The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.
3 people are dead because of that site. What they were doing was a crime. Criminal activity is not is not protected free speech. That's like arguing carding and SIM swapping sites are just expressing their right to free speech and should be protected.
Even if that were true, and I think it's pretty doubtful to just attribute a suicide to some people who made fun of or harassed the deceased, it's a criminal or civil matter. If people on that forum committed a crime, let them face the legal penalties. Why should the website be made persona non grata by Internet companies?
How many more are dead from activities on Facebook, Instagram, etc? Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
‘ratsmack: harassment was explicitly their stated goal from the very beginning. The very name is a play on the first person they decided to go after (and why the forum formed).
It's not countable, but vastly more than three. There are civil wars and ethnic cleansing that get organized and supported on Facebook (e.g. Ethiopia and Myanmar). Gang violence and mass murder also get spread on Facebook. Nevermind the harassment and bullying that happens on Facebook, which is, of course, orders of magnitude more than what goes on on KF.
It's just not very sensible to think that big companies care about a few people dying because of a small forum when they demonstrably do not care about many, many, more people dying because of a big forum. It seems way more plausible to me that big tech companies work together to kill small social media than that they have some secret ethic which compels them to care about small harms over big harms.
Oh, I see. Thank you for clearing this up for me. When big, rich, powerful companies get people killed they didn't intend to, so, actually, no harm done. When big, rich, powerful companies accuse a small community of getting someone killed obviously they did intend to do it and so they need to be shut down.
Can't you engage the point in good faith? Of course intent matters! If you have a fleet of trucks and occasionally one of your drivers gets in an accident, that's way different than if you have a fleet going out there running people off the road.
I think you may have good point hiding in there (maybe "Facebook may not do it intentionally, but they've been so negligent that..."), but it's lost in the dripping sarcasm. The point you're replying to wasn't that ridiculous.
How do you even define intent when Facebook knows this stuff is happening but doesn't do anything? Intent is hardly relevant when they are aware of consequences of their behavior and still don't change. Don't know intend for it to happen, but it does happen and they're aware of it and continue I do it. I honestly think this is just another case of third world lives being less important to people.
I would say that I did engage in good faith. I mean the argument I'm making and I'm making my arguments the way I feel is best.
It is, of course, completely ridiculous to think that "intent" separates Facebook and KiwiFarms. Facebook doesn't intend to cause civil wars, genocides, spree killers, gang violence, body dismorphia, self-harm, harassment, and suicide. Facebook intends to connect people so that they can develop a social network and monetize the social network and they are willing to break a few eggs to make that omelette.
You might as well say that it is the color of Mark Zuckerberg's shoes that matters as say it is Facebook's intent. No, obviously, what matters is the bad stuff and the people harmed. It's not like any of those people are less dead because of Facebook's intentions. If Facebook had terrible intentions and excellent outcomes that would be a much better world.
The other problem with saying intent is what matters is that the people who make this argument also make some kind of magical mind reading claim that they know the intentions of others. "Intent is what matters, and I know the intentions of KiwiFarms! They are bad!" Just save everyone some time and explain that you know KiwiFarms is bad and that is why they must be destroyed.
KiwiFarms is bad because they intended to get people killed. No, there is no evidence for that. And yes, there is plenty of evidence against that in the form of trying to get people hurt being against the rules and moderation of the site. No, there was no police or legal action against KiwiFarms for the crimes we "know" they were committing - but all that is beside the point. We know their intent! It is bad and they must be removed!
If you had a crystal ball and could magically determine how many incidents of harassment per daily active user were coordinated on KF vs. Facebook, which site do you think would come out looking worse?
Or... Let's say a group of a dozen people got together and decided to make life a living hell for their target. They are going to mock the target mercilessly, following up on any online interaction by posting vile shit, sending nasty DMs on every platform they can find, etc... Nothing illegal, but just being awful.
But let's say in one world, they're coordinating this stuff on Facebook, and in another they're coordinating it on KF. Now let's say the target gets logs of the coordination, and they report it to the site where it happened. Which site do you think would be most likely to take action, FB or KF? I think the obvious answer is that FB is much more likely to try to put a stop to the harassment.
Also, for you to claim you're arguing in good faith when your entire response to a reasonable argument was to mockingly agree with it and say "Very illuminating!" is really rich. If you want to actually convince people of your points, you're going to have to do a lot better.
For the record, I really don't like that KF has been forced off the internet the way it has. But you're not going to convince anyone by being sarcastic and pretending that KF isn't an awful place where users try to do awful things.
Yeah I know, isn't it illuminating to see Facebook profit off of disinformation campaigns and to be used as tool and aided a genocide in another country, killing thousands. Here we also have Twitter [0][1][2] still unable to remove CP images off of their website for years despite it being absolutely illegal in many countries.
I think the fine should be substantially higher since they are 'big, rich and powerful as well' [3].
Intent - mens rea in the law - is not about the intent to [commit insert crime here]. It is about the intent to do the thing that resulted in the crime. That is why if you get blackout drunk and drive through a crowd of kids, you get charged with manslaughter: you didn't intend to kill those kids, but you intended to get blackout drunk and drive, which resulted in the death of the kids.
Facebook absolutely would have criminal intent the same way kiwifarms would - in both cases, they intended to serve content from their users.
At least seven. I did a quick search on DuckDuckGo, because I remembered at least one suicide covered in Danish media. The first page alone yielded seven different teenagers from Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada and Danmark.
So just guessing here, but Meta properties alone must have killed thousands of teenagers.
If even only half the material presented in "The social dilemma" was credible, Meta have absolutely been knowingly responsible for more harm than KF. I don't know what the right solution is.
Not even the tweet you linked says this. The person says they have been depressed and mocked their entire life and that they have tried therapy and medication and that it did not work. That seems much more like a depressed person driven to suicide than a forum being responsible for responsible for their death.
To my knowledge there was a thread with ~13 pages of comments making fun of near, but nothing threatening or harmful to his life. So far as I know the true identity of near was never known - so it's not even like the mean internet comments were intruding on his life. Can you link to the mean things (or an archive of them) that the KiwiFarms people did or said that drove near to suicide? If not, can you summarize the things they said or did?
It literally says, "Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse." By all means, continue to enjoy your willful ignorance, it must be nice.
One of Near's friends just tweeted a message where they had begged, "do something about this site already" the day they killed themself. Nier committed suicide because of KF harassment. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1567014389282385922
Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
Because they have more resources and it's easier to take down a small target than a large one. I am more than fine with Zuckerberg and others being held to account for harms negligently or callously inflicted by Facebook.
What doesn’t make sense to me is why is Cloudflare harassed for providing an utility to some bad actors while other traditional providers aren’t?
Is Comcast getting any flak for providing internet to the KKK offices? Or their water provider? Is Netflix getting any complains for providing entertainment to terrorists? Or vodafone for mobile connectivity?
Netflix theoretically can’t provide entertainment to known terrorizes because KYC rules would prevent them from being able to pay for it.
Comcast must provide service as part of the agreement to give them local monopoly privilege.
The water company where I am is the government so they are forced to provide service because of the 1st amendment.
Vodafone similarly bought public airspace and it came with rules. I wonder if they can pick and choose their customers.
Cloudflare though is just a regular company. They provide a service, but there is nothing restricting them from banning people. It’s like how Google can ban you for almost no reason.
I think because some of us look at Internet access or phone service as akin to water or electricity service. You just don't deprive someone of those things.
Regarding your Netflix example, I doubt Netflix knows if any particular customer is a terrorist.
Having access to a CDN provider isn't in the same "basic rights" league.
I look at having a home and a place to sleep at night as categorically more important than KF having CDN access, but maybe I'm just being weird about stuff.
