Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. This means there will always be people who are guilty who will not be punished. We can make that less likely by just throwing every suspect into jail. This protects the general public better then the current system. But most will agree that the cost of this is too high. So we don't do it. That doesn't mean we don't want the protect the public from criminals.
The people who are against cloudflare banning kiwifarms aren't debating for who to protect. They are debating about the cost of that protection.
The high bar of "innocent until proven guilty" (and "beyond a reasonable doubt") only applies to criminal cases, though, and not to civil ones. The present situation is much more analogous to a civil case where you have to weigh the interests of two parties (i.e., Kiwifarms and their victims) against each other.
Online mobs need only confirmation bias.
Besides the two parties are not kiwifarms and their victims. The people who are against it make arguments about free speech and whether platforms should be responsible for the content hosted on them. If it was as simple as just kiwifarms vs the victims it would be an open and shut case.
Sure, but the parent post is asking you to also consider the cost of not acting.
That's seems like a false equivalence to me. They don't have nearly as much as power and influence as the Twitter mobs. Which entire major websites do you think the KF "mob" can get off the internet by political/social pressure?
Also, if there's no avoiding the existence of mobs in the current political climate, it's better to allow all sides to have their own.
> I know who I think is more worthy of protection.
People with backing from almost all social major institutions, corporations, and academia?
Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences.
Whenever I see this line, all I can think is this is the exact same reasoning used by racists and homophobes and religious fanatics in the past. Maybe it’s legal for you to be gay now, but we don’t want to welcome you in our community. Maybe it’s legal for black people to buy houses in our neighbourhoods now that doesn’t mean we have to be welcoming. Maybe we can’t kill you know for being an atheist but we’ll banish you from the community.
The reason modern societies are functionally republics ( I am counting constitutional monarchies here as well ) and not direct democracies is to protect against this very phenomenon of changing societal whims.
If you subscribe to this line of thinking, remember one thing. Societal normal are constantly changing. Just as acceptance of homosexuality waxed and waned across time, just as acceptance of foreigners waxed and waned, so to it will in the future. There will come one day, maybe in our life time, maybe far into the future, when all your values will be turned upside down and it will be people like you who will find themselves persecuted. And when that happens, just tell to yourself “Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences”
- A homophobe cca 1954
To quote Matthew Price: “it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process”
In a civilised society, we do not have mob rule, we have the rule of law.
The reason we have this stems from the observation that societal norms change throughout time. If we do not have rule of law people will find themselves at the mercy of mobs and petty tyrants. We do not let the mob or “gods anointed” dictate who gets rights and who doesn’t, we offer the same rights to everyone and have a system in place to punish those who step outside the boundaries of the law. This is how a civilised society functions.
If you believe kiwifarms did something wrong, the correct steps are to engage with the system, go through the courts and show they have stepped outside the law. The correct steps are not to censor on the whims of a mob.
Let me ask you a question as well. If a gay teenager or a pregnant teenager gets kicked out of their house for being gay or falling pregnant, would you be as callous as to tell them “you may be protected against government consequences but you’re not protected against social consequences”?
>If a gay teenager or a pregnant teenager gets kicked out of their house for being gay or falling pregnant, would you be as callous as to tell them “you may be protected against government consequences but you’re not protected against social consequences”?
Of course not, but I also wouldn't go out of my way to do anything to help the people who kicked out that teenager! There is no equivalence here, and it's utterly dystopian that you and anyone else seem to insist otherwise. What, specifically, is the protected class you think Kiwi Farms is a part of?
Do you believe stores should be allowed to ban black people from shopping there? Do you believe pharmacies should be allowed to deny medication to jewish people? Perhaps you believe bakeries should not have to sell cakes to gay people?
Are these groups not “owed a literal service at their own expense because... principles”?
To me it seems you’re the one painting yourself a bizarre rhetorical corner. You can’t have it both ways. If we agreed as a society businesses should not discriminate, then they should not discriminate.
So to answer the question you should asked, yes, I honestly believe that nobody should have consequences for any actions outside of the literal legal system when dealing with a business. Business relationships are not the same as interpersonal relationships.
And to answer this one too:
> What, specifically, is the protected class you think Kiwi Farms is a part of?
People who think differently from you.
> People who think differently from you.
The issue at hand is not that they "think differently" than me, it's that they did terrible things to innocent people. The mere virtue of them having a different opinion from me doesn't mean they're suddenly off limits for repercussions, again, that's assinine, and nobody reasonable thinks the only time there should be consequences for anything is when they're legal consequences.
A hate campaign was launched against a minority group wielding no societal power by a socially dominant group backed by governments and corporations alike. A group of people with institutional power used their power, influence and privilege to harass and silence a powerless minority. Because they think different to them. This is why Kiwifarms is no longer on the internet.
