There was no government involved, so it's not a "free speech" issue.
I always talk about the wild west of the late 90's when the Internet was brand new. My colleagues and I all talked about the myriad sketchy ways we could make money. We chose not to. It's as simple as that. If you want to develop something you think is beneficial to society, don't support bad behavior and certainly not dangerous or illegal behavior.
This idea that a "dangerous idea" should somehow be a protected normality is ridiculous. Society has limits. Get used to it.
It used to be that all forums had pervasive doxxing and swatting. People didn't use to have public internet identities like they do today- probably because there wasn't any way to profit from owning a public identity or from harvesting the data of others. Maybe people don't remember that since reddit (and others) ate up all the small forums and made them advertiser friendly.
One of these "sketchy ways to make money" is to abuse the networks with DDoS attacks and racketeering- on either the protection side (CloudFlare, etc.) or the offensive side (botnets, etc.)
I don't understand how anyone can look at the first amendment text and believe anything else. The only people that think they should be allowed to say whatever they want and face no repercussion are people that simply do not understand the first amendment.
I think the late Aaron Swartz describes my stance on free speech as a doctrine and moral principle: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/becausewecan
The status of the law has no influence on my stance on morality. Legality neither sufficient nor necessary for morality. The existence of slavery was once legal, was that sufficient to make it moral? It is obviously the case that the law is backed by moral principles and not the other way around, and that we should lead ourselves chiefly by moral principles and not legal ones.
I don't believe so. For example, hate speech and verbal abuse against a mentally vulnerable person, privately communicated, with only the intent to harm that person is clearly morally bad. It then follows that if we can identify exactly when this occurs and limit it without further externalities, then that would be morally good.
Another example: there is a fire, and you give firefighters misinformation with the intent to prevent people from being saved. That is a moral bad, externalities notwithstanding, and it is a moral good if we could prevent exactly such acts.
If you accept these, then the discussion is no longer that free speech is always good, but that what forms of speech in what contexts are acceptable, and what limits on enforcement on free speech is acceptable. I suppose that most people accept these, as opposed to having an absolute stance as yours, and people with varied experiences have different positions on this complicated issue, hence the constant conversation and reappraisal.
What we are seeing is not a shunning by society at large. What we're seeing is a fight between two radical (and generally unhinged) groups of individuals on the internet.
The real problem is that these technical problems devolve into bureaucratic social problems due to the design of the internet. If there is a silver lining here, it's that more people will be encouraged to learn about censorship-resistant networks like Tor.
I think a return to voluntary communication on a peer-to-peer basis may one day return sanity to the network, because direct-messaging retains much of the IRL social characteristics you've described.
Except, Cloudflare isn't required to run a website. If you are printing 100s or even 1000s of flyers your home printer might be fine. If you are printing millions your probably going to need to make a significant investment or work with a professional printer. The same is true for Cloudflare in this scenario. It doesn't enable running the site, it just helps scale it for cheaper. If the professional printers/cloudflare's of the world decide to shun you, yeah you'll have a harder time getting your message out, but I see that as a feature, not a bug. If I shun someone I don't want someone else handing them a megaphone to scream in my ear.
A sizable CDN, which Cloudflare is one example of, is practically required to serve a website seeing any significant traffic in this day and age.
And therein lies the problem.
The internet was founded on a philosophy of decentralization, the fucking thing was designed to withstand all the destructive forces of a nuclear war. If one part of the network is damaged or otherwise inaccessible, the rest of the network will route around the damage to reestablish connections.
But that's not the state of the internet today. The internet today is heavily centralized around a small handful of key players. Cloudflare is one such player. Without the blessings of such players, you have no ability to access or do anything on the internet.
For now the vast majority of people receive and enjoy the blessings and thus aren't compelled to do anything about this fucking gigantic elephant in the room. But those blessings aren't guaranteed, and the fact we must rely on such frivolous blessings is by itself preposterous.
>If you are printing millions your probably going to need to make a significant investment or work with a professional printer.
What we're seeing here is a professional printer refusing services because he doesn't like what's being printed, with no basis on legality which is the only grounds upon which any business may refuse to render services.
Anyone who claims to support free speech shouldn't be happy about any of this turn of events. You don't spread free speech by censoring speech, the results are quite the opposite every single time and these will all add up to come crashing down eventually.
And especially to those celebrating or ecstatic this happened: Be careful what you wish for, because when your turn to get cancelled comes up, nobody might be around to help you.
The whole point of free speech is to protect and guarantee the expression of disagreeable speech, because nobody's going to censor speech they like or agree with.
A business can in general refuse to do business with anyone for any reason. There are certain federal restrictions, namely religion, race, gender etc, but outside that refusing to do business with someone is an inherent part of free speech. Advocating for requiring a company to do business with someone they don't want to is advocating against free speech
Yes, quite so, and in fact I agree that Cloudflare has a right to do or not do business as they please.
The real, fundamental problem is that the internet has become too centralized, such that a few entities can direct the rest with impunity.
However, I think we can agree that fixing the centralization of the internet at this point is a fool's errand.