>I think because some of us look at Internet access or phone service as akin to water or electricity service. You just don't deprive someone of those things.
I agree that trying to cancel people from being able to enjoy baseline physical necessities is not a line that's being crossed yet, but an attack on utilities may not necessitate this. Let's say Joshua Moon also happened to run a small hobby store in a strip mall. Would going after the utility providers (or landlord) for this store be "fair game" in order to attack KiwiFarms? Why or why not?
Anything is fair game when the ends justify the means and the target is accused of killing people on your side. The only reason power companies aren't yet subject to pressure to disconnect bad people is because that tactic is presently judged as infeasible.
They absolutely will ask landlords to kick somebody out. If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
>If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
Do you have any examples of this line being crossed? I mean I'm sure that oftentimes the mob has raised these issues to landlords and managed to get leases revoked, but I haven't seen an actual serious attempt to attack an unresponsive landlord in the way we've seen with the attack on Cloudflare.
Also I am almost certain if you were using your natural gas utility to shoot flames at the neighbors houses, or using your power to electrocute people walking by, that you'd have your service disconnected rather quickly until it was proved you're not a public harm.
While from my original post it's assumed it was intentional malice creating the dangerous situation, but there plenty of real world situations where service is disconnected for safety reasons.
We act like utilities are some inalienable right, but this is by far the worst argument ever. Licensed installers setup the utilities and have the work inspected. At any point where your environment presents a hazard, the utilities will be disconnected until it passes another inspection.
It's because Cloudflare actively protects these bad actors. They host DNS, they host proxy services, and they hide identifying information from WHOIS. They say they won't listen to anything short of a court order, so now we have to convene juries and get indictments to get Cloudflare to do anything at all.
Cloudflare is playing a big game.
Comparing Cloudflare protecting bad actors to the water company providing water to KKK members is completely disingenuous, but you know that, obviously. You should pick better examples.
Does the KKK use water cannons to hose people down? No. Any benefit KKK members derive from having running water is incidental to their KKK activities. Likewise if some terrorist is watching Netflix to unwind it's not furthering their terrorist activities specifically.
On the other hand, multiple groups of people have targeted Netflix for producing or promoting content that those people find offensive, which is a different situation from providing content.
When white supremacist organizations meet in conference halls at hotels people absolutely raise a stink and complain that the hotels should cancel the conferences and ban them from attendance. Cloudflare is actively and directly enabling the specific activity that people find detestable, same as hotels hosting white supremacists.
Not sure that protection is a utility, but even then I think the reason Cloudflare gets criticism/critique (not harassment...) comes as a result of the online nature of LGBTQ communities and Cloudflare's location in the closest thing to a physical epicenter of those communities.
I don't know what distinction you were imagining, but I think this one is relatively simple
Well, by definition almost a Distributed DoS attack implies some kind of mob. Now, it could conceivably be some rich individual illegally paying money to an illegal botnet, but it could also very well be a larger group of people conspiring to illegally pool their money to buy time on an illegal botnet. It could also theoretically be a large group of people illegally conspiring to attack the site directly using their own machines.
Well, seeing as this thread is about a website losing their DDoS protection, it would be whichever criminal mob that the DDoS protection was defending against.
This is not a case of "good ideas" vs "better ideas", this is a case of DDoS: "inconvenient ideas and IP Bandwidth" vs "censorship and better IP bandwidth"
The cheesecake factory has no meaningful ideological motivations, unless you include the advancement of poor dieting amongst Americans, which I suppose could be considered to be anti-american in a sense.
Additionally, it's a retail store. I can't imagine they would lose a lot of business if their website was down. Still, they could just as easily fall victim to a DDoS racketeering scheme I suppose.
If somehow someone objected to cheesecake factory's practices (let's say they're a vegan or they disapproved of cheesecake factory's health practices or something), then it would be disproportionately easy for the cheesecake factory to conduct a DDoS attack on the protester's website than vice-versa. So the idea that we should support DDoS as some form of free speech is obviously pro-corporatist in my perspective, because it empowers those with more financial and bureaucratic control over the internet.
So let's see, if I don't like this comment of yours and I find out where you live and go and shoot you in the face so you can't make such comments again, that's also competition in the marketplace of ideas, right? It's my idea to shoot you in the face against your idea of making comments I don't like.
You're equating a website going offline to shooting me in the face? No, that's not a competition of ideas. It's murder. Does that really need to be spelled out for you?
Congratulations, you got the analogy. Both me shooting you in the face and a mob agreeing to perform a DDoS against a web server are both measures of force.
"I don't like what you're saying, so I'm going to shoot you in the face so you stop."
"I don't like the content your web server is serving, so I'm going to DDoS it so it stops."
The DDoS is not an idea in the same way that a bullet isn't one. Therefore no, this is not "the marketplace of ideas in action".
The problem is that human lives are likely to be lost over this precedent being set.
This isn't about 1 website here. This is about the precedent.
Every time cloudflare gets bullied into taking a website offline, it is ammunition that an authoritarian government can use against it.
What happens when one of these countries starts to threaten cloudflare employees lives, to force them to take down some human rights organizations' websites?
Maybe it won't happen tomorrow. But every time a mob forces cloudflare to take these sorts of actions, it weakens cloudflare's ability to fight against the real threats.
If you want to stand by your opinion in this, then fine. But I get to hold you responsible for the deaths that happen, if cloudflare is no longer able to stand up against these greater threats.
Look, if you simply don't care that authoritarian governments could use this precedent to target minorities, then you should just say so.
I, on the other hand, am concerned about the lives that could be lost, due to authoritarian governments having more ammo to pressure cloudflare with.
This specific time might not be the tipping point. But if stuff like this keeps happening, the real threats can use the precedent to target vulnerable groups, and yes that can cause lives to be lost.
You seem very obsessed with authoritarian governments. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live under authoritarianism either.
Why don't we stretch this in any old way back to DDoS? Why should the government say which packets I can and cannot send? Any encroachment by the government into something as silly as sending DDoS packets slices down my ability to speak freely. If they start at DDoS, then what's stopping them from limiting other forms of speech?
See, I can do the same thing. Just because free speech in the form of sending DDoS packets isn't liked by people doesn't mean we should be willing to give it up. Right? Because once we start limiting what kind of packets we can send, we're only a slipper slope away from being told which other kinds of packets we can't send.
Still, I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario which is otherwise devoid of government interference. In this whole story, all I see is a bunch of civilians. If there is a government actor, department, or anything, please share. Otherwise it just looks like standard whataboutism directed at the govt.
> Any encroachment by the government..... my ability to speak freely.
Look, if you are ok with authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations, then say so.
> I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario
So, one big reason why cloudflare is used, is by human rights organizations to protect themselves from being DDoS'ed by authoritarian governments.
If you don't care about that, then just say so.
> is otherwise devoid of government interference.
It is not devoid from government interference, because cloudflare stops authoritarian governments from interfering with human right's organizations.
And, as I said before, this precedent hurts cloudfares ability to protect human right's organizations from being taken down by these governments, by protecting them from DDoS attacks, from those governments.
> If there is a government actor, department, or anything
Every time cloudflare is pressured to stop protecting websites, this is ammo that authoritarian governments can use against them, to drop protections for other organizations, such as human rights organizations. It might not happen tomorrow, but it is more ammo that these governments can use.
Why do you keep avoiding this idea of authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations?
> that you're ok with the government censoring which packets people send.
So, if an authoritarian government, tried to target a gay rights organization, yes I would be ok with a different government protecting this targeted minority from DDoS attacks.
This is because I do not want important human rights organizations, such as ones that protect gay people from being oppressed, from being taken off the internet by bad people.
Do you see how I just directly addressed the question, by saying that yes I am in favor of the government protecting, for example, gay rights organizations, from being DDoSed?
