Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.”
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.
i encourage anybody who is calls themselves a "free speech advocate" to consider what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech". their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is. if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been harming their free speech. free speech is for everybody, not just the people who have opinions you agree with, and being openly trans is a form of speech.
> their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is.
Free speech to speak only that which the powers agrees with is not free speech. Kiwi farm by definition cannot be harming free speech by using it. Censorflare is harming it by stepping in and becoming a judge of what they deem allowed free speech and not allowed free speech. Which’s means that by definition they do not support free speech.
Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference between saying hateful things and doxing and harassing people with threats of violence.
We don't even need to dip into the endless debate about tolerating hate -- there's no level of ideological indirection here, Kiwi Farms was just very straightforwardly driving people offline with threats of physical harm and real-world harassment.
Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA.
Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that.
In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
> Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices.
Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
> I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc.
Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).
Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal.
Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options.
Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world.
ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone.
The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack.
The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.
> Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).
I'm not disagreeing with your entire argument, just that portion.
Multiple layers of moderation are only safer for free speech to the extent that none of them have too central of a role and there's some degree of visibility as to what is happening.
One of the things that has made social media so toxic to speech is that it has A) gathered so much of the "share" of being a conduit of speech at scale, and B) creates a false feeling of consensus by creating playing fields that are tilted in various ways without the tampering being obvious.
I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech.
I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)
Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.
> I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)
I'm not sure whether Cloudflare deserves antitrust action. But, yes, Facebook is concerning.
Of course, you've got to acknowledge the flip-side. Sometimes it should be left up to the government. If your internet service is a natural monopoly (perhaps augmented with protections of a franchise agreement from the government), it's especially problematic for them to be making moderation decisions.
> Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
CloudFlare acts against speech all the time. They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.
CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well, in many conditions that don't come anywhere approaching "organizing an international manhunt to intimidate a minority": https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#email-routing
They should stop talking about this like it's "pure speech" because it's not that at all, and even to the extent that it is, they already limit actual "pure speech" in many other scenarios not nearly as threatening as this.
OK, you're willfully missing the point because we're talking about the position relating to Cloudflare's security services, not hosting or other products that have have a more restrictive TOS.
As far as they do mention activity, they do say they ban content related to activity that is, for example, "libelous". So they'll block you for publishing insults about someone, without any further malicious activity.
They also say that they ban content used as part of malware command and control, which seems to cover spamming, meaning that they should have no problem blocking spammers trying to use their "security protection" service.
Of course it turns out I don't even have to use the analogy with spam because CloudFlare's own post that you linked to clearly states they can remove access to content that is "... harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals ...".
That's literally been KF's modus operandi for years now. Unless CF changed their terms very recently, that behavior of KF has always been proscribed. Yet CF saw fit in their discretion to make a conscious choice to continue aiding and abetting KF in its campaign of doxxing and incitement of violence, something far worse than libel or C2.
> As far as they do mention activity, they do say they ban content related to activity that is, for example, "libelous".
You're again missing the distinction between their hosting policy and their security product policy. This was the important distinction that I first pointed out to 2 comments ago, and that I posted this document which explains clearly 1 comment ago.
> Hosting products are subject to our Acceptable Hosting Policy. Under that policy, for these products, we may remove or disable access to content that we believe:
...
> has been determined by appropriate legal process to be defamatory or libelous.
...
> Our conclusion — informed by all of the many conversations we have had and the thoughtful discussion in the broader community — is that voluntarily terminating access to services that protect against cyberattack is not the correct approach.
Do we still call it “speech” if it’s a threat for physical violence? This seems even more clear when an established past of threats being actualized exists.
Edit-Maybe I’ll make this personal. I’ve been a victim of both verbal and physical bullying. At some point words cross a boundary from speech to violence. You could even see this with the audio simulations used to simulate schizophrenia. I’d say speech crosses the boundary into violence when it hurts another person and cannot be “muted” by the other. Ie doxxing someone-once it’s on the internet it’s out there for all time. Etc.
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
My issue is that the Kiwi post in question - which (to my reading) was a very VERY stupid bomb “joke” obliquely referencing the Belfast Troubles - appears to have been quickly moderated and the user banned. Which is, I thought, how this was all supposed to work.
The screenshot going around Twitter of the idiotic post was tweeted out within literal minutes of said post being made. I have no idea how long it took the KF moderators to delete the post and ban the user but, from a perusal of the following pages in that thread, it doesn’t seem like it was up very long.
