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.
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.)