Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
kiwifarms.ru
kiwifarms.ru
Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after.
Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudfl...
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...
[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...
[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...
[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...
First sentence of the definition on Wikipedia. What do you believe retaliation means in this context? If your consequence is a rebuttal or criticism, I have said nothing. Otherwise you are just wrong.
Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.
This analogy is interesting because it also applies to Keffals.
Do you really think that doxxing and harassing schoolteachers is the same as doxxing someone who goads others into suicide?
> minding their own businessSo we've just gone mask off to "doxxing is good when we do it."
If you can understand the distinction above, you should be able to understand the difference with Taylor Lorenz vs Libs of Tiktok. Unless you're operating in bad faith or just trying to be a contrarian in which case, more power to you.
Yes, if we're talking about actual physical assault and not mere criticism. Are you actually arguing that Lorenz prevented imminent acts of physical violence through her doxxing? Because this doesn't pass the laugh test unless you're relying on the usual vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
Releasing who she is was fine.
If a Ku Klux clan member had a very popular anonymous YouTube channel making fun of black people and bragging about it on Tucker Carlson, is it journalism to investigate and share where they work and who they are?
The fact that you assumed I was talking about targeting conservatives just goes to show that they happen to be the ones rocking the boat with violent rhetoric, which occasionally gets backed up by actions.
This is just shifting the partisan question-begging to the notion of "bad actions/bad actors." Why not just embrace the "doxxing is good when we do it" point that I originally made?
Yes.
> vague "stocastic terrorism" arguments that are used to justify censoring pretty much any culturally conservative speech.
The arguments aren't vague when mass killers have mentioned right-wing talking heads in their manifestos and suicide notes. Maybe conservatives (people of all political affiliations actually) should watch what they say instead of crying when they face consequences for their speech, no?
EDIT: I can see some people may not like what I'm saying; but I actively help organize real marches in Texas for orgs like NAACP, AAIA, PPC, etc. We have a stable of lawyers (TCRP, SCSJ, ...); and, I can assure you this is how free speech works in reality.
Is there anything metaphysically inherit to the internet as free speech? That's up for debate. Would the early internet had been successful if this type had not been the ones to build it, I'm on the fence.
The early internet was full of university staff, large company staff and military. They were mostly professionals and colleagues, and weren't assholes part because you had to be pretty smart and well educated, part because they were watched by their organizations, and part because they had colleagues that could take them to account. If you were an ass, chances were great your victim would easily figure out who to complain to.
There was "censorship", it was just more implicit. The model just started to fail once things got big enough that this model of accountability no longer worked. Systems had to be grafted with various patches to survive the new chaos, such as email, or died off by being spammed and trolled into oblivion like Usenet.
The internet simultaneously amplifies speech (this is not new: the printing press did so even more); but, it also concentrates speech. I'm not sure anyone thought about what that latter part would mean.
Like you said, we saw commtech leapfrogging over soctech in the early days of the printing press. But soctech caught up and we got over it. The same exists today - I'm sure we'll develop new soctech to handle it, but I have a desire to hasten that development rather than give up and relying on crumbling/outdated soctech infra in the meantime.
Do you think you provided a reasonable and objective analysis of events and viewpoints? It doesn't seem so to me, an outsider who had never heard of keffals or kf
No, I provided a selection of examples from the two HN threads on the happenings to demonstrate the subjectivity of what people consider harassment.
In any case, even if harassment is purely subjective, isn't it in within anyone's personal purview to take personal action if they feel something is harassment?
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
"With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion"
At this scale, for corporations, total value to society is part of the calculus society does. And KF has no value to demonstrate to offset the harm.
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
> Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
> Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue.
By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.
I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.
If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.
Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P
"By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""
I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.
I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.
Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.
Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.
In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.
Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.
Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.
The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).
Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.
You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.
Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.
Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.
That's about it.
Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.
I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.
Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.
Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.
Yes please! Pretty please with a kiwi on top?
Whether or not you're trying to, you are.
Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.
The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?
It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.
> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes
So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?
Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.
> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.
If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.
Also, it is not a small percentage of users. The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.
"It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site."
"If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”."
Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet, then mass censorship is not only possible but inevitable. Anyone can throw away a burner account making a terroristic threat on any number of websites. The fact that these threats will only be taken seriously when they confirm the narratives of those in power is a major problem. Cloudflare was right to point to due process being the mechanism to prevent this sort of biased treatment, but then immediately opened up a giant loophole that allows for people to avoid it!
It's not. The speaker also must (in general) have a history of tolerance of / implicit support of / explicit support of / creation of vile content, and (history suggests) the corporation making the call to pull the plug has to be feeling the pressure to either act or to be seen as also implicitly supporting such vile content, which will have financial ramifications down the road as they're seen as "Those KiwiFarms guys" and people of their own free will choose to do business with Instart instead.
The laws that force association in a corporate setting are extremely narrowly-tailored (at least in the US), and "harassers" isn't a protected class. For everything else, there's the First Amendment... The one that guarantees freedom of association. And the Internet is, at the end of the day, actually made of corporations and institutions that voluntarily associate with each other... Or don't.
This is reminiscent of dealing with someone who thought we needed to close mosques after 9/11.
Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.
Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.
Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.
Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.
But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.
Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.
The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.
Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.
Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.
Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.
You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.
The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.
Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640
> Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet
Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.
> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.
Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".
(1) Bullying and cyberbullying can both occur without direct interaction. If you're negatively gossiping about someone in the real world and the target is within earshot, that's bullying. If you bully someone enough to the point they kill themselves, that's morally equivalent to murder, even though our legal system hasn't yet caught up to this reality. What KF was doing was analogous.
(2) The legal boilerplate they put up to shield themselves from liability is irrelevant. It's not about their mere words, it's about the inevitable causal consequence of their policies and content that they tolerate and foster on their platform.
> inevitable casual consequence
What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.
That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.
KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.
The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.
Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?
I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?
You can criticize someone's ideas all you want, but dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity in the way that KF did is not that. It is cyberbullying and it's lethal and the people involved should be fined or locked up in prison for engaging in behavior that had a non-trivial probability of causing another person's suicide.
I would say the same about people dogpiling someone online about their physical appearance or ethnicity. It should be moderated out of existence, and if that doesn't work it should be illegal.
If you throw bricks off a building, I similarly want you locked up for the same reason. You probably won't kill someone, but the causal connection is such and the probability is sufficiently high that we lock people like you up, because you're a menace and direct threat to your fellow humans.
Of course, I'd want the punishment for throwing the brick to be larger, I am not throwing proportionality out the window.
Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.
The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.
Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.
With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)
Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.
Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.
And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.
Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.
This should disturb any right thinking person.
Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.
In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
They clearly want to keep this content up.
People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.
If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.
The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.
Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.
Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.
Because in this case, accountable really means it.
The post directly addressed this matter.
Don't be an apologist for these guys
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.
He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.
With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.
Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.
Come on. Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech and no company in their right mind should support that
stop using this dumb analogy. it was invented to justify prosecuting people for speaking out against the draft, and it was later denounced by the very person who coined it.
in this case it's more like: a random person who never went to the theatre before shouted fire in the theatre, the person was summarily booted from the premises and banned by the theatre staff. then later on the police come by and shut down the theatre because they hosted fire-shouters.
Actually, shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater IS explicitly free speech in America, and in fact, the idea that it's not is a layman's mistake (or a wives tale if you prefer) that is corrected in basically freshman legal classes.
In modern legal discussion, the idea of "fire in a theater!" is basically an immediate identifier that you are not educated in this part of the law at all and your opinion is low quality.