Do you really oppose this protection? Would you support an authoritarian government, taking down a gay rights organization?
I think the answer is because they simply support attacking and targeting human rights organizations, such as gay rights organizations, or ones that protect targeted minorities.
I tried to get them to talk about this issue, and they basically admitted that they support removing, for example, gay right organizations from the internet, via DDoS attacks.
Because apparently protecting gay rights organizations would infringe on their free speech to target and remove those organizations from the internet.
The content of the idea is superfluous. The point is that if you give the government the ability to tell people what packets they can and cannot send, then you're implicitly trusting that they won't abuse this power in the future and decide that there are other things people can and cannot send.
Sending a packet is free speech. Being prevented from sending a packet is censorship. It's pretty simple. Not really sure why we needed to take a detour into shooting people, but here we are.
No, there's no law anywhere that includes actions performed by machines in the definition of free speech. DDoSing a server is not performance art, and neither is shooting someone.
There's no such thing as a natural right. A right only exists where it goes unchallenged or where there's a force to answer such challenges. That force can come from laws and the power of a state or it can come from someplace else, but it needs to come from somewhere. You can believe that you have the right to send any packets you like however you like, but if you can't defend that right and you don't have anyone who will defend it for you, you may find there are those who will ensure your belief stays as just that.
The "point" is that anyone engaging in illegal violence, or similar, anywhere, should be punished via the legal system, and not via some other forms of illegal violence.
And that goes to anyone involved in any part of this whole fight.
And what if the legal system do not protect (or punish) all equally?
There was no physical not psychological violence here. Only Ddos. Why is that bad? Do you have an inherent right to not be buried under request? protected from bots?
"Free speech" is a bit of a misnomer. The valuable thing is the freedom to hear, not the freedom to speak.
With a DDOS the goal is to prevent people from reading someone's words. With harassment the goal is to prevent people hearing the targets future words.
You seem to be under the impression most crimes are prosecuted. Very few are, because, amongst many other things, the police do not exist to protect citizens.
So why not try to do something about the police, and instead focusing on Cloud Flare. Surely there are many more important crimes that Cloud Flare can't help with, and that the police could if it were forced by people to act as it is supposed to.
Also, have any of the people complaining about this on the internet actually filed complaints with the police/procesutor's office? Have they even attempted to follow the legal channels before deciding to take the law into their own hands?
Surely a prosecutor standing for re-election would be much more likely to be swayed than a massive mega corporation. But why go through the bother of actually doing something that could help set legal precedent when you can simply tweet furiously.
I don't know of any SIM swapping sites that have been taken down - I would be happy to be corrected here but there doesn't seem to be a populist fervor demanding it. Aren't there ISIS members on Twitter? There are also people advocating for the industrial scale genital mutilation of babies. I just checked and Purdue Pharma is still online and their cynical campaign of mass murder puts 3 people dead in a very stark perspective. This whack-a-mole approach to de-platforming seems reactionary and very fashion based and not based on coherent set of morals. There seems to be no proportionality. This extrajudicial punishment sounds like a neat solution to a lot of problems but I'm worried about setting precedents that will almost definitely be used against things I care about. Anti-war movements always start out as fringe minority (now casually defined as extremists paroting Russian talking points) and are very undermining to a state that has decided to mobilize its population for war - which leaves me counting down the days until I'm deplatformed.
People who have threads on KiwiFarms have (allegedly) committed suicide. That's about all that's required to attribute each death causally to KiwiFarms. It's an incredibly weak standard.
KiwiFarms members often don't just take notes of those they laugh at. They actively get involved in harassing them, online, through the phone and in person.
So was this the case for any of the people who actually committed suicide in a way that establishes a reasonable causal nexus? My impression is that the answer is "no".
Yes, but iirc the suicide note doesn't claim that the KF thread was leading to ongoing direct harassment that motivated the (alleged) suicide. Just that the mere existence of the thread played a role. So we're back to "if someone has a KiwiFarms thread and kills themselves, then KiwiFarms is to blame".
If somebody writes about something in their suicide note, that easily clears the bar for "relevant for their decision making about their suicide" to me. What would the required evidence look like for you? Sworn testimony to a notary saying that it was KF and nothing else?
- Whether ongoing harassment from KF was relevant to their suicide
Unless one equates the mere existence to the thread itself with ongoing harassment then one can answer affirm the former question without the latter. The "required evidence" for the latter would require some sort of allegation that KF members were actively harassing Near at some point reasonably prior to their suicide, which afaik was just not alleged.
People do archive those pages and have seen links were posted multiple times here. The issue is those pages posted end up going against to what the people wanting KF down say.
What they were doing was not a crime, as evidenced by every lawsuit against the site getting thrown out and the owner's extensive cooperation with law enforcement.
The line with "Kiwi Farms is responsible for 3 suicides" seems to be repeating that lie until it sticks. The truth is more complicated:
Whoop tee doo. I've seen dozens of livestreamed murders on Instagram Live and Facebook Live. Reddit has /r/chiraqology where there are hundreds of videos of gang bangers and drill rappers beefing with each other and shooting at each other, and commenters celebrate the lifestyle and keep detailed ontologies of it all.
Nobody is talking about nuking any of these platforms from existence just because of some isolated illegal incidents.
Reddit nukes hate subs weekly. They're slow to get to it, but they do it. As far as Facebook live and Instagram live, those platforms weren't made with the sole purpose of harassing and doxxing people. Neither is reddit. When they find communities that promote those things they do take them down. Their moderation is slow and overwhelmed, but don't pretend Facebook encourages murders on live streams. KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it.
If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
Wrong, Reddit explicitly allows hate speech against white people because it follows the nouveau definition of "racism" not including whites. There's a Reddit admin response to repeated requests to ban /r/FragileWhiteRedditor somewhere that outlines this.
> KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it
Wrong. The admin, Null, has explicitly said they don't allow doxxing or swatting and complies with law enforcement
> If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
That's cute but what you're describing as absurd is basically what Keffals et al are doing with this website by hounding every service they tangentially use to get them banned. If they could make the site operator unbankable or unable to receive postal mail it's pretty obvious they gladly would
They nuke hate subs selectively. There are plenty of hate subs they leave online routinely and don't nuke.
Heck, there are plenty of anecdotes showing they bias towards keeping hate subs targeted at "majorities" alive, and have actively changed their ToS multiple times to discriminate between who they consider vulnerable.
Pussypassdenied is basically misogyny, fatlogic is fat hate, religiousfruitcake is full of Islamophobia and antisemitism, combatfootage is just videos of foreigners dying with vile bigotry filled comments(wouldn't be surprised if many of them were innocent). Reddit hardly does anything about the hate they host, honestly.
People talk about threatening reddit and pulling out advertising all the time. It's also why on a random basis that reddit goes around and wipes some communities off the map. Especially when they start showing up in other media.
The Chiraqology stuff is wild. People threaten each other on YouTube and then follow through with murder! The only reason it’s not banned is because nobody with power cares what happens to impoverished black kids in Chicago unless they can make money from it.
I doubt that banning the subreddit would stop the violence, all that would do is sweep the problem under the rug where it's easier for people in power to ignore.
The solutions put forth by the elected officials of Chicago and Illinois seem to fall into two general strategies; providing funding for anti-violence programs in Chicago, and lobbying for DOA legislation in Washington. Those outreach programs, such as Chicago CRED, READI Chicago and Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, have social science studies backing up their efficacy, but say they need more money to have a greater impact (Chicago's 2021 budget was $12.8 billion, with $16.5 million allocated to violence prevention.) They're very clear about needing more money to hire more social workers, but I can't find any statements from these organizations about the need for moderating reddit and youtube.
