This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.
Seems to me that Transwomen just took the only scrutiny contrary to their own agenda temporarily off the net, putting one of the most technically competent hosting providers on the list of people who won't associate with them (people acting in opposition to Transwomen).
No comment on the hating on black people, as I learned long ago, platforms are not users of platforms, and horrible people can be found everywhere.
Despite all of this horribleness that apparently goes on with KiwiFarms, it still seems Transwomen is able to go on doing whatever it is it does.
Strictly speaking, your yardstick for empowerment measurement has a rather funny operating principle, as intuitively speaking, I'd expect the opposite result.
My comment about transwomen being disempowered is in the broader social sphere, where trans people in general are under social and legislative threat against their access to basic decency, public visibility, and medical care.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
Yep. KF is their harassment HQ where they share information about individuals they don't approve of. It's creepy.
The bus has sailed on that one though.
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"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."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_punishment
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
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What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.