Not trying to insult you here, I too have used this very analogy on the internet in the past, just laying out what exactly others see when they see what you wrote.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want their company to be used to kill anyone. Even if they are wrong that there is an "emergency", it seems likely they believe that there is one. Isn't a more plausible explanation that they truly believe free speech is important, but that it's not the only deciding factor?
Easy: for-profit organizations do not have conscience, in principle.
What they tried at first, which is very "90s internet", is to become a bit of a troll yourself:
"We are deeply committed to the principles of free speech and will never deny a customer service to our critical infrastructure based on the content of their messages. You are banned. Now, go away, lolcow."
Reddit did something similar -- not with the /r/thefappening, but later on with /r/the_donald. Recall when /u/spez randomly edited comments left by contributors there, sending a clear message "we have no rules, and we will break you if we feel like it". The public apology ( https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/ ) conveys the subtext that it will happen again, there are no firm rules, and you are not welcome here.
I dunno quite what the plan is here going forward. weev and null are kind of an amazing force for chaos and if you can get them defensive and off kilter, that's certainly interesting.
Overall though I have found kiwifarms a helpful resource for understanding online harassment. I appreciate that members do their coordination in the open; by reading forum activity you can understanding roughly where the next massacre will happen. The community targets lulz as weakness and many of their most persistent attackers have gotten sucked in and doxxed themselves, notably in the Chris-Chan maelstrom.
The community has successfully killed people and the fact that they have a centralized repository with documentation will be helpful for the next Michelle Carter style prosecution.
What? Citation needed. Has there been a single massacre committed by any of its members?
Ironically, it's SomethingAwful that is credited* with rousing the press attention required for Reddit to rescind its free speech ideal (making SA chaotically the progenitor of both 4chan and r/ShitRedditSays). There too was suspicion of raiding with questionable activity from those who wanted the ban.
*I'm not sure; take anything about this internet drama with ample salt. Some primary sources are the graph of pages reachable from the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
About this, however:
> We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. (from Reddit's statement, https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_cha...)
yea...
As for generalization, a 2012 writeup on Reddit's situation cites LiveJournal's incident in 2007 and further LambdaMOO's, from 1992: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997
If I wanted to understand this world further I'd probably call Drew Curtis. Of all the people in this space he seems to be the most levelheaded and usually seems to get what's really going on.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
Yep. KF is their harassment HQ where they share information about individuals they don't approve of. It's creepy.
The bus has sailed on that one though.
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Seems to me that Transwomen just took the only scrutiny contrary to their own agenda temporarily off the net, putting one of the most technically competent hosting providers on the list of people who won't associate with them (people acting in opposition to Transwomen).
No comment on the hating on black people, as I learned long ago, platforms are not users of platforms, and horrible people can be found everywhere.
Despite all of this horribleness that apparently goes on with KiwiFarms, it still seems Transwomen is able to go on doing whatever it is it does.
Strictly speaking, your yardstick for empowerment measurement has a rather funny operating principle, as intuitively speaking, I'd expect the opposite result.
My comment about transwomen being disempowered is in the broader social sphere, where trans people in general are under social and legislative threat against their access to basic decency, public visibility, and medical care.
Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_punishment
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
[edit]
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
This is a modern-day equivalent of lynch mobs that has nothing to do with reason, good intentions or due process.
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...
Their core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started. Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members.
EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?
They will just flag this post and rejoice that they got a billon dollar internet company to bend the knee only for them to scream a false victory, despite KF still being up and running on another domain with Tor and DDoS protection with another provider. Nothing has changed.
When it comes to a Twitter mob, there is no “Sorry” or “Please I can explain”, or “It’s not what you think it is” or “But the post was removed”. With the Twitter mob, there is just no redemption.
So on to the next villain of the month.
Exactly. Proving that this isn't really a problem at all.
Cloudflare has exercised their right to drop this user. And KiwiFarms has moved to someone else.
Makes you think.
Let's say you're afraid that someone might punch you in the face. So that person gets on a soapbox and gives an eloquent speech to a crowd about how they're not going to punch you in the face, in fact, they're quite against face-punching and regret the times in the past they've punched people, and you're able to relax a little. And then three days later they punch you in the face anyway. Don't you think that punch might hurt a bit more, on an emotional level, than if that person just clocked you when you thought they would?
There's actually quite a bit of follow up action chasing up both the new providers and hosters. The deplatforming has been shown to work before. Just adding the speedbump of requiring the tor access will kill a lot of interest in continuing the abuse.
Even if you look at the hashtags and the website, you'll see cf wasn't the only target. It's a pretty well planned action, but it's very clearly against kf and not stopping.
When Lincoln said that, we went to war, and the side that didn't want to enslave people won.
Polite society has no room in it for people who think that calling for the death of LGBT people (AKA people) is acceptable.
Yes
They know that KF will still exist and will move on from Cloudflare. The point isn't to hurt KF, but to hurt Cloudflare for daring to nominally support free speech. That's why they're botting hashtags, putting pressure on the stock price, and encouraging tech decision-makers to move their startups away from Cloudflare. The point is to say: if you do not pander to us, we will come for you.
It's an effective way to cement power over institutions from the bottom-up, without actually controlling those institutions.
It's a similar kind of social movement to the film censorship movement in early 20th century America, which was largely grassroots and yet ended up controlling the US's entire cultural output for most of a century.
In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
Every boycott has detractors; if those detractors are too numerous, the boycott fails. Boycotts are marketing campaigns like everything else in the world.
> In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
The point is to observe which direction this pressures companies to lean towards, and what this says about who holds grassroots or institutional power at any given time.
For instance, if they don't like you, they report you to your employer. If your employer defends you, they attack your employer's relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees.
Basically, cancel culture exploits social networks to force the submission of an opponent.
I think there's a line that most reasonable people can determine between "I disagree with $CURRENT_VIEW" and "I am against $PERSON_OF_CATEGORY existing." For example, frequently someone on Twitter will say things like, "calling for more bike lanes is ableist." I think - and am not afraid to have my name attached to this sentiment - that this is an absurd take. Every aspect of society cannot possibly serve everyone, but that doesn't mean we should fail to do something because a minority of that society can't participate. If the action actively harms that minority, then yes, close examination of it is warranted.
However, if your publicly stated opinion is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be teachers, you deserve to be pilloried, because that opinion is harmful and without merit.
And who gets to decide what views are sufficiently shitty to deserve life ruination?
Please remember this post if someone ever decides that something you said now means that you qualify for it.
If someone disagrees with me on, say, whether or not the USG should subsidize EV manufacturers, I wouldn't expect a 3rd party to call either side of that debate deserving of, well, anything. However, when someone holds an opinion that $GROUP is less deserving of x _due solely to their existence, not their choices,_ I expect that opinion to be questioned.
Also, it's very possible to be wrong on the internet, be corrected, and become a better person without having your life ruined. I used to be somewhat of a troll. Not 4chan level, but I was definitely a crueler person than I was in real life. Someone once had the patience to engage me in questions, I realized what I was doing was harmful or at least not helpful, and I stopped the behavior.
Obviously there is always a "but my beliefs" aspect, but I believe that these arguments can be ethically reduced to "do not harm others, unless in the defense of others."