If Reddit were materialists to that degree then they wouldn't have banned popular gore subs.
It's more likely the sub taps into a vein of black culture that happens to be interwoven with some violence, and Reddit tolerates it because they don't want to be seen as trampling out anything to do with black culture.
Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
There are still plenty of subs for hating fat people, Muslims, Indians, etc. Reddit just doesn't care about most of its issues, unless a journalist writes about them and puts on the heat.
>Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
Not the same, but combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed.
> combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed
That's a reeeeach. I've been subbed there since 2013 and there were also many contemporary posts of white Americans (because that's disproportionately who serves and dies in combat) and European service members being shot and blown up by IEDs and so forth in GWOT (although the votes and comments were more controversial).
The war in Donbas also yielded plenty of footage of white casualties. And now the latest Ukrainian conflict.
The most controversial time on the sub was when ISIS was at their peak and people were straight posting their propaganda (executions and so forth). That was all disallowed unless it was only traditional combat footage, preferably with nasheeds stripped out. If the sub was about enjoying brown death that carnage would've been allowed.
it's not made for illegal activities, it's made for discussion and making fun of people. rhetorical hyperbole (e.g. "Bob is a big fat idiot") is protected speech and the site owner routinely fights this in court and wins every single time.
I happened to see someone else post KF's response while it was protected by DDoS guard and read it.
Their story, which doesn't seem to appear in the responses in that Twitter thread, was that a 2 year old account that only posted once previously in its history suddenly activated, posted a picture of someone holding a threatening letter of some type outside of someone's home, then this was screencapped on Twitter a short time later (~15 minutes). The post was removed 2 minutes after it hit Twitter by the submitter (they originally thought their mods did it, but corrected this, saying it was removed with the note "retarded").
I don't ever read that site other than to look at stuff like this when it hits the news, so I don't claim to know anything more than that, but you were for a time able to look at the forum threads and see the posts they mentioned, etc.
If they have killed them, they shouldn't be kicked of the internet. They should be charged with the appropriate charge and go to prison if found guilty.
If they committed a crime, let the authorities deal with it. Committing another crime (DDoSing a website) is hardly the answer. Vigilantism is also a crime.
if you think the fault lies with the website and the posters won't just use some other website (plenty of death threats on twitter are still up)... you are sorely uninformed.
with a very high suicide rate among transgender individuals I'm not sure if the deaths can solely be attributed to the site.
Moreover some of the people, who pushed to shut down the forum, openly support the transition of teens (even without the knowledge of their parents).
Yet trans teens face an even higher risk of attempting suicide. Therefore one must ask if those who wanted to remove KF are not responsible for more suicides by promoting and facilitating transition among teens in identity crisis i.e. by making their problems even worse.
I'm a free speech advocate but 100% agree with you.
Our legislators needs to make laws against targeted, anonymous, non-journalistic doxxing. It needs to include clauses that escalate the severity when revenge porn or racial, sexual, or other discrimination is being incited. If this bullying results in suicide, that should also increase the severity of the crime.
Until these laws exist, prosecutors need to use this angle and try these cases anyway.
If someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news. What does "government leader" means? what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means? Especially in the era of twitter and immense followings from people that are just regulars and not some ultra-rich celebrities.
Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
>If someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news.
Fair enough.
>What does "government leader" means?
>what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means?
I'm not a lawmaker, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things.
>Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
Why would the US make any laws against doxxing? As of so far we've been nearly completely allergic to any laws for privacy. It's going to be very problematic in itself attempting to make a legal argument that disclosing an anonymous persons name is not protected under the first amendment.
I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...
They also provide a good counter to propaganda. You don't have to believe you get Covid chipped or in evil lizard people to see serious and concerning displays of media propaganda. And yes, it is US corporations in cooperation with government far more than the Russians on the English speaking net. There is just as much propaganda in Russia in Russian of course.
It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even more effectively as it did in the past.
I think there are much better ways to counter propaganda than running a site that doxxes people you don't like and harasses them to the point they commit suicide. We should not enable folks like this.
If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.
It isn't about this site in particular. These are people that make fun of others, there is no deeper "service" the platform provides, no particular insights to be gained. It is morally questionable endeavor to stay diplomatic and I hope users can learn to moderate themselves.
The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.
Note that "the site" doesn't do this. Some of their users may do so and may or may not (I couldn't dig very deep before it went down) organise via the site.
the counter to propaganda is thoughtful, deep investigation of the matter at hand, getting at least some minimal subject matter expertise and getting the opinion of experts, etc. (nowadays this has the fancy name of epistemological rationalism)
KF is at best more/different propaganda against the mainstream propaganda
That's more of a measure of how inadequate your laws currently are. I view GP's measure to be far more accurate and reasonable, and one that I use myself.
Harassment (e.g. attempting to communicate with someone with the intent to upset them) is indeed bad for discourse and should be stopped. However, talking to other likeminded people about how much X sucks and you hate them would not be harassment.
By this logic, there is no way you can deny someone their freedom of speech. What is the difference between someone putting you on death row for speaking out against the government versus publishing your information so that angry randos can do the same? Is the only problem with government censorship that their violence is somehow "special" and worse than other forms of violence?
I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.
Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.
These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.
Maybe we should ban criticism against politicians while we are at it. If we don't do that then politicians will be harassed off the internet which of course would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Politicians are harassed all the time and it is frequently organized. They are told they should die, they are bullied, etc. Their house address is frequently put on the internet. There is no difference between the harassment leveled towards people on KiwiFarms and what politicians experience on a daily basis.
I swear you have spent the last week doing nothing but making bad faith arguments and refusing to listen to or concede a single point. It’s QAnon level behaviour and for what?
I don't like people going after others while trying to censor them. You are doing the same thing as me. Honestly, it's authoritarian level behavior and for what?
Honestly, is it their goal? Admittedly, I'm not an expert in Kiwifarms, however, I understand they've taken a dislike to many people for various reasons, not just LGBT folk.
Calling it "harassment" is perhaps a bit misleading if it's people gossiping about and making fun of someone behind their back. Harassment generally involves intentional (as opposed to incidental) communication to the target. The issue is that this forum (like Twitter and other forums) is generally readable by the public, so someone can observe two people saying stuff about them, but it's not addressed to them.
It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.
KF's concept of “large public show” has very little connection to reality. No matter how small a target tries to make their audience, they are not guaranteed to escape harassment. Like on a school playground, the bullies pick on people who are unpopular.
Correct, and as an unpopular person myself (just ask around), I'm saying that the status quo is fine. The alternative is simply too dangerous to consider, particularly for queer communities that rely on the good graces of internet freedom to communicate within hostile regimes. Setting this precedent could very well encourage other countries to strongarm service providers into dropping customers, or worse yet lead to astroturfing that takes down perfectly innocent messageboards. What happens when China tries to claim that GitHub is hosting content that's highly offensive to Chinese citizens? Does Microsoft bend?
This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
I wonder how many people remember when the censorship online was wielded against queer people?
Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised.
I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
Maybe it's not my place to speculate, but I think the modern generation of TikTok queers and image-obsessed teens has completely forgotten that social media only gives them a platform because they profit off every like and view. If the shoe was on the other foot (say, they were trying to increase profits in queer-hostile countries) they would have no problem silencing your voice just to increase user retention. This already happens on TikTok, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened on Twitter and Facebook, to lesser extents. A sad allegory for the state of queer solidarity in 2022, I guess.
Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
> Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people.
I'm already starting to see the swing back.
Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
Of course corporations would crush queer people if it made them money. But defending KF won't change that one bit. The error is assuming that the people who'd treat gay people so badly would be swayed one bit by "well, we didn't get cloudflare to take down that forum full of bigots."
