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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

This is why arguments justifying censorship by saying "just host it yourself then" are wrong. Whenever you take over one level in the stack, the next level down will just censor you instead.

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I didn't see that argument a lot. I'm glad their ISP dropped them. "Censorship" is a bit of a silly word to me at this point. Is it censorship when your email provider removes spam? When your antivirus removes malware? I mean, spam is speech, malware is code and code is speech. So it is censorship. We just all agree it's a good thing.

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.

Censorship is different from email spam filters and antivirus software because the recipient can choose to bypass the latter for individual emails or files if they want to. And that ability is important, since both have false positives a lot.

Can the targets of Kiwifarms opt-out from being harassed as a result of being listed alongside their address on the site?

Two wrongs don't make a right. If Kiwifarms is acting illegally, sue them in court. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.

ISPs are not police, elected representatives or courts; they shouldn't be allowed to usurp that role.

You're acting like "lobbying to make them" is as easy as following a 3-step how to guide.

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.

> Two wrongs don't make a right. If Kiwifarms is acting illegally, sue them in court. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.

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.

Fair enough. That said, consider my comment part of this process. :)

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.

Yeah but I can still get fired for misgendering a coworker who decided last week that his name was "Sally". It works both ways.

I'm not sure what reality you live in, but I had decided long before I told anyone at work and they still kept misgendering and deadnaming me regularly without me magically getting them fired. The only solution really is to switch jobs and never tell them your prior name.

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.

> In March 2019, Kiwi Farms republished both the livestream and the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Shortly after, website owner Joshua Moon publicly denied a request by New Zealand Police to voluntarily hand over all data on posts about the shooting, including the email and IP addresses of posters. Moon responded aggressively and mockingly, calling New Zealand a "shithole country", and stated that he did not "give a single solitary fuck what section 50 of your faggot law says about sharing your email".

The law won’t work here. They don’t care about the law.

Why would anyone living outside of New Zealand care about New Zealand laws? Why the hell would (should?) he hand over private data of some people to the police?

He's an American citizen, and the Kiwi Farms is hosted in America. What law did he break by telling the New Zealand police to fuck off?

Like who?

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.

Come on now. This is common knowledge and you can easily research it yourself. What you're doing right now is the moral equivalent of saying "nobody has shown me evidence that germs exist" on a COVID-19 thread.

in fact, they actually do do this, don't they? Quite a lot of COVID-19 deniers demanded proof of "isolation" i.e. they demanded someone to show them a vial of pure COVID-19 virus and then somehow prove that's really what's in the vial. And they demanded proof of "Koch's postulates" i.e. that injecting people with the stuff in the vial gives them COVID-19, etc etc.

e.g. this FOIA request: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Is this false equivalence or whataboutism? I'm not very familiar with debate terms.

There's a fundamental difference between being spoken to and being spoken about. You have a right to prevent others from speaking to you but not about you (at least in the USA).

Yes, stop posting your personal information online.

Do you think perfect opsec is a realistic target for your average human being (especially outside the tech bubble) or did you just want to victim blame?

The fact that twitch streamers still regularly get their addresses leaked despite taking appropriate measures shows how impossible of a standard this is.

That's true in the case of email. Malware hosting services get removed all of the time, none of the people they were targeting "consented" to that or were even aware.

Spam is not speech. You haven't found a gotcha in the argument.

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.

> 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)

Next, you’ll be telling us that it’s OK for the government to arrest socialists for passing out anti-war flyers.

I think you're confusing speech with protected speech. Those are all examples of speech, they are just not protected.

> Is it censorship when your email provider removes spam?

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.

Exactly. If Alice wants to talk but Bob doesn't want to listen, it's not censorship to keep him from having to. But if he does want to listen, it is censorship to keep him from being able to.

yeah.. the problem is that you are forgetting about charlie...

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..

The question is if Charlie is some poor guy drafted to carry people's tapes... or if he's like a billionaire owning the street and forbidding Bob from stepping out to walk down to the other end of the street where Alice lives.

Charlie can be a billionaire and own his own private street, but neither alice or bob can walk into charlie private street, they need to deliver their tapes to charlie and charlie will have to physically transport those packages to the other end of the street to be delivered from alice to bob.. and that is what charlie is refusing to do because he find alice an asshole..

