource utilization attacks. But that very feature also necessarily makes the cache the source for the content in the overwhelming majority of cases.
It doesn't irk me that Cloudflare provides security services to kiwifarms. I don't think, for instance, McAfee should withhold virus protection from 8chan, or clinics withholding vaccines from people they're ideologically opposed to. But it does irk me that they essentially provide hosting but wiggle out of the repercussions of providing hosting through some corporate doublespeak. It's one thing to have morals, but it's another thing to use loopholes in your own morals to (try to) avoid the consequences of those morals.
They're providing the HTTP servers that serve the client requests.
IMO they're both hosts that work together. Want to prove that the downstream server is the real host and isn't just part of the hosting? Okay, point the DNS directly to the downstream server.
We (the US) need a build global infrastructure which will provide basic security and DoS protection for any website hosted in US: 100% free and public. Website might choose not use it.
Sure it will be run by government but the internet is run by the government anyway.
I think that will solve problems like this.
I'm sorry, I'm generally Mr. "Raw raw free speech", but let's not kid ourselves; by all accounts KiwiFarms is (and always has been) a cesspool of horrible people. It's not like 4chan or something, where it might have started with reasonable intentions and just became horrible; KiwiFarms was started for the specific purpose of bullying Chris-Chan, hence why it was initially called Cwcki Farms. KiwiFarms has been implicated in multiple suicides, and countless cases of bullying (and possibly doxing), and Null's response to all of these allegations has been almost entirely ambivalent.
At some point, we have to ask: is this the world we actually want to live it? I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron, but even I think that the doxing and SWATing campaigns against her lead to a really bad world to live in, and that's not even getting into people I actually like.
I'm just some idiot on the internet, but I think that the world is a better place without KiwiFarms.
I couldn’t find anything about home addresses of congresspeople being public. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if that was public info. I could be wrong.
Even if you think that kind of protest is a step too far (I do), you surely agree that there's a fundamental difference between peaceful protest at the home of a public figure (which is quite clearly what happened) and the practice of SWATing, which even in its least dangerous form is a perjurious accusation of a serious crime.
Everybody has a right to feel safe in their own home.
Bit of a devil's advocate here: I think private ordinary citizens should have this right. I think a lot of public figures have forgotten they're meant to be servants, not rulers. And I don't mean the supreme court, but congress and the senate. They fought and machinated and put great effort into attaining that position of power which they can abdicate at will any time they don't like the downsides. The fact that they don't says quite a lot. When you've built up all sorts of protective layers and alliances to protect yourself from any real accountability, it's invariably to the detriment of the people at large.
The People's History of the United States by Zinn is full of incidents of the people taking up arms en masse and getting what I would call justice for the little guy. Things like that are denigrated in the harshest possible terms and slandered and libelled with religious fervor these days. But I've read about Ruby Ridge, and Waco. The government was clearly the bad guy in those cases. But where was the accountability? One of the perpetrators at Waco was nearly nominated the head of the ATF instead of facing life in prison for killing children.
Keffals has called for SWATing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220810180051/https://twitter.c...
Do you really think a KF user would SWAT a GOP Congresswoman in the middle of this fight over their DDoS protection, and the call the cops to identify themselves as a specific Kiwi Farms user (moderator “AltisticRight”), one who denies any involvement in this? To me that sounds highly suspect. We will likely never know the truth.
And here’s a box of the Internet pharmacy hormones Keffals instructs kids to buy and self-dose in secret, without medical evaluation or parental knowledge:
See “Homebrew”, first shop link:
In regards to your second point, I don’t know. If it is the case that someone from KiwiFarms is SWATing people, and Null is ambivalent about it, then a world where KiwiFarms is tolerated is not one that I would like.
Considering how much of a jackass Null was in regards to Byuu/Near’s suicide, it really doesn’t seem out of character.
If your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health and your parents will send you to torture camp for being on hormones, then taking hormones in secret is the moral thing to do.
Doctors not performing tubal ligations on women and other afab people under 30 is pure, unadulterated misogyny.
edit: responding to post by deepdriver below, SEGM is a torture-promoting group (yes, conversion therapy is torture) funded by dark money. https://transsafety.network/posts/segm-uncovered/
Oh, and also, if your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health then focusing on fertility is just patriarchy. At the individual level, reproduction is a morally neutral act. Improving your mental health is a morally good act, so it clearly takes priority.