I don't want them to be swayed, I want them to be able to speak their (wrong) ideas. It's fine if people want to spread lies about gay people, or even engage in hateful harassment campaigns. Homophobic violence is where I draw the line, but we have hate crimes explicitly designed for deterring and prosecuting these offenses. Everything else, in my opinion, falls under the purview of fair expression. Obviously Cloudflare doesn't have any obligation to serve them, but that's not going to stop them from continuing their harassment campaigns. It just pushes them onto more esoteric, resilient platforms.
The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
Plenty of us remember. We also don't believe that protecting KF is in any way going to prevent those sorts of threats against the speech and association of queer groups online.
For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here.
And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?
And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.
Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it.
Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
I don't really understand the relevance here. The claim above, as I understood it, was that older queer people would be more cautious around supporting actions taken against unsavory speech because they remember being viciously targeted via those same means and fear them being used against their community once again.
I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.
This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.
This is going to be a subjective broad statement based on my experience of using the Internet for 20 years and growing up in the West: I think your thought experiment holds water. I think the older generations (30-35+) just care about being accepted by society for who they are and not denied anything everyone else has (jobs, housing, using the swimming pool, etc.). I think it is the younger generations who don't want just acceptance but almost a totalitarian adherence to their world view. This is where we get the majority of content around issues and it becomes non-negotiable as we've seen from other comments in this thread around medication. I still believe the most extreme voices are the ones that are the loudest.
"Hey, remember how we left up that hate website" isn't going to convince any authoritarian regime to treat gay people with respect. The history of oppression is littered with examples of legal protections simply not being granted to oppressed groups and I'd fully expect such an authority to just continue on crushing gay people beneath its heel regardless of how KF was dealt with.
I agree with everything you said, but that's only because none of it addressed anything I said. Authoritarian regimes will always have reason to hate anyone outside the standard model of a citizen. Our concept of internet freedom and service neutrality is what helps these oppressed people connect and share their stories. This already happened in the 90s, where LGBT BBS' and messageboards gave like-minded people places to reach out with each other. Later, this gave rise to platforms like Vice News and dozens of other media outlets that could freely report on queer topics without fear of persecution.
In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
So, they pick on Russians and Islamic fundamentalists? Labor organizers? Democratically elected socialist leaders in Latin America? Or maybe Julian Assange? Oh wait, they must pick on poor people! If any of that has been the case, then good riddance. Somehow one doubts that.
Sounds like you've internalized the idea that it's OK to be a punching bag for other people and if you retaliate when attacked that makes you a bad person. This is your right of course, but why should anyone else feel obliged to subscribe to your moral/risk calculus?
It has nothing to do with being good or bad. Might is right. Being morally good doesn't prevent harm from coming to you unless an effectively mightier faction deters it.
> Same rules as getting bullied on the playground, if you pick a fight with the people harassing you, then you're liable to get beat up.
Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
For a standard school bully, if you're a big enough problem for the bully they move on to an easier target. Even if you fight back and lose, the bully is far more likely to move on to another target that doesn't pose a response damage risk to them (the only way that isn't true, is if you're entirely unable to pose any physical threat to them, then they may be amused by the attempt to fight back).
This has very little in common with how playground rules work.
> Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
I don't think any fight has ever stopped once someone else starts throwing punches, certainly not on KiwiFarms. The only thing they care about is how you react. If you start getting mad on Twitter, then they'll take the fight to Twitter. If you start a public campaign to take them down, the users will obviously take it personally. If you reached out to the police and talked with a therapist/loved one... what would they do? In the hyper-sensational age though, the only response anyone wants is to make an eye-opening TikTok for their 15 seconds of fame... so long as they aren't hated, that sort of fame is obviously verboten.
My goal isn't to take a shot for KiwiFarms or blame the victims here. I'm simply expressing that, as a queer person, I prefer to live in a world where KiwiFarms is allowed to exist. It's a horrible place populated by increasingly toxic people, but without it the internet lacks balance. Without websites like KiwiFarms, it's hard to feel secure hosting anything that others are allowed to use. On the other side of that coin, the people lobbying against KiwiFarms are largely stationed on centralized platforms. They're encouraging a future where all of our communication is commodified and owned by private interests. Maybe it is too late to save the internet, but I'll be the last one to adopt the fatalist mindset that everything requires direct moderation.
> Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
Honestly, this is a myth. One day, I decided to follow the "stand up to the bullies and they'll leave you alone" stuff my mother sprouted off. It started with two on two. Two bullies were threatening me and my mate, and I said to my mate we should stand up to them and they'll leave us alone. My mate decided to run. The bullies chased after him. I decided to stop the bullies and stood in there way. What happened over the course of 5-10 minutes was me standing up to these bullies, every time someone they knew came along they asked for help, eventually it was something silly like 10 of them versus me. I'm not too sure of the number because eventually someone jumped me from behind and I was beated until I was out cold. I was found by some girls who then told Janitor that I was dead. That Janitor then came to where they said I was and saw me not moving and thought I was dead. He had the unpleasurable experience of thinking he just found a 10-year old kid dead in a school hallway.
I stood up to every bully. I beat every single one of them up at some point. One bully left the school because of a beating I gave him. You know what changed? Nothing until i started dealing with them differently. Once I started acting like I couldn't care less they stopped their taunting and name calling and all the other stuff that I would beat them up for.
Hard to believe that people honestly use that poem in situations like this. The poem was about not resisting virulent bigotry enough. It isn't about platforming bigots.
This is a pretty weak argument and extremely susceptible to Goodhart’s Law. It feels like you’re treating the existence of vile sites like this as a metric for the health of internet free speech. Be careful you don’t make the continued existence of such bigotry your target
This is just civilized society finally catching up with criminals on the internet, the internet as a tolerant forum for information exchange and discussion was lost as soon as serious money got involved.
Sure! We just need websites that organize brigading and harassing trans-people, women, and minorities until they commit suicide. Its an utter requirement of civilization. /cringe
I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this).
When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
I've lurked on KF with an empty account for a couple of years. (I have an interest in niche drama and as a lesbian, trans drama is pushed into any space for lesbians ANYWAY).
I didn't see brigading, but I did see doxxing.
And of course the whole thing is a mentally-toxic nut-picking echo chamber, but that's kind of par for the course on the modern Web.
This is my experience of Kiwifarms. If you do not have a thick skin, you should not be reading there. Moreover, most of the internet is probably not suitable for people who do not want to experience offense.
And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
I have seen many more threats against Kiwifarms that I have seen originate from within it. The forum seems to be a melting pot for grossly offensive people to make grossly offensive comments. And considering 4chan is still around (even if it only used to have a problem with CSAM) I'm at a loss at why Kiwifarms is being "deplatformed".
I can only assume it's like the "jailbait" subreddit - something reprehensible but action is only taken when it gets media attention.
The hilarious thing is that neither side are good or nice people. I've been queer online longer than keffels has been alive and I've been anti-censorship the entire time partially because I remember when people were trying to censor LGBT+ information. This is like my two mentally ill parents fighting.
One side is going to call me a dyke, carpet-muncher, and link the fact that I like women to being a child groomer.
The other is going to call me transphobic, a bitch, a cunt, and a TERF for not wanting to suck dick/not wanting all queer spaces to be about trans issues 24/7.
> And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
This is one thing that pisses me off about people like keffals. When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates. The Internet changed that. Since I had WWW access, I could talk to gay adults and realize that a.) you could find love being gay, b.) get advice on what to avoid and how to stay safe, and c.) start to plan out a gay life for myself. Nobody was ever inappropriate with me. (That was always straight men...) Keffels et al. are dragging us right back so gay adults can't support gay kids that are genuinely in danger or suicidal. Thanks, guys.