So is moderation an issue? It doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps that post was the final straw, but CloudFlare is framing their action as having to step in and “moderate” specifically because of THAT post - and yet the post in question had already been (correctly) nuked from orbit by the KF mods.
Edit: here’s where I do the obligatory “I didn’t vote for Trump, however” mea culpa: I do not have a KiwiFarms account and honestly I find it to be fairly distasteful in a 2004 FYAD sort of way.
> You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online.
No, we want the government to clandestinely meet every week with representatives of major internet companies and instruct them who to ban and what information to suppress, while pretending it's independent action of the same companies driven by their love of free speech. Or maybe we don't want that, but who cares - it's what we've got.
This is kind of exactly what I mean when I say that people haven't really though this through.
You intend this to be a gotcha, but yes, unironically getting pressured by a political representative has fewer free speech implications than the government openly threatening to throw people in prison. It does have implications; it's not ideal. But are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
I've brought up SESTA/FOSTA a few times already, but they're kind of an ever-green example. The government has been pressuring companies to deplatform sex workers for ages, but SESTA/FOSTA were still a worse outcome. I don't want the government trying to do run-arounds to the First Amendment in the first place, but if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
> But are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
Not the poster, but-- I'm not so sure either way. Both are pretty bad. The government convincing private parties to do their bidding while acting like it's just the private sector making choices blinds us all to what's happened, and gives the illusion that the decision to squash the speech is a popular, voluntary one by individual actors.
So, the government forcing it is directly more harmful but at least it is visible.
> The government has been pressuring companies to deplatform sex workers for ages, but SESTA/FOSTA were still a worse outcome. I don't want the government trying to do run-arounds to the First Amendment in the first place, but if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
Passing SESTA/FOSTA didn't require any "help" from free speech advocates. The government has had a longstanding policy to go overboard against prostitution and prostitution-adjacent material long before Section 230 or SESTA/FOSTA existed. Legislating run arounds against the First Amendment (e.g. Cosmtock Laws) and pressuring private industry (e.g. Hays Code), have been goto strategies since the country's founding, if not before. The solution has always been to fight it out in the courts (as in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) or find ways around the letter of the law (Backpage pre-2018).
Pushing the issue to government at least provides consistency, rather than leaving the issue to fairweather service providers and perfidious content policies.
> at least provides consistency, rather than leaving the issue to fairweather service providers and perfidious content policies
Once again, I think this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that people who advocate for more government involvement haven't thought about this issue enough.
Consistent censorship results in more censorship than you would see with inconsistent censorship by fairweather services.
If you want any argument about that, consider that Cloudflare dropped a number of sex sites specifically after SESTA/FOSTA was passed and not before.
Of course, it would be better to have neither situation, but an inconsistent patchwork of censorship is obviously less censorship than a consistently applied standard that even free-speech-absolutists like Cloudflare have to follow.
> or find ways around the letter of the law (Backpage pre-2018).
Once again, light legislation leads to more wiggle room for companies to interpret the law, which tends to result in less censorship overall. As proven by Backpage pre-2018.
You can still fight inconsistent censorship in the courts. You can still have laws struck down. You can still work to change public perception of censored speech or normalize it. Unless you're aiming for an acceleration of censorship (which is a usually a bad strategy), then "at least" and "provides consistency" shouldn't be chained together in the same sentence. If you believe that something is a negative outcome, a consistently negative outcome is worse than an inconsistently negative outcome.
This isn't just a free speech thing, it's just a general principle that accelerationists don't always completely grasp: the scenarios where accelerationism works to produce preferable outcomes are kind of narrow and rare. I don't want to get stabbed at all, but I prefer a world where I might get stabbed over a world where I definitely will get stabbed. Making the stabbings more consistent isn't an improvement.
> are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
No, I am not arguing that the government asking Zuckerberg for a regular friendly chat where it tells him who to ban and he complies is worse than the government shooting Zuckerberg in the head as a traitor and nationalizing Facebook. The latter would be worse. But both are very bad and should not happen in free democratic society where freedom of speech is valued.
