Kiwifarms Dropped by Their ISP
t.me
t.me
Yes they will. This is the example of them literally doing exactly that.
Infowars is literally on Cloudflare right now.
I guess Gab is not villain of the month to be deplatformed today.
The whole point is, Cloudflare still has them as a customer despite all the chaos that has happened with Gab in the past and despite the calls and previous failed attempts to deplatform and wipe them off the internet, they are still there using Epik, HE and I predict that KiwiFarms will follow suit.
Until the next time one of them becomes the villain of the month, then we'll see the same calls, deplatforming attempts once again.
This story is about an ISP, not a hosting business. To understand why, imagine if you were instead a utility company asking why you should have to provide water or electricity to them.
Kiwifarms triggered a cascade. They did "enough" questionable things to create a slew of articles that self-reference each other and paint a picture of "kiwi farms is a harassment website that does these X Y Z bad things". There is no "proving" that they aren't bad now, it's been decided by some sort of weird and emergent self-referencing consensus process on the internet.
Last time this topic came up, I tried so very very hard, to find credible sources about wtf this website or it's users did exactly, and couldn't (found some but it was very light). I mean it's there on Wikipedia sure, but if you keep digging it starts repeating and self-referencing other websites that are just as "not credible" or relying on "other websites" that I can't take them seriously on their claims.
This very much reminds me of the question of notability and citing of sources in Wikipedia. The articles they reference are "enough" to have Wikipedia say that this website is "tied [...] to the suicides of three people targeted by members of the forum.". Wtf does "tied" even mean here? Red-flags abound. At this point it seems like a targeted harassment campaign by activists that may well not even know what Kiwifarms did first-hand.
What if it's not a targeted harassment campaign and the site really is evil?
Paywalled, but: "How Journalists Botched Their Coverage Of #DropKiwiFarms" https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-journalists-botched-t...
Author is credible enough, I think. Quoting wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal
"Jesse Singal is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic."
"Singal's political orientation has often been described as liberal but "heterodox", though he has expressed an aversion to the latter term as a descriptor of his work"
==
I'll quote some parts:
> briefly, so as not to ignore one of the most serious allegations, I also think the oft-repeated claim that Kiwi Farms directly caused or “was linked to” multiple suicides, is, when presented without any further context, misleading — not to mention an irresponsible way to report on suicide. On this front, I can’t really do anything but link (https://archive.ph/34wUy) to Moon’s own post on the #DropKiwiFarms controversy. YOU SHOULD NOT ACCEPT HIS CLAIMS AT FACE VALUE. But many of them are easily checkable and clearly true — for example, one of the suicide victims herself blamed her act on homelessness and mental health issues (for what that’s worth), and prior to suicide nothing had been posted about her to Kiwi Farms in six months (Moon says eight, which appears to be incorrect). Of course if you are already struggling with other issues, having a thread on a site like Kiwi Farms could exacerbate your situation, and nudge you toward suicide — “suicide isn’t monocausal” doesn’t mean external factors have no impact on it. But this is being reported in a much more simplistic manner, without much regard for the specifics of these terrible cases.
--------
> The Journalism About Sorrenti’s Specific Fight With Kiwi Farms Has Also Been Extremely Negligent, More Like PR Than Reporting
> On August 21, Sorrenti was sent a bunch of Uber Eats stuff from her own account that she didn’t order — a fraudulent charge.
> (...) she immediately blames Kiwi Farms, and uses the incident to inject more momentum into her campaign: Her third tweet is directed at the CEO of Cloudflare, and she says “this is why I want you to drop kiwifarms from @Cloudflare. even speaking up about it has meant retaliation for me. they are going to keep trying to track me down and you have the power to end this[.]”
> Sorrenti’s personal information, including her Uber Eats password, was posted to a notorious doxxing site the very next day, August 22, and a known hacker collective took credit. It took days before that information showed up on Kiwi Farms, and when it did the poster specifically credited the other site.
> I do not believe the hackers explicitly said they submitted the false Uber Eats order, but they were the ones who acquired and posted her account info, making them a prime suspect, Occam’s Razor–wise: again, the false order is sent in, and then her info is dropped on the site, with very little time between the two acts. Sorrenti’s information has been posted to the top of that site ever since, making it one likely source of some of the harassment.
> But she hasn’t mentioned that site at all, and in a pair of subsequently deleted quote-retweets she actually criticized me for even acknowledging its existence on our podcast and on Twitter:
> > Can you please stop making allusions to the site that has the dox of my entire family. I haven’t talked about it and asked journalists not to mention it because I don’t want to put my family at risk. There is no reason for you to be sharing this information. … Actual journalists know what the truth is. I’ve been quite forward about it. You are actively putting my family at risk because you care more about views than human decency. What the hell are you even doing?