I recall recently about a story of how a father got kicked out by Google for uploading some pictures to his Google account. Fundamentally, KF getting kicked out by Cloudflare is the same thing: Customers getting kicked out by companies because of disagreeable content; companies which are effectively gatekeepers to the internet at large.
So the next best way, in the interim, to keep the internet working in some fashion, is to have businesses like Cloudflare not kick customers out simply for saying or having disagreeable things.
With great powers come great responsibilities, as the saying goes.
Only if you accept that corporations should have the same rights as people. To me that makes no sense once the get to a certain scale.
Cloudflare plays a critical role here because of DDoS and not any of the legitimate load.
There are very narrowly tailored prior restraint on the freedom of association in the US, and outside of those companies have wide latitude. The New York Times is not obligated to donate column inches to the KKK, for example.
> I think a return to voluntary communication on a peer-to-peer basis
That's what we have now; the issue I believe you appear to have is you're not a peer. Most of us never were; how many actually ran their own ISP back in the day or actually entered into a traffic peering agreement?
Cloudflare tried to stay in its lane, but it was dragged out of it by the Twitter mob.
That's bullshit. Cloudflare removed the sex worker-friendly social media network Switter over NO complaints or likewise.
Cloudflare seems eagerly anti-sexwork and pro nazi. Except when the whole internet comes out and says "NO".
Cloudflare can play pretend that it's some "core functionality" of the internet, but their core business is "safeguarding booters to DDoS sites" while they provide the DDoS cover as a business racket. One might even describe it as "organized"
Cloudflare clearly doesn't care about illegal things their users do unless it becomes a risk or too inconvenient to them. Content on KF might be illegal, but hosting KF with such content is generally not, which is why they could point to Section 230 and stick their fingers in their ears.
Whereas SESTA turned Switter into a massive legal risk for them, because it removed that protection. I bet if a SESTA-style law existed against KFs content Cloudflare would have kicked them off very quickly. And in reverse I think there is a good chance that if SESTA hadn't passed, CF would still host Switter.
(And just to be clear, SESTA is a terrible law, and trying to "fix" CFs attitude by making more such laws is not worth it. But clearly lawmakers decided kicking sexworkers of the internet was more important/worth it than kicking places like KF off the internet when making it)
The USA cannot criminalize being a "Nazi" because freedom of political affiliation and political expression is a core right. The USA went through political inquisitions in past decades to root out communism among US citizens, and nobody looks back on that with approval.
As an aside, "Nazi" has devolved into a completely meaningless term, so I'd prefer something a bit more specific.
Of course different communities that moderate can choose what that means to them. But there is a bad precedent when global bans are implemented, especially when it’s arbitrary. This appeal to authority, like begging a lordship is not the right direction.
What happens when inevitably the authority is not someone we agree with? Precedent has been set. We encoded into law free speech for this reason. We’d be wise to promote it as cultural value too.
If we want public squares, why then do we not pay for it with public money? Furthermore, is it not incredibly problematic that private companies are such an important pillar of free speech in an international context? Is CloudFlare essential for German free speech?
And most importantly, what about the freedom of association as a moral principle? How does an individual's freedom to speak weigh against another's capacity to say "leave me alone?" At the extreme, we might see that in a small town, if enough people disassociate from you then freedom of speech is no longer the top issue. The top issue becomes whether you can even live. So which of these ideal rights are most weighty, and how ought they interact with other rights?
What determines that freedom of association is subordinate to the freedom of speech in an X society?
On a more technical question, what is stopping Kiwi Farms from gathering on the many private forums which exist around the world? There's 4chan, Reddit, TruthSocial, or Facebook. CloudFlare was not a host in this context, it was a DDOS protection service, which is indirectly a wallet protection service. Who will be DDOS'ing Facebook's wallet?
I dunno what you think you're arguing, but it's nonsense.
In order to murder someone you would physically have to visit them and try not to get killed yourself. Anyone can defend against murder, but literally no one can defend against swatting. There is literally nothing you can do to legally prevent yourself from being swatted.
I don't think that's what you are trying to say, but I can't put together what you are.
There is no way this is true. I have been a member of countless forums over the decades, and have never seen or experienced this. Anecdotal of course. But for such a substantial claim as you have made, a source is necessary. Though I suspect there is none.
What kind of hell-forums were you using in the late 90s?! I never saw anything like that going on in the forums I was using back in my early days of internetting, though to be fair, I was mostly on classical music, historical fiction, and parrot-keeping forums, which tend to attract people outside the bored young male demographic, but I was also a regular Slashdot reader, where things sometimes got nasty, but I don't remember a swatting incident, or much in the way of doxxing.
Should be persecuted BY THE GOVERNMENT. At no point has any nation held that all people should be able to say whatever they want at any time with zero repercussions from anywhere. You can yell in a crowded theater, and they can kick you out. If you yell "fire" and cause a panic, you're arrested for the panic, not the fact you spoke, but for the fact you put people in potential danger. But if you only yell some racial slur, for example, no one will arrest you for the slur, but you can be asked to leave the theater and never return because that's private property.
