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> Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years.

Death threats, fraud, harassment, libel, and other harmful forms of speech have had legal consequences for much longer than that.

This has been said many times in all of these threads, but the operator of the site has always been very clear that he will comply with all legal subpoenas he is served. He condemns death threats and really anything that isn’t just pointing and laughing.

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?

Also said many times in all these threads: Getting law enforcement to act on these sorts of things is a difficult game, and a lengthy one even if you get very lucky.

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.

So we don't need Cloud Flare or Facebook deciding whose speech is bad, we can use the court system.

In a world where i can order drugs online with the comforts of a amazon order this sounds absurd.

There are no criminal consequences to speech in America.

Fraud is theft. Harassment is forcing a non-consenting party to listen. Libel is a civil issue, not criminal.

Cool. Let's say you are forbidden by law from posting comments on the Internet. Not because I'm limiting your speech, but because I made the law "it's illegal to make ceejayoz sad".

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.

then prosecute them, don't let corporate monopolies play judge, jury, and executioner

Why should I not be allowed to use my freedom of speech to ask a company to not do business with someone doing something nasty?

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.

I don't believe in "freedom of association" for monopolies and oligopolies, it's an end-run around our rights by another means. And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place. Organizing through market pressure only works if you're already rich, it's just another concentration of power at the top in what's already a very unequal country. No one is going to pressure or boycott facebook off the internet.

> And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.

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.

I don't believe abuses are okay if you have more market power, and I don't believe they will stop with Kiwifarms, which was not the first victim of this phenomenon. I was active on an anarchist forum that died because Cloudflare pulled the plug on 8chan, which hosted said forum. You may want a world where a few companies decide what you can and can't say; I don't think I can afford to live in one.

'Just go to the state monopoly instead and hope they're responsive' is a poor strategy. As is well established in law, cops and prosecutors aren't obliged to protect yu even though they have vast legal immunity of their own.

No, the censorship is not through the “proxy of corporations”, it’s directly instituted by corporations. It’s simply company leadership deciding they don’t want noxious people in their private club anymore.

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.

A lot of marginalized groups (or at least their loudest activists) used the internet to organize and then pulled the ladder up behind them, and I don't want to live a society where only a few tech billionaires get a vote. Cloudflare is not "society" but a specific for-profit corporation located in a specific part of the world, just like google and amazon and reddit.

The web is only 20 or so years old so these online speech issues are new.

> 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.

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.