The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech.
By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.
I don't see kiwifarms trying to silence keffals, I 100% see the reverse happening unless archiving keffals public statement about giving children drugs you aren't authorized to provide to anyone is somehow censorship.
And on Kiwifarms I can go learn optimal ways to commit suicide, of which several methods involve drugs. Do you think null does KYC do children can’t view that? Doubt it. You are clearly biased.
"Using your speech to silence people" is very vague, "the destruction of their reputation and social network" and "lying about them" could refer to any case of cancel culture. These things are bad of course, bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but they are way too vague for cloudflare to ban any forum that has speech like this (which is any forum I'm aware of, including HN).
The point isn't to prescribe behavior for cloudflare. The point is to show that "no censorship" doesn't provide a simple rule to follow in all cases. Speech itself can be censorship. In this case an entity like cloudflare needs to evaluate the particulars of the case, not apply a general rule.
This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign -- the social or other merit or the speech censored, etc.
Kiwi Farms is a particular clear case to illustrate this point.
> The point isn't to prescribe behavior for cloudflare.
No, that we're dealing with cloudflare, with DDoS protection, is the point here. If you want to run a forum where you ban speech that you feel silences people, that's great, but if you want to deny DDoS protection to other forums that don't have this rule, or don't enforce it to your satisfaction, that's very different.
> This is setting aside the mechanism of the censorship -- removing DDOS protection versus a harassment campaign
No we really can't set this aside. Removing DDoS protection directly makes it impossible to run any unpopular website. "Harassment campaign" is a vague term, that can be used (and arguably in this case is used) for any kind of persistent criticism, ridicule, outrage, doxxing - I see harassment campaigns on twitter every day.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-a...
The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech.
By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.