Freedom of speech is not and has never been freedom from consequences.
This analogy was created in an attempt to outlaw people speaking against the draft. My understanding is that it was overturned and is no longer considered a relevant example on the test of free speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
To put it another way, Brandenburg v. Ohio didn’t find that it actually is ok to shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre. Rather, it found that a particular instance of speech wasn’t analogous to that example.
I get your point, it's just a bad example given the historical baggage.
Since "it" is the draft stuff, not shouting fire, it's only mildly sometimes relevant.
And why would the approaches to them be different if, presumably, both represent the people?
No one is ever free of consequences with respect to free speech. I can march around a college town with a tiki torch yelling racist bullshit, and if I make the news and get fired, that's just how it goes. Don't say anything on twitter you wouldn't otherwise say in public to strangers.
Who is being persecuted? For which beliefs? And how are they being persecuted?
The coordinator of the DDoS attack (Who I am apparently not allowed to say the name of or my comment will be instantly flagged after posting) is being persecuted for their shady history and actions, which includes being a prostitute and sponsoring the (paralegal?) distribution of transgender hormones to minors.
The KiwiForum is being persecuted for the gossip and personal information that they have been (re-)publishing on the previously mentioned person. As well as some threats like swatting which have allegedly been attributed to them.
Both sides employ a public figurehead who abuses their para-social relationship with their supporters to extract donations from them. So in this sense, the "persecution complex" is an artificial mechanism whereby they drum up support.
"Generally" is an important word here. So is "should". That speech "should generally" be free does not mean all speech is always acceptable.
As the saying goes, your freedom to act ends where my nose begins. When a site is used to organize and synchronise harassment for months, to the at least tacit allowance and at most open encouragement of the site's management, it is way beyond where noses begin.
> It used to be that all forums had pervasive doxxing and swatting.
That is a level of nonsense and whataboutism I've rarely seen.
Cloudflare isn’t censoring Kiwi Farms, but I’ll answer your question anyway. Kiwi Farms is a space for people to collaborate on the intimidation of others. It is an inherently anti–free speech project. It causes people to be afraid to post publicly online, for fear of malicious people stalking them. It causes people to avoid talking about the abuse, for fear of being targeted themselves. At worst, it caused people to take their own lives to escape the harassment — the ultimate in silencing someone else.
The free speech rights of Kiwi Farms’ victims are no less important than its users. Its removal from the Internet is a net win for freedom of speech.
It is not really CF, so much as it's the collective action of many internet monopolies. The content they are hosting is legal to the extent of US law, and no one is allowing them to host it.
>It causes people to be afraid to post publicly online, for fear of malicious people stalking them
When someone is publishing their personal information online, is it really stalking to republish that information? It is almost impossible to prevent such a thing from occuring. Either an individual is a public figure or a private figure. If someone (say, a politician or celebrity) chooses to become a public figure, then they should be held under the scrutiny of the public eye and they should be held accountable for their actions. If someone is a private figure, they should be responsible for securing their own privacy on the internet.
I think what we have on the current internet is a situation where a lot of internet celebrities (including KF's own operator) want all of the benefits of being a para-social public figure with none of the responsibilities of maintaining a public image that stands up to scrutiny.
In the case of the NES emulator developer who allegedly committed suicide, the KF had not published this person's actual real-life identity. They could have merely started a new pseudonym, or operated more privately under the current pseudonym, or ignored the KF altogether. The so-called "harrasement" and "doxxing" of this person is completely inconsequential to their actual life outside of the internet. You would not infer any more information on this guy from his KF "dox" as you would infer from almost any pseudo-anonymous furry on any social media website. But instead, this figure tried to leverage their own suicide threat to take down the kiwifarms website and extort them by offering money in exchange for their article to be taken down. In the end, their suicide remains completely unconfirmed apart from a single, unbacked testimonial.
When you apply for your license in Germany, you can elect to not have your home and secondary station addresses published. While looking up potential callsigns for my application, I noticed that about half of the female-looking names chose not to publish their addresses.
I wonder how many women and other vulnerable people are staying away from amateur radio in the US because they can't take the risk of publicly revealing any sort of address they can receive mail at.
Sorry but the pro-KF well has been poisoned - ironically by KF users and supporters themselves. It's an absolute self punch in the face. Why don't you describe what your evidentiary level of acceptibility is first and then we provide the evidence?
I'm asking because, honestly, I don't think it exists. I dont think any level of evidence would be satisfactory. Happy to be proven wrong though.
Then I am too. I've been on the internet for longer than that, and I certainly don't recall this being the norm. It's possible it was in the corners you frequented, but not the ones I did. But unless you have some data that speaks to this being the norm across the internet and my experience being the exception all we have is anecdotes and mine cancels yours.
Nitpick: it is a free speech issue. It’s just not a First Amendment concern.
Your broader point stands: rights must balance; it’s perfectly fair for the freedom of assembly to peacefully balance someone freedom of speech.
You do not have the right to convince a fire department to stop protecting a house so you can burn it down in peace.