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..

To make the analogy work, consider that Alice and Bob are 2 miles apart, but Charlie owns so much of the land around them that the shortest path between them that doesn't cross his property is 200 miles long.

no, the distance is irrelevant..

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..

> 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.

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.

> You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone.

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.

> No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides.

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?

Again, I'm merely saying that spam control is not censorship. Your argument about participating in business relationships might have merit, but it is a different argument.

> 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.

Lots of spam filtering happens long before the user has any control.

You ever try to set up your own email server and then have it be able to send to Gmail addresses? Very very difficult.

As an aside, this is only true if the paper supplier has no market power. Generally, if the next best supplier of paper is significantly worse than the one refusing to supply you then yes, they are definitely censoring you.Your position is correct in a competitive market because there are lots of other sellers willing to give the same terms but in the real world it's mostly oligopolies and monopolies with significant market power across broad swaths of the economy who definitely can suppress speech by choosing to not do business with someone.

I've updated my post to address this. While some of that is in the user's control lots of this happens behind the scenes ie: AWS banning users of SES who send out spam emails, GMail banning the spam accounts, hosting providers removing domains or infra that host malware/C2 infra, etc. This is all happening constantly behind the scenes to stop what is very literally "speech", what might even be legally protected speech (certainly you can put the source code for malware online, you can even write and deploy malware - people do it all the time for pentesting).

"What if this entirely different situation that is in no way comparable, huh? Bet you didn't think about that, huh?"

I've justified why it's comparable.

You've attempted to and failed because it isn't comparable, yes.

You can say that I've failed but it doesn't make it so.

Using your analogy with malware and spam, the users that do not want to read kiwifarms can choose not to by.. just not reading it. Or blocking it in their firewall or browser. Seems like it's a bad analogy.

Not really. Those who host malware and spam domains have them taken down. It's not just about a user receiving a spam email, it's also the fact that when a domain is being used to distribute malware the hosting provider will remove them.

That's not the case. There are a lot of hosting providers and reverse proxies that will gladly host malware and their upstream ISPs (which this thread is about, not hosting) will not block them. But what happens instead is they (either domains or IPs) get added to lists of phishing or malware enabled by default on most clients (browsers). Google has Safe Browsing and SpamHaus is probably the most popular spam list.

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.

Malicious domains, users of email services for spam purposes, etc, get removed by their hosts all the time. That's simply a fact, I have made or been involved with the process as I work in security. There are some providers that are more cooperative than others, and certainly lists like Safe Browsing exists as well to deal with that + they can be more false positive tolerant.

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.

I've previously reported phishing and scams to sendgrid, aws and azure. Neither took the domains down.

I'm not sure what your anecdote is supposed to contribute. Are you trying to say that because of your experience you don't believe that hosting providers take malicious content down? That doesn't even seem worth responding to, if so, especially as I have given anecdotes to the contrary.

They certainly don't do it reliably. You might have different access to them, and they listen to reports from you, or it's an "you need this many Twitter followers before we take reports from you".

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".

It doesn't matter if they do it sometimes or all the time or 90% of the time or whatever. The point is that they do it, they already take those actions and no one cries "censorship" because it's obviously a good thing that a malware C2 gets taken down.

>Malicious domains, users of email services for spam purposes, etc, get removed by their hosts all the time. That's simply a fact, I have made or been involved with the process as I work in security.

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.

> Yes because it's illegal.

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.

>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.

My point is that the distinction already doesn't exist. This is because it really doesn't need to exist for most cases - no one worth talking to is on the "actually malware should be legal and providers should be forced to host it" side of the argument. Where things get murky is the "Potentially Unwanted Program" ie: programs that really really suck, are kinda sketchy, but don't cross over into malware territory.

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".

For decades, we've had a pretty consistent notion of what constitutes "network abuse". It's traffic that threatens the stability of the network itself (such as spam and worm traffic). Obviously illegal stuff can be taken down by law enforcement. But stuff that's simply "bad for society" is generally given a free pass. If you don't like it, your options should be:

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".

I guess I don’t understand the argument that it’s ok for Kiwifarms to harass everyone in an attempt to get them taken offline, arguably criminally, but not for other people to harass Kiwifarms or their web hosts. If Kiwifarms doesn’t like it, can’t they

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.