> I agree that journalists shouldn’t mention this other site by name, let alone link to it, and I haven’t. But you can’t have it both ways: You can’t launch an entire campaign dedicated to ending a website that hosts personal information about you and your family and then complain when someone mentions the existence of a different website that… hosts personal information about you and your family. I do think the other website probably has more personal information about her family and associates, yes, but either the question of who is harassing Sorrenti is an international story, or it isn’t. If it is — and everyone hoping to get companies to #DropKiwiFarms, Sorrenti included, has sought to make it an international story — then of course it matters that at least one of these incidents appears to have had nothing to do with Kiwi Farms.
> (It’s very striking that *Sorrenti appears to have asked journalists not to mention the other site, and that she seems to have succeeded. It suggests she is effectively manipulating them not to focus on any potential source of her ongoing travails other than Kiwi Farms, which is of course a smart PR strategy from the perspective of her campaign. But why should journalists participate in that campaign?*)
> Along those same lines, and as I laid out in an endless episode of the podcast, there’s very strong reason to believe that the person who showed up outside the apartment where Sorrenti was staying and posted a creepy note to 4chan — a note that promptly caused the #DropKiwiFarms snowball to roll even faster and bigger — has nothing to do with Kiwi Farms. The kid who says he did it, who I spoke with at length via Twitter and Discord DMs, has an extremely long, rich, abusive online history, all linked to the same base username, and he has no genuine connection to Kiwi Farms. In fact, Kiwi Farms thinks he’s a dork and has tried to dig up personal information on him.
> It’s crazy that this needs to be said, but there’s a difference between reporting on a sympathetic source and acting like a member of their public relations team.
Maybe you're not aware, but when an ISP receives a load of hate mail saying "cut off this site" this mail is received by a human who has a chance to check out the site and decide whether it is so evil it should be cut off, or whether the haters are just full of shit.
We aren't even talking about a mere repository of hateful information - in terms of badness, Kiwifarms isn't like a Nazi's Guide to Killing Untermensch. Even that could probably find hosting somewhere on the internet. It's a level above that. This was a forum for coordinating tracking down and harassing people in real life and keeping them in constant fear until they commit suicide. That's the point. They do it for fun.
I'm not sure KF would be considered protected speech, even in the USA.
True, but I'd rather this be decided by courts than unilateral ISP action.
It absolutely is.
This is a good thing.
edit: Since this keeps coming up, it's not just spam emails/ malware but also domains/infra hosting those services. If a hosting provider finds out that they are hosting Command and Control infrastructure, or malware, or spam (ie: SES), they will remove that. And no one is up in arms about censorship over it because that would be really stupid.
ISPs are not police, elected representatives or courts; they shouldn't be allowed to usurp that role.
Think about trans people as a demographic for a second.
We have very little economic power or numbers worth mobilizing for votes. Absolutely nobody has any interest in lobbying for us, corporations posturing to appeal to idealistic liberals (and then doing nothing) aside.
The only resemblance of institutional power trans people have is to appeal to those that have the actual power.
No ISP is compelled to provide services to the likes of kiwi farms. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.
You have no right to force others to cater to your personal whims, specially if they are objectionable.
edit: I guess my disagreement with the idea of "forcing others" is primarily that I don't consider companies past a certain size worthy of having a right of free expression.
The only exception to this is very obvious malice. Everything else is more likely to get you fired if you complain to HR than them.
The law won’t work here. They don’t care about the law.
Whenever Kiwi Farms comes up, I see these claims made about it - that people were threatened with violence, that the forum was used to coordinate harassment campaigns, that home addresses were posted, etc etc - but never with any specific examples shown of any of that happening.
e.g. this FOIA request: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
The fact that twitch streamers still regularly get their addresses leaked despite taking appropriate measures shows how impossible of a standard this is.
Spam is a form of harrassment.
If it's an attack, harrassment, violence, an initiation of force, etc. then it isn't speech. Which is why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is also not speech (despite people also thinking that's another gotcha example to free speech), it's an act of violence or attempted violence. Free speech doesn't exist in the context of violence being applied or threatened, an actor is not free if they're being threatened or attacked, they're under duress, which is a particular impingement of the mind.
> So it is censorship. We just all agree it's a good thing.
It's not censorship.
Next, you’ll be telling us that it’s OK for the government to arrest socialists for passing out anti-war flyers.