For example, murder is arguably ethically wrong. However, at least in most states in the U.S., you are allowed to murder someone if they are themselves attempting to murder you, or someone else. Taken further, if I was on a jury, and the defendant had murdered someone who had severely harmed their child - for instance, rape - I would have no qualms about finding them not guilty, even if the murder had occurred days or weeks after the first crime. I'm fully aware that this is illegal, but I don't consider it ethically wrong. If you're curious, I do consider the death penalty to be wrong, because I don't believe the state has the right to take life. Whether or not these two views are incongruous I don't know; it makes sense in my head.
On a more relevant level, I believe that teenagers are able to determine things like "I am gay," or "I have gender dysphoria." I also understand that I am not a doctor, and defer to the American Medical Association, who has stated[0] that:
> It is imperative that transgender minors be given the opportunity to explore their gender identity under the safe and supportive care of a physician.
Given that, I assert that the beliefs KF members have espoused are the ones that are harmful, should not be encouraged, and should be actively discouraged.
[0] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sta...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
When you let that percolate for a bit, you get to, "Treat others only in such a way as you yourself are alright with being treated.
Your self-defense example resonates with this way of life, as the person seeking to do you harm has telegraphed they are fine with you reacting in kind.
You cannot just murder anyone, as if no one is engaging in you, the idea is that one best should reciprocate only in kind. Most moral systems pre Kantian Categorical Imperative, are crippled by not being able to justify being moral as an end in and of itself just from the tenets within the system itself.
I would not, under the categorical imperative, censure either group in this case, as I am not willing to accept mob justice as something I am comfortable being applicable to me. Both parties, however, have have demonstrated that they are willing to accept being treated in that manner through their actions, though Transwomen moreso at this point than the users of KF. KF has merely existed.
Therefore, at this point, any follower of the Categorical Imperative can engage in mob/vigilante justice against either Transwomen/KF with clear conscience, as it has veen clearly evinced, that is how they wish to be dealt with, and this doesn't taint not engaging in mob justice/vigilantism against anyone else, as it is always the first mover that sets the level on which the interaction takes place.
It's where the Golden Rule "Treat others as you would have them do unto you" stems from.
https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1566301416917856256?t=...
"Those people," and myself, view KF and their ilk as harmful to society. What exactly do you suggest should be accepted if not victory?
> file lawsuits
And here a glaring issue with this approach is apparent. Even _if_ the harassers meet the criteria for law-breaking, anonymity and civil suits having the burden of proof be on the plaintiff make this extremely difficult. I can think of any number of defenses, starting with "Someone guessed my WiFi password / took over my forum account."
It is far easier to pressure companies to de-platform hate than to individually find and file suit against the harassers.
Deplatforming using Twitter pressure is a terrifying tactic that tosses out the rulebook and replaces it with a popularity contest.
It's bullshit.
"Boycott" comes from the last name of Charles Boycott. Protesters threatened and beat up people that worked with him, threatened shops not to sell to him, and ramped up to such a point that it cost more for the police to defend his harvest than the harvest was worth. His blacksmith was threatened with murder, and a 12 year old carrying his mail was threatened not to keep doing it. It was definitely not a polite "Oh, we don't buy from this particular guy" stand.
Now I'm not saying that threatening people is a good thing. What I am saying is that this narrative of that once upon a time people were civilized and suddenly this new "cancel culture" thing get everything out of whack is fiction. If anything, the past was a scarier and a rougher place, because if somebody stopped you in the middle of a rural road and threatened you, there were no cameras and no recording devices.
Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either.
Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you
In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business.
I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.
This is, if I recall, the same legislation that normally outlawed "unfair" practices in Capital/Labor relations, which included making illegal blacklisting, wildcat strikes, secondary striking, retaliation, etc...
Is it that hard to believe that the primary goal of a group of people who were being harassed, at times to the point of suicide, is to try to shut down the forum that is harassing them?
proof?
But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut.
The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies.
The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven).
So:
- The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF.
- The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets.
- The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum.
It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know.
More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do you draw the line? It has to be drawn somewhere or else half the internet would be deleted.
What bothers me here and why I wrote up the summary is the clear role of what Matt Taibbi calls the "transitive property of whatever". When one sees a claim of "person/group X is harassing person Y so badly they killed themselves", that's a very strong accusation and the evidence needs to be crystal clear as a consequence. Yet here we have a long chain of causal reasoning that somewhat resembles Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, and appears to stop at the first place in the chain where someone has a stable email address and might actually reply.
It's deeply unclear why this dev's demands or plea or extortion or whatever word you use for this, wouldn't also immediately apply to archive.org. The "harassment" he names is actually people in random chatrooms referring to things he himself had said online, which KF was documenting (or caching). This Keffals incident seems very similar. In fact it clearly would apply to archive.org if you read the full chain of emails and his answer to why that's not a problem is basically "i just hope it won't be cached or reuploaded anywhere".
It's also not clear why the same tactics couldn't be used against Hacker News - plenty of comments can be found on here criticizing 'personalities' of various kinds for their online antics. Just look at any thread on Elon Musk. If Musk emailed dang tomorrow and said "your users are harassing me <links to some post on another website> delete all the criticisms of me and my tweets or I'll kill myself" we wouldn't expect HN to suddenly purge thousands of posts, right? It'd be a horrible situation but a good reply might be, "please get help from a professional" or something along those lines. And we definitely would NOT want HN or every HN user to be classed as internet pond scum who need to be permanently booted off the internet.
Yes yes, you will say that's clearly different, HN posts and users are "nicer", there's more moderation etc. But it's not clearly different because nothing in this KF/byuu incident depends on any of those things. If we accept this claim at face value - that KF is a terrible place because it drives people to suicide - then this is only plausible if we rely entirely on his own perceptions/telling of the story, and he wasn't mentally stable, so theoretically he could have concluded more or less anything regardless of merit.
A lot of the philosophical issues here seem related to the EU's right to be forgotten. However I don't think the EU RTBF applies to pseudonyms. The obvious fix of just using a new pseudonym was rejected because, he claimed, he had no life whatsoever outside of that nym.
Obviously it’s completely unverifiable, but in the timeframes we are talking, if 30 minutes is too long to remove bad content, it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet.
The precedents set here are terrible.
This is the kind of stuff spies are experts at. It can be learned by motivated online communities to target their enemies.
They have removed multiple sites after a mob asked them to. How is it not turning into a precedent?
No it isn't. There's a bigger context to the decision. If you find a Justin Bieber fan club forum and post incitement to violence, I guarantee that nobody will want to take down the site, because everyone understands that the forum itself had nothing to do with the post.
This is a subjective call and one that is easy to get wrong since the person making the call is unfamiliar with the site.
I think it could help if there were actual discussions with a site's administers instead of just kicking them off the service.
> However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Seriously? I helped moderate a small community at one point and we would see stuff like this on a weekly basis. Or just look at a YouTube or Facebook comment section on a controversial topic. This looks like an excuse to cave to the Twitter mob.
It’s a good test to see how censorship resistant the internet can be.
If you get 5000 from a twitter mob, from people living all around the world, you can still report, but there's pretty much zero chance that anything will happen to any of those 5000 people, because the threats are considered as "not real" and nobody wants to deal with 5000 cases (paperwork, warrants, judical process after, etc.)
For example in Australia, employers have a duty under workplace health and safety legislation to provide a safe workplace. And similar legislation exists in most countries.
If you have an employee who is receiving death threats, you do nothing about it and then they are killed (or they even just sue you) then you would absolutely be liable.
If you're running a business you have duty of care obligations as a Director.
You seem to be completely ignorant of the seriousness of situations like this.
