This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.
When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.
Failing all that, KiwiFarms doesn't need a business to stay afloat. The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network. To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website. Websites don't harass people, people do.
And Cloudflare had no problem hosting Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer until they crossed a line. Cloudflare's history doesn't exactly paint it as bleeding-heart liberal who can't deal with 'icky feelings.' I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
>To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website.
Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
>Websites don't harass people, people do.
Guns don't kill people, people do. Except people with guns can kill a lot more people faster. That's why guns are a thing.
Whether or not you want to be a free speech absolutist, you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters. If it didn't, no one would be up in arms about deplatforming. Yes, it's literally and technically true that a website can't harass people, but having a platform meant to organize and facilitate harassment is a force multiplier for the people doing said embarrassment. Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters, even if it is a person pulling the trigger.
Indeed they do, which makes me a happy customer. Knowing how inflammatory their other customers are, it brings me great comfort in knowing that their free speech is honored as much as mine. If either of them pulled a "Cloudflare moment" at the same scale, I'd probably start looking for other hosting providers.
> Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
...did we do that, though? The past 2 months have done nothing but put KiwiFarms in the spotlight. Instead of privately petitioning Cloudflare to change their policy, we drew battle lines and took to Twitter. All KiwiFarms ever wanted was attention, and we gave them more attention than they could have ever hoped for. Do people seriously think they're going to struggle to bounce back after an attack like this? Giving online organizations a platform has been a huge mistake in the past, like treating "Anonymous" as anything other than the default name for 4chan posters.
> you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters
Absolutely. That's why I'm afraid that attacking the platform now will cause it to become harder to attack. It's already increased it's reach, the recent media hubbub has ensured that everyone knows about KiwiFarms. I guess the Streisand effect is lost on modern internet users...
> Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
Right. Now imagine how much worse things would get if there wasn't a website, but a Tor hidden service. Or a closed Matrix homeserver. Or an IPFS bulletin board. The sky is the limit, and I'd go as far as to argue that they were the least harmless on the surface web. Only time will tell, though.
> And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters
Well... no. This is something that has been proven time and time again in America; banning certain types of guns doesn't work. Banning an AK doesn't stop someone from chopping their Glock 17 and clearing a room at half the price. Gun legislation doesn't correlate with a reduction in firearm violence. The capacity, rate of fire and caliber never mattered, just the fact that the gun existed in the first place. If we're not going to ban guns outright, what's the point in picking-and-choosing which ones are-and-aren't perceived as harmful?
Obviously it's a reductive argument, but the same thing goes for free speech. By choosing to draw the line somewhere, we're giving other people the go-ahead to draw different lines. We're giving world governments the tools they need to oppress LGBT users. We're drawing the blueprints for a new era of information suppression, and nobody seems to care since both sides have started beating the "muh terrorism" and "think of the children!" drums, respectively. And when has that ended well for internet freedom in the past?
I do not subscribe to bullying or doxxing or anything like that, but now kiwifarms will get a fair chance at showing me what they are about, they had zero chance before, as I did not know they exist.
At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.
>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network
I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.
Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.
> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.
I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.
I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
This approach is making perfect the enemy of good. There is no perfect way to solve this problem.
> If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate.
It's still a website, it's still accessible. That part hasn't gone away. If the contention is that launching TOR somehow means it's "harder to monitor" then I have some news for you: Lots of monitoring of darkweb stuff goes on every day.
If I need to be prevented from knowing what the monsters say in order to avoid turning into a monster myself, then I promise you, we've lost. The monsters are going to eat us all.
Tolerance for ideas is not a suicide pact.
Yes because the police were doing such a great job at monitoring and responding to threats from KF. Wake up, this is such a weak argument that has no basis in reality. We hear these same tired arguments over and over that are not backed up with facts (or, you know, arrests).
> The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
Yes they are.
> I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
What part do you not "believe" in? Deplatforming absolutely works. These rats might scurry to another platform/provider but each time fewer and fewer jump through all the hoops. You are letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Terminating services to Kiwi Farms was completely in line with Cloudflare's TOS as-written.
Having the power to shut that place and therefore behavior down but choosing not to means they were complicit. Deplatforming works, the influx of new bullies shrinks when you make their place less public.
Therefore it would seem that this particular removal is motivated by erasing the documentation and performing a cover up.
A dozen children died because of the Tide Pod challenge-- and that's just one campaign. We could talk about planking falls, cinnamon poisonings and more if you like. That's before we get to the rise in runaways and child exploitation directly attributable to the "legitimate" platforms. Kids are being solicited on Roblox FFS.
How does a community of bullies deliberately targeting (internet celebrities) have a lower kill count and merit higher priority than a handful of individuals conspicuously encouraging ignorant children to engage in lethal acitivities?
This is clearly a crusade.