It is a very problematic catch-22 situation that is not helped by cops playing GI-Joe with combat gear.
This sounds like a total failure to bring them down, even Cloudflare knows it.
> On 1 June 2021, cyber-intelligence company Group-IB reported that they had found DDoS-Guard's database, containing site IP addresses, names, and payment information along with its full source code, for purchase on a cybercrime black market forum. The authenticity of the allegedly stolen data was unverified.[6][7]
The joke is still on you since after less than 13 days after all that chaos, outrage, etc the original domain "kiwifarms.net" is still accessible online.
A complete and total failure of a campaign to deplatform and block Kiwifarms.
What I'm wondering is whether it is because:
1. Only US-based websites and forums get to that level of extremism that is cause for de-platforming. I find this option the hardest to believe (pretty sure there are hideous things in other countries as well).
2. The infra is mostly US-based (Cloudflare, cloud providers, etc.), they are focused or getting their attention drawn specifically to US-centric topics.
3. It happens in other counties as well, but because HN is US-centric I am hearing about the instances that are dealing with US topics.
And specifically I'm currently focusing on democratic countries, where free speech is upheld in some form (obviously government based censorship is happening in authoritarian countries all the time).
So which is it? Why am I not hearing of these cases happening to EU-based, Canada-based, Australia-based or Israel-based forums/websites (mentioning Israel specifically as I'd expect to hear about those in my local echo-chamber)?
Would love to learn about similar cases from other countries.
Because in places like Brazil racists and bigots can be easily-ish arrested long before they reach that level of extremism. For example, throwing racist insults at another person in Brazil is a literal crime for which you can be arested by anyone.
Also, places like Brazil make website owner legally liable for user content if the website does not comply with court orders.
> 2. The infra is mostly US-based (Cloudflare, cloud providers, etc.), they are focused or getting their attention drawn specifically to US-centric topics.
> 3. It happens in other counties as well, but because HN is US-centric I am hearing about the instances that are dealing with US topics.
I think that's partially true. However, the big issue is that the US has an absurd view of free speech that doesn't line with anyone else and as such the US hasn't really ratified the ICCPR nor does the US enforce foriegn court orders on matters related to free speech (see the SPEECH act). So anytime anything bad happens anywhere in the world people are forced to go to the media instead of the US government for help.
> Would love to learn about similar cases from other countries.
In Brazil, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the arrest of congressman Daniel Silveira for his antidemocratic activities. Because congresspeople can only be arested _in flagrante delicto_, that justice came up with the novel legal theory that everytime a person watches a video you posted it's like if you were speaking the same words again and thus if there's any crime there, you can be arrested at any time so long as the video is still up.
I'm of course simplyfing. Daniel Silveira, if I recall correctly, was involved in groups making physical threats against the Supreme Court Justices among other stuff.
Some useful sources: (in Portuguese)
https://www.conjur.com.br/2021-fev-17/especialistas-defendem...
https://www.camara.leg.br/noticias/729294-camara-decide-mant...
https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2022/04/29/alexandre-d...
https://www.conjur.com.br/2022-jun-22/bloqueio-paginas-pco-g...
https://www.conjur.com.br/2022-set-06/tre-rj-nega-registro-c... (that congressman was barred from running for relection)
https://veja.abril.com.br/politica/deputado-do-psl-ameaca-st... (he said he would volunteer to physically/militarily attack the court)
If the police can swat someone anywhere within an hour, what's special about these new threats that the police cannot deal with?
I’m sorry, but what?
Few thoughts:
1. Couldn’t people be joining Kiwifarms and acting aggressive to get it banned?
2. Why is cloudflare reporting anything to police? That’s effectively implying they are regularly reviewing content… which is weird if your providing DDoS protection.
The main issue I take is that cloudflare isn’t hosting the content… it’s providing protection from DDoS. So kiwifarms is literally having their security turned on them.
That is imo a breach of contract. It’s one thing to just drop them as a customer it’s another to:
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
You’re hijacking their website and saying “read our content” instead.
Point me to the breach you believe exists.
> You’re hijacking their website and saying “read our content” instead.