No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship. In the case of spam, false positives and false negatives can be addressed by the user by adding/removing email from a spam folder. If the user does not have this kind of control, then it can be argued that this is censorship because, after all, who decides what is spam?
If the publisher is prevented from publishing despite having an audience that wants to read them, that is censorship.
Alice want to talk and bob want to listen, but they need charlie to grab tapes recorded by alice with what she said recorded on them and transport them all the way to bob so he can listen to whatever alice said in those recordings..
The problem is that charlie find alice to be assholes and do not want anything to do with her, and thus is refusing to transport the tapes she record..
Now, Alice can still record the tapes and she can even go and deliver the tapes herself and bob can listen to those tapes when he get those, but neither of then can force charlies to transport the tapes for them..
Now alice and bob are not being prevented from meeting in person somewhere else.. hell alice can even build her own street all the way to bob house if she can afford it..
the point is they want to use someone else existing structure to communicate while not following the rules from that third-party..
either you follow the rules or you built your own infra..
That makes no sense. A paper supplier is not censoring anyone if they can't or won't provide printing paper.
You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone. It's ok if you feel yo have something to say to the world, but that does not give you the right to coerce everyone around you to support your personal project.
No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides. I'm not sure how the paper supplier fits in to this argument. Perhaps it is a good analogy for the original topic.
You stated no point.
You're trying to ignore the fact that businesse relationships require all parts to participate voluntarily.
If one part tries to abuse the terms of those services then service providers are free to not continue with the business arrangement.
Not continuing a business arrangement is not censorship.
Are we supposed to feign ignorance and claim terms of service don't exist anymore?
Terms of service usually are vague bullshit which boils down to "we can drop you whenever we feel like it". And if it's an oligopoly? Well, too bad I guess. It's hilarious leftists support oligopolies now.
You ever try to set up your own email server and then have it be able to send to Gmail addresses? Very very difficult.
In contrast, nobody accidentally visits KiwiFarms. And there is nothing done to you (malware to download or your information being stolen) if you accidentally do.
My point is that these providers make choices about the content that they host all the time. They do this because some content is just bad. Kiwifarms tipped too far into "bad" and got removed, just like malware would get removed, just like spammers get removed.
Visiting a site, accidental or otherwise, isn't relevant.
Them removing malicious content "all the time" is certainly not something I've seen. I disagree with an argument that goes towards "they care and that's why they do it this way today".
Yes because it's illegal. Deadnaming a transperson might be mean but it's not illegal. If there are countries where it is illegal, then they could just do like China does to "protect people from offensive material" by banning sites in those locales.
What exactly is illegal? None of what I have described goes through a legal process, there is no official judge saying "yep, that's spam" or "yep, that's malware". In general things are very murky with regards to what the legality around malware is - if it has not been used to access another system maliciously you're really going to have to stretch the CFAA (partly why the CFAA is so vague).
Beyond that, just because something is not legally required does not mean that it's wrong to do it, so I don't see why the distinction even matters.
Define "wrong" though. That's the problem, and why the distinction matters.
That's to say that there are grey areas, but there are also black and white areas, or areas that are so far on the fringes of grey that it's fine to just treat them as black or white. We do that all the time.
In the case of Kiwifarms we have what I think is a very straightforward case. A website that exists for the sole purpose of organizing malicious acts falls well into the "maybe it's not illegal, but it's blatantly unethical".
1. Don't visit them. 2. Sue them. 3. Get law enforcement involved.
Note that there is no #4 that says "harass everyone they depend on in an attempt to get them taken offline".
1. Stop patronizing Cloudflare 2. Sue Cloudflare or the people speaking out 3. Get law enforcement involved?
From Cloudflare’s statement:
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
I don't think you've heard the other side of the story.
Although not mentioned, I am pretty sure they are referring to this post https://i.imgur.com/S1z3Po2.jpg which was taken down in under 30 minutes - as soon as the admin saw it. Making the comparison to Facebook again, the shooting stream was 36 minutes, they claim "no reports" until 12 minutes after it ended (which I doubt, 200 people were watching it live and 4000 watched it afterwards [0]) and no indication of time to reaction for a company with so much resources.
There are some theories that people that wanted the forum taken down made that post; even if that is not the case, does it mean that making a threat on any platform that allows UGC (for example, HN) and takes more than 30 minutes to get it taken down means that platform has to be taken down?
Again, this post is not talking about any web hosts, it's about an ISP. It's the same as if every bottling company was pressured into stopping to do business with you so you made your own bottling company. Then, your water spring was pressured into stopping to sell water to your bottling company because that bottling company sells bottled water to bad people. Springs are probably easier to find or buy though.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18272342/facebook-christc...
