Looking into Cloudflare's claims about Kiwi Farms
twitter.com
twitter.com
i recall one new account that signed up that was unequivocally pro-terrorist which also called for a "10x worse" shooting to happen in the UK and it was immediately flagged down as a fedpost by other users, so i have my reservations about sentiment of the forum being pro-shooter.
the same account would become active 3 years later as one of the bomb threats earlier last week, just for reference.
Your online community will adapt and shape itself to fit the moderation scheme and environment you build for. 4chan doesn't attract the clientele it does because shitty people flock to it, 4chan has the clientele it does because it's one of the only places shitty people can go be shitty in public and not be ostracized for it.
If you run a business, it's okay for you to tell shitty people that they aren't welcome, as long as you don't consider them shitty because of their skin color, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Banning someone for personal opinions or disgusting (to you) takes is a 1st amendment right of an individual and business.
It's not cloudflare's responsibility to ensure that websites run by people they don't like remain reliable and capable of weathering attacks on their infrastructure. If cloudflare thinks you aren't doing enough to not be a toxic, violent, gross cesspit of hatred, it doesn't matter if you are actually working 24/7 to take down bad stuff.
If I'm the biggest billboard maker in the US, I am within my right to not sell any billboards to the people who put up anti-abortion advertisements, purely because I don't like their message.
It would take seconds to change the kiwifarms DNS but apparently the admins don't care about their userbase being able to communicate all that much.
Glad to see service providers have freedoms too. Kiwifarms still has plenty of options.
Only after said government tried to get him to turn over all information about everyone who viewed the video, read the MF or even commented on the shooting. (OC all occurring AFTER the fact/shooting) All happening right around the same time the government there was literally locking people up for merely viewing any of it. Full police state kind of tactics. He told them to fuck off when they demanded he help them hunt down unrelated innocent people.
Again, this isn't happening on "their platform", they aren't hosts, only acting as network infrastructure. Which is and should always remain neutral.. For the survival of the internet and for freedom!
For one, the KiwiFarms thread on near, prior to his suicide, is pretty tame. There aren't that many comments and the comments that are there aren't so bad - at worst they accuse Near of pedophilia because he likes/defends drawn illustrations of child pornography. Near's real identity is not known so the thread doesn't even stalk him or intrude into his real life.
Near emailed KiwiFarms farms asking for the thread to be removed and said he would commit suicide if it wasn't but would pay if the thread was removed. The site owner was researching whether it would be legal to accept money when Near pupportedly killed himself - 12 hours after the initial exchange.
It's also not clear that any suicide actually took place. As I mentioned, no real identity is known so there is also no real official confirmation. All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter who is acting on behalf of someone who talked to the Japanese police - and apparently the police confirmed the suicide. A thread on KiwiFarms investigates the idea that Near faked his suicide, showing that Japan's vital statistics, a government page that reports, among other things, the deaths of foreigners in Japan has no corresponding record for Near's death. The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before. There is additional evidence that thread reviews that I've forgotten.
I haven't looked into the other two suicides - but from everything I have seen much of what is said of KiwiFarms is overblown. It's true they use racist slurs and say mean things - but the idea that they are some murderous swatting suicide cult seems vastly overblown to me.
You believe there is ~1 monthly death of US citizens in Japan? No, those stats are not useful.
> All of the "confirmation" that appears to exist is an anonymous person on Twitter
And you know... confirmation from Near's friends if you don't ignore them.
> The KiwiFarms thread also points out that Near had threatened (or maybe pretended to, can't remember) to commit suicide before
And this is just disgusting. If you want to publicly discuss someone's attempted suicide and consider if you can legally take their money to remove that discussion... You've hit the bottom. You need to reconsider your life choices at that point.
Yet in every public discussion to date, Y is guilty until proven innocent.
Regarding Near's friends - he wrote that he had no friends. None of the people who claim posthumously to have been his friends offered any evidence that any suicide took place. Near, when writing to KiwiFarms, said that right before he killed himself he would send copies of his passport to KiwiFarms so that they would be able to tell he actually did kill himself. Then, in his final message, he decided not to do that. There is no real evidence that Near's suicide actually took place - it's all "This person on Twitter knows Near's friend and they say he killed himself." Maybe that's accurate - but it seems like a low bar for confidence levels if we're going to ban a group from the Internet based on it.
Regarding discussing Near's suicide - Near emailed the site owner, Joshua Moon, and made the offer - "I'll pay you 125k to remove the thread or I'll kill myself." Moon replies that he doesn't even know if it would be legal to accept that offer, says that he probably won't and that he would feel guilty about taking Near's money, and the pair discuss it for a few exchanges before Near, apparently, loses patience. Moon also expresses his confusion that Near is upset, because the KiwiFarms thread is about 100 comments in length, none name Near, the thread is not active, and the comments are mostly pretty benign (e.g. "Near must be autistic to spend so much time on emulators).
More broadly, I can't speak authoritatively, but I never observed any coherent harassment effort, nor did I see any posts that a lone wolf could have really used to wage a harassment campaign. That is, in keffals case I never saw any post with an address or phone number, or UberEATS creds, or anything really that wasn't on the wide internet at some point. To wit, when keffals claimed KF users instigated a swatting, and later fraudulently ordered junk food to the hotel, the forum seemed to laugh it off as an attempt to get sympathy donations or free food. Even the sinister-sounding thread where they correctly snooped the hotel from keffals twitter post was pretty benign, it was a few posts over maybe an hour noting various details and cross referencing against image searches, followed by days of mockery over keffals feeling scared but then posting photos of the safehouse.
"Net neutrality" was really about double-dipping by demanding payment to not throttle bandwidth at the server side. It was never about tolerating hate speech.
This is how the net works now. It's not the 90s or 2000s anymore. If you are, or are thought to be, spreading hate and fomenting harassment against LGBTQ or other marginalized groups, you cannot be guaranteed that netsec companies will protect you, that networks will route packets coming from you, or that banks and payment processors will handle your money. You are too big a risk for legitimate businesses to deal with you.
Watch what you say online. Speech has consequences. LibsofTikTok, Jordan Peterson, J.K. Rowling, all of .win, the Babylon Bee -- they're next.
Well Kiwifarms is still up and running after all of that nonsense, making it a giant waste of time.
a) it's down right now;
b) there are hundreds if not thousands of trans activists able and willing to play whac-a-mole and exert pressure to shut down the site wherever it is found -- and many of those are experts in network infrastructure, which Null is not. Besides, Null is just one guy, he has only so much energy and financial resources. And he's running out of options in terms of people willing to host him.
a) It is still up.
b) And after all of the hacks and DDoSing by the script kiddies running booters and attempts to fully de-platform them, it is still up and working.
Looks like a complete giant waste of time and a total failure to shut them down.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/why-keffals-really-took...
None of this works to paint KF in a positive light, it's like a murderer coming out in defense of cannibals.
CF removed their Ddos protection, instead of working with law enforcement to unmask the supposedly offending users. Then all these other tech entities pile in and make it look like it never happened. No specifics we the public can know about.
KF isn't even the only site. Why are we focusing upon KF, but somehow forgetting literal abuse sites? If CF is going to go this far then what about tor? Even 4chan instigates harassment from time to time. Discord servers, telegram. Or you know, Facebook. The tool used for the jan 6th event in the U.S.
The excuse is these are big entities, but unwillfull lack of moderation is the same as intentional lack of moderation in effect, as demonstrated.
But will these entities take the same stance? No. Because this is about money and power.