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.
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.
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 ;)
Am I wrong here?
“There seems to be a double standard with who can partake in intimidation campaigns.”
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
That’s exactly what I think should be the case. The US government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and having a representative democracy is a way to achieve that decentralization. If the power structures that arise from this model threaten this process then the first goal should be fixing it rather than introducing a new process where a smaller ideological group gets to harass those within companies into acquiescing to their moral guidelines.
The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail.
So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?
If this is true, explain police protection. Or restraining order.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
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.
Laws aren't about what's moral or not.
> If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.
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.
Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
As an autistic person with a history of trauma, abuse and mental illness, I'm deeply offended at the insinuation that I and people like me can't tell if they're trans or not. Being trans is not mental illness, it's human variation.
Not intervening in puberty for someone who will grow up to be a trans adult also does permanent harm, resulting in tens to hundreds of thousands of USD in surgery and other costs, and (more importantly) a lot of pain. The fact is that early intervention prevents a lot of suffering down the road. If your moral calculus doesn't take that into account it is illegitimate.
* conversion therapy in the form of talk therapy [2], for which, the Independent Forensic Expert Group (which functions under the auspices of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims) has said [2a]:
"All forms of conversion therapy, including talk or psychotherapy, can cause intense psychological pain and suffering. All practices attempting conversion are inherently humiliating, demeaning, and discriminatory. The combined effects of feeling powerless and extreme humiliation generate profound feelings of shame, guilt, self-disgust, and worthlessness, which can result in a damaged self-concept and enduring personality changes"
* The "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)" hypothesis, the original paper of which was revised to say something completely different after it was shown to lack scientific basis [3] [4]
* right-wing propaganda about sex and relationships [5]
* ending all transition healthcare for adults up to age 25 [6]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32709551
[2] https://transsafety.network/posts/segm-uncovered/ (see the "Non-academic conversion therapy campaigning" section)
[2a] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/S...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210813225746/https://segm.org/... (p. 9)
[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20210814110728/https://careybapt...
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20210615111058/https://2d3aa506-...
I realize I sound like Charlie from It's Always Sunny, but it's all there. These organizations have deep links to various right-wing networks and are all attempts to launder right-wing, unscientific ideas into the mainstream.
I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
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.
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.
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.
And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
This is another reason why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision.
I understand people have mixed feelings about the Paradox of Tolerance, but I generally don't think that it even comes into play here except in its most pure form (Popper was a lot more narrow about what he considered intolerable speech than most people realize). I'm not here to litigate Popper -- the Paradox of Tolerance is worth talking about in general, but I don't think that the Kiwi Farms' ideology was the most dangerous thing about the site. I think that they were actively pushing people off of the Internet. They were actively taking away the rights of other people to speak.
The ideology of Kiwi Farms (to the extent it has one) is dangerous, but it's a secondary conversation from what the site was really doing.
I heard so many stories during this campaign from people talking about how they were scared to go online, how their family members were being intimidated just to get at them, how systematically isolated they felt. Is that the result of an ideology with negative consequences, or is that the result of a site that's just literally and plainly threatening freedom of discourse online? I think it's the second.
And I saw a lot of excuses made to Kiwi Farms victims that they could make the abuse stop by just not being public online: not talking about it, not streaming or having online businesses. Essentially, the solution people proposed to stop that abuse was to go away and stop existing in the public sphere so that Kiwi Farms wouldn't have a "reason" to target them. Well, when someone is arguing that the correct way to combat abuse is for the victims to give up their speech rights and to exit the public sphere, then who should be the first person to lose their right to speak in that case?
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.
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.
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?
defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
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.
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 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"
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.
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.
(edit: corrected US to canada. most of the coverage of this was coming from NBC, assumed that meant the victim was american)
When I grew up, people used to say that you should never post your personal details online. I think we should normalize that attitude again.
It really makes me wonder why they decided to go with a DDoS attack as opposed to counter-doxxing the operator of KiwiFarm, who also seems to be a donation-soliciting public nuisance and "internet celebrity".
in what ridiculous world does that count as "posting your personal details online"?
In any case, I think this young woman should stay strapped if there are people coming to her house.
That being the case, we should probably do a better job of educating people on just how much signal there is in even innocuous seeming information.
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/2022-alleged-kiwi-...
I don't want to really get into the details, but we should push places like kiwifarms to the corners of the internet, and then keep pushing.
But at least three trans/gnc people have died through suicide, directly attributable to Kiwi Farms. Near, a brilliant and widely respected open source contributor, specified in their suicide note that it was because Kiwi Farms had made their life hell for years (https://www.ign.com/articles/near-bsnes-remembrance). Just because there are some bad apples in the trans community doesn't make this okay, and they don't get carte blanche to make threats online - they get banned from social media like most other people. There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
Huh? Of course there is. It's called Twitter. I've seen posts from all kinds of people calling for the deaths of all men, for example. Literally: "kill all men", verbatim. I've seen them get called out on it, only to laugh in the face of the "reddit virgins" who had the audacity to talk back to them. It's a mistake to think they are not hateful.