Not at all the case. We still rely on the CFAA, which is extremely vague.
> It's traffic that threatens the stability of the network itself (such as spam and worm traffic).
Definitely not that.
> Obviously illegal stuff can be taken down by law enforcement.
Not really, no.
a) Jurisdiction can be unclear
b) There is no "shut down website" button that the government has. They have the ability to take over physical infrastructure if it is located in the US or they can request seizure of domain names (may or may not work!)
The point being that there are actually limitations to what the government is able to do to respond, even in cases where they would like to.
> But stuff that's simply "bad for society" is generally given a free pass.
Indeed it is the opposite. Most of the "policing" on the internet is done with very basic common sense. Software that exists to trick you into paying someone for "AV" software? Not actually illegal (mostly - the malware itself is not illegal, there may be wire fraud charges as part of the payment etc), but it's malware and it gets removed by hosting providers all the time.
> 1. Don't visit them.
No one who wants Kiwifarms taken down visits Kiwifarms. The issue is that Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to a community that attacks others. This isn't an issue of user consent.
> 2. Sue them.
Sue who? Again, you're talking about international issues, you may not even know who is involved because people use pseudonyms.
> Note that there is no #4 that says "harass everyone they depend on in an attempt to get them taken offline".
"harass" is a really disingenuous way to put it. Again, deeply ironic given that it was Kiwifarms who harassed Cloudflare. Tweeting "Fuck you for not taking them down" is not harassment (although Twitter would be within their rights to moderate such content!).
Beyond that, you haven't really made any argument for why the system you have described (which does not exist) is better. You haven't made a case for why it's important that we abide by your system, or why there's "no #4". I don't care, to be clear, but I see the argument a lot that "well it should be handled through the legal system" as if we have no agency in this world except to live to the fullest extent of the law's mercy and exactly no more or less.
Hosting providers are free to moderate their content. Diners are free to turn away customers who are not protected. Dang can delete message on HN. Google and ban spammers. AWS can disable accounts that abuse SES. And so on.
Might not be relevant to your point but it is relevant to the discussion.
If you're the recipient of a DDoS from malware, how do you choose not to receive the DDoS? Is it a violation of the malware author's free speech if you take down its C&C server to stop the DDoS?
Kiwifarms users do the real-life moral equivalent of DDoS, and Kiwifarms is a C&C server.
there's specific prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of certain categories
I would of course also love to see this addressed in legislature, but that seems unlikely given the current political climate.
Where/how is vigilantism occurring?
I agree that the participants there are engaging in something closer to vigilantism, although I don’t think they actually believe they have a righteous cause, they’re just unabashedly intolerant and enjoy harassing people which is something else.
There doesn’t need to be a legal case to refuse service to someone using your services for harassment.
If a group of people make a hobby out of walking into gay bars and verbally abusing customers, it’s not vigilantism to refuse service to those groups / kick them out.
One can be banned from an establishment for far less.
Moon has its own server, its own network (AS), a colocation that is willing to host his server as long as he does not violate US law or ignores incoming complaints.
But now it's the peering companies just refusing to route to them, based on some complaints that might not even be fact checked. For many that could be considered essential infrastructure, since you cannot simply start your own peering company.
For reference, his .is domain was taken down since people complained about CSAM hosted on his site. But in fact the links provided were not CSAM. But who is willing to check with that and potentially having to deal with law enforcement as a consequence for this? Likely no one, thus they drop him to stay on the safe and easy side then to protect a costumer that's could be trouble, even if some accusations are wrong.
It's a bit similar as with roads or with the post. Many people dislike Joe Rogan I guess. But imagine now disallowing him to drive on certain roads, UPS/DHL refusing to send packages to his address, AT&T disconnecting his lines because they disagree with him.
Surely at some point you cannot just build everything on your own.
And that's all for services that are (still) considered to be legal, but for which companies just are not willing to take up the heat.
If you're saying that swatting is free speech, then we've pushed the idea of speech beyond all reasonable boundaries and have decided that speech just means that people are free from consequences of their actions.
I haven't seen any news reports which substantiate these claims that Kiwi Farms is a haven of criminality, just allegations in newspapers which are presented as fact. I've seen no way to verify that any of these claims are in fact true, nobody has.
Now, this isn't bigshell's real address. This is a random place from Google Maps and in fact I picked a gap between existing addresses just in case. But tell me, bigshell, if this had been your real address, would you be okay with it?
