I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
(copied from https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/x56mot/cloudfla...)
the post was deleted within a few mins, so extremely sus. violent threats are posted on all major websites, idk why this one is so exceptional.
doesn't even look real, smells entirely like bait. or someone trying to get KF taken down.
Is there more?
No. Just no.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.