At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
> At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
This is something I feel too, having seen some of the most fringe communities on the internet (a good example is furrys) and how they act predatory around children. I am afraid to say it to any of my friends, colleagues, or even my partner as I feel like I would be seen as bigoted.
I think some people don't see how some behaviour is completely inappropriate (like that Reddit moderator who had a parent that raped children in the attic and, thanks to Kiwifarms, you saw how they were also very predatory). It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
Those people are sometimes right that an INORDINATE amount of moral panic are focused on LGBT+ people. (Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women).
On the other hand, most of them are so urban and online that they can't conceive of trying to navigate this space as a normie parent. Most normal parents are AWARE that strange men are potential dangers to female people and teach us about it accordingly so we're wary, we can go to them or teachers if someone DOES prey on us, etc. (I see a lot of warnings to teen girls that 'that guy doesn't think he's mature for your age, he just wants someone easy to manipulate').
But most normal parents aren't plugged into the queer community enough to teach their kids how to avoid predators in those spaces. And most of those parents just have too much else going on to learn - if somebody is working 50 hours a week with 3 kids, they don't have TIME to keep up with the drama of who was revealed to be a predator this week. And the instinct to not take chances when it comes to one's child's safety makes sense.
> What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
One of the reasons I made an account for lurking was to watch and see where waves of newbies arrived to KF from and why. There are a lot of participants who ended up there after what they wanted to discuss was completely banned from the other places they talked about things online.
> It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
The lack of tolerance for dissent or deviation bothers me. In a lot of places, you can't even have procedural or intellectual disagreements about trans orthodoxy, or discuss how some of the rhetoric is hurtful to other members of the community. It's very 'there is one way to be and only one way'. Very similar to conservative Christian spaces. (My family is half conservative Christians, so I'm familiar with THEIR filter bubbles too).
> Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women
Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women? But you're further saying that you think trans women are as likely to be predators as straight men? Doesn't your own experience contradict that?
You're upset that the trans women posted on KF are going to make the public think all LGBT people are groomers. I'm upset that they'll make the public think all trans women are groomers. And comments like yours feel like punching down, frankly.
Girls are mostly preyed on when they're younger than 20- and mostly when they're in middle and high school. At the time, out trans women were rare enough that no, none of the people who tried to prey on me identified as such. I haven't looked everyone up to make sure that they still identify that way, obviously.
So there's a confounding variable. If 5% of straight cis men and 5% of trans women are predators but I only meet 2 trans women, odds are I'm never going to run into a trans woman predator. Whereas being a geek in the 90s and 00s I was SURROUNDED by cis straight dudes. It was very common for me to be the only female in the room, or there to be less than 5 of us at a computer show.
(I also think women and trans men are about as likely to be predators but that they show/act it out differently. I tend to think assholeishness/predatory natures are fairly equally dispersed across different identity groups but expressed differently due to socio-cultural factors.)
> Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women?
Isn't it a numbers game? ~50% of the population are men. You see thousands of men a day (if you don't WFH). I think the occurrence rate of trans people (in real life) is vastly smaller.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the likelihood of predation to be the same, but not experience any from one group that is vastly under-represented in daily life.
Trans people weren't a substantial portion of queer spaces until the mid to late 2010s, and I'm talking about the 90s and early-mid 00s. There was also more of a focus on passing/not talking about it + it was more common to be in the closet, so even if I had been acquainted with trans women, I probably wouldn't have known.
On the other hand, I've seen entitled behavior from trans women in lesbian spaces post 2015ish. It just hasn't been directed at me personally because predators choose their victims based on vulnerability and I aged out of that. Not many sexual predators go after men or women OLDER than they are.
The focus on passing/not talking about it might return. I'm fortunate enough to pass. The past few years I felt like I ought to be out, irl, to dispel the negative stereotypes my conservative acquaintances were hearing about. But things are getting increasingly ugly, and I get treated better when people don't know I'm trans, so I've stopped speaking up.
I'm growing my hair out and have started painted my nails and wearing dresses again, and the binders have gone back in a box. (I'm not trans but I like male clothing).
Likewise, I WANT to be out, especially since a lot of younger queer people are so very '!' when they see stable adult queer people, but unfortunately, the in-fighting means not only can I not trust the general populace to be chill, I can't trust my fellow queers not to throw me under the bus for being too 'privileged'. (Even though I'm poor and disabled, because all that matters is cis + white.)
Good point, actually, I forgot about prior probability. I concede the logic of your point.
Personally, I am a trans woman, so my social circle includes many more trans women than the average. And I am not a predator, and I don't know any predators personally, so I conclude we're not likely to be predators. But I'm just a random person on the internet, so you can't know if I'm telling the truth, or even if I am, whether my circle of friends is a representative sample of trans women in general.
I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
> I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
I agree! Which is why I made the point about straight men also being gross and my point that people should be leery because we (queer people) are doing a bad job ejecting predators and holding them accountable, not because we're any worse. And that's not just about trans women: There's a large problem with some cis gay men sexualizing teenage boys, and I will absolutely throw hands over that, too.
Also, since you are not a predator, I assume you wouldn't want to be friends with predators and would not support groups with predators in them, so predatory trans women probably don't want to be friends with you bc you'd call their asses out. Predators seek out friends and spaces that allow them to prey on people. You not having predatory friends just says your circle is not a safe space for predators which is good.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that you may not know. A lot of abusers/predators act like good people outside of their abuse victims. Nobody in my communities would have known or suspected my parents were abusive, for example. Or how many people find out suddenly that their dad/grandpa/uncle are creeps.
I just point this out because a loooot of cis straight guys say the same thing to girls and women: "Well, none of MY friends sexually harrass/rape/assault people, so it can't be that common!" Except that it is.
I think there are a lot of variables that go into understanding these things, and that non-queer people who are suddenly thrust into it once their kids come out have no way to orient themselves, which is WHY we should be more diligent.
Yes. I follow/consume media from roughly 400-1000 people on the internet. I don't know any trans people in real life but probably a good dozen or two dozen of these people I follow online (tech, art, etc. you know, normal stuff people like) are trans. That's quite statistically significant, I've only (knowingly) met 1 trans person in real life but at least 4% of the people I follow online are trans. Nearly all of them being trans women.
I think trans people get a shit time online because as soon as the topic enters anything to do with activism it is only the loudest and most extreme voices that are amplified.
This is a shame for all of the people within LGBT who these voices drown out, including other trans people.
I've been on there when some harrassment stuff has came up in the past and have seen some threads. It's probably 0.00x% of it's posts but it's also what it's famous for.
So you go to the source site _after_ the evil things they've done are reported on, and the site posted a rebuttal. And you think you're getting a true, unaltered representation of the things that occured BEFORE this happened? Bad take.
> saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading
Either because it was now removed or hidden from public view. These activities have definitely occured on KF and just because you "don't see it happening now", doesn't mean it hasn't.
Right now there is no way to have a good faith argument due to the witch hunt. Anyone who 'confessed' to being active is a witch so their word is no good, and anyone who isn't active doesn't know the dark sorceries of the inner circle so their word is no good.
I walked into a nightclub and asked for sex. I did not get sex, so therefore nightclubs are not places people go for sex. All those people claiming nightclubbers hook up for one night stands seems like scurrilous slander to me. It’s terrible to see people believing the journalists who attended night clubs for years and reported on their supposed sexual exploits over my story which is clearly a sign of leftist bias. Why do these people believe a journalist over my reliable reporting?
I am sometimes very worried about the apparent naivete of people who think this way, and then I am even more worried thinking that they might just be intentionally obtuse.
If freedom of speech doesn't protect Kiwifarms I don't see why we should put up with sex workers either. Either we should defend speech we don't like or we should make the world a better place.
You realize that Cloudflare took down a bunch of sites with sex workers on them already, right? Including ones that weren't actually violating any laws. The internet already slipped off that particular slippery slope.