I'm not thrilled with it but everyone has the full right to copy and share public records and factual information. I'm not taking the morality of said copying or sharing into question here, I just don't see why you can't reproduce public records of factual information.
If I link a social media profile to my real name, or something that identifies me, that's my responsibility.
And a few of these aren't even heinous! If I happen to be self-taught in the law and I am particularly good at giving wise and helpful legal advice, but I am not actually admitted to the bar, nobody is directly hurt by my advice, but society has decided the potential for harm in this situation is high enough that I still shouldn't be allowed to do that.
It's irresponsible, but it's generally protected.
Luckily, Kiwi Farms has always denied having anything to do with swattings, and there has never been anything to substantiate the claim that people are organising swattings on Kiwi Farms. It is (or was) a public website, so if people are really planning this criminal activity in plain sight it should not really be too difficult to provide evidence for this.
The addresses on Kiwi Farms are already public. They're on the White Pages, public voter registries, WHOIS records, legal filings. Do you think that Kiwi Farms not sharing these addresses would somehow prevent a criminal from getting these addresses?
Edit: I completely misread the comment sorry, I thought your statement "swatting is illegal" was implying that Kiwi Farms had been organising swattings, etc. I'm not going to delete this comment though because I like to think its contents make a good point.
That was never the argument.
The argument is that private companies have the right to provide their services in their terms, and if your intended use violates those terms then you also have the right to pick a services that tolerates you and your intended use. Aka gay wedding cakes.
[0] https://www.zayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/zayo-accepta...
That’s (among the reasons) why you need net neutrality, which covers the lowest level of the stack.
EDIT: It is interesting that it is the same people that oppose net neutrality that tend to support government intervention at all other levels of the stack to assure that their preferred content regulation and only that content regulation is enforced.
Isn't the issue here freedom of association? When in conflict with freedom of speech, which is more important, and why?
I can't wait to support the other side being censored whenever it'll be possible somehow.
KF can still have their servers and have the site running on then.. They can also go out and install cables connecting their servers to other people for then to access it if they want.. They are allowed to implement their own parallel stack on the side and have 100% control over it as long as they can afford it..
What is happening is that in order to cut those costs they need to use the existing stack and have other companies grab the content from their servers and deliver to other people screens, but other people do not want KF content in their network in any way.. something entirely in their right..
In the end of the day, if they went all the way up the stack and still cannot find a single other company in the whole world willing to work with them it honestly say more about them then it say about the world..
Excerpt from the top:
Zayo, our ISP, has suddenly discontinued service. This is because Blake Willis, a 20 year senior network engineer in the company's Paris HQ, is friends with Liz Fong-Jones - a former Google employee associated with Trans LifeLine charity directors who were removed for inurement, and recently accused of sexual assault. I have appealed this decision but absolutely nothing will happen until Monday.I'm no fan of Kiwifarms, but I'm also no fan of the DIY HRT guide Keffals runs that advises (often underage) people on doing home-chemistry to make hormones.
Would be nice if the right could stop slandering every trans person as a mentally ill groomer and the left could stop labeling anyone questioning the ethics of underage transition as nazis long enough to have a reasonable discussion about the topic.
Estradiol as a medication is easily available. It is listed on the WHO list of essential medicines and very commonly prescribed to women after menopause. So there's no money to be made there either.
If you have any information to the contrary I'd love to see it.
Advising underage people through a wiki on how to make hormones at home is neither sexual assault nor grooming as the term is conventionally understood. How could it be? You can't get in contact with an anonymous reader of information that has been published to the public. You have no idea what they do with that information. So I am not really understanding what its relevance in this thread is.
(If anything, it's an example of free speech. You might not be a fan of it, which is totally fine, but information that advises people of any age on knowledge that people would prefer to be un-known is obviously at least as deserving of free speech protection - both in the legal sense of protection from government interference and in the moral sense that lovers of a free society should support it having a platform - as anything posted on Kiwifarms.)
Well, you have a point there.
But if any of the screenshots of the 'catboy'(?) discord are real... I think there's probably a line being crossed.
Attempting to associate LGBT people with pedophiles is as old of a smear tactic as gay people being visible in public.
As for diyhrt.wiki, they added a prompt asking you to confirm you're over 18 a while ago. Of course people can just lie, but even if you do that, the site does warn of possible risks and recommends having a blood test taken once every 3 months for the first year. Also, while it's good to be cautious, the risk is still not that big. If we were talking about surgeries that would be riskier, though you can't exactly DIY that.
