Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a legal team would all of a sudden decide 3 days after they publically announce they wouldn't remove security services from a customer that one customer who has basically been the same for god only knows how long needs to have those services removed. I honestly, would be surprised if the original announcement hadn't already had input from legal. So if legal thought this customer was so bad, why wouldn't they have it done before they publically say they won't do it.
I think the twitter mobbing of CloudFlare worked.
And about that decision, he said this:
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
> Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
This is kind of dubious as a basic ethical position (if you think it’s bad just don’t do it) but note that it’s not entirely ridiculous as if it’s legal, others can and will pressure you to do it. Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing, you can’t be coerced by an angry mob to do it.
>Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing
Perhaps we shouldn't be hurrying to get rid of freedom of association.
Truth is he likes the money, and the power. That's why he has it.
The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/weevs-case-flawed-begi...
>The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
Pretty sure most smart people have already distanced themselves from the EFF at this point, so that's not very convincing.
EFF, despite getting repeatedly called out by several top experts, spent years pushing downright dangerous disinformation via their "secure messaging scorecard". Not exactly a trustworthy organisation.
It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
Then why link the slurs at all to accompany the argument?
> It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
On that same page you linked there are about as many people in favor as against, tptacek's word is not the law regardless of his competency, and it sure wasn't as uncontroversial as you make it out to be.
It would be silly to say there are definitely no Nazis in a company above a certain size. It's easy to fire them as soon as you know about them, but a lot of shitheads know to fly under the radar, so you can't really proactively hunt them out.
As a CF customer, I am far more concerned with a policy or precedent of capriciously cutting off customers than a policy of defending "bad" customers.
So yes, they worried about their income.
Cloudflare is a public company. I can tell you from being in a position to know this at a small company, but the "vendor review / procurement process" that happens to acquire a new service is non-trivial and usually offers several checkpoints to make sure that you're only onboarding vendors that meet strict criteria. One of those criteria is "not being embroiled in an obviously bad PR scandal easily revealed by a basic Google search."
CloudFlare is public and that means that their shareholders have the final say, not the individual customers. If shareholders see that CloudFlare's revenue is declining or that key customers are leaving, and there's an obvious reason why that's happening, well, that's the answer to who has the most say.
The whole operational plan that @SleepingGiants had during the Trump administration was to systematically identify corporate links and associations, and to highlight them to PR and legal teams who knew how this worked. "Cancellation" works not because individuals are easily moved by emotional arguments. It works because most companies answer to shareholders, and most shareholders care about value and growth. The company has a fiduciary duty to drive value for shareholders. When those stars align, obvious reasons why value is being artificially capped don't become "hard decisions." They become easy ways to increase value.
There are very few companies that can successfully hold an ideology. When they do hold an ideology, that ideology is usually aligned with some market force. Apple advertises privacy as its ideology because it's seemingly aligned with shareholder value. The ideology becomes expensive or even net-negative commensurate with the value being driven.
I don’t know how popular this is, or at least how popular it should be.
Conviction is based on the extremely high bar of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the standard for depriving a person of their liberty.
Society rightly does not operate at that standard. Conviction was never meant to be a proxy for whether you ought to do business with somebody.
Think about killers who “got off on a technicality,” where everyone knew they were guilty. Or open criminals who for whatever reason were unable to face a jury, like many mass shooters. It just doesn’t make sense to say “well the courts never formally convicted them so we have a duty to defend them.”
Sorry if this is long-winded. I am just alarmed by this trend of equating legal standards with social standards.
It simply made Cloudflare's position untenable - they are not piratebay but need customers.
The thing is that just about every company and individual is going to have the caveat "be bad enough and I won't deal with you" in practice. Kiwi Farms is pretty horrible but you could have an even more awful site - say real murder for hire - and it would be dropped even faster.
Do really expect someone to offer a "principled position" that no matter the real world consequences, they'll never stand against some horror getting out onto the Internet?
Edit: I want to add that Cloudflair's original statement and it's recent statement have involved a consistent point of "we shouldn't be the one to suppress this" which is fundamentally different from "nothing should be done about these problems". They're basically saying "we should be doing this but we should be doing this based on a court order rather than on our own". Which is to say there are never any "free speech fundamentalism" in these statements.
You can think of many other examples, but the point is, if you think there's an easy-to-create and easy-to-enforce content policy on the Internet, I think you're mistaken.
What exactly is inconsistent about their banning of services? Is there another site which is on their radar, which does what kiwifarm does, and they've come out and stated they will never ban them?
The reality is, we're moving from an early pseudo-anarchic ideals of early internet free speech mode to the pseudo-feudal setups where if you want to have an internet presence you must have a liege lord and must live at their sufferance, or you'll quickly fall victim to one of the roving mobs that live to collect the scalps of the likes of you. It's not a fun place to be in, but that's where we're at. And as a vassal you don't have too much position to make demands on your lord. You can change the lord, for sure, but there aren't many and if none of them likes you, you're out of luck. Welcome to the Web 3.0, it's not what you thought it'd be.
Everyone has a different line in the sand. For me, a platform designed to promote hate speech crosses that line.
You absolutely can not say the same thing of Kiwifarms. Let's not be deliberately obtuse here.
As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.
Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.
But-- we should have big markets of many participants who all make their own decisions about what they condone. Then, the individual decisions are not so toxic. And if you are doing something egregious where almost all of them say no, well, you got what you deserved.