> if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
It's the same world. If the operators would not comply "voluntarily", that exactly what would happen. But the censorship by it's nature does not like exposure, so the less overt means can be used, the better. If they can do it without loud clashes, just by everybody "consenting" to it "privately" - much better. If somebody dares to step out - the pressure would be increased, up to, ultimately, using the force of violence, if necessary. That has happened many times to journalists that dug in wrong places. So far none of the companies has been dangerous enough to employ such level of pressure - usually there's always somebody in the lower levels that can help with the problem, like CF, or Amazon, or Google - but we're just getting ramped up. We'll get to felonies eventually. Unless we manage to stop it somehow.
So, does Cloudflare in this blogpost actively asking governments to take a more active role in moderation decisions across the board make it more likely for the scenario you're describing to happen, or less likely?
We can disagree about which outcome is worse or about whether they're equivalent, but other than that disagreement it doesn't sound like you're arguing that Cloudflare is being prudent or helping advance freedom of speech when it asks governments to make these decisions for it.
If you think US federal government has "little to no power" over the company whose main business, headquarters and most of the workers are all located in the US - you really misunderstand just how vast US federal government powers are.
I trust you can find many more links about this topic. As a side note, this is the part we have just learned. Is that all of it? FBI just told us it routinely instructs social media companies about which content they'd like suppressed. And, as we know, they get their wishes.
> what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't
How would I know? I wasn't there. I know which consequences US Federal Government can visit on you if it really hates you, and that's a real lot of bad consequences. How it went on those meetings - I have no idea. Maybe they didn't even need to threaten - though they certainly did in public - the President accused Facebook of "killing people". Do you thing if the Supreme Commander of the US Army and the head of US Federal Executive tells you you're killing people and need to stop it - it's not something you need to think really really hard about?
> Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR
I know, I've been there. We're not. But we're inching closer and closer to there. When it'd become obvious, it'd be too late to complain - by then, any complaint outside of the boundaries of your private kitchen will land you is a big trouble. Better complain while it's still allowed.
And yet, none of this information was remotely suppressed, which suggests that the government is largely toothless with regard to these requests. Perhaps corporations acquiesce due to a gentleman's agreement, or even because they think it's the right thing to do, in which case your beef should be with them more than the government. On the whole, this feels like a "think about it, man!" kind of argument to me.
Also, these sources seem sketchy at best. Do you have reporting from a reputable newspaper? I'm not saying this didn't happen, but the way this reporting is presented definitely doesn't pass my sniff test.
FWIW, I believe that the government shouldn't be threatening corporations to censor things, but I also don't think that's what's happening here. (Though I could be wrong — waiting to read some credible investigative journalism about it.) I also don't know what the precedent is for this kind of public-private coordination.
In any case, the information still gets out, whether on social media or elsewhere.
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Now we're somehow discussing "multiple layers of moderation". This was fast. No limiting principles in sight either.
> Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company.
Very obviously Cloudflare is operating at a higher level of infrastructure than ISPs or the government.
If they actually believe that they are infrastructure that people have a human right to access and that is so fundamental to the Internet that they should be treated as level 0 infrastructure, then they should consider dissolving the company and forming a public org instead.
Otherwise, yes, of course Cloudflare should have stricter standards. Even under Net Neutrality (which I support) ISPs have more moderation power than the government does. Banks arguably have far too much moderation power (I do think people should have a right to banking access), but I don't know anyone who would argue that banks should have no moderation powers at all, it would make it impossible for them to prevent fraud or abuse if that was the case.
Cloudflare obviously should not have as strict moderation as a web forum, but this isn't a binary choice. The limiting principle here is having multiple layers of infrastructure. It's choosing not to have a single company in charge of DDOS protection for 20% of the web.
The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail.
So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?
But we can have a society where CEO can decide who can use their company service. That itself is by every definition, free speech. Kiwifarm doesn't cease to exist; they just can't use CF.
Let's not be coy here - the ultimate goal is to exactly make them cease to exist. And indeed, in any other case such action would be pointless - if they're dangerous hateful bigots that endanger lives, then what changes if they move to another provider? What has been achieved by that? It's like the police would say "we caught this terrible murderer and we forced him to change the store where he shops for groceries and to wear different brand of clothes. Yay us!" What's the point then? The only case where it makes any sense if when the ultimate goal - maybe not immediate, but eventual - is to drive it out of existence.
CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
Everyone here has defended the CEO right to make those decision. The disagreement is his argument and justfication.
He should just come out and say "I did it because i can and want to" not those long winded excuses
> We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not.
> If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.