To think this situation is anything BUT that is pure hypocrisy.
Fires kill people. As do bombs. As in bomb threats levied to intimidate someone into not speaking. Nobody is dying because Kiwi Farms is being DDOS’d. If there is a side antithetical to free speech in this discussion, it’s the group threatening to assault people whose speech they disagree with. Not those asking them to take their business elsewhere.
>In a profile on her in the Washington Post, written by, oh wow, Taylor Lorenz again, Taylor writes...
Because it IS just that. This is the logical and proper consequence for freedom of speech. You speak, others get to react in their own way that does not HARM you but they are not obligated to HELP you speak.
Strong disagree. Free speech is a central tenet for the entire modern society. Without it, there is no scientific revolution, no Enlightenment.
Accept controversial, unpleasant, disruptive discussion and ideas or accept stagnation. That's it, there is no way around it.
Free speech isn't just the ability to say things, but also the ability to not say something, and to not help share something. Action (and inaction) is a form of speech.
The leader of the campaign to take down Kiwi Farms is Keffals, a transsexual Twitch streamer with a large underage audience. Kiwi Farms has documented Keffals’ sexualized interactions with underage members of her community, as well as her history in porn and online interactions with several open pedophiles. Some believe this is why she wants the site nuked.
See archived copy of the Kiwi Farms thread for documentation of Keffals' encouragement of doxing and SWATing, sexual grooming of minors on the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, and her website which instructs minors on how to secretly obtain and self-dose cross-sex hormones behind parents’ backs:
The sketchy online pharmacy Keffals’ DIY HRT Directory promotes sells cross-sex hormones marketed to children, with holofoil anime lolita box art and labels that say “keep away from parents”:
The medical consequences of a confused child self-dosing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones outside parental and medical supervision can be sterilizing, irreversible, and lifelong. Keffals promotes the DIY HRT Directory on Twitter and Twitch to a huge audience of underaged viewers.
None of these details about Keffals were mentioned in WaPo or NBC accounts of this story. It is incredibly dismaying to see Keffals doing this to children, well-documented and for the most part out in the open, and realize that no one in the news media cares.
===
EDIT: In response to a comment below...
KF's owner refused the New Zealand's government command to remove Brenton Tarrant's manifesto and shooting video. This demand was not backed up by American law. He cooperates with law enforcement requests for information on criminal threats and illegal material posted to Kiwi Farms.
(b) It’s irrelevant — this is about kiwifarms behavior, not Keffals
What would independent verification look like? I browsed the archived thread and it seems like the vast majority of claims have accompanying Twitter and archive links.
There absolutely is. The DIY HRT Directory website is live right now, as are Keffals' tweets and Twitch clips promoting it. The sexual tweets directed at minors are archived on archive.ph, as are Keffals' doxing of the KF owner's mom and Keffal's calls for SWAting and doxing. The "Catboy Ranch" screenshots and Kiwi Farms investigation prompted Keffals to wipe the server. It's impossible to save Discord content on third-party archival services, but tweets between Discord users from that period buttress the allegations.
How about we stop labeling people pedophiles and support people (even kids) finding their truth.
I'd also firmly believe all transgender adults would be _horrified_ by any type of abuse. You're going to find an outlier in there as with any statistic. But like 99.9999% of all transgender adults come from a position of empathy and support. To assume otherwise is you just pushing your idea of morality on other people.
Of course if you simply refuse to believe in the idea that someone could be gay or bi or trans (and be certain of it at a young age), that's an entirely different conversation. Kids know who they are. We're supposed to guide them. Not oppress them.
Transitioning requires a massive amount of support and steps and children are NOT being rushed into irreversible medical procedures. This is a scare mongering tactic of the alt-right and has no bearing on reality.
https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
Some highlights:
>Within the Dutch Approach, children and young people with neurodiversity and/or complex mental health problems are routinely given therapeutic support in advance of, or when considered appropriate, instead of early hormone intervention. Whereas criteria to have accessed therapeutic support prior to starting hormone blocking treatment do not appear to be integral to the current NHS process.
>Evidence on the appropriate management of children and young people with gender incongruence and dysphoria is inconclusive both nationally and internationally.
>If pubertal sex hormones are essential to these brain maturation processes, this raises a secondary question of whether there is a critical time window for the processes to take place, or whether catch up is possible when oestrogen or testosterone is introduced later.
Here's a documentary by the Swedish public broadcaster with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJGAoNbHYzk
Evidence of "gender-affirming hysterectomies" performed on US patients as young as 16:
https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Abstract/2017/05001/Hy...
Article which summarizes trans kid desistance research (which got its author, journalist Jesse Singal, a wave of death threats and suicide-baiting DMs from trans activists):
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/whats-missing-from-the-conver...
Detransitioned 17-year-old girl Chloe Cole testimonies to the California state legislators:
Not NHS. It's not a great sign of accuracy if you're getting this wrong.
And the Cass review calls for an expansion of provision of gender affirming care for children, which is why we're moving from a single clinic to multiple clinics.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/npc-c...
