Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.
Generally speaking, the best way to handle situations like that is to get the police to put someone in a cage.
And that goes to anyone involved in any part of this whole fight.
With a DDOS the goal is to prevent people from reading someone's words. With harassment the goal is to prevent people hearing the targets future words.
Both are forms of censorship.
There was no physical not psychological violence here. Only Ddos. Why is that bad? Do you have an inherent right to not be buried under request? protected from bots?
Well, we have a lot of laws against that in every major country.
Yes, if police catch you doing that, then they will put you in a cage.
Additionally, it's a retail store. I can't imagine they would lose a lot of business if their website was down. Still, they could just as easily fall victim to a DDoS racketeering scheme I suppose.
If somehow someone objected to cheesecake factory's practices (let's say they're a vegan or they disapproved of cheesecake factory's health practices or something), then it would be disproportionately easy for the cheesecake factory to conduct a DDoS attack on the protester's website than vice-versa. So the idea that we should support DDoS as some form of free speech is obviously pro-corporatist in my perspective, because it empowers those with more financial and bureaucratic control over the internet.
"I don't like what you're saying, so I'm going to shoot you in the face so you stop."
"I don't like the content your web server is serving, so I'm going to DDoS it so it stops."
The DDoS is not an idea in the same way that a bullet isn't one. Therefore no, this is not "the marketplace of ideas in action".
No, there's no law anywhere that includes actions performed by machines in the definition of free speech. DDoSing a server is not performance art, and neither is shooting someone.
This isn't about 1 website here. This is about the precedent.
Every time cloudflare gets bullied into taking a website offline, it is ammunition that an authoritarian government can use against it.
What happens when one of these countries starts to threaten cloudflare employees lives, to force them to take down some human rights organizations' websites?
Maybe it won't happen tomorrow. But every time a mob forces cloudflare to take these sorts of actions, it weakens cloudflare's ability to fight against the real threats.
If you want to stand by your opinion in this, then fine. But I get to hold you responsible for the deaths that happen, if cloudflare is no longer able to stand up against these greater threats.
This isn't how normal people think.
I, on the other hand, am concerned about the lives that could be lost, due to authoritarian governments having more ammo to pressure cloudflare with.
This specific time might not be the tipping point. But if stuff like this keeps happening, the real threats can use the precedent to target vulnerable groups, and yes that can cause lives to be lost.
Why don't we stretch this in any old way back to DDoS? Why should the government say which packets I can and cannot send? Any encroachment by the government into something as silly as sending DDoS packets slices down my ability to speak freely. If they start at DDoS, then what's stopping them from limiting other forms of speech?
See, I can do the same thing. Just because free speech in the form of sending DDoS packets isn't liked by people doesn't mean we should be willing to give it up. Right? Because once we start limiting what kind of packets we can send, we're only a slipper slope away from being told which other kinds of packets we can't send.
Still, I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario which is otherwise devoid of government interference. In this whole story, all I see is a bunch of civilians. If there is a government actor, department, or anything, please share. Otherwise it just looks like standard whataboutism directed at the govt.
Look, if you are ok with authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations, then say so.
> I'm not sure why you're dragging government into a scenario
So, one big reason why cloudflare is used, is by human rights organizations to protect themselves from being DDoS'ed by authoritarian governments.
If you don't care about that, then just say so.
> is otherwise devoid of government interference.
It is not devoid from government interference, because cloudflare stops authoritarian governments from interfering with human right's organizations.
And, as I said before, this precedent hurts cloudfares ability to protect human right's organizations from being taken down by these governments, by protecting them from DDoS attacks, from those governments.
> If there is a government actor, department, or anything
Every time cloudflare is pressured to stop protecting websites, this is ammo that authoritarian governments can use against them, to drop protections for other organizations, such as human rights organizations. It might not happen tomorrow, but it is more ammo that these governments can use.
Why do you keep avoiding this idea of authoritarian governments DDoSing human rights organizations?
> that you're ok with the government censoring which packets people send.
So, if an authoritarian government, tried to target a gay rights organization, yes I would be ok with a different government protecting this targeted minority from DDoS attacks.