They have their domain pointed to their servers. As soon as HateFarms points their DNS elsewhere people will no longer get that message.
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
It’s clear they can cancel service; it’s not clear from the cloudflare TOS they can redirect you to their own content.
That doesn’t mean a judge would necessarily rule in kiwifarms favor or anything, but it seems obvious to me litigation could work sue to ambiguity.
Further, cloudflare could open itself to a lawsuit from police. If they already notified law enforcement then they are probably interfering in an investigation by letting the world know AND shutting down the source of said investigation.
It's really not, CF blocked websites that they dislike in the past, and they continue doing so.
I don't mind a company sabotaging their customers, but the blog post is beyond pale.
Or are these too far above Cloudflare’s moral standard?
The underlying infrastructure of the internet must remain infrastructure: as pipes sending bits and bytes.
Today, it's Kiwifarms. Tomorrow, it is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that doesn't have a backdoor.
I know that Google takes those deplatforming decisions with ease, because they have billions of users but with Cloudflare's much more finite enterprise userbase, I would be careful to aspire to Google's heavy handed approach: for Cloudflare's customers, real money and real jobs are at stake.
It seems especially weird too considering how they just made a blog post promising not to do this (https://archive.ph/gJXgF), and then not only did it but used broad, over the top language which sounds, if I'm honest, a bit disingenuous. Like if someone's life is in imminent danger, you shouldn't be playing games on the internet you should be calling the cops
Politics is a pendulum, and it won’t be pretty when it swings back.
The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.
I actually think the other half of the reason why Cloudflare became such a target is because of their 404 cloudflare site that displays when the origin host goes offline. It's essentially an ad for cloudflare, there is no technical need for them to show this. Only: if my site protected by akamai goes down, I dont believe my users will see that it was protected by akamai. It's just offline. The best protection cloudflare has is to stop making it so easy to see who is protected by them. In fact, they should even stop giving out information on who they are protecting and put it into their TOS that social media sites are not allowed to broadcast the fact that they are protected by cloudflare.
These would be practical steps to massively help Cloudflare mitigate further risks.
If you said you're not using Cloudflare because Cloudflare is attempting to become a monopoly that can mix good with bad and prevent anyone from blocking whoever they choose to host, that'd make sense.
But it sounds like you're just bullshitting. Anyone who'd stretch this event to the possibility of "losing business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor" is just absolutely bullshitting. You, cft, are full of shit.
1. https://imgur.com/a/hY2BN7p
2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_dogs_bark,_but_the_carava...
That is why I'm saying you're full of shit.
Do real adults make ridiculous assertions about imaginary things and expect to be taken seriously?
It's telling that you're not all that secure about being believed about spending all that money with Verisign (which, personally, I think is a very bad choice, but you do you).
Right, they had IRL stalking deaththreat posted to there site?
That being said, timing is a bit sus with their stock price. Although I think I believe they are standing on principal, it's easy to make a case that they are just watching the market and responding.
so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?
how could Cloudflare write that entire justification without giving an example to someone that wasn't following the drama? To me it looks like Cloudflare arbitrarily took someone down specifically after writing that they wouldn't, in the same blog entry.
We dont know.
Being that Kiwifarms is an open forum, and I assume Cloudflare has computers, they could show us the proof, but it is actually in their best interest not to. Now anyone can make their own fantasy what "dangerous content" is.
https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/#pos...
Notice how once again that have nothing at all to do with KF, simply claims by others that it was from them.
Why We Terminated Daily Stormer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922 - 857 points | 2017-08-16 | 1574 (1526) comments
Terminating Service for 8Chan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395 - 1098 points | 2019-08-05 | 1438 (1376) comments
And, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=8chan + https://hn.algolia.com/?query=stormer
…as part of coordinated, targeted harassment campaigns with the ultimate goal of forcing the targeted individuals to kill themselves.
I don’t know if you think calling it “just archiving publicly available information” is clever or something, but it’s incredibly transparent.
Thats believable /s
But even if they were speaking the truth, this is just throwing more bait to the pressure campaigns. As the post says this does not make these issues go away, just as putting paint over mold just hides the issue.
This move was correct because it protects cloudflare shareholders. Taking the site down has serious downsides. It puts all of society at risk. Law enforcement now loses transparency on what is going on with these forums, whose connecting to it, how users are interacting with it. Driving these sites underground means they are more difficult to interdict and may ultimately increase danger and death.