Much like the old site Portal of Evil, another best-of-the-worst aggregator from the early internet, making on-site trolling/harassment plans is a great way to get your account banned very quickly ... or becoming a thread topic yourself.
We (and cloudflare) are morally allowed to read between the lines.
a random person on the Internet said. Meanwhile, another random person on the Internet[1] said KF has a ToS that bans anything illegal from the site.
I was unable to independently verify either side of the report.
The article I linked has as many citations of primary sources as you could ever want.
The parent comment seeks to poison the well by casting doubt on the claims that KF is a hate site and pushed people to suicide. It is well-documented and there is no disputing it. Instead of "begging the question", just perform a quick Google search. That way you can:
1. Inform yourself. 2. Not cast a shadow of doubt on easily provable claims.
Furthermore, RationalWiki is hardly a neutral site, especially on matters like this. Specifically, some members have a long-running irrational beef with KiwiFarms (I used to edit there fairly frequently back in the day). That it includes information on the site owner's mom – who has no proven relationship with the site beyond that there's an account with her real name, which proves nothing – and that it links to an extortionist "mugshot site" for her proves that the article is not as "rational" as one might hope.
> slamming anyone down as ignorant is not constructive.
It is when they are reducing it to a he said/she said instead of, I don't know, providing evidence? Begging the question is a way to reduce the credibility of an argument with zero evidence. It's far less constructive than my reply to it, but yet people have taken more issue with my reply.
On the other hand, about bloody time they got rid of the site, and if they need to post a public excuse to feel justified in it, sure, whatever.
This rubs me the wrong way because it doesn’t feel like any sort of justice. It feels like you paid the security guard to step aside so you could read the address on the door, call your friends and mob the store. You didn’t call the cops to shutdown the store. You just cleared a path for more vigilante action.
It’s for this reason I see this as a failing of the legal system. If a website is so abhorrent as to be illegal, then you should be able to open an investigation, and investigators should be able to get warrants to seize the site hosting structure and take it down. If that doesn’t happen, why should it fall to vigilantes to harass and dox the site owners? That’s not justice, and Cloudflare is certainly not facilitating it by abdicating their position. In fact it’s the classic definition of cowardice.
They have been investigated a lot over the years, the operator works with law-enforcement to provide the information they request, and the moderators are pretty quick at removing any illegal content. One can argue that the police concluding that there's nothing illegal going on is because of their incompetence, but it's more likely that the US holds the 1A sacred and has no legal reason to take it down.
Regardless of the law, Kiwi Farms is a place where a significant portion of the content, even when not veering into illegality, is based on harassment. There’s a history. Given the history and recent threats on people’s physical well being, Cloudflare decided they had enough. The same concept of freedom of speech that allows Kiwi Farms to exist is also what allows Cloudflare to decide to not do business with them.
Is that incorrect? Or are you just saying the operator responds only to warrants and subpoenas? I wouldn't call that "working with" law enforcement, I would call that staying within the bounds of the law in that particular matter.
The citations on Wikipedia are interesting though (from the perspective of what's considered a reliable source when it comes to controversial pages). e.g. [19] says that the operator was "allegedly removed for promoting paedophilia". The same guy that wanted to ban discussions about 'VTubers' because some of their 2D models looked too young and might attract pedos to his site. So take that with a grain of salt.
(2) : https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566303971911909376
(3) : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/599a356e-2bc1-11ed-a4d5-a...
Keffals did something extremely brave in using herself as a live-fire target. She knew she was being doxxed, so she went to Northern Ireland and mentioned looking for a particular kind of restaurant. This inevitably resulted in bomb threats and fake calls to the police.
Bomb threats are taken seriously in Northern Ireland. It seems that this time the threat was given enough credibility for Cloudflare to take it seriously and cut them off.
(As a Brit, there's a deep irony in the idea of someone fleeing to Northern Ireland for their personal safety!)
Northern Ireland is probably one of the safest places in the entire UK to be if there's a threat to your life.
It's also, incidentally, the only place in the UK or Ireland where concealed carry permits are available.
You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here.
'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users.
Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions.
Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
Death threats are generally not legal, but ones that are obvious hyperbole might be. Natural language processing algorithms might be able to identify death threats automatically, but they struggle with hyperbole and sarcasm. But so do humans.
Context matters and attempts to avoid acknowledging context to create false equivalency is a big reason why most Twitter and Reddit arguments are so-toxic.
Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting and would find the Nazi's rightfully abhorrent.
Many people don’t have the luxury of assuming that people brandishing Nazi symbolism are shit-posting. For quite a few that symbolism represents an existential threat.
What Cloudflare did was legal too.
If folks aren't exposed to radical ideologies regularly - if everything they read on a screen is True and Safe - what happens when they stumble across a dark corner of the internet and are exposed for the first time? Censorship erodes our ability to critically evaluate, without actually stamping out the censored topic.
Frequent exposure to something normalizes that thing, it doesn’t make it stick out and be more identifiable.
Seeing a mainstream interview with Louis Theroux and debate livestream with Destiny quickly outs him as a white nationalist with an incoherent worldview.
If the only way to hear his ideas, directly from his mouth, are on his platform in a dark corner of the internet you're only going to get his one-sided propaganda.
Do I just take journos word for it? Hell no.
I go to the Smithsonian archives and read the source material in Latin
Anyway, back to the point. I whole heartedly believe that exposing someone like Nick Fuentes on a livestream is a net positive that turns more people away from him than gains him followers.
It's a cynical person who thinks platforming bad ideas will make them spread. Sunlight.. disinfectant...
pft you take those people at their word? hell no
> Sunlight.. disinfectant...
Go ahead, name a case where this happened.
[citation needed]. Even IRL law in extremely pro-free-speech nations is rife with "imminent threat of danger" exceptions to their laws.
One definition of free speech is the freedom of a people to speak their minds openly that power may be held to account. In that regard, it's an extremely useful tool for a free democracy to remain free; it minimizes the risk of the systems of power becoming unquestionable, which tends to create bad feedback loops that ultimately detach such power from its utility in serving the people.
Another definition is saying whatever one wants on any topic without consequences. This is not the same as the first, and has questionable utility in a free society.
Opinion. But also, no one's First Amendment rights was violated here. No one has a right to post on a website.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to compare the idea of a physical building for discussion (privately owned, to make the comparison fair) to a website like Twitter. I've come to the conclusion that if I ran a physical building where anyone could rent it out, and it came to light that neo-Nazis or other horrible people were using it, there would probably be protests. People would gather outside, or forcibly enter the building to disrupt it, or make my life difficult. While you can argue that this is mob rule, this is how society functions. If you're doing something a lot of people find reprehensible, they're going to let you know about it, and they're going to encourage others to join them.
> These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else.
That might seem to be the case at first glance.
[0], 6.3:
>By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior (as measured via our hate lexicons).
[0], 6.6:
> Recent work has shown that some banned subreddit users migrated to other social media sites like Voat, Snapzu, and Empeopled.
However, the numbers were smaller than expected:
[1], 7:
> Despite the hysteria concerning a mass exodus from Reddit, our behavior trend analysis shows that no such exodus occurred, though a small user migration was apparent.
Furthermore, of the sites listed, the one that was most notorious for free speech absolutism (Voat) was shut down due to lack of funding. The others appear to all be up, albeit Empeopled is apparently being rebuilt on the blockchain - I'm sure that will go well.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3134666
[1] https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14750/1459...