It shut Tavistock, highlighted diagnostic overshadowing of co-morbind conditions such as abuse, trauma, and autism, found gross evidentiary gaps in the medical arguments for puberty blockers and youth HRT, and recommended the curtailment of medical youth transition. The move to multiple clinics is one part trans activists highlight while ignoring the rest.
> It shut Tavistock
All the anti-trans activists think this is some brilliant "gotcha" moment, but they don't appear to know that most trans people hated Tavistock and were calling for services to be removed from Tavi.
Cass isn't doing what anti-trans campaigners wanted, she's doing what trans people want remove services from Tavi, and create a bunch of new centres across England. Access is going to be greatly increased.
Keep spinning it how you like, this is an unambiguous win for trans people and their allies.
I really doubt your claims here; you lie in your first paragraph.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220707041302/https://kiwifarms...
the same links from archive.md: https://archive.md/c8hXj https://archive.md/cgWAJ
That's the issue. You are getting your understanding for the situation from one side as the other is being actively censored.
> There was no government involved, so it's not a "free speech" issue.
(US) government or laws have nothing to do with free speech.
> don't support bad behavior and certainly not dangerous
"bad" and "dangerous" are broad and extremely, extremely subjective terms.
This seems like a pretty easy line to draw to start to show they're serious about keeping things "look but don't touch." Allowing doxxing seems akin to "won't someone rid me of the meddlesome priest" territory.
then why does it happen all the time?
> According to a police report obtained by the Daily Dot, a caller tipped the police to inform them that a man had been shot five times in a bathtub in Greene's home. Police arrived at Greene's home and confirmed no such incident had occurred. The tipper then called the police department again and, using a computer-generated voice, explained the motive for their false tip was their opposition to Greene's stances on transgender youth's rights. They also stated they were a Kiwi Farms user and said their username was AltisticRight, an admin on the site.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene actually believed that the tipper told the truth and supported the deplatforming of the site. So much for the "politically incorrect" being any better on this sort of thing.
Are you using this as a pejorative or as a descriptor? If the latter, what's your definition of "boomer"? She was born in 1974.
Folks being harassed by KF get swatted after being doxed. It's pretty easy to make the conclusion that they're being swatted because they've been doxed on KF.
You even have in the document made by herself people explicitly being against it, to the point of saying people who do it should kill themselves[0].
[0]:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lt1qmYCFKonDaIVe7yvkZQnBc0m...
Here’s someone doxxing and saying to “just send him a Doordash”: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
Here’s someone being glib about “inconvenient but polite visits from law enforcement”: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
Here’s someone saying he’d have “danced for joy” if London cops had shot Keffals: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
Is this person talking about swatting in general, or specifically by Kiwi Farms? https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
More lamenting the SWAT officers didn’t kill Keffals: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
> Here’s the ominous disclaimer “I disavow any actions taken with this information in advance” in a post doxxing Keffals where she was eventually swatted.
If we are to assume that posting a dox is evidence for swatting sure, but if we don't that is not more ominous than anything else that could've been said.
>Here’s someone being glib about “inconvenient but polite visits from law enforcement”: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/mobile/folders/1rwQ_3hMKm...
I assume this is violent threat #24[0]? this was after the swatting happened and is referring to the statement from the police[1] that clarified they just knocked on the door to come in and were let in, and didn't really deadname her in the manner that was claimed, contrary to her recollection of events. I quote the statement from the police department: " Officers did not conduct what is sometimes referred to as a “dynamic entry” into Ms. Sorrenti’s residence. Rather, they knocked on the door, announced themselves as police officers, and occupants answered. Any attempt by uninvolved third parties to suggest otherwise is inaccurate and irresponsible. "
It wasn't being glib about it from my point of view
All others by your description, just show people there being nasty, which seems to be par for the curse, but nothing pointing towards doing the swatting.
[0]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgqW69SZn-yfjrLQKBnJ8XudEA4... [1]: https://www.londonpolice.ca/en/news/statement-from-police-ch...
Again, if this is such frequent behavior, you should be able to fire up a Tor browser, go to the site, and drop several links to such posts right now.
They aren't actively lying or even putting in effort to lie for the sake of it. They just aren't putting in the effort to uncover the truth and explaining things beyond outrage bait. A few clickbait articles help generate clicks among a majority crowd that doesn't even know what KF is, and will have forgotten by tomorrow. They just care about the clicks.
Which leads to millions of half-truths which are far more complicated in depth, but most people aren't going through the effort to criticize what they read. They just want the quick drama to talk about and go on with their day.
Anyone who's read a magazine intended for the opposite gender can tell most of the articles regarding their own gender is largely bogus half-truths missing nuance. It's no different in most other spaces, but it's not as obvious when you don't have expertise on the matter yourself.
But again, use a little critical thinking. Most of the time people do not gleefully name themselves after they have committed a major crime.
Do a web search for “dumb criminals” and you might want to revisit that thought. “America's Dumbest Criminals”¹ had enough content to run for over one hundred episodes in four seasons over two decades years ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Dumbest_Criminals
There’s no “but” here. This is a common talking point defending this forum — “at least they didn’t explicitly do something worse” — but doxxing is unethical and illegal. Period. This forum encouraged, enabled, and glorified it.