This is because I do not want important human rights organizations, such as ones that protect gay people from being oppressed, from being taken off the internet by bad people.
Do you see how I just directly addressed the question, by saying that yes I am in favor of the government protecting, for example, gay rights organizations, from being DDoSed?
Do you really oppose this protection? Would you support an authoritarian government, taking down a gay rights organization?
I tried to get them to talk about this issue, and they basically admitted that they support removing, for example, gay right organizations from the internet, via DDoS attacks.
Because apparently protecting gay rights organizations would infringe on their free speech to target and remove those organizations from the internet.
Also, have any of the people complaining about this on the internet actually filed complaints with the police/procesutor's office? Have they even attempted to follow the legal channels before deciding to take the law into their own hands?
Surely a prosecutor standing for re-election would be much more likely to be swayed than a massive mega corporation. But why go through the bother of actually doing something that could help set legal precedent when you can simply tweet furiously.
CloudFlare’s original announcement mentions law enforcement. The bomb threats will almost certainly see investigation; that’s domestic terrorism.
Is Comcast getting any flak for providing internet to the KKK offices? Or their water provider? Is Netflix getting any complains for providing entertainment to terrorists? Or vodafone for mobile connectivity?
Why is it different for cloudflare?
Regarding your Netflix example, I doubt Netflix knows if any particular customer is a terrorist.
Having access to a CDN provider isn't in the same "basic rights" league.
I agree that trying to cancel people from being able to enjoy baseline physical necessities is not a line that's being crossed yet, but an attack on utilities may not necessitate this. Let's say Joshua Moon also happened to run a small hobby store in a strip mall. Would going after the utility providers (or landlord) for this store be "fair game" in order to attack KiwiFarms? Why or why not?
They absolutely will ask landlords to kick somebody out. If it becomes known that you're renting a spare room to a neonazi who's become infamous to twitter, don't expect to stay out of the fray.
Do you have any examples of this line being crossed? I mean I'm sure that oftentimes the mob has raised these issues to landlords and managed to get leases revoked, but I haven't seen an actual serious attempt to attack an unresponsive landlord in the way we've seen with the attack on Cloudflare.
We act like utilities are some inalienable right, but this is by far the worst argument ever. Licensed installers setup the utilities and have the work inspected. At any point where your environment presents a hazard, the utilities will be disconnected until it passes another inspection.
I don't know what distinction you were imagining, but I think this one is relatively simple
Comcast must provide service as part of the agreement to give them local monopoly privilege.
The water company where I am is the government so they are forced to provide service because of the 1st amendment.
Vodafone similarly bought public airspace and it came with rules. I wonder if they can pick and choose their customers.
Cloudflare though is just a regular company. They provide a service, but there is nothing restricting them from banning people. It’s like how Google can ban you for almost no reason.
Cloudflare is playing a big game.
Comparing Cloudflare protecting bad actors to the water company providing water to KKK members is completely disingenuous, but you know that, obviously. You should pick better examples.
How many more are dead from activities on Facebook, Instagram, etc? Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
It's just not very sensible to think that big companies care about a few people dying because of a small forum when they demonstrably do not care about many, many, more people dying because of a big forum. It seems way more plausible to me that big tech companies work together to kill small social media than that they have some secret ethic which compels them to care about small harms over big harms.
Very illuminating!
I think you may have good point hiding in there (maybe "Facebook may not do it intentionally, but they've been so negligent that..."), but it's lost in the dripping sarcasm. The point you're replying to wasn't that ridiculous.
It is, of course, completely ridiculous to think that "intent" separates Facebook and KiwiFarms. Facebook doesn't intend to cause civil wars, genocides, spree killers, gang violence, body dismorphia, self-harm, harassment, and suicide. Facebook intends to connect people so that they can develop a social network and monetize the social network and they are willing to break a few eggs to make that omelette.
You might as well say that it is the color of Mark Zuckerberg's shoes that matters as say it is Facebook's intent. No, obviously, what matters is the bad stuff and the people harmed. It's not like any of those people are less dead because of Facebook's intentions. If Facebook had terrible intentions and excellent outcomes that would be a much better world.