Seems kiwifarms was prepared for this and already transferred to new infra at another dns I won’t name
A website isn't liable for what its users post. Also, a website isn't liable for what its users do.
An edge service having problems about edgelords. Almost poetic.
If they paid the bills to Cloudflare what is the issue?
Should Cloudflare decide what sites have value to stay online?
Oh, and KF sucks.
Ignoring the fact that cloudflare provides we security services and they decided to just give up on it, this leaves a very sour taste in my month. I won’t be giving cloudflare my business anymore. If Kiwifarms users were engaging in illegal activity then just let enforcement do their job.
I give it 2 years and they will be successful.
It's worth noting that she's based in the UK where it is really mainstream to be a TERF, it's the default position in most tabloids and magazines and plenty of TERF columnists get a lot of column inches to complain to their hearts' content. The likely next Prime Minister recently shouted "A woman is a woman" to screams of delight from a crowd - TERFs are not an oppressed, downtrodden minority there.
Is this a new buzzword to blanket a group and opinions? Something like "I dont think transgenders should compete in elite sports" would now label me a TERF. All these defenitions are made up on one side and can change on a whim.
I’d provide screenshots but documenting the escapades of public figures must be relegated to the memory hole these days.
Are you sure? Because somehow I doubt it.
Amazing that humans never learn from history.
At this point, expect everything that doesn't agree with their ideology to be taken down or thwarted through their theatrical pressure campaigns on the blue bird app.
This is beyond comical.
Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time.
"Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink"
Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts.
"It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod"
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-biden-admin-held-week...
https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...
"We're just doing commons sense stuff. Like following science."
https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-quietly-dropped-covid-cens...
Etc, etc.
All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who are now claiming that they want some sort of "reasonable" policy from infrastructure providers. It has been demonstrated time and time again that people who don't oppose deplatforming on principle are actually fine with it whenever it suits them.
1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;
2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.
However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.
Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.
They are now using DD0S-guard : https://ddos-guard.net/
The website was one created by a lunatic who wanted to say whatever he wanted amongst other people who felt the same. A true free speech advocate, who abided by every law the US has regarding content moderation but did nothing additional. The bulk of KiwiFarm users were not Nazis, they were just people. Everyone is a bit fucked, and some people like being able to say anything about odd people on the internet. The downside to that, is you will get genuinely harmful or crazy people who take it too far. But that's nothing new, Facebook has hosted live massacres, snapchat is a vector for nude stealing and distribution, Pornhub hosted child or underage porn and probably still does. The point is, KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, it was the small minority causing huge problems as they always do. What will change now that it's gone? Nothing. You'll still have the same people who take it too far, you'll still have the regular people who just want to be able to talk without having to care how other people feel, you'll still have the oddities on the internet, they'll just disperse somewhere else. No issues have been fixed, no problems addressed, but everyone will pat themselves on the back and feel good. Another pillar of the internet gone, and we'll see what is the next to go.
KiwiFarms going down changes nothing, but the act of it being taken down by such a formerly neutral, and vital part of internet infrastructure is a terrible precedent. When everything is political, when everything is responsible for everything else, then only the most milktoast, party-line response will be allowed, and since politics is pendulum shaped, everyone celebrating this now will unfortunately reap the rewards when it swings again.
Broadly, to the left, the worst-case scenario is that this policy terminates with a part 2 of Black's _IBM and the Holocaust_. That is: a scenario where eventually the public _believes_ the company to be materially responsible for a terrible outcome, even if it was legal at the time. They think these harms are both on the table and imminent, and they are willing to deplatform KF/Stormfront/_etc_. as a result.
I think CF believes this is not plausible, and is instead worried about a worst-case scenario where (I'm guessing) an audience like Trump voters are not allowed to host websites.
I think this issues is unlikely to make real progress until both camps can find a way to talk about these material outcomes, and get aligned on which are plausible.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Does Al-Shabaab not create a "threat of violence"?
What argument can there be for blocking one and not the other?
That said, is anyone willing to steelman this website? Could this possibly be construed as just a big misunderstanding?
Then you are not a freedom speech absolutist (which is fine, and not completely unreasonable).