A better comparison with what happened is, at some point in the past before civil rights were implemented, a white man overhears a black man talking. The white man doesn’t like what the black man is saying, so he says “that black man there is a murderer!”. So the black man is arrested and executed. And you, a passerby, take the word of the white man and begin telling everyone “oh that black guy was a vicious murderer”.
In any case, I have no further wish to engage. I have expressed my thoughts on the matter. I’ll leave you with an echo of my original post. When you’ll find yourself outside the cathedral, just tell your self “nobody reasonable thinks the only time there should be consequences for anything is when they're legal consequences”
He acts like as if internet outside of Cloudflare doesn’t exist, he pretends that there are no alternatives. Either he’s actually insane or this is just a marketing strategy.
The comparison isn't to the people who are being harassed randomly. It's between two "mobs", the Twitter one and the KF one.
> Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences.
The legal concept doesn't, but the ideal (and the social norm) does.
What alternative are you suggesting, that we just roll over and let these kinds of assholes ruin lives with impunity?
"Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power."
And remember we’re not talking about their physical ability to connect to the internet (after all, no one has deprived Kiwifarms of that), we’re talking about their ability to access their audience and use their current identity.
The site owner seems to rarely promote that kind of content to the front page though, unless they try to get the site shut down.
As for the second allegation, I haven’t seen any substantiation. But I do know that in some circles any discussion in any context (eg: school) about sexual identity with teenagers has come to be considered “grooming” so I’m a bit suspect about the choice of words.
And coincidentally posting dox is not the same as SWATing someone.
Anti-KF people will say they're close enough and anti-Keffals people will say the same about the DIY HRT website & marketplaces it lists.
"We don't do X, but we give you all the information to do it"
Nobody is trying to SWAT the guy behind KF. It is a huge, consequential difference.
This is just untrue for the most part. Some users of KF have harassed some people, sure. But the point of the forum has never been that. I will however concede that the nature of the forum tends to attract such people.
Now this I find doubtful considering everything else in this post. If anything the point has been exactly that with the exception of provably illegal things
The people who participated there were scum, absolute scum. I saw nothing redeemable about anything kiwifarms did.
"Doxxing" doesn't restrict someone else's free speech. It just discourages them from conducting speech under their public identity.
If you ask me, what they ought to do is "counter-dox" the KiwiForum users and give them a taste of their own medicine.
That is restricting their ability to speak freely - now they have to hide their identity for fear of physical violence!!!
Isn’t this the exact same thing? Discouraging someone from conducting speech under their public identity is taking away their audience and community. It’s not removing their ability to speak, but it’s hard to see how it’s not restricting their free speech.
And in the exact same way, no one has removed the ability to speak of any KiwiFarms member (or indeed of their community as a whole). It’s simply been made harder for them to conduct their speech under their current public identity.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/x76vck/...
The "free speech" angle is an obvious smoke screen for bullying. Their "doxing" is in typical bully style, a whole forum against one person they take a dislike to.
Most normal people don't want to play that game, or even have the resources to do it.
On a larger, more serious scale, almost every world power uses the internet to distribute propaganda with the effect of "threatening and intimidating" other nations. There is some degree of "threatening and intimidating" in almost every discussion of politics.
The US Gov might consider Wikileaks to be "threatening and intimidating". Ukraine "threatens and intimidates" Russia and vice versa. Corporations "threaten and intimidate" their workers, while unions "threaten and intimidate" corporations.
I don't think that's a justified basis to atomize the entire internet, but I do think that is a basis for partisan censorship
On a small scale, none of this matters because it is just internet gossip between a few deranged individuals. But this is creating a precedent for internet censorship at large.
Of course, but I think a threat to kill someone with a bomb is unambiguously threatening and intimidating whereas "I think this person's ideology is terrible and disagree with it" is not.
> The US Gov might consider Wikileaks to be "threatening and intimidating". Ukraine "threatens and intimidates" Russia and vice versa. Corporations "threaten and intimidate" their workers, while unions "threaten and intimidate" corporations.
You're kind of lumping in a bunch of separate concerns - a war between Russia and Ukraine is not the same as a forum of neo Nazis and neither are whistleblowing or labour relations disputes. Could you explain why you think they're related (as I can't personally see how they are)?
The "bomb threat" was posted by a recently-created and otherwise inactive account, immediately flagged by multiple users, and deleted by a moderator within minutes. The user who posted it was immediately banned. It was also clearly unserious.
The key differences are Kiwifarms is targeting individuals personally. And that they’re doing it kind of randomly, for the lulz. Whereas their main opponents here are targeting a company/community, and acting in self-defence.
I know who I think is more worthy of protection.