The other problem with saying intent is what matters is that the people who make this argument also make some kind of magical mind reading claim that they know the intentions of others. "Intent is what matters, and I know the intentions of KiwiFarms! They are bad!" Just save everyone some time and explain that you know KiwiFarms is bad and that is why they must be destroyed.
KiwiFarms is bad because they intended to get people killed. No, there is no evidence for that. And yes, there is plenty of evidence against that in the form of trying to get people hurt being against the rules and moderation of the site. No, there was no police or legal action against KiwiFarms for the crimes we "know" they were committing - but all that is beside the point. We know their intent! It is bad and they must be removed!
Or... Let's say a group of a dozen people got together and decided to make life a living hell for their target. They are going to mock the target mercilessly, following up on any online interaction by posting vile shit, sending nasty DMs on every platform they can find, etc... Nothing illegal, but just being awful.
But let's say in one world, they're coordinating this stuff on Facebook, and in another they're coordinating it on KF. Now let's say the target gets logs of the coordination, and they report it to the site where it happened. Which site do you think would be most likely to take action, FB or KF? I think the obvious answer is that FB is much more likely to try to put a stop to the harassment.
Also, for you to claim you're arguing in good faith when your entire response to a reasonable argument was to mockingly agree with it and say "Very illuminating!" is really rich. If you want to actually convince people of your points, you're going to have to do a lot better.
For the record, I really don't like that KF has been forced off the internet the way it has. But you're not going to convince anyone by being sarcastic and pretending that KF isn't an awful place where users try to do awful things.
I think the fine should be substantially higher since they are 'big, rich and powerful as well' [3].
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Facebook absolutely would have criminal intent the same way kiwifarms would - in both cases, they intended to serve content from their users.
So just guessing here, but Meta properties alone must have killed thousands of teenagers.
KF never evolved.
Because they have more resources and it's easier to take down a small target than a large one. I am more than fine with Zuckerberg and others being held to account for harms negligently or callously inflicted by Facebook.
Near literally said he was committing suicide due to the abuse from Kiwi Farms. If you're doubtful, it's because you're willfully ignorant.
https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986855014428672
It could be guilting those who harrassed and bullied him. But it's probably just highlighting how bad it was for him.
To me, it's pretty clear KiwiFarms were a major contributing factor to their sucide.
One of Near's friends just tweeted a message where they had begged, "do something about this site already" the day they killed themself. Nier committed suicide because of KF harassment. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1567014389282385922
Their story, which doesn't seem to appear in the responses in that Twitter thread, was that a 2 year old account that only posted once previously in its history suddenly activated, posted a picture of someone holding a threatening letter of some type outside of someone's home, then this was screencapped on Twitter a short time later (~15 minutes). The post was removed 2 minutes after it hit Twitter by the submitter (they originally thought their mods did it, but corrected this, saying it was removed with the note "retarded").
I don't ever read that site other than to look at stuff like this when it hits the news, so I don't claim to know anything more than that, but you were for a time able to look at the forum threads and see the posts they mentioned, etc.
Our legislators needs to make laws against targeted, anonymous, non-journalistic doxxing. It needs to include clauses that escalate the severity when revenge porn or racial, sexual, or other discrimination is being incited. If this bullying results in suicide, that should also increase the severity of the crime.
Until these laws exist, prosecutors need to use this angle and try these cases anyway.
- leader of a mafia
- any government leader
- billionaires in general
- anyone in a position of power
Investigating their crimes and doxxing them is very different from "lmao look at this piece of shit loser, let's bully it to death".
Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
Fair enough.
>What does "government leader" means?
>what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means?
I'm not a lawmaker, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things.
>Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today.
That's exactly why I put the above caveat.
Now be a good boy or else CNN might release your name and address: https://www.engadget.com/2017-07-05-cnn-will-expose-reddit-u...
Nobody is talking about nuking any of these platforms from existence just because of some isolated illegal incidents.