Means he can put up (if his site was actually online). But stuff like this clearly shows a conflict in interest between Liz and Moon, hence what makes this story even more complicated.
I'm waiting...
Once it's up again, people can link to your thread that contains archives of your tweets admitting to violating someone's consent.
Liz Fong-Jones was friends with the founders of Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for trans people. The charity had an admirable mission, but people on the KiwiFarms wondered why the site frequently had no operators available, despite receiving significant funding from private individuals and other LGBTQ groups. This led to questions about where the funding was going, with many users thinking that the charity was a scam.
At some point the Trans Lifeline founders became aware of the KiwiFarms thread, and their friend Liz Fong-Jones got involved. She allegedly used her corporate @google.com email to send a complaint to KiwiFarms' email provider, in what Moon believed was an attempt to intimidate the small business by harnessing Google's clout for a personal beef [0].
Eventually the issues with Trans Lifeline hit the mainstream LGBTQ news and Twitter, the founders left the organization, and there is a filing that the organization made with the California government stating that the old founders made $350k in "unauthorized purchases" yet no criminal charges were laid [1].
[0] - https://archive.ph/U4d0h
[1] - http://web.archive.org/web/20190221114026/http://rct.doj.ca....
You seem to be under the delusion that this is about anything other than the ability of a handful of well connected perverts to effectively silence opinions, information and people they don't like, off of the net. It's pretty humorous for you to argue the need for proof.
Also don't forget the the person being talked about has been obsessively stalking and harassing the site owner in question. And yes, that's an objective statement since even the media openly report on his activities against the site.
To pretend this is a crusade for free speech is laughable.
Here's the thing: No it isn't. This isn't a test, a crusade, the last dying breaths of free speech, or any other hyperbolic pearl clutching nonsense.
This is about a man having a hard time getting someone to consistently host his racist, homophobic, and downright deplorable content.
What is zero times ten thousand?
I certainly believe that racist and homophobic content has absolutely zero value, and the people that produce it are diminishing their own self-worth. I believe spending your finite existence to disparage others for things they can't control is not a worthy use of time.
If that is the definition of too far gone, then I'm happy to be here.
What is the implication here? That I can't meaningfully defend someone's ability to discuss their ideas with other willing participants if I don't actually agree with the content of their message? Interesting stuff.
> I certainly believe that racist and homophobic content has absolutely zero value
To be clear, your original comment implied that the people themselves are of zero value. Regardless, if person A wants to listen to what person B has to say about race or sexuality, why does your opinion even matter? I don't give a fuck what you, or the relevant ISP thinks.
There are plenty of websites on the internet that cater to your sensibilities. Reddit, for instance. Perhaps you should go back.
Not exactly. The implication is that it is all you can do. You have to wrap up all this hateful content and cover it in a blanket of "free speech" so that it is palatable for you to defend. There is no defending the actual content, just the abstract idea that should be allowed to be said.
Forgive me for not making my context clear in the original comment. I believe every human has value, I believe producing hateful content diminishes that value, and is not a productive activity.
I'm not sure what to say about the last bit of your comment. My opinion certainly doesn't matter. The legal rights of the companies' that are being asked to host this content is what matters. In section 2.6.7 and 2.7 of Zayo's Acceptable Use policy, they use open ended language so they can express their right to control what customers they do business with.
https://www.zayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/zayo-accepta...
I don't believe you. This is the first time you've brought this up, I'm inclined to believe this is just the strongest rationalization you can come up with. In reality, you don't want these people to discuss their ideas and you're shopping for any justification.
The internet is built on peering relationships at the end of the day. Alice doesn't get to see Bob's website unless the intermediaries agree. In this case, the intermediaries are being made to disagree with Alice and Bob.
You shouldn't be surprised when people don't want to be in a relationship with you anymore, or do business with you anymore.
Of course, he wouldn't do that, because then he'd be able to be IP-geolocated, and he knows all about how posting people's real addresses in a room full of people who don't like them is evil :)
What you're describing is just a single implication of net neutrality involving self-bias of ISPs.
>The net is not politically neutral; it arcs toward progress
Humble the assumptions you make on the direction of progress
Have you noticed something about Hackernews? So many of the coolest hacks featured here are created partly or entirely by trans, nonbinary, or genderqueer folx. Asahi Linux, Cosmopolitan libc, bsnes, frickin' ARM processors! And this seems to be only increasing with time. The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered. And the trans/binary/genderqueer/neuroqueer contingent are increasingly in decision-making roles at tech companies and the internet infrastructure itself. If we were to lose them, we would lose perhaps the biggest wellspring of talent in the whole tech sector.