> the forums were not about swatting and doing so is against the spirit and the rules of the forums. That said if someone was swatted it is fair game for that event to be documented on the forums.
This is bullshit designed to evade responsibility with a wink and a nod. The forum provides the means and glorifies the result, but believes that its hands are clean because they don’t explicitly setup a SWAT autodialer.
> In the case of the internet where most of it is privately owned it will require the companies and individuals to protect freedom of speech to have freedom of speech on the internet.
There is because I wrote it there. But is used to show contrast. I was contrasting how there was doxing and there wasn't swatting.
>doxxing is unethical and illegal
It may be unethical to you, but it is ethical to me. Doxxing is not illegal in the United States.
>This forum encouraged, enabled, and glorified it.
I see the documentation and preservation as a good thing. Not everyone has to share the same opinion as me. People who don't want to see this stuff can not visit the site.
>This is bullshit designed to evade responsibility with a wink and a nod
It doesn't glorify it anymore than wikipedia glorifies the historical events it has articles about.
>The forum provides the means
That doesn't mean the forum should be responsible. If Is someone googles a person's name and their address shows up does that mean Google is responsible for the person being swatted? In my opinion, no it isn't.
>glorifies the result
The forum can't control how people respond to the event. No one is forcing people to commented negatively or positively or even at all about it. Even without the Kiwi Farms it would likely be talked about somewhere else.
>they don’t explicitly setup a SWAT autodialer
They don't implicitly do this either. The community in general doesn't swat people. Yes, I'm sure you can find some exception, but I don't believe a community should be killed just because there are some bad people who claim to be a part of it in it.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
A link isn't an argument. Are you trying to say that free speech is bad and that we should censor people to avoid the subset of acceptable speech from changing? I personally am pro free speech and anti censorship so we disagree on these things if that was what you were trying to say.
and deliberately not protecting a paying customer as they are attacked by DDoSing criminals is just censorship by another name. it's a critical piece of infrastructure; large sites just can't survive on the modern internet without it. it's like if the police and fire services announced they wouldn't protect a specific house from roving packs of arsonists.
They might be referring to CF also being the domain registrar for KF.
Sure, you might celebrate when that’s done to someone you dislike, but a lot less appealing if you imagine it done to a cause you agree with.
It's funny you mention the megaphone thing too, as that is an example of free speech. People do this regularly. The person with the megaphone has the free speech right to shout over the person next to him- at least in public.
> Sure, you might celebrate when that’s done to someone you dislike, but a lot less appealing if you imagine it done to a cause you agree with.
The slippery slop fallacy is called a fallacy for a reason. What kills me though is that people on this site aren't nearly as upset about Cloudflare taking down Switter and other sex worker websites as they are about Kiwifarms. It makes it hard to take the free speech argument seriously when the people making it only care about it when the sites they visit get taken down.
And the slippery slope is a real problem, no matter how much people call it a fallacy. As we’ve seen countless times in history, the distance from viewing some group as less deserving of freedom than you, and actively persecuting them is short.
> Over two decades ago, our state Supreme Court concluded that a privately owned shopping center that attracts large numbers of people to congregate in order to shop and take advantage of other amenities offered by the shopping center is the functional equivalent of the traditional town center, which historically is a public forum where persons can exercise the right to free speech. ( Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center (1979)
Further, the Supreme Court has found that putting a website on the internet grants a wide variety of privileges to the people using it. Specifically speaking, the Supreme Court held that if websites such as Linkedin make pages publicly accessible they can't use the legal system to stop access of those pages that they don't like- specifically, they can't stop bots from scraping by suing to get them to stop.
So if we're talking free speech I'm not sure we can count a website as private property in the sense you're talking about, and whether it would even matter if we could.
In addition, what the Supreme Court found in HiQ Labs vs LinkedIn in regards to obtaining publicly available information says nothing about pinging a website too death until its offline. We're both quite capable in separating the two.
Canaries are everywhere and real.
And of course I wouldn’t be happy if a website I support were DDoSed. It’s perfectly consistent to celebrate when a murderer gets convicted and be outraged when an innocent person does. There’s a difference between good and bad things!
- https://www.fastly.com/products/ddos-mitigation
- https://aws.amazon.com/shield/
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ddos-protection/ddos-...
- https://www.akamai.com/solutions/security/ddos-protection
- https://cloud.google.com/armor
- https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloud-internet-services
- https://www.rackspace.com/response/rackspace-ddos-mitigation...
Haven’t researched all the options, but there must be some reason that DDoS targets all tend to use Cloudflare.
At some point this is just going to become their entire reputation and good luck renewing all of those enterprise accounts and attracting new staff.
People and organisations generally don’t want to be associated with this and don’t see it as some great moral cause they want to get behind.
Kiwi Farms absolutely incited imminent criminal activity (harassment, among other things) and made lots of specific threats against specifically targeted people and groups.
This is a false equivalence.