Crimes are committed on Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Tor, Signal, Telegram everyday. Better take those down too.
In terms of crimes, I think there were people who did make threats, there were two users if I remember who went on to commit shootings, but my counter to that is that Facebook too has had users who committed mass shootings. I believe the KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, more the actual users who did the crimes.
If yes, Cloudflare is also responsible for death (and more of them) and should be shut down, if no then Kiwifarms is not responsible for death.
The rumblings I'm detecting now seem to be related to misinformation.
Edit:
And 4chan is always bigger but more diffuse. Hard to say who's more of a pest.
Edit edit:
I think the important lesson here is that direct targeting of fascist employees and ex-employees of enablers is very much a live tactic. It worked, it works, it will continue to work.
The excuses here are as pitiful as those of the misinformed hateful mobs trying to take the site down.
Since this mess all started I've been paying close attention to everything going on, including the site, and noting the major discrepancies between what the mob and media report about the site and the reality of the site itself. From allegations of being an alt-right site (the have an entire sub form dedicated to laughing at major alt-right and right-wing personalities, and have leftist members.. not to mention that the site is apolitical in nature to begin with) To claims that it has a history of supposed "intimidation campaigns" and "swatting". (which is not only against the rules but also goes against the core nature of the site to begin with. To document, look and laugh.. but never touch!)
Is it distasteful and vulgar, yes, but they (and not just the staff but most users as well) treat threats and attempts at off site harassment, swatting or interaction of any kind, as serious.
The site also seems to take dangerous and illegal stuff seriously as well. There is a whole board and a thread dedicated to documenting all the legal interactions and requests by law enforcement. The idea that they suddenly, now, stopped responding is hard to believe. This is why they have been so hard to shutdown in the past. Further more, from the sound of the statement here, not only was law enforcement not on board with this so called threat, but not even after CF reached out to them!
This is and has always been about perfectly legal speech that some people don't like and refuse to allow spoken. This is a case of literal misinformation. Much like all the claims of swatting and deaths. It's literally "if you say it enough times people start to believe it" in action. It doesn't matter that allegations have no proof or don't even attempt to provide any.. certain types of media just pick up the allegations are repeat as fact. And specifically here exact type of people complaining should give you a big hint at why this is all being taken so seriously.
I know what the response to this is going to be.. "right" minded people jumping in to yell about swatting and harassment etc. Pointing out that keffals was swatted. But ignoring that keffals themselves is the one who claims it was KF based only on... who knows. and before anyone asks who else could or would have done it, don't forget that keffals has a reputation, and is prideful in fact, of a history of attacking and de-platforming people for literal misunderstandings and personal grudges. This all started when the owner of the site commented on keffals gloating about getting Destiny banned and "deprived of his livelihood" for daring to make what amounted to a joke. And that's not even getting into all the messed up stuff they are connected to or directly responsible for. (grooming, abuse allegations, running an under age sexual forum, supporting a site that teaches children how to make homemade hormones in their bathtub secretly and more) This person is the hill so many seem to want to die on!
This whole think smells like a major copout.
1. Some awful website uses Cloudflare.
2. Something ignites outrage that Cloudflare is protecting that awful website.
3. Cloudflare initially refuses to take it down, arguing that they are neutral infrastructure providers.
4. Twitter-amplified outrage keeps growing
5. Cloudflare caves in and kicks that site off, posting about that this is only due to very recent emergency (which is nonsense, they serviced these sites for years and nothing materially changed).
6. ???
7. No profit, go back to step 1.
My prediction: because they cannot stick to their stance, every cycle makes it more probable that next attempt will succeed, until nobody will believe in infrastructure provider interpretation and they will be forced to estabilish some moderation.
I don't care what Kiwifarms did, this kind of thing has to be left to state. If Kiwifarms is doing something illegal law enforcement will deal with it. This move means Cloudflare is now a company that will remove content they find problematic. Or put another way, if they don't remove content we can now assume it's because they don't find it "dangerous" enough. So all those racist and transphobic blogs calling for race wars and celebrating trans suicides, well I guess Cloudflare just doesn't think they're that bad. And that's why these things always progresses, because turning a blind eye is no longer justifiable position. If you cast judgement on one piece of content, you must do so for everything. Now they've made this move the pressure to remove more content will only intensify. And it will be even harder to say no next time because now they've now lost the ability to say they're neutral.