Kiwifarms is a forum, it doesn't itself harass anyone, it does as much as Facebook or Twitter do (they don't, their users might be). Facebook wasn't taken down when the Christchurch event was streamed there.

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...

It sounds like your beef is with Cloudflare though, no? As the argument is that harassing people online is free speech that Cloudflare could have ignored, sued to stop, or complained to law enforcement about, had they chosen?

My "beef" is with companies that are not directly hosting the legal user generated content on KiwiFarms - that's the case with Zayo as an upstream ISP and Cloudflare as a reverse proxy. Harassment, if any, can't happen on the forum as I assume the people that are harassed don't visit it. Though that 3-step solution comment was made by someone else, Cloudflare chooses to ignore various illegal things with the argument "we are not hosting it." I don't think Cloudflare can sue Kiwifarms. And I think the process usually goes the other way around - law enforcement complains to Cloudflare to get something taken down. My point is law is above any AUPs or ToS and it's hypocritical for a company to claim "we don't host content" or no responsibility when it comes to illegal content but take down legal content because of pressure or political beliefs as if they now have some responsibility.

> For decades, we've had a pretty consistent notion of what constitutes "network abuse".

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.

> Visiting a site, accidental or otherwise, isn't relevant.

Might not be relevant to your point but it is relevant to the discussion.

How do you choose not to be infected with the malware?

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.

Sure. And soon the argument devolves into 'just run your own ISP'.

Yep. And even that ends up not working, because even when you are an ISP, you need to peer with or get transit from other ISPs.

Is municipal fiber the solution to this problem? The government cannot arbitrarily deny services or crack down on lawful speech.

I am getting SMSes from (D) governor candidate in the inbox and the ones from (R) are going into the "Spam". If my telco decided to delete those it would be censorship.

> Whenever you take over one level in the stack, the next level down will just censor you instead.

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.

You can make this argument when it's someone's home connection being shut off. Until then, there's still another level.

Yeah, not really.. the argument still stand..

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..

> This is why arguments justifying censorship by saying "just host it yourself then" are wrong.

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.

And what point of the acceptable use policy of Zayo does KiwiFarms break? In any case, is there a point at which it's impossible to have another private company provide you services and you'd consider it censorship?

2.7 The prohibited activities set forth above are not an exhaustive list and Zayo reserves the right to take appropriate action to remedy any conduct which it deems to be a violation of this Policy or otherwise may be harmful to Zayo’s Network, its Customers, or Internet users.

[0] https://www.zayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/zayo-accepta...

Ah, guess I missed that. It's still sadly vague, same as how most other companies choose to write their terms/AUP.

One might apply this argument to HN, where mods can silently ban people so that those who are banned don't realize. I mean, are you going to create your own HN? It doesn't matter if creating HN is easier than creating an ISP if the task is practically unsurmountable.

Isn't the issue here freedom of association? When in conflict with freedom of speech, which is more important, and why?

Perhaps high quality fiber connections with decent upload capacity should be a utility to every home. And ipv6. Then cutting off connections has to go through courts.

Hosting anything on your home connections is already a ToS violation on probably 99.999% of ISPs out there. No need to be Kiwifarms to be kicked off. It's also common from what I heard for them to block incoming HTTP ports entirely.

Yes, that would have to be changed by legislation requiring a utility to not do that.

First we'd need legislation to decide ISPs are actually utilities.

Yes, if absolutely no one wants to associate with you, you'll have to do everything yourself.

I mean, such a thing happened multiple times at this point. Supporters of this aren't really ashamed of what they do.

I can't wait to support the other side being censored whenever it'll be possible somehow.

Indeed all this ride has been a cold lesson and has thankfully shut down the stupid “host it yourself” argument forever.

It mostly works until your speech is so repugnant that no one is willing to risk being associated with you.

I don't know what Kikifarms is/does/has. That said, what do you do if you are asymmetrically attacked by activists? Are you automatically in the wrong?

No, but Cloudflare and several other ISPs will not drop you simply because a large volume of people complains. This doesn't work like Twitter moderation. The quality of these complaints warrants not wanting those people associated with you.

Then sue them in US court. They are a US company.

> Cloudflare and several other ISPs will not drop you simply because a large volume of people complains.