"First they came for the Nazis" is how World War II could be described (1), and with the exception of a few misguided sympathizers the story ends well with the destruction of their power structure and hanging of their leadership.
Probably worth noting that among the reasons KF just lost their newest DDoS protector is that many Russians are understandably sensitive to Nazi sympathizing, even "for the lulz".
(1) One could even argue that hesitating to come for the Nazis sooner was a significant mistake in the international community that allowed the severity of the War and the atrocities that occurred in it.
The Germans came for the Nazis. The Weimar Republic was very much in favor of imprisoning them for their (detestable) ideals and proposals. The Nazis were able to parlay this persecution (and Weimar failures) into an increasing share of the electorate and eventually total control.
Leaving out the 1923 putsch in Munich damages your argument beyond repair. Nazis' legal troubles in the Weimar era were not simply the result of unpopular ideas ruffling feathers in high places.
This is what my critics who say things like "lol, we know you're for censorship" don't understand. The Nazi movement rose because they were free to express their vile ideology. Germany prevented renazification for 80 years through censorship.
This was what Marcuse was getting at in "Repressive Tolerance". Some views deserve free expression. Others do not. If you give free expression to all perspectives, the vile ones will spread until you can't control them anymore, and then you're no longer a tolerant society but a repressive one.
We have the means and now the will to identify vile speech online and shut it down at the network level.
The Nazis also breathed air; that doesn't make breathing air immediately suspect.
Can we think of some good reasons for suppression of communication? I can name several (disruption of ongoing stochastic terrorism, disruption of immediate harassment process, failure to comply with the TOS of a private corporation voluntarily doing business with the offending party, use of network compromising service provision for third parties in the same system), and many of them apply to the KF situation.
Correct, and the difference between them and KF is (a) their market cap and (b) the work they've done, consistently, to address issues when they come up, up to and including using automation to scale the moderation pipeline.
KF either can't or won't keep its house in order, and at this point, the can't-won't difference is immaterial. I welcome someone making a solid run at providing another channel alongside Twitter / FB / et al, but this ain't it.
That difference is, I fear, ideological rather than principled.
Think of all the harassment directed at Kyle Rittenhouse, or the Covington Catholic kids, or just Republicans generally, on reddit and Twitter. Harassment was featured on the front page.
That isn't a small problem that the moderators are unaware of; it's an ideological belief that certain harassment is acceptable.
It's almost certainly both, because Nazism is also an ideology (one with no platform given and no platform deserved).
FWIW, I've gotten kicked from FB far more often for vitriolic criticism of the right than the left. At least to my eye, they try to steer an even keel... If people are seeing more Republicans get snagged, I think it's because of their own social circle (because filter bubbles are pretty thick these days).
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.
What I would prefer is that they have a day in court. Even this twitter thread tries to make the case that these aren't "criminals" effecting the DDoS, but rather they should be viewed as "victims."
I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.
>This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence.
It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
What they wish to do is cut the head off the proverbial snake when the snake hasn't committed a crime or directly conspired with people who did commit a crime. It might be an effective strategy, but it's not one our laws allow, because we don't base guilt on "but-for" causation alone. Nor do we base it on that icky feeling we get when we look at the proverbial snake.
Kiwifarms is a downgrade from the others aka its already a slippery slope. Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are known to protect booters.
So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them.
The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
These listed companies literally break the law to grow. They create demand by knownly allowing illegal DDOS-for-Hire websites. That is not a free market if the people on top are allowed to break the law to stifle competition and force people to use them or stop existing.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it.
But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban.
So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands.
Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.
> What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
As you might have read, I am european. Threats of violence can be illegal here. I did not seek to explain the US flavour of freedom of speech here, I sought to explain a limitation on it I grew up with and why I think it produces a (to me) desirable outcome.
Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out.
By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights.
When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago.
Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?
> What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
I'm not sure how speech can impede on the right of others to speak freely. Speech can certainly discourage others from speaking freely, and that's bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but it's too vague to justify shutting down an entire forum because some speech there might discourage others from speaking freely.
If I were to threaten to shoot your kids if you again post something that I don't like, while making clear that I know where you live, my speach will certainly imped with your ability to express yourself freely, or wouldn't it?
If you think it wouldn't I'd like to know how your thinking goes. I am not from the US, so maybe the whole theoretical idea is different from the ground up.
> If I were to threaten to shoot your kids if you again post something that I don't like, while making clear that I know where you live, my speech will certainly impede with your ability to express yourself freely, or wouldn't it?
You're right, certain speech, like direct threats of violence can impede on other people's right to freedom of speech. But such speech is illegal even in the US and also banned on Kiwi Farms.
How about coordinating to targeted attacks? Imagine a muslim terrorist groups forum and how their coordination works there.
Is it legitimate to take that platform down? You don't have to answer, the US certainly thought so during the past wars.
Is it legitimate speech to write some vague SMS to the wrong person? You don't have to answer, whole wedding societies have been killed for that speech.
Now one could argue, "Yeah but they might have been terrorists, or associated themselves with the wrong people."
But what is terrorism and why does a free society break it's promise of freedom of speech to fight it? Terrorism is trying to reach political goals by (often) violent means, with the aim to create fear. This fear stifles the free discourse in a free society by targeting specific symbolic targets. And isn't that a definition that fits many fringe political groups that would target individuals and make their lives hell like it apparently happened in the case of KF?
Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour.
"There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
You presenting that as "interesting" and thinking a choice quote that is absolutely a hateful transphobic interpretation of the state of things ("literal correct information") is extremely telling.
Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too.
Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
I personally find Ovarit interesting reading in general. I don't consider it to be a "hate site", but rather, one of the very few places on the internet where women can be openly critical of the ideology of gender identity, particularly with regards to the legal and social implications, from a feminist perspective.
I remember when the public image of Mumsnet was all warm and friendly and Mums looking out for each other and all of a sudden every time I hear about them it's because they've gone on a rager againist some poor person whose greatest crime is that they decided they wanted a sex change.
KF is essentially a deniable harassment vector (ie they say 'we don't condone harassment, so please don't harass Random Person* who lives at 123 Name Street and whose phone # is 212-555-1212 and whose email is... (etc)).'
Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime.
The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc.
I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.
Kiwifarms looks like it is essentially a technical evolution of the tabloid. Tabloid media has been doxxing people and saying really terrible things about them forever. It's hard to feel sympathetic for people like tabloid media, but tabloid media still has a place in society.
when 'all the news that's fit to print' stops reporting what goes against their upper crust values, you need to look in the gutters for the truth.
There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.
I mean, what are your alternatives? Should the government legislate as to which clients companies should accept and which they shouldn’t? Even if the client is unprofitable?
Should the government itself offer these services?
Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them.
This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech.
Speak for yourself. Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. It’s way beyond 1st amendment and the technicalities of Government limits.
ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following.
The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
This has been said many times in all of these threads, but the operator of the site has always been very clear that he will comply with all legal subpoenas he is served. He condemns death threats and really anything that isn’t just pointing and laughing.
The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?
Also said many times in all these threads: Getting law enforcement to act on these sorts of things is a difficult game, and a lengthy one even if you get very lucky.
Meanwhile, victims can face years of harassment while they wait for a bored cop to get a "yep, they used Tor" conclusion to the case.
Why should I not be allowed to use my freedom of speech to ask a company to not do business with someone doing something nasty?
Why should that business not be allowed to use their freedom of association to not do business with those folks?
Why is legal action the only acceptable approach to bad actions? Direct action, pressure, and boycots have worked well against injustices in the past; see sit-ins in the American south during the civil rights era as an example.