It's more likely the sub taps into a vein of black culture that happens to be interwoven with some violence, and Reddit tolerates it because they don't want to be seen as trampling out anything to do with black culture.
Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
>Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
Not the same, but combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed.
With the war in Ukraine, it's gotten more diverse (even if there's still some ME content published)
That's a reeeeach. I've been subbed there since 2013 and there were also many contemporary posts of white Americans (because that's disproportionately who serves and dies in combat) and European service members being shot and blown up by IEDs and so forth in GWOT (although the votes and comments were more controversial).
The war in Donbas also yielded plenty of footage of white casualties. And now the latest Ukrainian conflict.
The most controversial time on the sub was when ISIS was at their peak and people were straight posting their propaganda (executions and so forth). That was all disallowed unless it was only traditional combat footage, preferably with nasheeds stripped out. If the sub was about enjoying brown death that carnage would've been allowed.
The solutions put forth by the elected officials of Chicago and Illinois seem to fall into two general strategies; providing funding for anti-violence programs in Chicago, and lobbying for DOA legislation in Washington. Those outreach programs, such as Chicago CRED, READI Chicago and Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, have social science studies backing up their efficacy, but say they need more money to have a greater impact (Chicago's 2021 budget was $12.8 billion, with $16.5 million allocated to violence prevention.) They're very clear about needing more money to hire more social workers, but I can't find any statements from these organizations about the need for moderating reddit and youtube.
If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
Heck, there are plenty of anecdotes showing they bias towards keeping hate subs targeted at "majorities" alive, and have actively changed their ToS multiple times to discriminate between who they consider vulnerable.
> KiwiFarms does encourage everything that happens on it
Wrong. The admin, Null, has explicitly said they don't allow doxxing or swatting and complies with law enforcement
> If you're going to take a strawman this far, blame the cellphone and camera manufacturers involved in those live streams. As well as the landlord who owned the building it happened in. And any restaurants that serve them, can't murder if you don't eat.
That's cute but what you're describing as absurd is basically what Keffals et al are doing with this website by hounding every service they tangentially use to get them banned. If they could make the site operator unbankable or unable to receive postal mail it's pretty obvious they gladly would
Not concern trolling, a google search only turned up a kiwifarms thread that _could_ have been relevant, but is now obviously inaccessable.
- Whether KF was relevant to their suicide
- Whether ongoing harassment from KF was relevant to their suicide
Unless one equates the mere existence to the thread itself with ongoing harassment then one can answer affirm the former question without the latter. The "required evidence" for the latter would require some sort of allegation that KF members were actively harassing Near at some point reasonably prior to their suicide, which afaik was just not alleged.
For the love of god, please use archive.ph or archive.org.
How many people are dead because of twitter/facebook/tiktok stalking, arguments, etc?
The line with "Kiwi Farms is responsible for 3 suicides" seems to be repeating that lie until it sticks. The truth is more complicated:
Moreover some of the people, who pushed to shut down the forum, openly support the transition of teens (even without the knowledge of their parents). Yet trans teens face an even higher risk of attempting suicide. Therefore one must ask if those who wanted to remove KF are not responsible for more suicides by promoting and facilitating transition among teens in identity crisis i.e. by making their problems even worse.
When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
I didn't see brigading, but I did see doxxing.
And of course the whole thing is a mentally-toxic nut-picking echo chamber, but that's kind of par for the course on the modern Web.
And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
I have seen many more threats against Kiwifarms that I have seen originate from within it. The forum seems to be a melting pot for grossly offensive people to make grossly offensive comments. And considering 4chan is still around (even if it only used to have a problem with CSAM) I'm at a loss at why Kiwifarms is being "deplatformed".
I can only assume it's like the "jailbait" subreddit - something reprehensible but action is only taken when it gets media attention.
One side is going to call me a dyke, carpet-muncher, and link the fact that I like women to being a child groomer.
The other is going to call me transphobic, a bitch, a cunt, and a TERF for not wanting to suck dick/not wanting all queer spaces to be about trans issues 24/7.