But whatever. I have no hope of a free internet anymore. At this point I think if the West is ever to truly value free speech again we'll need to learn that lesson the hard way.
And no, the right to ban someone does not translate to an obligation.
Where does twitter get all of its money from? Not directly from users, but instead from ads. They are not directly beholden to the interests of their customers but instead other corporations.
You wouldn’t want to have your media controlled by the government instead of corporations. Ask any Eastern European.
Yes, I believe there are laws that are unjustly applied, but this is a) not a law and b) so obviously different from any sort of edge case. The only people who think kiwifarms should exist are sociopaths.
The problem with real witch hunts was that witches don't exist. By definition, any "witches" found and punished was an injustice.
That's not the case here. Kiwifarms users have committed acts that have drawn public attention, criticism, and consequences like today's.
I read it that way too at first but it makes no sense in light of your OP.
Which makes them a prime target for extremist thinking/alt-right groups.
The alt-right playbook series goes into this rather well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g (video has content warning, ironically).
I have looked at the site and it's doesn't seem that extreme, unless there's a bunch of content not visible to guests. It looks like any anonymous IB from the early 2000s. The people who are calling it "extreme" seem to mostly be trusting other people's descriptions of the site.
> SWATting of minorities
As far as I can tell, the only people verifiably being swatted are KF site operators. I have yet to see a case of swatting with compelling evidence of attribution to KF.
That's pretty extreme no?
It's one of the most awful places I've ever seen on the internet, and I have zero respect for the people who try to launder large-scale harassment into "it's just free speech!"
Swatting is illegal on the site, harassing too, in fact it's against the rules to really try to interact with anyone at all. And they target everyone and anyone who publicly says or does stupid stuff regularly. Don't feel to bad, most people tend to easily fall for misinformation like this.
I get how if you just read about it that KF sounds awful. Not sure how legit any of that is tho. Do the people you suspect of being readers of KF seem like awful degenerates to you?
Worse than that, the mentality pushed forth in echo chambers like this seems to crystallise peoples thoughts, to the point that alternative thoughts to the zeitgeist therein these spaces are not tolerated or even heard without revulsion or aggression.
I’ve seen this in both the extremes of Right wing and Left wing politics in the last ten years.
Currently in my opinion, the extreme right wing seems to be the more dangerous of the two. In part due to the volume of adherents to the ideology and the secondly proportion of people within who are die-hard adherents, thirdly globally, the political centre appears to be a good bit further to the right of where it was 20 years ago, it seems that more extreme right wing political thought is more accepted now.
For example, the person that started #dropkiwifarms is a literal soviet worshipping communist, openly flirted with minors on twitter, hosted a discord server full of minors and sexual fetish content, and had a terminally embarrassing findom porn career, and talks frequently about sending minors illegally brewed HRT without their parents knowledge. This is all factual and documented, you can look it up if you want. So you can see why they would want the site taken down.
>I am so full of hate for this situation. I try to write down my thoughts and I find myself unable to focus on one thing I hate the most. The person committing crimes to frame my community, or the sex pest who groom little boys, or the journalists who outright lie, or the corporate cowardice responsibility for the fragile state of the Internet.
>It is all so rotten and unsalvageable. Each of these problems complement the other, in a strange and disjointed way, where trying to explain how they tie together is just exhausting. Multiple evils with their own completely independent and selfish objectives - each coincidentally involve wanting to stop people from talking to each other freely as they have been able to for the last 20 years.
----- Here is an archive and a screenshot of the message:
https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/owner-of-christchurch-s...
1. Christchurch terrorist had no known account on the site so there was no information to give.
2. That Oceanic law enforcement were trying to arrest anybody who so clips of the shooting video or materials related to the shooting under the same laws as child porn.
The media, with the same disregard for the facts as they have now and here when talking about the site, simply made up their own narrative as they went along. Some reported the truth, others made it look ambiguous and other intentionally reported it to sound like the information was related to the killer, or even to sound like the killer was a member of the site. When in fact he was not, nor was the site ever even mentioned by him.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
Isn't Kiwifarms the site which uses their so-called 'lolcows' to 'milk entertainment'? Sounds like a prime example of people dreaming themselves masters.