When credible threats are made to law enforcement or their families, law enforcement takes quick action. It's frustrating to me that marginalized groups don't get that same privilege, including credible threats of imminent violence from spouses. You do that once, you should be hauled in to cool off in jail for 24 hours. Do it again and it's a month and heavy fines.
In the Kiwi case, I don't know that any laws were broken. But it seems American law is very reactive rather than proactive or preventative.
So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline.
But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else.
The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
”Unmasking” is merely code for “doxing someone we don’t like.” Someone’s full legal name is all you really need to look them up on people-finder websites, which IMO are the real problem and in urgent need of regulation.
There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
There is no such counter on Kiwifarms - at most they’ve front paged claims (totally unsourced and totally unfounded) by Keffals and others that KF has caused three or more suicides.
A reminder, by the way, that Keffals has used her platform to promote the use of DIY HRT by minors. (https://t.co/4dnauozhuS) KF was the first to find evidence of Keffals flirting with underage trans children in her discord (known as her Femboy Ranch) and, despite my dislike of KF, her campaign seems mostly committed to memory holing these events.
What you've linked to is a DIY HRT guide sponsored by her. This is an essential resource for trans people in most of the world -- not all parts of the world are as progressive as the San Francisco Bay Area.
There's no mention of minors on that website. It's not reasonable to try and restrict this information from minors either.
edit: responding to post from deepdriver below: your first link is from a vicious transphobe who in the very first line misgenders trans women and girls, and the second post has blatant anti-Semitism in it within the first couple of sentences. Also, the packaging is pretty cringe, but saying that it is explicitly targeting kids is ridiculous -- I've seen plenty of adults with that aesthetic.
If you really care about unlicensed pharmacies on the internet, you would encourage easier access to HRT so that trans teens don't have to resort to this.
edit: responding to other post from Banana699 below: The thing that separates you and me is that the scientific evidence clearly indicates that gender dysphoria is real, and that social and medical transition is greatly helpful. My "ideology" is to follow the science, understanding that it has limitations but that it is the best known way to understand reality.
Huh? You know nothing of my views on HRT availability and created a massive straw man. Bobposting and Keffals both brag about how many young people they’ve gotten on HRT; this information is logged on Keffals’ thread and she started her rampage against KF when this archiving happened - well before any supposed bomb threat or harassment.
I have absolutely zero issues with trans people and support affirmation. I don’t like non-doctors/non-professionals, streamers who are essentially entertainers, telling kids how to medically change their body (without parental input) and then connecting them to sources that are of extremely dubious quality (bathtub HRT). I don’t think that’s a ridiculous stance.
Everything your ideology do is justified and reasonable and Morality itself personified. Everything the other guy's ideology do is unthinkable and shameful and should be taken off the Internet without due process or even a chance to clarify oneself.
If this is how you want it, this is how it's gonna be. But be advised that pendulums swing left and right.
There are many archived Twitter posts where the owners of this site (Keffals and Chloe aka bobposting) brag about supplying minors with hormones behind parents’ backs, even sending these drugs to children directly which is highly illegal. The top “Homebrew” online pharmacy they link to sells cross-sex hormones in holofoil boxes clearly marketed to children, decorated with lolita anime art and “Keep Away from Parents” labels:
Hardly surprising given the sexualized Discord server called “Catboy Ranch” where Keffals, who is nearly 30, led many underage viewers down the path of medical gender transition. Some were as young as 13. Keffals sent them collars to show they were Keffals’ pets. Users engaged in sexual talk and discussed taking naked selfies. Ctrl+F “Catboy”):
I believe Kiwi Farms’ investigation of this activity, as well as Keffals’ failed career as a niche porn actress, are why Keffals seeks to get the site taken down. Of course, all this has been saved across multiple archive services and will never go away.
I think the issue was mainly that (from the viewpoint of those complaining) she harassed the LoTT’s family at their homes and then went live with the article before giving anyone connected to LoTT (including LoTT herself) sufficient time to address her questions and statements.
I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
She published LoTT’s full legal name and enough of a description to positively locate her on Spokeo/White Pages/etc. That is a common cop-out for Twitter mobs; posting the ready-made parts for such a search but not the actual home address, so in the poster’s eyes it technically isn’t “doxing.”
The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc.
The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical
Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal.
Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit.
That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably.
I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government.
I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack.
Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
Most of the posters on the site might do nothing illegal, but one or two did make actual threats that crossed the line into criminal conduct. Even if the posts were immediately deleted by moderators, people still took screenshots.