> And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
This is one thing that pisses me off about people like keffals. When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates. The Internet changed that. Since I had WWW access, I could talk to gay adults and realize that a.) you could find love being gay, b.) get advice on what to avoid and how to stay safe, and c.) start to plan out a gay life for myself. Nobody was ever inappropriate with me. (That was always straight men...) Keffels et al. are dragging us right back so gay adults can't support gay kids that are genuinely in danger or suicidal. Thanks, guys.
At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
This is something I feel too, having seen some of the most fringe communities on the internet (a good example is furrys) and how they act predatory around children. I am afraid to say it to any of my friends, colleagues, or even my partner as I feel like I would be seen as bigoted.
I think some people don't see how some behaviour is completely inappropriate (like that Reddit moderator who had a parent that raped children in the attic and, thanks to Kiwifarms, you saw how they were also very predatory). It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
Those people are sometimes right that an INORDINATE amount of moral panic are focused on LGBT+ people. (Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women).
On the other hand, most of them are so urban and online that they can't conceive of trying to navigate this space as a normie parent. Most normal parents are AWARE that strange men are potential dangers to female people and teach us about it accordingly so we're wary, we can go to them or teachers if someone DOES prey on us, etc. (I see a lot of warnings to teen girls that 'that guy doesn't think he's mature for your age, he just wants someone easy to manipulate').
But most normal parents aren't plugged into the queer community enough to teach their kids how to avoid predators in those spaces. And most of those parents just have too much else going on to learn - if somebody is working 50 hours a week with 3 kids, they don't have TIME to keep up with the drama of who was revealed to be a predator this week. And the instinct to not take chances when it comes to one's child's safety makes sense.
> What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
One of the reasons I made an account for lurking was to watch and see where waves of newbies arrived to KF from and why. There are a lot of participants who ended up there after what they wanted to discuss was completely banned from the other places they talked about things online.
> It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
The lack of tolerance for dissent or deviation bothers me. In a lot of places, you can't even have procedural or intellectual disagreements about trans orthodoxy, or discuss how some of the rhetoric is hurtful to other members of the community. It's very 'there is one way to be and only one way'. Very similar to conservative Christian spaces. (My family is half conservative Christians, so I'm familiar with THEIR filter bubbles too).
Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women? But you're further saying that you think trans women are as likely to be predators as straight men? Doesn't your own experience contradict that?
You're upset that the trans women posted on KF are going to make the public think all LGBT people are groomers. I'm upset that they'll make the public think all trans women are groomers. And comments like yours feel like punching down, frankly.
Isn't it a numbers game? ~50% of the population are men. You see thousands of men a day (if you don't WFH). I think the occurrence rate of trans people (in real life) is vastly smaller.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the likelihood of predation to be the same, but not experience any from one group that is vastly under-represented in daily life.
Trans people weren't a substantial portion of queer spaces until the mid to late 2010s, and I'm talking about the 90s and early-mid 00s. There was also more of a focus on passing/not talking about it + it was more common to be in the closet, so even if I had been acquainted with trans women, I probably wouldn't have known.
On the other hand, I've seen entitled behavior from trans women in lesbian spaces post 2015ish. It just hasn't been directed at me personally because predators choose their victims based on vulnerability and I aged out of that. Not many sexual predators go after men or women OLDER than they are.
I'm growing my hair out and have started painted my nails and wearing dresses again, and the binders have gone back in a box. (I'm not trans but I like male clothing).
Likewise, I WANT to be out, especially since a lot of younger queer people are so very '!' when they see stable adult queer people, but unfortunately, the in-fighting means not only can I not trust the general populace to be chill, I can't trust my fellow queers not to throw me under the bus for being too 'privileged'. (Even though I'm poor and disabled, because all that matters is cis + white.)
Personally, I am a trans woman, so my social circle includes many more trans women than the average. And I am not a predator, and I don't know any predators personally, so I conclude we're not likely to be predators. But I'm just a random person on the internet, so you can't know if I'm telling the truth, or even if I am, whether my circle of friends is a representative sample of trans women in general.