Facebook has billions of users. Kiwi farms, presumably, has several orders of magnitude less.
User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
Which best parts are you referring to?
One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
The comments posted on HN are not moderated prior to appearing in a thread. Keep in mind that the bar that has been set here is that an account's second post (the first being made a long time ago, and the account since sitting idle) contained a bomb threat that users reported and mods reviewed before it was taken down within 20 minutes.
Go ahead and try it. Make a new account on HN and do the same. If said comment lasts more than 20 minutes, HN would fall afoul of this new unofficial guideline.
HN ostensibly exist for discussion about tech and that’s reflected by the vast majority of the content, a significant portion of content of KF is unsavory or worse.
If you set the bar low enough, it doesn't matter what the platform's content is oriented towards, and while HackerNews may not be in the firing line right now, who's to say that it will forever remain off the radar? If we are fine setting the bar towards a platform being responsible for all user generated content in real-time, just know that this puts niche communities like HN at-risk.
I don’t buy the slippery slope argument.
Racism and calls for violence were never allowed on t_d and were removed on report / were downvoted heavily. T_d was allowed to persist for as long as it did precisely because it didn't violate any site rules, even though the reddit leadership really hated it.
KF: None of this is true.
My understanding is that KF has had this problem for years and has directly (as in, named specifically by victims) been involved with several suicides due to massive online and real-life harassment campaigns.
That is what you are arguing for. The GP said the best parts of the internet are at stake and you dismissed that off-hand by implying that the communities you participate in can either exceed the timeliness of KF's moderation, or less charitibly, there are no parts of the internet worth saving.
Dang runs a tight ship, but make no mistake that Dang and team relies just as much on user reports as other sites do. And it is impossible to moderate new users / posts within minutes of creation.
On KF, harassment in meatspace was not only against the rules (threads removed, perpetrators banned), but against the site culture. Instigators were called out and made fun of. Doxing and making mean threads about people is certainly distasteful, but until legislation catches up, this activity is unfortunately not illegal and not isolated to KF.
Your understand of KF is either biased by people with a vested stake in taking down KF, or mis-informed. Others in these threads have gone through KF's "side of the story", which makes the entire situation complicated and not a clear black-and-white case.
From what I understand, there has only been one alleged suicide tied to KF. I use the word alleged because said suicide has not to date been confirmed by authorities (Japanese or American), and the supposed victim has gone radio silent in the past. If a platform (even a supposed hateful one), can only be tied to a single suicide, how is that even comparable to the unimaginable number of suicides tied to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, etc.?
Make no mistake, I think KF is a vile place and don't support them in the least... but we must be cognisant of what exactly is at stake if we set impossible bars for moderation.
We also do not know exactly what incident in particular caused CloudFlare to about-face walk back the policy they communicated just days before later blocking KF. We can only guess that it was related to the bomb threat made by a user that was immediately taken down (sub 20min), but was still weaponised by the crowd attempting to cancel CloudFlare over their inaction.
Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side).
But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments.
Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch.
And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question.
The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies.
So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website.
Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
By moderating early and often.
KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.
Are you suggesting that Cloudflare should drop sites that don't censor the word "retard"? How about "moron" or "stupid"?
There's a huge difference between insults and active shooters and it's strange to see them juxtaposed.
If a site is host to the culture that is normalizing genuine hate (and that does seem to be the case!) I say CF should absolutely drop them.
Like they say, can't tear down Rome in a day.
None of this is illegal. None of this warrants censorship. Twitter is not real. You can block traffic you don‘t like or log out. None of the above actively influences your life until you make the choice to let it.
Given that a friend of mine had to jump thru many hoops to report to CF a website that was very clearly and obviously abusive with hard evidence for it. It was a blackmail type website that was preying on women in the cam industry.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/website-terms/
Hackernews can do the same to your account on their site.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal#tou
It is what you agree to when you use someone's service.
Pretty much every online service has this clause buried away in their ToS.
Twitter deplatformed an ex-POTUS and he went and built his own platform.
CloudFlare is well within their rights to do so. It might not be "right" to you, but it is their right to do so and they pulled the trigger on KF.
Yeah sure -- you're right, but you're avoiding the real topic.
That CF is trigger happy?
That KF has put forth their argument and CF is being dishonest?
That free speech is being curtailed?
I also, from my perspective, see a lot of "noise" in this discussion. Just as you see noise in my previous comment and that's okay.
Whether you are Team CF, Team KF or a neutral the fact is CF has pulled the trigger for their own reasons and that's that.
We use a world wide network that started with high hopes for openess and freedom, it got monetized, coalesced into a number of large players who proprierized their forks of FOSS standards (IRC == Discord, XMPP == WhatsApp, etc) and we all know governments around the world has allowed this to happen.
Even as someone who never visited KF before this saga, you must admit that this campaign against KF is coordinated and that you can't expect either side to be completely honest. It's already been documented that Keffal's side has been either dishonest or has strongly exaggerated details during parts of the campaign and her origin story really doesn't help her case. I've also seen some of the rhetoric coming from KF, and it's incredibly toxic and understandable why someone wouldn't want it online.
Cloudflare originally voiced their support (albeit not mentioning KF by name) for offering security services to _any_ customer -- a stance I can understand and can support. But it's difficult for me to keep supporting CF because it took less than 1 week for them to go back on their public stance. It also doesn't help that CF was not more specific about the threat made that made them change their mind. It would help me be more on their side instead of it just looking like a copout.
If I had to choose a bucket, I'd lean more into the neutral category, because this situation is just so incredibly complicated and nuanced if you've looked deeper than the news stories. I don't think a coordinated social media campaign started by a leader with an incredibly dubious history should win outright, and I can completely understand CF's position of not wanting to be affiliated with KF anymore.
Stating the obvious. Coordination is a prerequisite for any campaign/change movement, and no one is perfect.
But on coordination: I began advocating against CF after listening to @lizthegrey [1], a leader of the campaign, lay out the evidence of harassment - not exclusive to keffals - going back years [2]. (I mildly trust keffals by proxy, but I too am unsure of her history.)
My involvement of message amplification was purely voluntary and I received zero direction from anyone. The new friends I made along the way seem to be in the same boat. This was organic political discourse over an issue that finally came to a head.
[1] https://twitter.com/lizthegrey [2] https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1560771369134170113
Demonstrably untrue. There are literally dozens of posts here in this very ycombinator discussion explaining loudly and often that none of the kiwifarms content was illegal, never mind discussions in other places.
Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
This is goalpost-shifting. Kiwifarms does moderate threats and such. It does not moderate mere "hateful and harassing content" (whatever that means, I assume a lot of "harassing" content does overlap with illegality), but if the clear no-no actions are swatting and such then clearly KF actively tries to prevent that.
I fear that the implicit argument here is that in order for these efforts to be treated as "good faith", then forum owners need to not only remove clear legal threats but all sorts of speech (particularly "hate speech") that can be stochastically linked with the generation of those threats. That having sufficient moderation entails that moderators address not only actual threats but in removing a wide range of speech.
Swatting is not organized on KF. It's illegal, any planning of such an attack would be deleted and the users banned, and if necessary their details would be shared US law enforcement. It's not only against the rules, it's against the site culture. You're not meant to go out and do stupid offsite or IRL shit (gayops). People who do (or suggest it) are mocked and shunned. KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them, not proactively harassing them.
Someone swatted a congresswoman; in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username. But there is no evidence of any planning on the site itself, and anyone who did so would be incredibly stupid given the admin has repeatedly warned that doing so would result in contacting law enforcement with the details of the perpetrator. Given that a great many people want the site gone, it seems likely this was a low-effort frame job.
