Is there room for principled takes on moderation? | Hacker News Reader

Is there room for principled takes on moderation?

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15 pointsphilippejara23 comments

Regarding Kiwi Farms, Cloudflare claims that they took immediate action due to "imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site" [1]. They never disclosed what these threats were and nobody seems to have any screenshots or anything of what these were either. Further, the owner of the website said that they had never been contacted by law enforcement about it [2]. It's strange to me that something supposedly so heinous has not been disclosed, yet Cloudflare has been just fine protecting sites like 4chan for years [3] (and I doubt that KF is anywhere near as bad as 4chan which has had loads of media attention around countless numbers of posts and scandals over the years, including violent threats, doxing, leaks, etc. I've only heard about Kiwi Farms recently myself).

What's also curious is that this alleged incident happened shortly after CF posted an Abuse Policies and Approach entry onto their blog [4] (which was made in response to recent pressure to drop KF without saying as much in the post itself, from what I understand). It seems like Cloudflare was backed into a corner and made some rather irresponsible PR moves to get out of it.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

[2] https://t.me/kiwifarms/19

[3] https://www.4chan.org/4channews.php?all#106

[4] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...

There just simply isn't much of a story here.

The law says that CF can refuse service to anyone and that isn't going to change. They're not a monopoly and there's no chance someone is going to be able to force them to provide a service they don't want to provide unless it's contrary to a contract CF signed, which isn't likely here.

There are three main reasons CF would cancel service.

1. Cost: Unlikely as CF seems to relish the opportunity to defend against big ddos (see all their blog posts on this subject).

2. Law: if they find they're providing service contrary to US law. The straightforward example is aiding terrorism. Also unlikely.

3. Loss of future revenue due to negative PR reputation. Most likely. They're defending against bad publicity.

This same story has played out a zillion times and way before the internet.

This isn't new or interesting. This is a tired and repeated storyline.

>This isn't new or interesting. This is a tired and repeated storyline.

it isn't new or interesting until you consider (their own) 'infrastructure' narrative.

Infrastructure, generally, is required by public lawmakers to require oversights and accommodations that a privately owned company would not generally be held to.

Let's take any other infrastructure as an example.

Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if the power company decided to selectively turn off power to properties owned by 'The Westboro Baptist Church'?

OK -- let's try another that isn't protected by religious freedom laws.

Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if the power company decided to disallow service to white nationalist radical groups? What if they have broken no laws?

Generally speaking, the only politics that I want my infrastructure to kowtow to is local abided-by laws and regulations. I don't think infrastructure should be a mouth-piece for bias-politick on one side or another.

Now, if CF wants to admit that they're just a regular old private company -- sure, they can do as they please. They shouldn't have the benefits of self-proclaimed infrastructure while still being allowed to operate as a private group without oversight.

Infrastructure analogies are terrible. It seems everyone on HN wants to have their cake and eat it too.

"I" don't get to install infrastructure. Instead there are any number of codes that control it and licensed installers must certify it and then it must be inspected (and depending on what, at a regular basis). If at any point the infrastructure becomes harmful (for example a gas leak) that infrastructure will be shut down for the safety of others. The problem must then be remediated and then again certified to be safe.

Society, in general, does not allow unsafe infrastructure

I mean, yea, we can hold groups like Cloudflare to that standard, but I don't think this is going to be the panacea for those that like to intimidate and use violence you think it is.

The real problem with this and every other cloudflare saga is that if cloudflare doesn't like you, you are not on the internet.

Doesn’t that mean someone can start a company to fill that void?

No, they can't because of economies of scale and network effects and cultural targeting from other parts of the leftist corporate cabal.

Simple example is the kind of targeting that has happened on Gab and Truth Social and Hatreon, etc. Payment services shut down, hosting denied, domains unregistered, etc.

You're talking about being an upstart competing against an established behemoth, with your only distinguishing feature being freedom of speech. But of course if your big thing is being against witch burning, you'll be inundated by witches, targeted and shut down for that reason.

The "Just build your own internet and payment infrastructure totally cut off from existing systems, under constant media vilification, bro" argument has been made a million times, tried many times, doesn't work at all.

> Simple example is the kind of targeting that has happened on Gab and Truth Social and Hatreon, etc. Payment services shut down, hosting denied, domains unregistered, etc.

They were all crying, and throwing a tantrum here when OnlyFans, got de-platformed from Instagram, VISA, Mastercard and many just replied: 'they can choose to do business with whoever they want to' which is true. Same with the YouTube demonitization events, or Ukraine's 'Come back Alive' Patreon account de-platformed; pointing to the ToS violations. In all cases, it means that it can happen to anyone and their is zero viable alternative, unless they wait for cryptocurrencies / stablecoins to be fully regulated.

So for now, the respondents on both sides of the argument just didn't like the 'private company can choose to do business with whoever they want' answer. It doesn't matter.

This infrastructure should not be dependent on the whims of private companies. In the case of KF, they ought to switch to Tor. In the case of OF, they ought to switch to cryptocurrency.

There is a moderately-large group on the political right trying to build "the parallel economy", but it's a nigh impossible task, because you have to start at the very bottom of the stack. You can't start at the internet service level, because Cloudflare will stop you. You can't start at the Cloudflare level either, because the peering services and the payment rails will stop you. You have to start all the way at the bottom of the stack by building a parallel financial system first, then parallel networking, then parallel internet infrastructure, and only then parallel user services. And you'll need parallel browsers, on parallel mobile operating systems, on parallel hardware, on parallel telephone networks.

Current oligopolies at all of these levels have demonstrated willingness to apply political-cultural censorship at various times. In order to "build your own", you have to actually make an entire parallel economic system.