I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
I agree! Which is why I made the point about straight men also being gross and my point that people should be leery because we (queer people) are doing a bad job ejecting predators and holding them accountable, not because we're any worse. And that's not just about trans women: There's a large problem with some cis gay men sexualizing teenage boys, and I will absolutely throw hands over that, too.
Also, since you are not a predator, I assume you wouldn't want to be friends with predators and would not support groups with predators in them, so predatory trans women probably don't want to be friends with you bc you'd call their asses out. Predators seek out friends and spaces that allow them to prey on people. You not having predatory friends just says your circle is not a safe space for predators which is good.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that you may not know. A lot of abusers/predators act like good people outside of their abuse victims. Nobody in my communities would have known or suspected my parents were abusive, for example. Or how many people find out suddenly that their dad/grandpa/uncle are creeps.
I just point this out because a loooot of cis straight guys say the same thing to girls and women: "Well, none of MY friends sexually harrass/rape/assault people, so it can't be that common!" Except that it is.
I think there are a lot of variables that go into understanding these things, and that non-queer people who are suddenly thrust into it once their kids come out have no way to orient themselves, which is WHY we should be more diligent.
Please be careful about spreading this particular fact. It's unfortunately true, but not everybody has what it takes to handle it responsibly.
It makes people suspicious and paranoid, which leaves them susceptible to manipulation by the actual threats among us.
I think trans people get a shit time online because as soon as the topic enters anything to do with activism it is only the loudest and most extreme voices that are amplified.
This is a shame for all of the people within LGBT who these voices drown out, including other trans people.
So there's a confounding variable. If 5% of straight cis men and 5% of trans women are predators but I only meet 2 trans women, odds are I'm never going to run into a trans woman predator. Whereas being a geek in the 90s and 00s I was SURROUNDED by cis straight dudes. It was very common for me to be the only female in the room, or there to be less than 5 of us at a computer show.
(I also think women and trans men are about as likely to be predators but that they show/act it out differently. I tend to think assholeishness/predatory natures are fairly equally dispersed across different identity groups but expressed differently due to socio-cultural factors.)
Didn't see it so it must not exist? That's the kind of "research" everyone should ignore.
> saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading
Either because it was now removed or hidden from public view. These activities have definitely occured on KF and just because you "don't see it happening now", doesn't mean it hasn't.
It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even more effectively as it did in the past.
If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.
The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.
KF is at best more/different propaganda against the mainstream propaganda
"First they came for the Nazis" is how World War II could be described (1), and with the exception of a few misguided sympathizers the story ends well with the destruction of their power structure and hanging of their leadership.
Probably worth noting that among the reasons KF just lost their newest DDoS protector is that many Russians are understandably sensitive to Nazi sympathizing, even "for the lulz".
(1) One could even argue that hesitating to come for the Nazis sooner was a significant mistake in the international community that allowed the severity of the War and the atrocities that occurred in it.
I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.
Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.
These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.
Hopefully more of them are taken offline.
The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.
It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.
So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them.
The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it.
But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban.
So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?
While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands.
Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.
How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out.
By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights.
When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago.
Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?
I'm not sure how speech can impede on the right of others to speak freely. Speech can certainly discourage others from speaking freely, and that's bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but it's too vague to justify shutting down an entire forum because some speech there might discourage others from speaking freely.
If you think it wouldn't I'd like to know how your thinking goes. I am not from the US, so maybe the whole theoretical idea is different from the ground up.
You're right, certain speech, like direct threats of violence can impede on other people's right to freedom of speech. But such speech is illegal even in the US and also banned on Kiwi Farms.
Is it legitimate to take that platform down? You don't have to answer, the US certainly thought so during the past wars.
Is it legitimate speech to write some vague SMS to the wrong person? You don't have to answer, whole wedding societies have been killed for that speech.
Now one could argue, "Yeah but they might have been terrorists, or associated themselves with the wrong people."