Like ... swatting is easy. Saying you're someone you're not is easy. Blaming it on someone you don't like is easy. You just have to call 911 and say a bunch of unhinged bullshit. Anyone, anywhere, can do it.
Other claims like "KF bullies people to suicide": there is a point-by-point rebuttal to this at the top of the Keffals thread. I'd link to it, but the site is yet again down ...
EDIT: here it is:
>1. Near / Byuu
>Byuu had a 13 page inactive thread on the forum at the time he e-mailed Null offering him money in exchange for deleting his thread. He told Null if he does not accept this offer he would commit suicide, this is extortion. Null told him he can not accept money in exchange for deleting threads and he will not be extorted. The next day a twitter user claiming to be Byuu's co-worker says that Byuu went through with the suicide. His only proof was that he claimed to have called the Japanese police and they confirmed it to him, something that the police would never do since he is not a relative of Byuu. He also posted a picture of an urn that supposedly had Byuus ashes in them as "evidence" of his death. The US government puts out a report every 6 months that includes all American citizen that have died abroad. Byuu's death was never on this list. No American citizens have died overseas within the time-frame that Byuu's death supposedly happened. The japanese government is meticulous when it comes to bureaucracy so this is unlikely to be an oversight. Byuu being dead is extremely unlikely. Something Kiwifarms users have pointed out is that Byuu has gotten in legal trouble with the Japanese police because his emulators broke their copyright law, something that is a very serious offense in Japan.
>2. Chloe Sagal
>Sagal's thread had been inactive for 8 months before his death. Sagal suffered from BPD and extreme mental health issues. He antagonized his room-mates to the point where they kicked him out and he became homeless. He started a GoFundMe to get help from the trans community to get back on his feet, nobody donated to this GoFundMe due to how unpopular he was in the community. Before Sagal set himself on fire in a public park he held a long speech about mental health and homelessness amongst trans people and how difficult it was for him to get help for his situation and how he was abandoned by his own community. He never mentioned Kiwifarms.
>3. Julie Terryberry
>Julie was a mentally ill young woman in a relationship with a man 10 years older than her that started when she was 17 and he was 27. She came from a broken home and extreme poverty. Her boyfriend was abusive and regularly beat and cut her. Kiwifarms repeatedly tried to get her help to escape the abusive situation she was in. Her boyfriend regularly threaded to leave her and she told him in return she would kill herself if he did. He left her and she killed herself. The only person who has ever blamed Kiwifarms for this death was the abusive boyfriend who has an account on the site and was an active participant in her thread
Assuming this is how it happened – you'll have to excuse me for not trusting MTG on her word considering she has demonstrated to have only a passing familiarity with reality in the past – it strikes me as a ridiculous thing to do by an actual KF member, and certainly isn't the kind of action from someone with the best interest of the site in mind.
I read up on the spat that lead to CF's ban a bit, and Keffals claimed to be responsible for the site's owners mom to lose her job, in spite of not being involved in her son's activities at all. Seems pretty mean-spirited, to say the least, and among other things evidence of a "the goal justify the means"-kind of mentality that I'm not a huge fan of.
No one is looking good here; KiwiFarms doesn't have a good look, but this Keffals person also doesn't come off well. She seems like an unpleasant person and while she is right to complain about KF IMHO, that doesn't mean she's the "the good guy" (or gal) in this story, or that everything she says can be trusted at face value.
You don't know the half of it:
https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/keffals-clara-sorrenti-lucas-jo...
Streisand affect?
My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
> not proactively harassing them.
That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
it's like one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I am bringing accountability, you are a journalist, he is a bully.
>That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
this is self-evidently ridiculous. it would justify any kind and degree of censorship anything of remotely controversial, and there's no way to disprove the accusation. someone, somewhere, becomes "radicalized" and commit some crime, and months ago you said something vaguely related to it: that means you're a "stochastic terrorist". it's an absurd thought-terminating cliche.
and note that this is never applied with any kind of consistency or good faith, and never to people comfortably inside the Overton window even when they do objectively evil shit. e.g. will the neocon pundits who lied for months about Iraqi WMDs ever be prosecuted as "stochastic terrorists" because they made it more likely that the US went overboard and launched an illegal war? will BLM organizers get done for "stochastic terrorism" because their rhetoric made race riots more likely?
"stochastic terrorism" is just a fancier and more sinister way of saying "stirring up trouble", a catchall excuse/euphemism for authority to clamp down on speech they don't like.
Journalism is a profession with backing organizations and an ethical code. Random idiots posting about transwomen they don't like isn't that.
there is more diligence and fact-checking on KF than in many "professional" news organizations.
* He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though.
* He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published.
* There's been no independent confirmation of his death otherwise
* The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time.
That doesn't mean the death is impossible.
The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth!
Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.
Guilty until proven innocent. And naturally we’ll take away your freedom of speech since your guilty, and also generally disregard anything you have to say to defend yourself, we don’t listen to someone guilty of a crime.
The underlying issue here seems like a really complicated and socially tricky one - how should someone respond to a demand of the form "remove evidence of my past online activity or else I'll kill myself". It's probably not specific to KF. Theoretically archive.org could face the exact same situation.
He (Moon) doesn't actually know that though, it's very easy to disprove an argument when you set that argument up yourself - I took Matthew's statement to be a more general observation on the state of dozens, if not hundreds of problematic posts on the forum that were overwhelming Cloudflare, but that's just me
Cloudflare may be able to handle a botnet that can generate 250GBps of traffic, but a few hundred problematic forum posts coupled with some Twitter outrage totally jams them up. (Purposely leaving aside the qualitative details here.)
This shows that Cloudflare is completely defenseless against a certain variety of meatspace attacks.
> This seems to be based off one of two things (lists two cases)
But it's just guesswork, we don't know if and what cf saw and what was reported to any law enforcement.
Random possible alternative: Cloudflare got a considerable increase in their "kf complaints" pile and because of the outside pressure legal actually looked at them for the first time and said "we can't take this risk". There's just so many ways this could've played out, null's "it wasn't even us, promise" is just meaningless.
Neither kf nor cf is great at being truthful and open at the moment. We can wait for the arrests or court documents if any will happen.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome. This false dichotomy allows them to cling to their ideology.
I don't know why you've decided that we don't.
in my city a school was closed entirely due to administrators failure to act on reported abuse
You'd have to ban mainstream news outlets for the exact same reason.
They are categorically different when it comes to the practical question of law regarding how we can come up with a system that doesn't pose undue unintended risks to free expression.
In arguing the latter, free speech purists are often incapable of communicating an understanding of the former.
The same is not true for anything internet. When I was growing up as a teen the internet was just about to grow into the first e-commerce bubble around y2k. Not linking your real identity to online accounts was common sense and thought to people everywhere.
People seem to have forgotten this. The internet is not a real place. You enable yourself to be cyberbullied by sharing your identity. It can be entirely avoided, easily.
How do I do it? By not giving out any personal information. It really is that simple.
Are you sure that you actually want a world where mens rea plays no role in criminal determination? You're not just making a free speech critique here.
This is the world you wanted. This is the reaping you have sowed. Enjoy it!
Furthermore the KYM page is convenient for other uninformed readers, but it is obviously incomplete and not a primary source of information for me because I watched this entire episode unfold in real time.