Yes they will. This is the example of them literally doing exactly that.

Then why are they still hosting several sites that people complain about it all the time too. Cloudflare loves providing services to Nazis as long as they don't get themselves associated with mass shootings too often in the same small time window (8chan) or your Infosec hire turns out to be associated with some of the Nazis who claim they have inside help to stay on Cloudflare. (Daily Stormer)

Infowars is literally on Cloudflare right now.

So is Gab, and they are also using Cloudflare. They also have their own ASN and have been sitting on Hurricane Electric (HE) for years despite all the calls to 'deplatform' them, which like I expected Kiwifarms to move to Epik for their domain, they will also move to HE or elsewhere.

I guess Gab is not villain of the month to be deplatformed today.

Gab is simply irrelevant in the big picture.

That's beside the point. Even so, it is as 'irrelevant' as Mastodon is regardless.

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.

It's not simply because a large volume of people complained.

Not according to Cloudflare. Ironically, once Kiwifarms started harassing Cloudflare employees that's when Cloudflare removed them.

No, but any reasonable examination of Kiwifarms shows a history of swatting, doxing, and bullying that has led to suicides. If I had a hosting business, I don't see why I should be required to carry their content or provide service to them. It's not a free speech question - it's a shitty behavior question.

> If I had a hosting business, I don't see why I should be required to carry their content or provide service to them.

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.

Putting this at the beginning, just in case. I'm not saying that I support this website, but if we're going to be deplatforming and targeting websites, we better be damn sure that they're evil, otherwise we're just puppets of the activists.

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.

Last I checked, Kiwifarms was accessible intermittently on Tor and it contained pretty much the content described.

What if it's not a targeted harassment campaign and the site really is evil?

> 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.

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.

Then you should research it before commenting.

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.

That doesn't appear to be the issue here, though. The users of the site don't find each other completely repugnant. The ISPs might, but repugnance has historically not been a justification for de-peering in the past (at least in the USA).

Not entirely. It should inspire people to push for legislation that requires cloud providers to host protected speech, provided someone is paying the bill.

Provided someone is paying the bill and the site's location and ownership are accessible to law enforcement (like any other site).

I'm not sure KF would be considered protected speech, even in the USA.

> 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.

The courts still can decide it. Joshua Conner Moon can sue his ISP and demand they reinstate his website.

>I'm not sure KF would be considered protected speech, even in the USA.

It absolutely is.

This is correct. The vast majority of KiwiFarm's content (aside from vulgar replies) is the obsessive compilation of public posts, e.g. screenshots of deleted tweets. It's protected because the right to be forgotten isn't recognized in American law.

Kiwifarms has gone way past free speech and onto active harassment. To fly this one as a free speech issue is disingenuous. To act like censorship is the issue here is pretty ripe.

Do you mean the legal definition of harassment, or just the colloquial one? If the legal one, then use the legal system to stop it instead of vigilantism. If just the colloquial one, then it is a free speech issue.

If I think my customer is using my service to harass people do I need to sue them? Or can I just refuse business? It's not the same as refusing to make a gay cake either, because you can't discriminate based on someone being an asshole.

it's the other way around, you can discriminate against arseholes

there's specific prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of certain categories

Do you think legal processes can be flawed?

Yes, but when they are, we should just fix them, rather than resorting to vigilantism.

One could argue that a great many things have been left up for corporations to decide, especially in the US. That is by design.

I would of course also love to see this addressed in legislature, but that seems unlikely given the current political climate.

> rather than resorting to vigilantism

Where/how is vigilantism occurring?

Kiwifarms users are engaging in vigilantism against their targets, and it's not even vigilantism for a real crime - it's vigilantism for the "crime" of being transgender.

I believe the parent comment was implying vigilantism on the part of ISPs/providers for the actions they’ve taken against KF.

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.

This isn't quite accurate. While they do disproportionately make threads about people who are trans, they have plenty of threads about cis people as well. It's not like they target random transgender people. If anything, the "crime" would be being Internet-famous.

And many of the things they post is about immoral/illegal actions. You don't really become a target for them for being well behaved.

It's vigilantism in the sense that people are trying to take down their service on every possible layer (in this case: peering/infrastructure) but no one is willing to make a legal case against them.

