Future blog idea: How Cloudflare stood up for KiwiFarms
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?
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.
It becomes much less murky after repeated and individually targeted "making fun". If it's made clear that you want them to leave you alone and they choose to persist, it becomes crystal clear.
Simply talking about other people behind their back isn't harassment, but it's typically unacceptable in a workplace. Outside the workplace, it's just a natural tendency of humans.
This is how I imagine living in parts of Europe are and also how I imagine people fantasize about the US becoming.
They just seem to not have the foresight that their current cultural thoughts might not be the dominant one and once the other side takes power they will call it fascism ... regardless of the side!
Let's say I buy your premise (I don't completely) but where does it stop? Does it include Trump? What about non-public figures only, but ones you probably don't like, for example White supremacists or neo-Nazis? Does it count against corporations?
And who gets to decide if you are making fun of someone? Just someone is offended or feeling hurt? If that is the metric then I defy you to write an English sentence that I can't turn into an oppressive, smart-ass remark about someone.
I am being a little hyperbolic here, but surely you see how any move to limit speech outside of literal threats or similar can just be used the opposite way round.
---- (1)Fear for the person's safety or the safety of the person's immediate family or close personal associates. (2) Suffer substantial emotional distress by placing that person in fear of death, bodily injury, or continued harassment. ----
The second part of that is a little circular, but the point I am trying to get across to you is that in the US, I can call you a "fool" every time I see you and it is mostly perfectly legal even if you don't like it and tell me to stop. It generally has to be very escalated to involve the police.
And this is how it should be, and it should be a police matter. Not the "roadways" of the Internet making those decisions.
Today it might be some asshole calling someone the n-word or misgendering someone that gets their site shut down for all intents and purposes, but if we go down this road, tomorrow it could be because you misspoke about some "Dear Leader" in charge politically and now you can not participate in society in any real respect.
Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms as a customer doesn't make kiwifarms go away. It doesn't target you if you were a user of that site either. All it does is say, "we do not wish to do business with them, so they should go solve the problems we solved for them in another way". I think it behooves us as technologists to influence these businesses to be ethical about who they choose to do business with. There is no forcing hand here. There is no government oversight involved (although perhaps there should be if we consider them infrastructure). If "buttflare but for nazis" forms as a business and they decide to take all the websites that everyone decries under their umbrella, offering site protection and all that jazz, we can make a fit about how unethical it is that such a service exists, but at the end of the day we can't do much about it other than do the same: advocate for them to not do what they do.
Yes! At this point.
And just because electrical services are a utility now, doesn't mean they always were, and internet infrastructure should be classified that way as well.
Or do you think the NYT (as a private enterprise) can decide what messages they distribute on their platform? (this is a different question than whether or not the NYT has a moral responsibility to not distribute hateful messages)
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.
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
Visa and Mastercard won't processes payments from dispensaries even though they have (effectively) no limit on the number of transactions they can support.
Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
>Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
I also, think that this should not be allowed, although the first one is a little more murky, due to possibly moving money across state lines where marijuana is illegal.
However, at the end of the day no one is stopping you from using cash, which is an inconvenient, but reasonable alternative. If a few large scale web infrastructure companies team up, you are fucked, there is no reasonable alternative.
I know that Cloudflare previously did this. I don't think they should be taking an editorial stance like that.
My point is that it is not typical to have a CDN taking an editorial stance. It is expected that a newspaper will.
>Visa and Mastercard won't processes payments from dispensaries even though they have (effectively) no limit on the number of transactions they can support.
I think weed is still illegal at the federal level? Visa and MasterCard could easily be accused of facilitating a felony. This seems clear cut to me.
Is Visa and MasterCard doing this in countries where weed is completely legal?
>Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
Visa and MasterCard claimed they were doing it because banks require there to be proper validation against child porn. This is not Visa and MasterCard directly.
Regardless, who is to blame in this situation, they are not taking an editorial stance. They are saying that OnlyFans is facilitating child porn which is against the law.
I don't know about OnlyFans, but before getting threatened by Visa, PornHub clearly wasn't doing enough. They appear to have knowingly kept multiple child porn videos up even after being informed multiple times that they were child porn. Perhaps onlyfans is better than pornHub, but I doubt it.
Regardless, you can't really compare on of the most heavily regulated industries with one of the least.
It is not clear to me that KiwiFarms is actually violating the law or not removing illegal content. Do you have any examples of Kiwi Farm facilitating criminal behavior like PornHub and probably OnlyFans were doing?
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.
The meaning of "correct" is highly dependent on who you talk to, and is frequently perverted when corporate profitability is involved.
Cloudflare doesn’t need to protect them under some vaguely defined free speech argument.
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.
CloudFlare continue to host them despite all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kiwi_Farms&type=r...
If it was so easy to prove, you would have already done so in less than an hour. 20 hours is plenty of time to show this proof by now, yet there is none.
There is no shame to admit that you have no evidence and you made a baseless claim.
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?
What? It was originally a forum for users of a wiki about Chris Chan. It's purpose is more about documenting what exists and discussing it. It's never been about trolling others or harassing people.
That is not the point of the site.
>Why are you defending them?
Because I've been a member of communities where outsiders inaccurately describe the community to others making it seem like something it isn't.
It's always been like this
Just because they misgender her doesn’t give you permission to do it.
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.
In other words:
- "Just make your own subreddit/group chat/etc"
- "Just find another website to speak your views on"
- "Just make your own website if you want free speech"
- "Just run your own hosting company"
- "Just run your own DNS registrar"
- "Just build your own datacentre"
- "Just run your own worldwide DDoS protection" (<-- You are here)
- "Just run your own Internet backbone if you want infrastructure companies to peer with you"
- "Just create your own Internet"
It should be noted that the stated aim of KF is a forum to document and discuss the escapades of people that naturally produce their own drama and spectacle, and actually interacting with the "lolcows", on- or off-site, is explicitly against the site rules. Obviously whether you believe that sentiment to be genuine is your prerogative.
>Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community
While I'm sure others have mentioned that there isn't any direct evidence to indicate that Near actually did commit suicide (I truly hope he is still alive, both on a human level, and because I followed his excellent emulation development), the uncomfortable detail that is always left unstated is that he was not a person driven from a previously well mental state to suicide. The truth is that, prior to his suicide note, Near attracted very little attention on the site, with just a small, HN-sized thread before he made an account to directly talk to people in the thread. In his communication with the KF administrator (which ironically I can't find since the site is being DDoSed right now) he said that his mental state caused him to hyper-fixate on the relatively small amount of negative attention from the community, and he admitted that he didn't know the precise reason that it bothered him so much. Before the administrator finished the email negotiations about what action to take about the thread, Near had sent a follow-up message saying that it was, essentially, too late and that he was going to take his own life immediately.
All this isn't to say that this was Near's fault, and I think it's obvious that the ethical thing to do would have been to remove the thread. But ultimately if the question is whether a website's existence should be made de facto impossible, it's an important detail to mention, and a very similar story to other 2 or so people on the supposed "kill list". To put it crudely, the site exists to document the things that "crazy people" do online. Without ruling out that the site had a hand in people's suicide, it's pertinent to consider that there is a very strong selection bias at play if a person featured on the forum sadly takes their own life.
>CloudFlare continue to host them despite all.
I believe Cloudflare doesn't host the website per se, but proxies traffic for mitigation against attacks. The organiser of this current movement has been pretty overt about getting Cloudflare protection removed so that the site is at the mercy of DDoS attacks and other highly illegal means of disruption.
??
> 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.
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).
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.