Aren't these already crimes? Isn't the "hate crime" charge just a way to enhance the sentencing for someone thus convicted? And isn't the original charge required for this enhancement? Thus, mere "hate speech" in and of itself cannot be a crime?
> Kiwi Farms absolutely incited imminent criminal activity
According to you and some twitter threads. I'm not comfortable accepting this prima facie, though.
> This is a false equivalence.
Does Section 230 not apply to Kiwi Farms? Is Kiwi Farms actually guilty of crimes here, or is it specific forum users? If so, why are there no efforts to go after the users but just go directly to banning the entire site?
2. You don’t have to accept it prima facie. Go read the forums, they’re still up on Tor. Fair warning, I have, and they’re horrid.
3. Not when the mods and owners of KF are engaging in the very same. I do not know if law enforcement is looking into individual users or KF itself, but that’s not what we’re discussing. We are discussing the rights of a private company to not give a platform to a group of people they believe are committing or engaging in potentially criminal activity. CF doesn’t have to prove it. If CF is wrong, KF is welcome to find support elsewhere. Good luck.
(I edited the parent comment to include the word “never” to clarify my position)
Sounds like we’re not going to come to a conclusion here, which is fine.
And as the claims are usually about it being widespread, it should be very easy to provide at least one example.
I am saying that companies which provide protection services shouldn't extend them to Kiwi Farms because they are societally not worth protecting.
In the US, the way we apply this to private corporations is by calling them "utilities" and subjecting them to stringent regulation.
So do you support Cloudflare and other such companies being recognized as public utilities, like phone or electricity? Because that's what you're asking for, and honestly, I might take you up on it, even if this is the price. You just may not like what other regulations they might end up subjected to.
They are absolutely forbidden to refuse emergency care to stabilize, and forbidden to turn away a woman in labor. By law. No matter how private they are, if they are open they must provide care or arrange for it to be provided.
Similar regulations cover many private businesses - only some of which are utilities.
Banks are private companies too and they're regulated in regards to who they can turn away as a client. I would hazard a guess that Cloudflare isn't eager to be regulated in the same way that a bank is.
Keep in mind that for both hospitals and banks, the restrictions about what customers they can turn down are not as far-reaching as the 1st Amendment and public service restrictions are. What people are asking for with Cloudflare (don't take down a site's protection unless a court tells you to) is even stricter regulation than what a bank or a hospital has.
Can you think of any private entity where they're not allowed to turn down service to any customer unless they're first ordered to by a judge?
Frankly, you are embodying desired HN behavior more than I am.
Cheers.
If the alternative to this mob rule is regulation, then yes bring it on.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Voltaire. Today he would be castigated and crucified by well-meaning fools.
Phone companies are not exempt.[3][4]
You're essentially arguing against free speech as a concept just so that you get the outcome you want. You aren't going to escape from living in a society that sometimes finds things you're OK with objectionable. It's just a matter of who gets to pull the lever.
I don't honestly understand why Kiwi Farms, of all things, is the thing that's worth saving from this... but even if it were something I personally loved, there's not a way to. You can have the government regulate speech, or you can have society regulate it. There's never going to be a perfect free-for-all, and there shouldn't be.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr... [2] https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/rulemaking-process [3] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2012-title47-vol3/CF... [4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/223
the problem with this allegory is that in the movie the 12 jurors are also trying to associate and cooperate due to their need to re-acquire their own freedom. They must work together in order to create a verdict and avoid being held sequestered indefinitely. They turn their back primarily due to a self-interest in escape, alongside the moral implications.
The other problem with that allegory within this comparison is that the '12 angry men' in this scenario are mega-conglomerates that label themselves as public infrastructure yet have no transparency or public accountability like a government entity might in that position.
The burden of transparency and government oversight is supposed to be bundled atop the premise of being or becoming a public infrastructural entity; if not then whatever conglomerate is making private decisions on behalf of the public's interests will continue to make self-important decisions until they reach a point of total corruption and public disservice.
DDoS is more of a heckler's veto.
>"Sit down, and don't open your mouth again while I'm here."
so they don't allow him to speak? I don't think you're proving the point you're trying to prove.
>What that means, though, is that if there are sentiments so odious (and in some cases, literally dangerous, but not illegal) that our free society doesn't think it's appropriate to support a venue for their discussion, it's up to that society writ large, not government, to limit that discussion. There is nothing wrong with fostering a societal sense that there is no room in our world for the kind of shit that Kiwi Farms spewed, even if it is legal. There is nothing wrong with expecting large companies to live up to that standard.
300 years ago, the "odious shit that society should limit" would be anything blasphemous. 200 years ago, it would be calls to allow black people in public office. 100 years ago, it would be communism. 80 years ago, it would be gay rights. Can you explain to me exactly who determines which free speech is odious and which isn't, and when did we perfect morality, so that no controversial discussion should be allowed?
I think this is yet again another example of a group of people thinking that something bad is not bad if it happens to the right people and another group thinking that something bad is bad no matter who does it. I am firmly in the latter group and to me Kiwi Farms and the people that kept harassing Cloudflare all look like bloodthirsty psychopaths with the difference being that the Kiwi Farmers knew they were disgusting and horrible and the others thinking they are brave saviors.
