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Comment by holowoodman | Hacker News Reader

There is quite a difference between "speech" and what ZfpS does. Their actions are often criminal, and not in the sense of "political crimes" but actually criminal acts that have nothing to do with speech or opinions. They have doxed people and called for violence against them, they have exhumed dead children and paraded around their corpses, stolen things, stuff like that.

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The trouble comes when "speech" is arbitrarily defined and/or enforced to suit a narrative. The initial targets are always the lesser-favored extreme cases in order to have the least amount of people disagree with it. Then when the people are comfortable having them define what speech is acceptable, they slowly start eroding rights to include simply anything that they don't like.

That's why people say that taking away the rights of one group is like taking it away for everyone.

Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.

When CF continues to host 8chan and other groups that routinely trade monkey torture/zoosadism videos, but for some reason only KF goes too far... yea that doesn't make sense to me. I don't think they should be playing Internet police, and it's possible that (in the US at least) even doing so in the first place could nullify their Section 230 safe harbor protections, by attempting to moderate content that flows through them.

But also in KF's case I think it was not so much their content that got them "in trouble", but the people behind that crusade being so loud about it, like Liz Fong-Jones and Keffals, who relentlessly harassed every possible service provider even remotely related to any aspect of KF-related services at all, which included domain registrars, DDoS protection services, hosting/colo/DNS providers, IP space owners, upstream ISPs (and even Tier 1s), etc.

It was basically a master class in mentally-questionable retribution crusades for bringing their very ugly skeletons out of the closet and exposing all of their wrongdoings. LFJ was mad that their rape allegation was made public by KF, and Keffals was mad that their illegal bathtub-HRT scheme was made public.

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