Kiwi Farms has attacked them and in so doing, attacked the network itself. The network is fighting back. It thrives on diversity, nonconformity, and those who question everything, even the identities assigned to them at birth. Kiwi Farms is making those people suffer. Do not expect the internet, which is basically a set of peering relationships maintained by very vulnerable humans, to carry their traffic and thereby condone further harm.
which highlights a point i like to make: if you wish to defend KF, first you have to justify the concrete speech being carried out on it
with examples
which you can't post here because it goes against the rules of this place -- which should be a pretty big hint as to why the fruit site got censured
It’s sort of like how they support federalism except when states do things they don’t like, or small government except for when it comes to their pet issues.
That is why they hold these two seemingly-opposing viewpoints.
That being said I don’t think this line of thinking applies to Kiwi Farms. There are loads of conservative mags and podcasts and blogs online that argue against e.g. aspects of the trans movement. They do not get kicked off their ISPs because they do not doxx and cyberbully people to the point of suicide.
what i implied was specific and concrete: KF should not be served by anyone
you're the one marketing a generic and abstract “no duty to serve”, because you can't defend the specific and concrete actions taken by KF
edit: i'll also happily make the concrete argument that cake shops shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against gays/lesbians/etc, while at the same time saying no-one should be allowed to serve KF
these two points of view are perfectly consistent with one another -- confusion only arises if you try to think of abstract nonsense that must apply to both situations
that is a strawman of your own creation
> The right supports the right of private businesses to decide who to serve unless they are kicking out right wingers in which case we need government intervention to guarantee a platform.
i usually caution folks to speak of concrete things, so that you're not led astray and forget what you're defending
But in this specific case: I mentioned that "it's a crime if done to me, but totally fine if done to thee" is pretty much universal, and you'll find it in most large ideological groups. Going "the other side does that (but not mine, we're better than that)" is cheap tribalism that is based only in wishful thinking.
Unless you have some videos of right-wing politicians calling for the executives at Cloudflare to go to prison, I think that the right-wing position has always been the fairly consistent "you can choose to not provide services to whomever you want, but it's a pretty dick move to do so."
Speech does not require justification any more than any other right does. As a principle, speech is not for something. So I in fact have to neither justify nor endorse KF to consider this wrong.
Absent a holy constitution given to us by the divine, the way we decide what is and isn't a right is we look at its effect. Places that recognize a right to bear arms, for instance, do so because they believe that arming the citizenry protects them against abuses of the government. Places that don't do so because they believe that disarming the citizenry protects them against crimes from other citizens. To the extent that one of these views is correct and the other is not, it is not because they guessed wrong about the nature of the universe - it is because one argument is correct and another is not.
Free speech is not axiomatic. Free speech is a right (and I agree it is a right!) because it has particular positive effects on society, through the benefits of open and unfiltered public discourse.
And the same reasoning helps us define exactly what "free speech" is. We make significant restrictions on free speech - classified information, copyright and trademark law, slander and tortious interference, electioneering laws, unauthorized practice of medicine or law, fraud, etc. - in the expectation that those restrictions serve to benefit society, and in the understanding that if we were to allow these forms of speech, they wouldn't really serve the goals which we see free speech, overall, as helping. If I were to say "I am a licensed doctor and I think you should take two pounds of Vitamin D a day," we understand that the benefit of me adding that statement to the public discourse is nil, and the harm is great, and so we don't recognize that as protected by free speech.
But you're right that I hold free speech to be a right for its own sake. So it's that I first believe that to be a right, on grounds of personal preference, and then I advocate for it because of that. But obviously I cannot convince someone on that basis - though that goes for pretty much every preference.
That said, I think the particular issue here is that the abrogation of the right of free speech created by this action did not come about through any particular instance of the democratic process, and is not actually based on any process of formally weighing rights against one another, but rather who can threaten to cost companies the most revenue.
i'm European, you're arguing as if i had to meekly accept your framing that impeding someone from speaking is a bad thing
who is speaking and what they're saying is crucial to that assessment, hence you get to justify e.g. the threats KF orchestrated in Belfast if you want to justify keeping KF on the air
That's not true, though. Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am... David Goldberger, a Jewish lawyer, defended actual Nazis' rights to free speech. Do you think that he thought Nazism was justified?
The NSPA's goal was never to actually hold a march. They never did hold a march in Skokie, after that defense. Their goal was to harass Jewish communities through the process of applying for the march, which Goldberger, for all his good intention, assisted them with.
