Cloudflare stood up to a patent troll and won (2019)

I’d say too lazy to google. Because I have never heard of them anywhere before, not exactly widespread outsides of some sites (but I googled them).

> an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.

You know, funnily enough, not exactly in my regular browsing habits so im extremely sorry for not knowing.

Its pretty normal to change the name of something slightly on reddit to avoid the attention of banning bots while still conveying the original meaning.

However, their victims are nearly all under the "left wing" umbrella. And if you go and read the posts on the maniacally long threads discussing their victims (especially the ones they've successfully goaded into suicide), it's riddled with far-right hate speech. So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck?

In general, this is how it works. Public pressure causes public change and eventually that leads to codification in law, not the other way around.

Imagine for a moment that Cloudflare leans in and starts doing this. Then, let's image a DeSantis Presidency, with a full hard-right Senate, House, and majority SC soon.

Now, imagine what those people feel like is harassing them. 90% of Twitter posts would likely qualify. Half of the post on this very site. Most of Reddit. Then they start passing laws that you can't pick and choose. If you are a piece of infrastructure that is gatekeeping what someone felt was hate-speech or harassement yesterday, well then you have to do it today.

Another way of looking at it - should there be a concerted (and successful!) effort from the Christian Right in America to start taking positions of power in major tech firms, would you be happy for them to stop serving people/companies who held social views at odds with their own?

You run a business that, while pretty unethical, is fairly soundly legal (as evidenced by winning multiple lawsuits and not being taken offline by a court order). An aggrieved person incites a mob that attempts to burn down (DDoS, etc) the business. Thankfully for the business, it has a deal with the local, privatized fire department (CloudFlare) that mitigates most of the ongoing arson attacks. The mob protests outside the fire department's front door for them to drop the business as a customer, with the obvious intent to destroy the business once the protection is removed.

Cloudflare basically has no limit on the number of sites they can support, a newspaper has limited space. They are just providing CDN services not editorial services like a newspaper does. The average person probably does not even know that a website is using Cloudflare so the association is significantly less than a newspaper

Should the mail have to take the letter to the NYT without opening it and making sure that the content is culturally appropriate, is the proper question. And I argue yes!

If something in that mail turns out to be a death threat and something that the very end receiver have a problem with they can deal with it.

The individuals who committed crimes should be tracked down and prosecuted. However, I still have zero desire for cloudflare and other tech companies to suppress "incorrect" ideas or communities.

I am completely fine with tolerating disgusting people being allowed to communicate, when the alternative is corporations maliciously lording over speech to maximize their profit margins. Even in abscence of that tradeoff, I have no desire to suppress other people's "wrong" opinions, because I acknowledge that "wrong" is completely subjective and variable between groups of people.

Maybe you think this makes me a bad person from your point-of-view, and I respect your right to have and express that viewpoint.

Or has Kiwi Farms been shown in a court of law to have engaged in the behavior you describe?

They have been having some trouble with n00bs trolling. What do you expect when the media and, frankly, most of you spend 7 years telling everybody it's a 'trolling and harassing forum', i.e. lying through your blueteeth, just because you want to see the site gone. The thread I was going to link is the sole site admin literally begging the n00bs (people who've joined relatively recently and think trolling is cool) to stop trolling the subjects. There are a lot of joke threads and the Kiwis are ironic in the extreme, but that thread is not a joke thread. It's been Josh's stance forever: look and laugh, don't mess with them. If you're an asshole and you want to make dumb trolling plans, do it elsewhere. It isn't just the admin and the mods, either. Pretty much all of the OG users have always tried to quash trolling talk as much as they can. What the hell else can they do? They can't control what a few of their thousands of users do off-site.

Ask yourself if you want a global pseudo-public internet where any one of its critical private infrastructure companies can de facto censor the planet-wide web at the request of aggrieved Twitter mobs. Ugh. I don't think I have the energy for this today.

This is a tremendous misunderstanding of LibsOfTiktok, for starters. The vast majority of content posted by LOTT is no longer social media content to be mocked. The majority is:

1. Event announcements, particularly for queer events, accompanied by a call to shut them down; naturally, their followers do so via a combination of attack threats and actual attacks on the events

2. news articles, some real and some hoax, framing the targets of (1) as acceptable targets

"The account, run by Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, tweeted on August 11 that “Boston Children's Hospital is now offering ‘gender-affirming hysterectomies’ for young girls.” The claim has been widely debunked by fact-checking groups—but as is typical in anti-trans rhetoric, facts rarely matter, and the claims were shared widely on right-wing social media accounts."

What fun, silly stuff they have going on over at LibsOfTikTok. no one should have to be tolerant of intolerance.

My own willingness to learn the skills was a large part, don't get me wrong lol - but I'm happier making little scripts and tools/toys for me and a few others to use to make their day to day lives easier.

I would never want to work for a larger company like a FAANG outlet, nor any other media-based tech company like game developers. Too many politics have been injected into the identity of a typical programmer, when it should just be about the code.

The current flavor of exerting social pressure on companies to, in effect, enforce their version of what the law should be, won’t end well for anyone.

What’s righteous today will become the evil of tomorrow. Political winds shift all the time.

We shouldn’t box ourselves into a corner where corporations enforce the rule of the people. There’s a threshold that once reached will be very hard to undo. I certainly don’t want to live in that version of the future.

We should all be working to fix the broken system we’ve got, not throw it away and start from scratch.