How many people commit suicide because of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? I have absolutely no doubt it's a far greater number than some trolling website in the darker corners of the internet. Why isn't cloudflare condemning them?
If you have examples of such people getting banned or arrested, feel free to post them. I've seen numerous examples to the contrary over the years to the point it turned into a neat little collection.
I don't feel threatened by bullshit bomb threats either but apparently it's enough for cloudflare to deplatform some site. So why do they say nothing in other cases?
The same world where a similar, much more benign comment, aimed at women would very likely get you fired, ruined and turned into a social pariah that isn't allowed to be touched by a ten-foot pole. And if a company dared employ you, they'd be pressured into firing you.
However, I do hope it was not a hoax, and not because I want him dead, but because I am not looking forward to the era where people commit fake “suicides” as the ultimate way to bring attention to a cause or argument, or just as a way to “win” and get the last word. It’s the climax of clout chasing IMO. But it takes away from people who actually do commit suicide and minimizes their tragedies, as our first instinct will eventually be to assume all suicides are fake.
We have not crossed that line yet as a society, but I fear someday we will. Already I doubt anyone has actually killed themselves because of KF.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
If you look at this, yes, no deaths are shown for the date of Near's death. But if you actually pay attention, no deaths are shown anywhere past May 2021.
On and before May 2021, the death rate is about one per month. It's pretty much impossible that just by chance there would be seven consecutive months with no deaths; the reasonable conclusion is that the death listings are not in fact complete and that anyone who died after May 2021 just isn't listed.
That's possible, but it's worth pointing out that only unnatural deaths are cataloged. This does not include deaths by a natural cause.
edit to respond to xwdv below: Unlike you, I care about trans people and their loved ones being terrorized.
I know that I'm going to regret stepping in this pile of community dog poo, but ...
The simple idea behind "the rule of law" and the concept of "justice" is that it applies equally to all. Regardless of what someone claims to "support" or "oppose" online, death threats are illegal (and sometimes deadly) and should be dealt with accordingly.
I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling". As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; in the absence of such evidence, which your post is, your claims are inflammatory, at best. Were there an option to report your comment (or were I intelligent enough to know how that option worked), I would have done so.
I know that I should not have to spell this out, but it is not OK to threaten people's lives. This, regardless of whether (i) you are trans, (ii) you support trans people, (iii) you hate trans people, or (iv) none of the above.
DataRacer on Twitter is really good at cataloging this sort of stuff, as early as 2020: https://nitter.net/dataracer117/status/1272737061703790592
Looks like there's finally some actions being taken in the case of JK Rowling:
https://www.thewrap.com/jk-rowling-death-threat-music-video-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10976955/Police-inv... https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-j-k-rowling-r...
Keep in mind that this is a billionaire who seems to get mediocre support from social media platforms against threats of violence. What chance do the mere plebs have?
As I said, justice means equal application of the law, and threats of violence and calls to violence are never OK, even when they are "on your side". It doesn't matter if you are calling for the killing of trans people, or the killing of people who are mean to trans people; calls for violence are wrong, and threats of violence are wrong. I hope that we can at least agree on this one thing.
And frankly, shame on Twitter if they did not take quick action on the posts that you linked to. And FWIW, the first post (an obvious threat) has had its account deleted, the second post was neither a threat nor a call to violence, the third post (an obvious call to violence) has been deleted, but the account remains (but is dormant), etc. So it appears that something _was_ done, but I know neither by whom it was done, nor when it was done.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Télévision_Libre_des_Mil...
Many things aren't black and white but what you just said is pure evil. Your parents ought to be ashamed.
You seem to have visited a very different Kiwifarms than I have. They always made a point about not interacting with the shown individuals. There haven't been any threatening or harassment campaigns. In fact people saying such things out loud have been shamed for their behaviour.
Not sure if you know the Chris Chan saga and the role Kiwifarms had and has in protecting Chris?
I am not excusing them, I have no exclusive opinion about them either. But your image of the site is simply wrong.
> 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
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...
“…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.
A business terminating their relationship with a problematic customer is not "vigilantism".
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.
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.
On other note, I expect ICANN to become political in a few years, observing the way our institutions are failing, both domestic and international.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No. The post alludes to active investigations concerning, among other things, bomb threats. One doesn’t air evidence in that situation.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.
> 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...
It shouldn't be up to harassed individuals to seek justice, prosecutors should be able to go after them. If the issue is with the law itself, the government needs to effectively legislate.
Is this "I don't like the rulings of the court." or "The rulings of the court fly in utter defiance of legal evidence presented."?
Because if it is the former, you are the actual part of the real problem.
Winning in court every single time is a pretty strong argument that they aren't breaking the law even if they are disagreeable.
I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.
Something can be both legal and ethically wrong. You can apply your same reasoning to Cloudflare's censorship of Kiwifarms: nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
Just because the site started with Chris Chan (an individual with his own issues) doesn’t mean that similar individuals are the site’s only purview.
