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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

> the future of the internet seems pretty sad...

That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s

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This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it.

Its easy to say those things for someone you dislike, but zoom out and look at the implications, you have a campaign pretty much asking cloudflare to stand aside and allow them to do DDOS attacks on a website which apparently won several lawsuits against them already(ill dig up the sources a bit later on when I get home, sorry).

And that's before getting into what this "harassment" that is being reported by every journalist seems to actually be, or rather, the sources thereof. In the previous couple threads I tried to get a bit deeper into what those things actually were and i'm yet to get a straight answer with archives or something.

Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are, but I've been part of a regional forum that was vilified for handwavy accusations from people that hated us and had said accusations get a life of their own, and were pretty much all fabrications or things blown out of context to the extreme, of course in an infinitely smaller scale, and of course you'll have to take my word for it. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

> This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it.

Like the slippery slope of dropping terrorist harrasser site being "extremely scary" is actually an attempt of discussion, right?

You could call any politically-adjacent forum a "terrorist harasser" site. Is Wikileaks not a "terrorist harasser site" in the 9/11-era rhetoric?

> Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are

"All people say they are" is a site running coordinated harassment campaigns, including SWATing and bomb threats, though. Those are clear crimes. You can't seriously be arguing that CloudFlare or DDos-Guard or whoever shouldn't be allowed to choose not to do business with that sort of thing, can you?

Like so many others here[1], your perception thing seems to be based solely on your personal judgement as to whether the claims are true. But if they're true, it doesn't seem very controversial at all. And even if they're not true, it seems like the only party's judgement that really matters here (absent law enforcement, of course), is CloudFlare's.

[1] I admit I've been stunned at the general level of anti-trans sentiment in these threads. So many of these subthreads end in arguments like yours, which sound like they're trying to be arguments of general libertarian principle but end up falling into subjectivity traps.

My friend i've been trying to get some archive links or anything that shows any real evidence of swatting from the website, which seemed at the time to be completely open and freely archive-able and yet it's like trying to pull water out of a stone. Furthermore you have articles like the one from the AP[0] straight up saying: "They gang up on victims and pool their personal details such as addresses and phone numbers in a practice called “doxxing,” spreading vile rumors and targeting workplaces, friends, families and homes. Another favorite tactic has been “swatting” — making false emergency calls to provoke an armed police response at a target’s home. " Without any evidence of it anywhere, surely if a public open forum had been so infamous for swatting someone as to be described as "another favorite tactic" there would be a paper trail? And that's pretty much all the articles I've read.

I'm not even being given a chance to use my personal judgement to evaluate the evidence because there doesn't seem to be evidence?

My original post in this thread already addresses the matter regarding it being CloudFlare's judgment in the end.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/technology-gay-rights-7d64f7b7173...

is more due to the fact that KF is born from the sole purpose of harassment(CWC) then move to harass more than just that one person

I have only seen a handful of anti-trans sentiments here, and those were quickly downvoted, flagged, and eventually deleted. Care to link to one live example in this thread?

I suspect linking is against site guidelines, but if you search for 'degenerate' you will find at least one example of a trans person being called such in an unflagged comment.

It is not against site guidelines, as far as I know or have seen

Searching for "degenerate" on the page leads to a single comment for me [0], and that comment uses it completely impersonally:

> When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32726080

It's perhaps not against the guidelines per se, but linking to flamebait comments does tend to lead discussions in the wrong direction, and tends to be discouraged by mods AFAIK.

I'm not sure why your browser search is not turning up the other comment. Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32729604

edit: Actually, the comment seems to have been flagged just now, a few minutes after I replied here. At least it is flagged now, I guess.

Perhaps there were some collapsed comments so that's why I missed it.

Still, I believe 1h for it to be removed seems decent time for moderation, especially in such a large and relatively flamey thread.

How have they won court cases over this? That's what I don't understand. They seem to be doing illegal things, and yet there's no legal recourse? Honestly it's just a matter of time until they figure out some way to make it work. They're still on TOR which is probably enough for their most dedicated members. A legal ruling could really tie their hands

It is possible that KF content was cruel and abhorrent and yet not actually illegal.

Individuals have sued them repeatedly and lost; the case I remember best is a woman called Melinda Scott. Here's an explanatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iqkpN9a6q8

The average person is much, much more likely to get fired because of a Twitter mob than a Kiwi Farms mob. Twitter users got David Shor fired because he said riots often cause political blowback; Emmanuel Cafferty because someone saw him make an OK sign and got a Twitter mob riled up. Both stories here[1].

We can argue about the merits of free speech vs. the merits of cutting off all sites that enable harassment. But this isn't where we're at. At the moment, we're in a situation where sites that create some of the largest amounts of harassment are allowed to continue on just fine, while smaller sites are taken down after successful social media campaigns.

This isn't a principled stance against harassment that's evenly applied. It's selective enforcement directed by whoever has the largest online mob.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

It has become increasingly clear over the recent years that there is no real rationality that we can apply here. You cannot reason about it. The foundational axioms have fallen off and eroded.

Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Get some perspective please.

> this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse

Source?

There have been loads of recent articles and posts on HN about the type of content Kiwifarms hosts and promotes, easily findable from the HN search bar. Even people who disagree with Cloudflare's actions aren't debating the odiousness of Kiwifarms' content.

