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Comment by dxuh | Hacker News Reader

Large corporations policing free speech is a horrible trend that often enough goes absolutely wrong and the only way to prevent censoring content inappropriately is to not censor anything at all. There are laws and courts that judge over what content should stay online and it should stay their responsibility. If we give that up, we replace democracy with a technocracy, that already showed us plenty of times is not something we want. If it means that a website like Kiwi farms has to stay up, then that's what it takes. A twitter mob should never have the power to take any website offline. I doubt anyone in their right mind would lay their trust into every Twitter mob. It's just luck that this mob is in line with your opinions, but others might not.

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> Large corporations policing free speech

Let me stop you right there. This is not a free speech issue. Please be precise with your terminology.

"Free speech" for normal people means "the practical freedom to speak freely", not whatever nitpicking legalistic definition I infer you're using.

I don't think you know that this is what it means, nor do I think you know what "normal people" entails.

And let me get you out the way so gp doesn't get sidetracked. Nobody needs pedantry when the subject under discussion is existentially important, and every normal person already knows what the problem is.

Firstly, this is not existentially important aside for the people whose lives are ruined (and will continue to be ruined) by Kiwi Farms. Secondly, "every normal person already knows..." doesn't mean anything, because (a) you don't get to declare what normal is, and (b) you don't know that.

> This is not a free speech issue. Please be precise with your terminology.

Let me take a stab in the dark: you think "free speech" refers only to the United States' First Amendment, and not a universal principle, which:

* according to Wikipedia, is "a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction"

* or, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is the "freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

You're shifting goalposts.

No, you need to be more precise in your wording if you're not getting your intended message across.

There's really nothing else to say here other than, "no, you do".

Just stating the type of fallacy being made is not evidence the fallacy occurred.

You should qualify how the goalpost is being shifted. I don’t see any evidence to your claim.

That's not true. The concept of free speech, and what is specifically allowed and disallowed by the First Amendment of the USA, are two different things. Not least which is that the latter applies to a small fraction of the world's population.

Censorship of ideas by a private company is not a first amendment issue. It is a free speech issue.

Takes some presumption to demand precision in terminology while being completely and totally incorrect.

Okay.

It's an American company hosting content for an American. The laws of America apply.

Precisely, they do! Which is why this isn't a free speech issue. Cloudflare is not a utility, nor are they a government entity.

As another commenter already pointed out, you’re treating first amendment and free speech as synonymous. If you request that others be precise with their language you should too.

This could be a free speech issue although not a first amendment issue. America does have a constitutional protection for citizens from their government in terms of free speech but we also place cultural value to it and laws that codify or restrict certain speech.

It is a free speech issue. It is not a First Amendment (or equivalent in non-US jurisdictions) issue. Legal provisions that protect speech from government interference provide a minimum level of free expression; in a health society private citizens and organizations will generally go above and beyond that minimum.

Just a reminder that (lowercase) "free speech" always has a giant fucking asterisk after it. It has never been, and will never be, absolute.

"Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Additionally, private companies can always throw you off their platform for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service.

This means that the KF mob can take people offline.

What do you mean by that exactly?

They have a track record of brutal, lengthy harassment that has already pushed at least one person to take their own life after years of abuse.

Per wikipedia, the actual number is three.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...

I wonder how that number compares to other forums and social media sites.

Seems odd to me that everyone is hyper-fixating on that site, as tasteless as it may be, when much larger ones are given a pass.

Mobs always attack the weakest link. KF is not widely known- if it were canceled basically nobody would care.

I think there are two key reasons:

1. KiwiFarms was explicitly created for essentially that purpose

2. It's far more extreme. Part of the reason it exists is because people on these larger sites (notably, 2000s-era SomethingAwful) were getting progressively more concerned and uncomfortable with the behavior. Sure, it's a concern in other places, but there are checks there. KiwiFarms has none of those checks because the behavior is the intended use of the site.

So, sure, you could go after some of these other places, but KF sounds like a very good starting point.

Twitter mobs can drive people to get fired, websites or companies to shut down... But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.

People are worried more about ending a website than they are worried about ending actual lives.

>But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.

Are you actually implying that Twitter mobs haven't done all of these things too? This is obviously wrong.

So we should keep up Kiwifarms because something similar has happened on Twitter? Is that the logic? Instead of removing one of the evils let's keep them both up because fairness or something like that?

The logic is that we shouldn't use some sort of "one drop" thinking to characterize a platform as broadly evil based on its worst users.

The problem here is that KF does not have "substantial noninfringing uses", it's all harassment even if most of it is non-fatal.

> to characterize a platform as broadly evil based on its worst users.

It's literally the purpose of KiwiFarms. It's all their users. Any forum board not dedicated to "lolcows" (what they call the people the harass, because they can be "milked for laughs") is in the off-topic section.

I don't think you're aware of what KF is. It's not just a free-form social platform like Twitter. It's specifically for documenting, and scheming to harass lolcows.

It's not "one drop" thinking. It's 99.999% of the drops.

Twitter doesn't exist solely to harass and cyberstalk people. KiwiFarms does. That's the difference.

>People are worried more about ending a website than they are worried about ending actual lives.

People are saying "Call the FBI, not Cloudflare"

If people are doing things that break the law, it's law enforcement's job to do the protecting, not an Internet company providing services.

It's not true that there is nothing in between censoring everything and censoring nothing.

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