But what is terrorism and why does a free society break it's promise of freedom of speech to fight it? Terrorism is trying to reach political goals by (often) violent means, with the aim to create fear. This fear stifles the free discourse in a free society by targeting specific symbolic targets. And isn't that a definition that fits many fringe political groups that would target individuals and make their lives hell like it apparently happened in the case of KF?
https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-o...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-c...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-state...
https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rend...
Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour.
"There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too.
Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime.
The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc.
I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.
There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.
Should the government itself offer these services?
Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.
This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech.
Spreading this pro-KF propaganda needs to stop.
ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights.
The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following.
The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
Death threats, fraud, harassment, libel, and other harmful forms of speech have had legal consequences for much longer than that.
The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?
Meanwhile, victims can face years of harassment while they wait for a bored cop to get a "yep, they used Tor" conclusion to the case.
Fraud is theft. Harassment is forcing a non-consenting party to listen. Libel is a civil issue, not criminal.
Come on.
The Constitution doesn't say "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless it is super loud late at night near sleeping people." We read that in, because we're not idiots.
Why should that business not be allowed to use their freedom of association to not do business with those folks?
Why is legal action the only acceptable approach to bad actions? Direct action, pressure, and boycots have worked well against injustices in the past; see sit-ins in the American south during the civil rights era as an example.
Sure, freedom of association goes both ways. We decided as a society to add protections for minority groups to prevent that sort of specific abuse. I don't think we'll do the same for Kiwifarms, and I'd argue that's the correct call.
Yes, because that speech was within the limits of constitutional free speech. Most of my knowledge about free speech comes from reading up on how America has defined it for more than a century.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you start talking and everyone tells you to shut up, then tough shit, you live in a society that doesn't like what you’re saying. This has always been the case, and it continues to be the case.
For many years, marginalized groups of all stripes were denied the megaphone of popular media, but they fought and convinced people they were right and built popular acceptance. If Kiwifarms wants to get the private protection and reach afforded to broader society then they need to convince the public that its actually good to harass and stalk trans people. Good luck.
We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.
It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
That’s what 100% matters.
I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights.
Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product.
Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
It's like a person smugly telling you their hydrangeas are better watered than yours while you are trying to get them to notice that there is clearly a house fire starting in one of their bedrooms.
Does the old laissez-faire approach continue to work when more than half the living population is online?
What truly matters is which speech ends up being successful and adopted in the broader society. This is why the focus is placed on the availability of platforms rather than the presence of free speech on its own. The argument is never just to let people speak without arrest or restraint, but to let them speak AND give them access to a convenient platform that will help their speech be more successful. The next step is to force platforms to host them and give them an algorithmic pipeline of views.
If freedom of speech is the key ingredient on its own, why is the US on an steeper authoritarian slide compared to the rest of the West despite more robust speech protections? Largely because authoritarian elements there are extremely adept at using speech rules for their own ends, and will then be able to discard most freedoms of any type once they solidify their grip on the institutions.
If you mean 1A, that only protects your speech from the government, not anyone else (and even then it's not an unabridged right since there are legal limits on what you can say.)
We understand. And the 2nd amendment. And the rest of the constitution. We just don't think the American ideas are the best.
Let's be clear about a few things:
Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not.
Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP.
Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS?
The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled.
They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility.
Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action.
What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands.
So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.
Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.
Uh I do
As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.
The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.
Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.
The whole thing relies on the loose causality of stochastic terrorism. It's a bit like the Nuremberg trials "only gave orders" defense, except they're not even orders, just innuendo - it's just spreading smear material and a general attitude of hate among a fractious, isolated and angry audience.
A makes the post. B makes a fake phone call to the police. Cop C arrives and pulls the trigger. All in different countries. Is A really free of the repercussions?
Actual evidence of harassment from members of kiwifarms seems to be missing in all of these discussions. There is no doubt that there was lots of doxxing and lots of mean words on the site, but I haven't seen any evidence of harassment campaigns or anything similar. The closest thing that there was to evidence is someone who called in a SWAT team on a Republican congressperson and said to the police, "I am a kiwifarms mod, please come investigate me."
If that evidence existed, given the microscope this site was under, someone would have found it.
And the "you" is meant as in general, or in this case Kiwi Farms.