> 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.