We're letting private corporations act as the judiciary and executive branch of governance.
"What could go wrong?" I wonder.
Then YOU could proudly serve the content of those poor under-served souls which you preemptively mourn
This is just doublespeak. No matter the merits of this decision, clearly this not the policy they advertised they have on Wednesday.
It seems like this does nothing more than push the forum more underground and hidden. But doesn’t actually solve the issue of them doxing people?
Literally, they just point their domain at new DNS. It takes seconds.
Who is going to want to do biz with KF?
Yes but here Cloudflare claims that law enforcement was "too slow"
Edit: I’d love a definition of hate speech from someone who downvoted me.
You were misinformed.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
* It happens in public
* it is capable of disturbing the public peace
* it attacks an entire segment of the population
* by inciting hatred, insulting, defaming or calling for violence or arbitrary measures against them.
You'll have a hard time explaining what the value is in allowing speech that fulfulls all of the above.
For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
Edit: Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
Lots of laws are subjective to some degree (And the degree here is really not very high here), that is absolutely normal and not problematic. For example, in order to decide whether someone was acting negligent, something called the "reasonable person standard" is used in US jurisprudence.
> For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
That is a silly strawman. Because it really doesn't matter what some unspecified "people" on the internet say on Twitter. What matters is what a judge says after carefuly consideration of the specific circumstances and possibly precedence cases, and possibly other judges on appeal.
> Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
The line is not nearly as blurry as you make it out to be, nor is it difficult to stay well away from it.
> Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
"public peace" has been defined in case law and commentaries as the peaceful coexistence of the population, free of fear of violence or lawlessness. "capable of" (geeignet) is a recurring term in German jurisprudence and means that an action is realistically fit to achieve something, considering the concrete circumstances of the case.
My example wasn’t meant to be a straw man. I just think defining hate speech is extremely difficult and sometimes unpopular things need to be said in order to improve society.
Also, it’s not just “people on twitter”. I’m so sick of people dismissing these things using that framing. No, these people have power. The woke mob has power. They don’t like free speech and I guarantee you that if we implemented hate speech laws people will fight to enshrine their ideologies into law.
I really don't see why that would make a difference.
> I just think defining hate speech is extremely difficult
Well, I have given you a definition that has been working quite well in Germany for decades.
> and sometimes unpopular things need to be said in order to improve society.
Which is why nobody is proposing to ban "unpopular things".
> No, these people have power. The woke mob has power.
Can you name a single person that "woke mob" has killed? Because I can name dozens upon dozens of people killed by people radicalized on the internet through things that could be curbed by sensible laws such as the one I referred to.
> They don’t like free speech and I guarantee you that if we implemented hate speech laws people will fight to enshrine their ideologies into law.
Yeah, and others will fight to have the laws differently. That's called democracy.
Do you think that’s because white men just looooove to kill themselves? Or perhaps it’s at least partly because men receive zero support because the woke mob hates them?
Meanwhile we have woke individuals like yourself focusing on a small number of violent acts performed by the most extreme individuals.
Where’s your empathy for the vast, vast majority who don’t commit these violent acts?
Also, did it ever occur to you that male suicides and those violent acts you mentioned are linked? Call me crazy but perhaps we are seeing male pain and suffering expressed in different ways. Violence pointed inwards and some pointed outwards.
And your solution is to take these hateful ideologies and enshrine them into law? Because, again, that’s exactly what will happen.
[1]: https://easydns.com/blog/2020/07/20/turns-out-half-the-inter...
Why are crimes committed on KF not stopped “the old fashioned way”, ie rule of law and the court system?
2. Has the owner of the site ever allowed illegal content or behaviour on the website?
That is simply not how it works. The bits came from Cloudflare.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
Should everything with "anti-trans jokes" be taken down? Better take down every forum, every game chat, Twitter, Whatsapp etc .
Why add this?
Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
And a CDN is a hosting service if you push content there and don’t set it to expire.
What are they talking about? From what I've seen, this is somewhere between grossly exaggerated and completely fictional. Did they see someone post the "300 confirmed kills" copypasta and think it was serious?
You should all think about the people dying in dictatorships before you give up a free and open Internet over some paedophile using twitter clout to ban a gossip forum