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

Source?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of what you said makes it different than Twitter.

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

Why should we only count slurs for these groups?

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

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

> since when is "doxxing" a crime?

The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?

The swats were not verified as coming from KF, and they said they oppose that sort of thing. I noticed that some of the people KF had threads on, were targeted specifically because they overstep the boundaries of what KF considers acceptable (for instance the "Ralph Retort" blogger).

You could still argue that Kiwifarms still "enables" people who are even worse than them, in the same way that certain glossy magazines enable harassment of various celebrities. Certainly Kiwifarms themselves get worked up over people who merely "enable" bad things, so they don't have that much non-hypocritical leg to stand on. Still, we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest.

(The "credible bomb threats" was IMO not very credible, it was a fresh account claiming to be able to commandeer out Irish paramilitaries to bomb multiple sites in minutes. And the post was reported instantly, and removed within minutes. That's something that could happen to all sites that allow public comments.)

> we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest

There was editorial control. Someone to be held accountable, and someone making decisions knowing that. User-generated content is different. I am less certain of any prescription for the problem than I am in the difference being salient. Heuristics that work on print media aren’t easily translated to social.

Kiwifarms has editorial control, though. Posts advocating swatting or violence are removed, and their users banned.

Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party.

If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked?

The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.

> started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame?

If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble.

> journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society

There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.

The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0].

And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate.

[0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...

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