My personal thoughts: exposing peoples' personal information for the explicit purpose of severe and illegal harassment is on the "definitely not OK" side of things. Ordinary hate speech that occasionally leads to spree violence is much murkier.
If Property X is something like the color of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, etc, then I would support cloudflare banning them.
I am certainly not the master of what should and should not be on the internet, and neither should cloudflare. As a society, though, there are some things that most can agree on.
We may disagree on where that line should be, but most people absolutely have this line.
Harassment forums like the one in discussion here have no place in civilized society and I am happy for them to be censored. The people that frequent these sites can get together in person and chat about hating all they want, but the method of their harassment (the global platform of the internet) should removed -- insofar as that is possible.
> Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is.
Ideally, many smaller elements make their decisions about what speech to promote or convey, and "society" or the "government" is the actor of last resort-- stepping in for the most not-OK stuff when the market has been shown to fail.
Concentrated power is dangerous-- whether it's in the hands of a government or a single overly-powerful commercial actor-- and needs to be restrained one way or another.
Okay, please, if you dont mind, specify how that line is drawn up
They're also not encouraging their viewers to harass, contact, and troll specific individuals.
I don't support doxxing, and this is a false equivalency at best.
I don't watch CNN, so I had to read up on the boxing meme thing first.
There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?
Are they targeting specific rich people in a dedicated and persistent fashion to the point that said rich persons kill themselves? No, that's not happening. I've seen posts of the type you've described. They're almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned. They're much less frequent than any one of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-jew, or anti-trans comments... which are almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned as well. This site does not remotely compare to KF.
Kiwifarms was founded to troll and harass a specific webcomic author. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people or communities.
Surely you see the difference here.
Why should we?
Society has been doing pretty fine with some fuzziness until now. Sometimes something really goes to far and they end up not hosted anymore. That’s the system working, not it failing to work. Well, that came a bit slowly for kiwifarms sadly but I’m glade sanity prevailed in the end.
HN was made to discuss tech topics. KF was made to harass and doxx a specific target.
I'm not here to explicitly define "hate speech", but I think that we can agree that KF has crossed that line into hate speech.
Unless you're cool with encouraging harassment and doxxing, that is.
I would define hate speech as speech that directs hatred at a particular group. For instance, Joe Biden recently gave a state speech (The "Gates of Hell" speech) that was completely choked with hatred for a group. Shrug. I have no interest in banning this, whether from the "president" or from anon. My understanding of Kiwifarms is that they basically just make fun of idiot liberals--a sport on endless grounds.
If you gave your honest definition of hate speech it would likely be "People who disagree with me and make me look bad showing how stupid or wrong I am."
It was the entire purpose of the site.
My thoroughly unscientific analysis of the situation seemed like it was about 98% bullshit posts and maybe 2% of the posts I found truly objectionable (mostly jew/black hate) but not illegal.
I'm not doubting that there is some illegal stuff there, nor that there is some truly vile content, but, I don't even think it's in the majority on a post-level basis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701383
Threats that what happened in Germany in the 30s will happen again, and it's deserved:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701442
People blaming Jews/Jewish conspiracies for various actions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692308
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32691199
I'd like to point out that I understand what's "vile" to one person isn't to another. I've had my posts reported as "hate speech" on reddit for saying that "the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous" and that "Obesity is wrong."
Banned speech should have a very high bar -- direct, specific threats of physical harm.
Some of those other links are vile though.
Those comments are really awful and wtf upvoted....
A forum dedicated to the principal and culture of free speech is designed to promote hate speech?
Btw, a forum dedicated to the principle and culture of free speech would absolutely (by definition) be promoting/hosting hate speech.
What is your personal understanding of the term?
The alternative is to accept that moderation is NECESSARY for online communities (or else spam and hate speech will take up a huge part of the content and suddenly you'll realize you're essentially promoting this content afterall) and moderation will always look like the opposite of "free speech".
See the problem?
I'm not supportive of banning Joshua Moon from the internet. Do you agree that there is a difference here?
Yeah none of us here are happy about this site existing or innocent people being targeted, of course. But the next one will be slightly less extreme as kiwi farms and we'll say the same things.
One which hid behind Cloudflare in order to hide their identity while simultaneously exposing yours?
This is how KF started and continued to operate.
You have a line. I have a line. What is happening here is that we're trying to define a common line which works for society, and it is going to "slip" over time as views change.
In the past, that line would have included books which even mentioned homosexual behavior. Today that is more tolerated and accepted, which is good in my opinion because gay people certainly exist.
I guess what I'm saying is that the line is going to have to slip a bit, and in more than one direction.
We should be consistent and non-arbitrary. There’s so many more examples.
How would you feel if someone made a "Finding Nemo" forum in which they tracked down your identity, your family, and your friends and encouraged its members to harass and doxx you and your family?
Oh, and this forum hid their identity behind Cloudflare while, at the same time exposing your identity and personal details?
Would you support Cloudflare banning said forum?
Publishing libsoftiktok's information was definitely intended to harass them, and implicit support for doxxing.
> Would you support Cloudflare banning said forum?
No.
I agree and I'm very worried for it.
It is truly pitiful, because this is ultimately what social media encourages. They encourage tagging posts by location, they rip the EXIF data from the images (which most users don't even know exists in the first place). This is all information that is fed into the advertising and mass surveillance machine.
At the very least, this is what we have castle doctrine and self-defense law for.
But they're not credible and nothing will happen.
Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.