As the article notes, they sent letters to a whole bunch of suburbs asking for a permit to hold a march. They never followed up with the suburbs that ignored them, nor did they march in those suburbs either.
The whole thing was a bad-faith tactic which today we'd call trolling. They weren't fighting for their right to speak freely in Skokie, they were fighting for their right to use the legal process to harass the city of Skokie.
keywords: i'm European
meaning your appeal to an absolute right to freely speech washes right off
it's on you to defend the harassment incited and guided by KF
that includes, i'll remind you, a juvenile attempt at calling in a threat in Belfast; didn't work, they didn't know the old code-words
one example of what you'll need to defend; or you can stop digging
A lot of blood was spilled for that right.
if you think USA-style free-speech ideas will somehow shield you if you engage in that sort of behaviour, or if you frequent the online spaces where that sort of behaviour is coordinated
you should go and have another think
besides, the eejit briefly hosted from a Netherlands DC so good luck with that whole approach ;)
> with examples
> which you can't post here because it goes against the rules of this place -- which should be a pretty big hint as to why the fruit site got censured
Shouldn't the logic here be the reverse? If we want to censor Kiwifarms, we should justify it as heinously evil and an active threat to people's lives or something. Many articles claim they are, but at least according to other posters here end up being a case of circular citations with little in the way of actual examples of Kiwifarms content that'd convince people that maybe it's enough of a pile of garbage to toss out of society.
I know it's definitely not a pleasant place - a friend recently dug out some posts from there on what archives he managed to find, and said it was basically a sneer club site. But a sneer club in a small godforsaken corner of the net is pretty far from actively harassing people to suicide.
Made more complicated by keffals, as far as I know, basically being a similar grade of asshole.
No.
> If we want to censor Kiwifarms
That’s not the debate, we aren’t doing that. We are debating the propriety of another party exercising their free speech rights to not relay Kiwifarms speech.
there's isn't
“censorship” is when an advocate of human-rights gets silenced by a powerful entity that wishes to revoke said human rights
“being censured” is me getting moderated for insulting the intelligence of right-wingers here, if that goes against the rules
A trans twitch personality was swatted a while ago and fought back by informing everyone involved with keeping the site alive. They have been dropped by about 99% of the ISPs they've been with (including before that campaign, but now also by Cloudflare).
KF "only" archived and reposted the video and manifesto by the Christchurch terrorist. This is illegal in New Zealand and the police asked KF to release the data of all NZ users commenting on the video, which JM refused to do since it's an overreach and they legally run under an US entity thus don't have to comply. That didn't go well with the NZ law enforcement and got them delisted from there.
This is why people associate KF with Christchurch, however the terrorism act itself was not initiated by a KF user and anyone saying so is spreading fake news.
oh yeah, then they're totally fine...
Saying something that is demonstrably false like this only makes the argument against them look worse. It has the opposite effect you're going for.
Kiwi Farms was dropped by Cloudflare due to "imminent threat to human life". You know what that threat was? Some shitpost saying the poster called up some lads to place bombs at all the poutine places in Belfast. That post, which was very obviously nothing more than a joke in poor taste, was downvoted by the community as being dumb, and was removed within 15 minutes. Cloudflare used it as justification to permanently drop the entire site. Yet Facebook can actually live-stream a massacre (how's that for an "imminent threat"?) and continue operating. Hmm.
As for the suicides, that's something that gets repeated constantly, but is rather spurious. The supposed victims had messed up lives that they intentionally publicized online, and the Kiwi Farms did not cause their issues just by laughing at them. How do you "directly attribute" a suicide to a site, anyway? If I post saying someone is ugly, and that person kills themselves, am I directly responsible?
Also, one of the supposed victims is most likely still alive and faked his suicide, as the only confirmation is that a journalist claims to have called his employer, which is a weird way to confirm someone's death. No official reports or any other confirmation.
To me it is sad, because the trend is unmistakable. The 90s internet has been dying for a while, but it will just not be there ( or likely partially move to tor-land ) for my kids.
For all those, who are cheering this on. You are effectively stamping your approval on the concept 'forbidden knowledge' and that 'some people need to be silenced for the greater good'. I am not being hyperbolic.
Have they and/or their nihilistic and sadistic salivation over victims of harassment been made illegal…?
Turns out, no…
Are private businesses choosing not to service their reprehensible needs for irrelevant gossip legal…?
Turns out, yes!!!
You either die a free speech defender or you were always an irrelevant misanthropic shitbag who no one wants to associate with…
Your next step is to start a “free speech” oriented ISP, cause, you know, that is still not actually illegal.
You’ve been talking the talk, time to walk the walk…