Edit: In the incredibly unlikely event that the parallel economy is successfully built, it will not increase societal cohesiveness to have a bifurcated society, where what "side" you are on determines what banks you can use, what phone networks you use, and, for all practical purposes, which internet you are on. Overall, it is better for society if the parallel economy is not needed.

My neighbor two houses down fired his lawn guy because the the lawn guy had both a Trump sticker and a Confederate flag license plate on his truck.

My neighbor passed away last year but he was a 93 year old WWII vet who later became a chaplain and then even later became an atheist.

He would occasionally invite me over to his garage to share a Yuengling whenever he saw me out working in my own yard.

I asked him why his lawn was looking shaggy, and he proudly told me why. I miss that man.

He didn’t want his neighbors thinking he associated with individuals who supported Trump and/or the Confederacy.

I believe CF and other service providers have that same right.

Your neighbor's lawn guy can get work in many other places.

But there is no comparable alternative to CloudFlare.

Same with Twitter, Google, etc. An individual or small business cannot escape the influence of these companies and being censured by them is a huge and sometimes unbearable cost.

That's the difference.

It's the reason that if the random person who owns your local monopoly power/water/phone company doesn't like how you look, talk, or think, he can't cut you off services.

Because if he can - if CloudFlare can - they gain massive unjustified influence over the discourse of our entire society.

It is a massive disenfranchisement of huge segments of the population. The only reason you support it is because you don't like the people getting crushed under this boot of technological power, just as you don't like the lawn guy. If you liked them, you'd be up in arms over the injustice and the overreach of corporate power. Please try the basic basic exercise of, "What if someone else was targeted?", if you don't you have no principles, you only have friends and enemies.

I'm very familiar with being crushed under that boot. My wife made one FB post denouncing Trump and it cost me about $200k per year after a property management company dropped me from their preferred service provider list.

It stung for a few weeks but them I recovered like I always do. I didn't get upset. She and I both know the cost of being a decent human here in the South. It isn't easy. I simply shrugged my shoulders and made a few calls and got on with two other property management companies.

That company was well within their rights to drop me. Just like I am well within my rights to take as many of their clients with me as I possibly can and have. It makes things a bit more exciting.

Okay, but in this case there is no where else for KF to turn to.

The situation here would be analogous if every single property management company in the world dropped you (of which there are only a handful) and you were forced to set up your own business in a dark alleyway.

That reasoning only works when the market is actually competitive.

But if there are so many individuals or companies with distasteful views surely there would be enough of a demand to warrant someone setting up another company to serve them.

It is not possible due to bureaucracy inherent in the design of the internet. It is like starting your own email provider- you need people to peer with you in order to make your infrastructure useful. If you set up your own email provider and gmail marks your emails as spam, then no one will use your email provider and you go out of business. Likewise, if you set up your internet infrastructure and no one peers with you, no one outside your network will be able to connect to your clients.

Because the internet is broken and has no real defense against spam or DDoS, the only way to have load balancing is to have a big intermediary with a lot of bandwidth sit between all the traffic and discriminate. These spam prevention systems are trivial to bypass for those with the right political connections, this is why the internet is persistently weak. In order to stay online, you need to manage a political relationship with the gatekeepers like CF.

The end game is that the capital-I "Internet" is fractured into separate autonomous systems (AS) as negotiations between them break down. This is basically the ultimate goal of chinese and russian internet censorship. This is why firewall-punching software like tor is important for freedom of speech: the alternative is the complete balkanization of the network.

There is no real alternative to ICANN's DNS root. What are you going to do? tell people to use openNIC? Fat chance. Most people are not even aware of such a thing, let alone the existence of DNS itself. In order to have a domain name with ICANN, you must have a registrar who is on good terms with ICANN and pays the racketeering fee upstream to them. I am confident that there is no domain registrar other than CF that would be willing to hold KF's domain name.

The only real option is to convince people to use a reverse-compatible system like Tor that breaks up these peering relationships and does away with racketeering schemes like DNS/PKI that sit on the wrong side of zooko triangle.

CF exists because of multiple rounds of huge funding -- it's useful and huge now, but it wasn't the type of company that spun up organically from a quality and voluminous customer base.

also, mysteriously, when they were trying to secure funding and gain traction they stayed apolitical; funny how that works.

good luck going around and asking for money to build a cloudflare like service whose customer base are heavily political, nuanced, and un-profitable, hated & violent.

I'm sure the rich are going to race to their checkbooks to fund that project!

So it sounds like CF did a good thing by canceling their service.

CF didn't just decide not to do business with a customer. They cut them off without notice in a way which they knew would cause service disruption to that customer, after having been paid to do just the opposite. CF in fact hijacked their domain so that everyone would know they had done this. They did this after keeping the customer on their platform for weeks (and presumably billing them) while they wrung their hands over the customer and contacted law enforcement about that customer, which was plenty of time for them to tell the customer they were closing the account and to migrate their domain off of CF and whatnot, if that was what they wanted to do.

Imagine your neighbor had called out his Trump/Confederacy-endorsing lawn guy out for a job, then instead slashed his tires and told him "Well why don't you just push it home, you goddamn fascist?" I mean, sure, he's not entitled to an offer of work from your neighbor, and he can always get new tires. But somehow I still don't feel like your neighbor has done the right thing.

Is everyone mad at Cloudflare? The people I know whose employers are Cloudflare customers say this affair has made no difference.

I suspect the set of customers and the set of angry people may not a large intersection.

im not mad.

Is this supposed to link to a specific comment on the page, or the article itself?

ah, that was a mistake on my part, will get it fixed. Was just supposed to link to the article itself but somehow the rest of the path got lost.

*contacted admis to attempt to change the url, if/while it isn't, this is the url in question: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/06/everyones-mad-at-cloudfl...

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