This situation is highly nuanced. However, the KYM page gives fair treatment to the issue.
I can see now how the "both sides to every story" implied KF had a moral leg to stand on. Not my intention. I think people almost intentionally avoid visiting the KF site out of some sort of fear, but people shouldn't be afraid to see what's going on over there.
I know some will say that is too much work for some internet drama, and while that's a valid opinion, any further opinion on the issue itself by those people would be entirely invalid due to lack of proper research.
And honestly, what's the strongest rebuttal to the claim that the suicide was faked? I guess I've seen claims that some journalists independently confirmed it, but I don't know where these stories are nor what sort of confirmation they received? It shouldn't be particularly unthinkable to consider that Near just was going to abandon their current pseudonymous internet presence and wanted to damage Kiwifarms as a free add-on to this.
What is even happening here? Why doesn't anyone else see it?
People died. People have been driven to death. The people of this place know what they did. They know not to keep things centralized. To do harassment in a multi pronged off site method. That isn't evidence of innocence when you can't find posts on there anymore.
Cloudflare may be hypocritical, but it's good they pulled the plug.
> quite a few reply with "doxx", "nigga/er", and "jew". That should say enough.
Pretty sure claiming that they are celebrating their killcount and using naughty words are different things.
The contact information for DDoS-Guard show it's based in Edinburg, Scotland.
I think they will have to look for another DDoS protection provider very soon.
Anyways that Scottish entity will soon have some bad things happening to it. The UK authorities will come down hard on anyone who supports the shitty "Bully LGBT people into suicide" forum.
There are currently sanctions against Russia. They're not comprehensive, but many companies won't want to use a Russian company just because they don't want the risk that more stuff will be banned later (never mind the hassle of figuring out whether what you need to do is banned already)
Anyway this association means they miss out on business not only from legitimate clients, but also shadier sites who don't really want that association either. Also significant tax advantages.
We cannot simply accept "free speech" as a value without question: it has to serve an underlying purpose as a tool with which our values are enacted. The purpose of free speech is to serve the best interests of society against bad actors, i.e. governments, who would use censorship to centralize power. Defending hate speech and organized violence contradicts the underlying purpose of free speech as a value in the first place.
Free speech absolutists fail to see through the tool to the values beneath, to the detriment of society.
To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.
Naturally, they will vigorously reject claims that it's a hate site: it's in their interests to portray themselves as such, and hate groups are not known for placing a high value on the truth. It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence. We do not need a court's opinion to make this judgement, though I would welcome such an opinion nevertheless -- these people should be held accountable in a court of law.
As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values. In terms of values, I expect them (1) to have values compatible with peaceful society, and (2) to act in accordance with those values. Should they fail to do so, it reflects poorly on the people responsible for making those decisions.
I don't think it's obvious. It sounds possible, sure, but they vigorously deny it, and when it comes to actual, falsifiable claims, I don't think the evidence is terribly strong. (For instance, the alleged "Kiwi Farms death list" contains people who did not even have an active thread on the forum). When you make a serious claim like this, it does seem like some more evidence is in order than "everyone knows it".
> As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values.
Then where does the limit go? Do you, as a general rule, support large monopoly corporations having veto rights over all public speech?
Except... In reality, horrible people say horrible things on the Internet, all the time, and if we have the Police running around constantly trying to protect one odious group from another, then perhaps it's better to wait until one group substantively commits a prosecutable offense, then deal with them, then.
None of that happened. We went straight to mob justice. Again.
Oh, did the Twitter Jury return with a verdict already? I didn’t see Judge Musk tweet that the case had completed.
Imagine if private companies started acting like this. You’d suddenly find your power shut off because they read one of your tweets and decided that you’d committed a hate crime for complaining about the rising energy prices…
There is nothing even remotely related to criminal charges or the legal system involved in this case. The CEO of one company decided to censor a forum because he felt like it, without any due process, without even notifying the site.
Your generalization is false -- utilities such as electricity are regulated by the government and provide a life-critical service. No one has suggested that we should shut off the heat for alleged bigots in the middle of winter.
I can't take seriously the idea that corporations have any human rights at all. Corporations are distinctly non-human, so the idea that CloudFlare has "freedom of association" seems nonsensical. If I run a newspaper and print bold-faced lies, that's (rarely) illegal, but if you run false advertising that's not permitted.
I think this is a very large and unstated assumption. If you stick with it, where do you end up?
For example, landlords are private corporations and not utilities. Should they be free to kick out alleged bigots, too? Should their banks? If all the private corporations band together to decide to deny you service, rendering you homeless, unemployed, etc., in what meaningful sense do you enjoy free speech?
Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
Again, you're exaggerating to ridiculous extremes. No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless. Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on, though I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job. Certain industries are regulated, and those freedoms limited by this regulation, such as banks, to serve the interest of the public. But again, the essential freedoms are present by default, and important.
My specific argument is that large, monopoly providers (e.g. CloudFlare) should be regulated industries, because to do otherwise would undermine the authority of the government.
> Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.
This is more common than you'd think. In Italy, there was a case where a (registered, legal) quasi-fascist party sued Facebook for being banned - and won. Facebook got a court order to reinstate their access. The reason for this was simply that the Italians had decided that they should be allowed to have a platform, and so Facebook wasn't in a position to say otherwise.
> I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people.
Agreed.
> No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless.
I'm not sure. The common line of reasoning that I hear goes something like this: "While the government can't shut them down (owing to legal technicalities), they still should be, and so anything that is done to them is ipso facto morally justified.". Grant that this may be a strawman, but it doesn't seem far off from the paradox of tolerance, under which depriving them of things more precious than their homes would seem justified.
> Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.
Where does the limit go?
Firstly, if private corporations can deny people the (de-facto) ability to spread their views, why couldn't they also deny them of their (de-facto) ability to, say, eat? The basic issue at play doesn't seem to be that speech rights are ontologically different from other rights, just that private corporations are not bound by these rights.
On the contrary, denying them of both would obviously be more efficient at preventing "bad" speech - if people had their bank accounts closed as soon as their phone heard them saying a racial slur, this would trivially result in people saying less racial slurs.
Secondly, if people are deprived of all their abilities to, say, host websites, then by what metric do they still enjoy free speech? If I'm running a newspaper, and all the printing presses decide to stop doing business with me, then how am I to get anything published? Doesn't this have the direct and obvious result of moving power over from the (democratic) government to corporations?
> Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job.
This is a very interesting point. But what do you mean by people?
Do you mean the employees? That's fair, but, though I hate to belabor the point, it's not really the employees on the ground making this kind of decision. Maybe we should have more workplace democracy, but the way it empirically works in practice is that the guys at the top tells them what they have to do, and then they do it.
But if you mean the owners, then I will have to most vehemently disagree. "Property rights should be unlimited" is not a natural corollary of freedom of association, and a tiny clique of property-owners deciding who gets to speak is not a desirable social result.
You work PR for Cloudflare, right?
I do not work for CloudFlare.
DDoS-Guard and VanwaTech are just specialist providers that offer hosting to websites that very few companies would willing to work with.
It's not an oligopoly either.
Cloudflare being a monopoly, or DDoS protection market being an oligopoly is absolute bullshit.
>It's not like you could start up your own.
You can. Vanwatech you just mentioned was run by a little kid who was bundling testcookie-as-a-service with filtering services from a bunch of other small providers like BuyVM.
You can get something like this started for much less than $1k/mo.
>Who else is big within the DDoS protection market?