That's a different statement though. Twitter hosts some terrible content. Hell, Cloudflare provides CDN-services for some terrible content. But I'm sure you wouldn't say that therefore they exist for the "express purpose" of doing that.

Let's propose a test. We can scrape all of the tweets submitted in the last month and all of the posts on Kiwi Farms in the last month. Then let's count up the percentage of posts that contain a slur for black people, jewish people, or trans people. If the rate of slurs on KF is no more than 10x that of Twitter then we can consider these sites comparable. Otherwise, we can consider them to be in different categories.

Why should we only count slurs for these groups?

In many of the recent discussions on the topic on HN, you can easily read about the origins of Kiwi Farms, which was originally "CWCki Forums", created for the express purpose of harassing a webcomic creator, Chris Chandler - the name literally grew out of the initials of their first primary target.

Furthermore, heck, the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms has tons of references to primary sources that detail some of the directed harassment, e.g. from one well sourced article at https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/...

> In the most extreme instance of this, they goaded a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler (and record it, of course).

This information is so trivially easy to find (just go down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, or again, read many of the posts on this topic on HN) that I can't believe the requests for "Source?" and false equivalence statements of "lots of companies host objectionable content" are made in good faith.

TBH, I haven't seen anyone really try to defend any of Kiwi Farms' content. The only real question is whether Cloudflare should be in the position to make judgement calls on the level of danger inherent to any of the sites that use their DDoS protection services.

None of what you said makes it different than Twitter.

And all of them boil down to hearsay. I havent seen any actual evidence.

Type the name of the site into a web search engine, click the Wikipedia result, and look at the sources there. It literally would have been less effort for you than copying/pasting my message, adding a caret and posting a question.

What happens if another site that you consider completely legitimate can't be hosted just because others think it is not acceptable? Maybe your views are currently acceptable, but will they be in 5, 10, 20 years?

When was the last time a site got taken down because "others think it is not acceptable"? Please, name a single one. There's a difference between people simply "not liking" a site, and people using extremely well-established principles of ethical concepts and human rights (which have been refined over centuries) to decide what content is violating the "laws", as we call them, which have been generally agreed upon in modern society. Further to that, hosts have what we call "terms of service" or "acceptable use policy" which clearly define what content is acceptable for that host to continue to serve the customer operating the site and administrating its content. Again, not someone "thinking it is not acceptable".

oh, that's easy: Stormfront, the Daily Stormer...

... hey, Kiwifarm's holding company was named 'Final Solutions, LLC', what a coincidence! ;)

https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730

take a seat, gamers... we've found the REAL most-oppressed minority here (/s)

The most recent one was probably Parler. Usually deplatforming is due to a moral panic involving a massively exaggerated risk. All sites probably violate the AUP or TOS if you look closely enough. But during the panic, you can't see that the risk is tiny in the grand scheme of things.

Let’s cross that bridge if it happens.

At that point it will be too late.

Censorship like this creeps on forward until everyone is scared to speak up against it and then it clamps down hard enough that no one is able to speak up against it.

History has told that lesson a thousand times. Still, there are ever new people that seemingly lack the capacity to recognize the lesson (my guess is, the minority), or, for arguments sake, chose to ignore it (my guess, the majority).

That’s because it’s a garbage argument disproved by exemple.

Most of Europe has strong law regarding hate speech and didn’t devolve into an awful fascist tyranny. A free country doesn’t have to tolerate everything.

Meanwhile their allegedly incredible laws didn’t stop the USA to conduct kidnapping, jailing without trial and for indefinite duration and torture of dozens.

Is it a free country if they don't tolerate "hate" speech?

Yes.

The guy who made the nazi pug video might disagree.

Why should private entities bear the burden of supporting content they don't endorse?

Do you believe your ISP should be allowed to drop you if you say something they don't like? What about your phone company? We, as a society, already forcing companies to support content they don't endorse.

Those are bad examples; Telcos are almost universally heavily regulated and as such in many (most?) countries out there can't just refuse people service.

Cloudflare is doing neither here. This is closer to Subway banning you than your phone company; it's highly optional to do business with CF.

Do you believe that Kiwi Farms should be able to set up shop in a restaurant and peddle their hateful shit?

What about an airline terminal?

We, as a society, are already denying individuals and organizations the right to disseminate information while using our private property when it doesn't align with our goals and beliefs.

What about the site owner's water supply?

The disagreement here seems to over whether Cloudflare is more like a restaurant, or more like a utility company. Given the ubiquity of DDOS attacks online, (and the fact that KF seemingly can't stay online without DDOS mitigation), I think there's a good argument to be made that DDOS mitigation might be more like a utility.

It's far closer to an insurance company than a utility. And either way, utilities aren't common carriers.

Yea! Today death threats are banned, tomorrow it will be collecting Pokémon!

Depends on the specifics, as always. I'm comfortable saying that whatever the line is, KF is firmly on the other side of it.

If you do not have a consistent standard other than something arbitrary and subjective then it is only a matter of time until the line changes again.

Yeah well, such is life.

>Maybe your views are currently acceptable, but will they be in 5, 10, 20 years?

Not just that. It's views that anyone else on the site shares. Your community on a site can be destroyed by the actions of a completely separate community on the same site.

This argument can't persuade those who never have any views of their own and always adopt the currently acceptable ones.

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