I don't believe in "freedom of association" for monopolies and oligopolies, it's an end-run around our rights by another means. And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Organizing through market pressure only works if you're already rich, it's just another concentration of power at the top in what's already a very unequal country. No one is going to pressure or boycott facebook off the internet.
> And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Sure, freedom of association goes both ways. We decided as a society to add protections for minority groups to prevent that sort of specific abuse. I don't think we'll do the same for Kiwifarms, and I'd argue that's the correct call.
I don't believe abuses are okay if you have more market power, and I don't believe they will stop with Kiwifarms, which was not the first victim of this phenomenon.
I was active on an anarchist forum that died because Cloudflare pulled the plug on 8chan, which hosted said forum. You may want a world where a few companies decide what you can and can't say; I don't think I can afford to live in one.
'Just go to the state monopoly instead and hope they're responsive' is a poor strategy. As is well established in law, cops and prosecutors aren't obliged to protect yu even though they have vast legal immunity of their own.
Cool. Let's say you are forbidden by law from posting comments on the Internet. Not because I'm limiting your speech, but because I made the law "it's illegal to make ceejayoz sad".
Come on.
The Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless it is super loud late at night near sleeping people." We read that in, because we're not idiots.
No, the censorship is not through the “proxy of corporations”, it’s directly instituted by corporations. It’s simply company leadership deciding they don’t want noxious people in their private club anymore.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you start talking and everyone tells you to shut up, then tough shit, you live in a society that doesn't like what you’re saying. This has always been the case, and it continues to be the case.
For many years, marginalized groups of all stripes were denied the megaphone of popular media, but they fought and convinced people they were right and built popular acceptance. If Kiwifarms wants to get the private protection and reach afforded to broader society then they need to convince the public that its actually good to harass and stalk trans people. Good luck.
A lot of marginalized groups (or at least their loudest activists) used the internet to organize and then pulled the ladder up behind them, and I don't want to live a society where only a few tech billionaires get a vote.
Cloudflare is not "society" but a specific for-profit corporation located in a specific part of the world, just like google and amazon and reddit.
> ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
Yes, because that speech was within the limits of constitutional free speech. Most of my knowledge about free speech comes from reading up on how America has defined it for more than a century.
It's not hard to feel bad for anyone getting censored/booted off the Internet. I see that "Gossithedog" lives in England, which - I reckon - makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right (a list that doesn't include England).
We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.
> The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right
If you mean 1A, that only protects your speech from the government, not anyone else (and even then it's not an unabridged right since there are legal limits on what you can say.)
I often hear this argument, but the US is currently on a much clearer trajectory towards increased authoritarianism than most EU countries/CANZUK despite all of this freedom. The situation is more complicated than just straightforward definitions of what freedom is. What really matters is not edge cases where some forum or other is banned, but whether your society is populated with authoritarian ideologies and to what extent these ideologies are present in the institutions.
It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights.
Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product.
Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
I understand this concept, but that's not the point. The GP was condescendingly referring to people outside of the US as being unable to understand freedom of speech or slippery legal slopes. We do in fact understand it, it's just that we don't all agree that the American cultural model is conducive to freedom overall, as evidenced by the current state of the country.
It's like a person smugly telling you their hydrangeas are better watered than yours while you are trying to get them to notice that there is clearly a house fire starting in one of their bedrooms.
In the US the government just ask corporations to censor content and they comply. Activists will spout their usual XKCD-interpretations of free speech, which is legally correct, but heavily fails to see the larger picture.
There's an even larger picture than this, which is that the argumentation around speech is gamed by people who have no interest in preserving it overall.
What truly matters is which speech ends up being successful and adopted in the broader society. This is why the focus is placed on the availability of platforms rather than the presence of free speech on its own. The argument is never just to let people speak without arrest or restraint, but to let them speak AND give them access to a convenient platform that will help their speech be more successful. The next step is to force platforms to host them and give them an algorithmic pipeline of views.
If freedom of speech is the key ingredient on its own, why is the US on an steeper authoritarian slide compared to the rest of the West despite more robust speech protections? Largely because authoritarian elements there are extremely adept at using speech rules for their own ends, and will then be able to discard most freedoms of any type once they solidify their grip on the institutions.
No. You're absolutely wrong here. The issue isn't that "it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet" - that's a dog whistle to try to say Cloudflare is a victim.
Let's be clear about a few things:
Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not.
Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP.
Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS?
The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled.
They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility.
Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action.
What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands.
So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.
This has all the hallmarks of an overreaction to a moral panic, not a rational response to the actual evidence. People become incredibly sure of their positions and don't even want to look at the evidence, but to be honest, the evidence doesn't matter, because people won't be persuaded by it anyway given the stress level and strong emotions.
Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.
I mean, this is a site with a body count. How many people do you think hid themselves from the public, or guarded what they said online or had to be suspicious of mundane interactions for fear of being targeted? Why is their freedom of speech less important than Kiwi Farms’?
As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.
Freedom of speech, famously, doesn't give you the right to shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater [1]. It also doesn't give you the right to target, stalk, and harass people.
The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site.
Except you do have the right to shout "Fire" at a crowded theater, at least in the US. The original Supreme Court case (about criticism of the draft) was, IMO, a miscarriage of justice. Fortunately it was overturned a few decades later.
To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.
How else would the website be removed? Should Cloudflare have hosted a vote or something? I think they took it down because millions of people wanted them to, not on a whim.
What is supposedly being suppressed by Cloudflair is kiwifarm's ability to coordinate violent harassment campaigns against vulnerable individuals. I'm pretty sure neither the US nor any nation state includes immediate, credible threats of and facilitation of violence in their concept of Freedom Of Speech.
Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.
The whole thing relies on the loose causality of stochastic terrorism. It's a bit like the Nuremberg trials "only gave orders" defense, except they're not even orders, just innuendo - it's just spreading smear material and a general attitude of hate among a fractious, isolated and angry audience.
A makes the post. B makes a fake phone call to the police. Cop C arrives and pulls the trigger. All in different countries. Is A really free of the repercussions?
Actual evidence of harassment from members of kiwifarms seems to be missing in all of these discussions. There is no doubt that there was lots of doxxing and lots of mean words on the site, but I haven't seen any evidence of harassment campaigns or anything similar. The closest thing that there was to evidence is someone who called in a SWAT team on a Republican congressperson and said to the police, "I am a kiwifarms mod, please come investigate me."
If that evidence existed, given the microscope this site was under, someone would have found it.
that's actually false, if you're referring to keffals at least, the doxing of the second hotel where the whole ordering food happened was done by Vile on doxbin[0]. Furthermore there's a lot more places that get those doxes on the web, pretty much all i've learned from kiwifarms was in the last 3 days or so and I still know of half a dozen.
Doxxing to facilitate swatting is attempted murder. They aren't unearthing this information because they're devoted archivists; they operate within a broader culture of harassment, and when one considers the modern arsenal of digital harassment that's enabled via doxxing, the SWAT team is front and center.
The only person who has claimed KF lead to their supposed suicide is Near/byuu after he attempted to extort the site into removing his thread. But we know he didn't kill himself as he lives in Japan and the state department releases a report every six months about the deaths of Americans overseas. It's been over a year, there have been two reports, and neither had any suicides in Japan, and the Japanese government is no slouch when it comes to paperwork. The only evidence that was ever given was a picture of an urn with byuu's name on it posted by a friend living in Hong Kong.
Nonetheless this has not stopped journalists from reporting it as fact so they can create via citeogenesis a bloody shirt to wave and justify campaigns against the KiwiFarms.
Yet the "free speech absolutists" are absolutely nowhere to be found when the speech of groups other than right wing bigots are relevant to the discussion. If we must protect the speech of the most vile and disgusting and hateful and wretched monsters on the planet then surely we should also protect the speech of those who are oppressed and suffering. Where's that?
Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.