Just off the top of my head: OVH, Voxility, Level3, Akamai, Neustar, Path.net, Stackpath, Hyperfilter, Javapipe, Sharktech, Blazingfast...
Landlords can do this in the US almost anywhere.
"Kiwifarms was taken down by the Twitter mob"
or
"Kiwifarms was just freedom of speech"
Those people either have clearly never visited the site, or are operating in bad faith. I would visit Kiwifarms occasionally to catch up on obscure drama, get updates on Chris Chan, or just look at the deranged posts from users on the site.
Kiwifarms had always been instrumental in coordinating attacks on people, not just "mean words" but swatting, doxxing, getting people fired, mass well-poisonings (aka "cancel culture"). It was not only a cesspool, but a source of what would probably be called "active measures" in the 20th century.
As for Joshua Moon, he has never been the voice of reason beyond damage control for the site. When eyes are on the site you best believe he's trying his best to control optics. But even then, he's such a deranged psycho that his letter to the press on why Keffal's was "targeting him" used the "Jewish parentheses" and multiple slurs. Taking his arguments in good faith isn't playing centrist, it's extending an olive branch to a holocaust-denying antisemite, whose hobby is running a site that bullies trans people into suicide.
I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms. If you haven't visited the site before, I implore you to listen to the people who have for years. What KF engaged in was not protected speech.
As you sit here trying to convince people that no, really, that's not free speech. Pragmatists ruin everything, and I've been around long enough to understand "boiling the frog", "not one inch", and that love of liberty creates at times very strange bedfellows.
If you want to make progress dealing with horrible people, stop trying to turn me/everyone else against them, and deal with them. Like an adult. Either avoid, or work with authorities, within the rails of due process, to resolve the issue. If there is no unsavoryness to the non-KF side, there should be no reluctance with regards to letting the authorities deal with it. If there is, then that suggests someone is seeking to leverage the justice system who wants to avoid the inevitable consequences of doing so when one doesn't have clean hands, which I see no reason to offer myself as a conduit to deliver. Investigation and truth cuts both ways.
I will not tell you that taking the easy way out is okay. I will not let you convince me through equivocation to give up a value I cherish deeply, that everyone is entitled to be heard, and to be free to pursue the ends of what they believe in short of actually engaging in violence. In time, it may be my own undoing, but I accept that. Too much has been sacrificed on the altar of the hypothetical in my life Clean hands and evidence, or it's just more "tit-for-tat" playing out at large.
A corporation choosing to cease to do business with another corporation is avoidance. So CloudFlare is following your prescription here.
That's exactly what these people did by getting Cloudflare to take action. Kiwifarms still has the "liberty" to host their hate site elsewhere, which just so happens to be the freedom-loving nation of Russia.
Russia is always happy to be a friendly port in a storm when the subject is speech that American powers that be wish to silence, and as uncomfortable as that relationship is, I'm glad that our nation's geopolitical enemies will back unpopular speech, even if it's only to spite their own enemies of state.
1) Snowden's reveal of PRISM and more generally the reveal that the government could access almost any text message sent to or from America took the idea of the surveillance state out of the land of theory and made people aware just how widely the state was into practice.
2) Yandex providing search engines not filtered through the bubble of this is misinformation, do not attempt to research this was useful enough to actually find the heart of the claims about things like, say ivermectin. Did the ivermectin pushers meet their burden of proof? No. Is it useful to drown out the original claims with half paragraph blurbs from a state presser, and lazy, toothless rebuttals from cnn.com that are so poorly framed that they do a better job shilling the drug than the actual shills? Also no.
3) Archiving and making public content that powerful entities don't want public is an extremely valuable, if risky service. It's unfortunate that we are in the position of a single person like Josh Moon being the bulwark between New Zealand and its citizens, but I certainly think he provided value. I personally can't afford to take that risk any more, so I feel the need to support those who can.
I get why this site is so infamous.
Eh, a few users using naughty words on the internet doesn't really say much about what a site "is all about". Unless you're equating "naughty words" with "horrible person" and extrapolate a narrative about what such a person could possibly post. Which is a pretty Twitter-level view of the world..
I love how easy it is to spot you guys. You can't help yourselves. You wish you were normal.
"On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat.
The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face."
Meanwhile, no one will ever see this comment because I'm shadowbanned.
You sure?
The number of folks that confuse government censorship with people deciding that their private company shouldn't support abhorrent content is astonishing, especially for a forum with this level of sophistication.
De-facto, the identity politics activists are provided free tools to reach the attention of the public, any any opposing movements that get popular enough get quickly shut down by equating the entire movement or platform with the worst action of their worst members.
There is a valid opinion that this is a coordinated policy aimed at turning the middle class vs. corporations conflict into a race/sexuality conflict that keeps the corporate interests unaffected [0].
Carol isn't the only messenger in town, and Carol is not obligated to participate in communication they do not agree with. It's a weird position to insist otherwise.
In this example, if the anti-DDOS service providers were forced to charge their customers proportionally to the used resources, the market would have 20+ players as opposed to just a handful, and Cloudflare would instantly lose a considerable amount of paying customers by deciding to take sides.
Carol has a literal right to their "free speech" too and there is really no getting around that no matter how you slice it.
Otherwise, the group of elites that got on top during the current economic cycle gets a powerful tool for shaping the public opinion and avoiding any criticism, further entrenching themselves on the top. The result is the 3rd-world economy with a bunch of cronies engaging in rent-seeking, and everybody else living in poverty with no way up.
With the bottom right graph removed, this would be believable as something other than an antisemitic /pol/ meme.
However these websites are also blatantly anti-semitic and there is a lot of Holocaust denial going on. Russia has laws against both anti-Jewish hate speech and Holocaust denial.
It will be interesting to witness what happens when the Western far-right collides with their Russian buddy's laws against anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
The site literally displays taglines like “obviously Hitler had a problem with Jewish people.”
What would be the attack vector?
They now have my IP and the fact I came from https://news.ycombinator.com/
Even if I'm logged in on Kiwifarms so they know who I am they have no idea if I have a login on HN or even what thread I was reading.
I still support an archive link for availability reasons; I just wouldn't worry about being attacked or something just because you visited the site.
Read a book about iptables. And be done with 3rd parties between you and your visitors.
IPTables won't cut it when the traffic is big enough to saturate the network:
https://www.linode.com/blog/cloud-computing/christmas-ddos-r...
(I do agree about 3rd parties though, which is what makes this problem hard.)
> but they at least have teams of salaried people dedicated to dealing with it.
As pointed out in the post, their volunteer moderators didn't notice the offending post for 14 minutes.
Facebooks paid moderators and advanced AI let a terrorist stream for 29 minutes before noticing.
Some perspective: I run Facebook Pages and Groups with many times more users than that. Whole Facebook Pages and Groups consisting of many more users have been terminated over far less from a single user.
Stay hydrated and keep cool. I've made silly statements before on HN when I'm dehydrated or flustered, and I'm not one to chastise or mock over it, but really, look after yourself if you aren't already, mate.
You may want to consider your own advice mate.
Go on then, what's wrong with what I said? Are you not genuinely impressed by the logistics of handling that much UGC? Scaling up to that level means that response times increase.
KF is operating at a loss with volunteers trying to filter the content and handling the reports; still the vast majority is handled within minutes.
The ratio of investment/resources to response-time should be in FBs favour, yet them being slow / inefficient is expected while a small forum "can't successfully moderate" if it takes 13 minutes to remove a problematic post that few users ever even saw.