So long as you're arguing that instead of "tHe CoUrTs ArE nAzIs", then I have nothing else to add because I'm in full agreement with your sentiment concerning law.
>nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
Of course; Cloudflare has a right to freedom of association and fundamentally I support whatever they choose to do, legally speaking.
However, there is a consequential problem in that the internet is becoming more and more centralized by the day and Cloudflare access is one of those facets.
Generally speaking, if you're a big website you either need Cloudflare or your own CDN to distribute the load and ward off hostile entities.
Consequently, Cloudflare is able to dictate a significant portion of the discourse on the internet by simply allowing or blocking their services. This wouldn't be a big deal if the internet was decentralized like it should be, but it isn't so the internet can't route around such nonsense anymore.
If Kiwifarms users can't see that what they are doing already is unethical, why should anyone believe that they truly think these other illegal actions are wrong? They just know not to talk about it out loud because then you will actually get in trouble with the law.
The only reason the site has been able to get away with it for so long is because they are targeting vulnerable people who are least well equipped to legally defend themselves.
Not sure how you think this makes it ethical.
I'd say it's evidence of conspiring to delete evidence before victims and law enforcement can act, particularly if the threads are completely deleted, as opposed to being locked and moved to a mod-only area so the posts are preserved for law enforcement action.
Are there any automated filters that detect personal information, filters that are trivial to employ?
Are the users who post doxxing/violence threads banned?
What is the purpose of the forum in the first place? Answer: to harass and doxx trans people.
I wonder how [redacted] would feel if people knew he was defending a site that exists solely to harass trans people.
It's pretty shocking that you'd have done this in a comment right after asking whether users who post doxxing threads are banned. The answer on HN, btw, is yes—although if an account has a lot of history on the site, as yours does, we tend not to ban on first offence.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32729939 for more about this.
He should be on this list: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra... But there’s nothing.
https://jp.usembassy.gov/services/death-of-a-u-s-citizen/ Nobody was ever able to get any of the documentation listed on this page from the Japanese side, even family, and the Japanese continually report they have no record of the death. There are also no “blotter” style documents in Japan or the USA documenting his death.
I’m willing to be proven wrong - and accept others will not believe what is hearsay to them - but as someone who has been involved in emulation for years my Bayesian prior is extremely, strongly on the side of him being alive.
Do you mean the allegedly-deceased person's family has been unable to confirm their death with the government? This seems like a significant fact I have not seen reported. Do you have a link for this claim?
That's more than a bit creepy. Please reconsider the lengths you're willing to go to to win this internet argument.
Why is that, [redacted]?
You did this repeatedly, which is a serious abuse. I'm not going to ban you for it because this entire thread was so hellish, but please don't do anything like this again.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You've been breaking the rules badly, unfortunately—not just in this thread. We've had to ask you this several times.
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.
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.)
Giving in to them is allowing domestic terrorism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you would like Cloudflare to be legally obliged to act like a utility or public infrastructure, lobby for actual laws to regulate it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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?- every evil person ever
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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/
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.
So you are fine to bypass the laws on your own? How practical.
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.
It is not your job to be the police. You should let the authorities do their job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota
> CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there's actual violence being organized here I'm wondering why nobody has been charged with a crime.
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.
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
In conclusion, vigilantism is fine if done against someone you dont like... cool
For example: why is the Tor project facilitating the spread of hate by keeping Kiwifarms accessible? The Tor project's mission of preserving user privacy does not include facilitating access to harassment material.
>We opened a Pandora's box of hate and violence when we created the internet
With the advent of the internet, people's ability to easily communicate with each other was drastically increased. We opened up the ability for us to collaboratively see beyond the official narratives handed down through the media, government spokesmen, and educational institutions. Such a thing is of course abominable to those who desire centralized control over the demos, truth be damned, but I am grateful for it. Technologists should instead oppose anything like what you describe, and build technologies that thwart the efforts of those who wish to limit our ability to communicate with each other.
Those lists are for malware. Not for site content. You have grossly misunderstood the function of those lists.
Maybe you think if there is a place that is too critical to these marginalized groups that is unsafe and should be blocked. Ok, but then what happens when somebody who doesn't agree with you gets into the a position of power? They could easily say if you support trans then you are indoctrinating kids and that is unsafe and block all LGBT websites.
You are advocating for an arms race. Are you sure you can win?
Kiwifarms, Gab (Still uses Cloudflare), 4chan, 8kun and the rest of them are still alive even after this. It's not Cloudflare's problem anymore, it is now the internet's problem.
So are you going to write a letter to ICANN just like the Ukrainian Government did to get them to take down all .ru or all possible 'hate' domains and TLDs? I bet you won't and even if you did ICANN won't do anything.
This just made them more uncensorable and now they can't be monitored easily and they are all still alive. This doesn't solve the doxing issues, therefore nothing has changed.
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...
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.