We're way, way past that standard. We're way past when ACLU was defending Nazi's right to speak and were proud of it. Nobody would even think about doing this now. In fact, if you defend a "wrong" client as a lawyer, you may lose your whole career now and become unperson among your peers. If you say a wrong thing publicly, your right to make a living will very likely be taken away, and your physical security would be in serious danger. Your home - if you can keep it while being denied income - surely. But in some countries they government also may lock your bank accounts. Hope you don't have a mortgage and have enough cash stashed to pay your utility bills, because otherwise your house is going bye-bye.
As for jail, no, the US is not there yet. Other countries on the West already very much so, so I wonder for how long that one would hold. After all, the government is already talking about a "clear and present danger" from their political opponents - and this is not a random set of words. This is the legal standard that until 1969 was being used to jail people for saying wrong things. So we may be just one SCOTUS ruling away from going back there. Current SCOTUS may not be willing to do it, but judges are retiring, they are mortal, and then there's talk about court packing... The ice is very thin.
> as a result of other people using their free speech rights.
Running a DDoS is really stretching the definition of "using their free speech rights", I think. But firing you from a job or closing your bank account for saying wrong things is "private companies adjusting their priorities" too. I wonder how long you could make a living if you can't use banking services, or phone services, or internet services - all of which are run by private companies? How long it would be before CPS shows at you door to take your children - because private utility companies refused to serve you and it's not safe for them to be there anymore? You can take that "private companies adjusting their priorities" pretty far. If you think in this situation you still have free speech because you can still stand on a public square and yell into the sky - you definition of freedom of speech is flawed, and honestly, pretty useless in practice.
I won't use CloudFlare if they are internet bodyguards for Nazis. I've registered my displeasure. I did not participate in the DDoS attack.
It's your choice to shun the providers that support free speech (yes, that means letting people you do not like speak, there was a time once that even ACLU understood that) - but it's not what happened here.
Real people were swatted by real posts on KiwiFarms. No tears will be spilt if these internet tough guys/gals can't afford their hosting bill and thus close down shop. Another group of keyboard heroes face minor consequences for their disgusting actions.
Your view of free speech isn't workable. You tell others to preemptively hamper their own liberty and free speech so these habitual line steppers can preach intolerance.
What you want is the freedom to speak without consequence. That will never exist, nor should it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...
Free speech isn't anywhere in this equation. If these people wanted to go to a park and march, have at it. They can scream their hate as loud as they'd like.
I won't do business with a company that supports those ideas.
We don't? Didn't Zuckerberg just admit on Joe Rogan that during the last election all the major media companies were briefed by feds that were was a big "misinformation" news piece incoming, so that when the Hunter Biden laptop story finally dropped, they all censored it, sight unseen? Therefore it seems all the big social media tech companies have no problem with rubberstamping gov't requests for censorship.
They almost made it glaringly obvious when they tried to roll out their Disinformation Governance Board, which fell flat.
If you're in favor of suppressing your political opponents' speech rights that's fine I guess, just don't lecture me about "our democracy."
I guess it wouldn't have looked good if Rudy Guliani came out and said "the Kremelin gave me compromising videos of Joe Biden's son".
Folks on this site have a childishly simple view on information and propaganda. I've heard many people say if it's true it can't have an agenda. But what you say is just as important as what you DON'T say.
When the Russians hacked both the DNC and the RNC and leaked only the DNC emails to WikiLeaks who gladly posted them (because to be fair Clinton and Obama wanted Assange's head), and used the RNC info to blackmail Republicans, that's a misinformation campaign.
Doesn't matter if all the emails were true.
I'm not following you.
To equate the two is to insult the rest of us and I, for one, despise being insulted.
Nobody puts him in jail. Nobody takes away his right to make a living or his children or his home. They just send a clear message: Don't bring that sort of thing around here. Don't bring it around us. There's no point in engaging in a dialogue with that person. Sure, you allow them to speak, in that you don't respond to that speech with violence or prosecution. But you don't have to make room for it.
We can't and shouldn't have the government stepping in to say what speech is or is not allowed. And in the United States, we don't. Russia is another matter, but as the post says, the idea that that means every Russian person or company is OK with things this awful is not true.
What that means, though, is that if there are sentiments so odious (and in some cases, literally dangerous, but not illegal) that our free society doesn't think it's appropriate to support a venue for their discussion, it's up to that society writ large, not government, to limit that discussion. There is nothing wrong with fostering a societal sense that there is no room in our world for the kind of shit that Kiwi Farms spewed, even if it is legal. There is nothing wrong with expecting large companies to live up to that standard.
So I don't see this as scary, at all. I see it as a relief. I see it as a free society working the way it's supposed to, with some caveats. (I still don't love how much power large corporate entities have, but not for this reason, exactly.) And I think there are a lot of people out there whose lives are safer because of it.
Edit: For people who haven't seen it, here's the scene I reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA