Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.
Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.
Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.
Because in this case, accountable really means it.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.
The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?
It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.
> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes
So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?
Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.
> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.
If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.
Also, it is not a small percentage of users. The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.
"It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site."
"If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”."
Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet, then mass censorship is not only possible but inevitable. Anyone can throw away a burner account making a terroristic threat on any number of websites. The fact that these threats will only be taken seriously when they confirm the narratives of those in power is a major problem. Cloudflare was right to point to due process being the mechanism to prevent this sort of biased treatment, but then immediately opened up a giant loophole that allows for people to avoid it!
It's not. The speaker also must (in general) have a history of tolerance of / implicit support of / explicit support of / creation of vile content, and (history suggests) the corporation making the call to pull the plug has to be feeling the pressure to either act or to be seen as also implicitly supporting such vile content, which will have financial ramifications down the road as they're seen as "Those KiwiFarms guys" and people of their own free will choose to do business with Instart instead.
The laws that force association in a corporate setting are extremely narrowly-tailored (at least in the US), and "harassers" isn't a protected class. For everything else, there's the First Amendment... The one that guarantees freedom of association. And the Internet is, at the end of the day, actually made of corporations and institutions that voluntarily associate with each other... Or don't.
This is reminiscent of dealing with someone who thought we needed to close mosques after 9/11.
Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.
Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.
Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.
Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.
But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.
Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.
The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.
Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.
Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.
Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.
You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.
The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.
Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640
> Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet
Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.
> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".
(1) Bullying and cyberbullying can both occur without direct interaction. If you're negatively gossiping about someone in the real world and the target is within earshot, that's bullying. If you bully someone enough to the point they kill themselves, that's morally equivalent to murder, even though our legal system hasn't yet caught up to this reality. What KF was doing was analogous.
(2) The legal boilerplate they put up to shield themselves from liability is irrelevant. It's not about their mere words, it's about the inevitable causal consequence of their policies and content that they tolerate and foster on their platform.
> inevitable casual consequence
What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.
That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.
KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.
The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.
Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?
I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?
You can criticize someone's ideas all you want, but dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity in the way that KF did is not that. It is cyberbullying and it's lethal and the people involved should be fined or locked up in prison for engaging in behavior that had a non-trivial probability of causing another person's suicide.
I would say the same about people dogpiling someone online about their physical appearance or ethnicity. It should be moderated out of existence, and if that doesn't work it should be illegal.
If you throw bricks off a building, I similarly want you locked up for the same reason. You probably won't kill someone, but the causal connection is such and the probability is sufficiently high that we lock people like you up, because you're a menace and direct threat to your fellow humans.
Of course, I'd want the punishment for throwing the brick to be larger, I am not throwing proportionality out the window.
Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.
The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.
Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.
With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)
Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.
Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.
And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.
Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.
This should disturb any right thinking person.
Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.
In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
They clearly want to keep this content up.
People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.
If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
> Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
> Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue.
By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.
I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.
If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.
"By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""
I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.
I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.
Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.
Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P
Yes please! Pretty please with a kiwi on top?
Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.
In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.
Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.
Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.
The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).
Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.
You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.
Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.
Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.
That's about it.
Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.
I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.
Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.
Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.
Whether or not you're trying to, you are.
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.
He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.
With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.
Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.
"With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion"
At this scale, for corporations, total value to society is part of the calculus society does. And KF has no value to demonstrate to offset the harm.
The post directly addressed this matter.
Don't be an apologist for these guys
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?