But how is this vigilantism, which implies taking the law into one’s own hands?

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.

The thing is that at a certain level, things just become essential infrastructure to function.

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.

For one, KF constantly faces DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare isn't required to host your site because you pay them money. Unless that changes, I don't see how they're in the wrong here.

What is harassment? Is it talking about people on a website? People say that stating someone's address, phone number, email, is a form of doxing and therefore harassment. But, these things are just statements of fact. To say that the statement and sharing of factual information obtained legally is not a free speech issue is completely disingenous, 12 years ago when WikiLeaks was leaking information which had been given to them illegally (they didn't recieve the information illegally, but the whistleblower did break the law) they were thrown off of AWS, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Bank of America, for the crime of sharing documents. The highest profile free speech related issues on the internet have always been about what you should and shouldn't be able to share publicly.

We keep seeing actions from Kiwifarms that include doxing, swatting,and cyber bullying that lead to the suicide and death of people.

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.

Have you visited this website? I have. I found what I assume to be doxes which you have to log in to the website if you'd like to view, but that's factual information, why is the statement of factual information so heinous that this website must be taken off the internet? I saw some pretty mean things, but nobody was saying that you should go say these things on other people's profiles, they just kept these mean things on their website. I didn't see anybody organising swattings, or any other sort of criminal activity.

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.

Hello readers. "bigshell" lives at 1539 William St SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico. How about all you folks who think "bigshell" is incorrect go and show him your numbers?

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?

My public address is on the internet if you Google my full name, it's public record as I've registered a company to my name, and it's also on WHOIS records for domain names and IP addresses. You can also find it on the White Pages, which I have nothing to do with and I have no idea how it got there and it was there before I ever had anything on public record with my name and address.

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.

And how would I get from "bigshell" to your full name and company name?

You wouldn't be able to, I don't really post anything on HN that would really tie back to my uneventful and unremarkable real life. I don't see what this has to do with the fact that if you Google someone you can find public records of them, and that you should be able to reproduce and share factual information.

Do you think everyone has a right to comment your full name and address below your comments?

Sure, print it in a book or on your blog, on a sign outside your house, or on a postcard, or with green eggs and ham.

Mind telling me what it is so I can utilize that right?

I'm on the internet writing from an anonymous HN account. I get to choose what you know about me. Obviously, I want to stay anonymous, so I'm not going to compromise my anonymity by telling you my address. If you find it, go post it to your blog or wherever you wish.

If I link a social media profile to my real name, or something that identifies me, that's my responsibility.

You said you had absolutely no problem with me exercising my right to post your real name and address here. I can't do that unless you tell me. The fact you don't want to tell me indicates that actually, you DO have a problem with me exercising that right.

In general "factual information" is not a defense to a whole bunch of things that society generally recognizes as not protected by free speech (the broad concept, not solely the legal right). I cannot claim to be lawyer and provide you with legal advice, even if that legal advice is correct. I cannot redistribute copies of Taylor Swift's latest album, even if (perhaps especially if) it is a faithful copy. I cannot make a public list of all the black people at my company who show up late to work and leave the white people off that list, even if I'm accurate about when they're showing up. If I am a doctor, I cannot publish transcripts of all the conversations I have with patients.

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.

Addresses aren't copyrighted, and workplace health and safety and discrimination or doctor patient confidentiality don't really fall under this because this information like addresses was already public. And if this information becomes public, whether illegally or legally, you're allowed to republish it. Data breaches get shared all the time and that's legal to do because it's considered public information. You are allowed to publish books and news articles with names and addresses in them, or your legal opinions even if you haven't passed the bar exam (also it's worth noting that this is an American idea) and that's not illegal, so why not websites?

Swatting is not free speech. Posting the address of someone (knowing that there's a non-zero chance some idiot might use it in a swatting) is generally free speech, because negligent or reckless speech is usually protected.

It's irresponsible, but it's generally protected.

I never said swatting was free speech. I know people who have been SWATted over petty Minecraft related disputes before, and I've had people threaten to call the police on me before and tell them that I'm going to rock up to a crowded event with a carbomb. It's a very scary thing, and I don't have an issue with outlawing false emergency services calls that aim to mobilize unnecessarily militarized police forces.

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.

Something about spending most of your time defending scoundrels comes to mind.

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