So if I threatened you right here in this post, and someone screencapped it before a moderator deleted it, then HN has no right to exist? Or does there need to be another person or two also threatening you? Just the fact that it happened, regardless of it being against the site's TOS and taken down by site admins, means that the site is now complicit and loses any right or privilege to protection?
Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News.
The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online.
We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong.
The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.
The 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech aren't the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a philosophical concept and is, in fact, "freedom from consequences."
There is consequences to everything. It’s the philosophical right to talk. Not the right to an audience or the right that people won’t be mad at you for disagreeing.
If I call your fiance ugly you may not invite me to your wedding even though I have freedom of speech. If I tell the waiter they’re ugly, they may not serve me food even though I have the freedom of speech. Everything has consequences.
What if you criticize Amazon? Should you be banned from using all their services? What if you criticize private enterprise in general? Banned from everything except services provided by the state then? Your interpersonal examples where both people/groups have very little and similar amounts of power. 'Consequences' to speech become dangerous when corporations or even larger groups of people get involved.
but "giving the individual the choice to listen to whatever influence they wish" means that when somebody uses the threat of physical violence to silence one of those influences, anybody who stands up for free speech must push back against that. everybody deserves to have their say, except those who would seek to silence others.
defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
Free speech is not completely unfettered. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech that incites imminent lawless action - and that would likely cause such action - can be punished under the law.
In all likelihood this appears to be what is happening with kiwi farms. Of course, the issue is that Cloudflare can’t undertake legal enforcement, but they have a terms of use and so contractually are duly within their rights to end service to kiwifarms.
Why should I take this argument on good faith when literally this same argument has been repeatedly used in attempts to deplatform comedians, popular politicians, writers, journalists and tons of ordinary people?
Were said comedians, popular politicians, writers, and journalist calling for immediate violent acts and intimidation of others.
If yes, then I believe they should be censored.
If no, , then they should not.
Authoritarians will use both arguments at the same time, they have no problem with hypocrisy. They will threaten you with violence, and demand their violence be published, while with the slights of those they do not like demand censorship.
Calls for violence must not be tolerated, for if they are civil society cannot exist.
What? Testing it? To make sure we can actually exercise it in practice? Because "be careful how you use it or you might ruin it for everyone" wasn't ever how the 1st amendment was meant to work. Like, what would be the point. Let's let the 1st amendment say you have to check in with anyone sensitive and if they don't like it, you can't say it, because "we live in a society" Let's have a new Mandatory Courtesy and Respect amendment.
I am so utterly ashamed of the tech industry at this point. I'm glad I retired and don't have to pretend to your faces.
"The Internet interpretes censorship as damage and routes around it." Oh how naive and libertarian us techies were in the reactionary nineteen hundred and nineties.
It's very hard for me to take this seriously when the same rules are never applied to trans people and their advocates.
They have free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling for her crime of acknowledging biological reality... and nobody will even acknowledge they're doing anything wrong.
This argument is essentially "Free speech goes both ways. Except you, you don't get it, only we do
Free speech only goes one way." which is directly and immediately contradictory.
Also, being trans isn't free speech, it's stifling the free speech of others. Nobody is allowed to acknowledge physical, biological facts about transgender people. Taking away people's free speech is not free speech, it's the opposite.
Nobody is arguing that any one group should have blanket free speech protections. There are definitely trans people who turn to harassment and threats to try to protect their community, which isn't okay.
But at least three trans/gnc people have died through suicide, directly attributable to Kiwi Farms. Near, a brilliant and widely respected open source contributor, specified in their suicide note that it was because Kiwi Farms had made their life hell for years (https://www.ign.com/articles/near-bsnes-remembrance). Just because there are some bad apples in the trans community doesn't make this okay, and they don't get carte blanche to make threats online - they get banned from social media like most other people. There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
> There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
Huh? Of course there is. It's called Twitter. I've seen posts from all kinds of people calling for the deaths of all men, for example. Literally: "kill all men", verbatim. I've seen them get called out on it, only to laugh in the face of the "reddit virgins" who had the audacity to talk back to them. It's a mistake to think they are not hateful.
How many people commit suicide because of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? I have absolutely no doubt it's a far greater number than some trolling website in the darker corners of the internet. Why isn't cloudflare condemning them?
No - with Twitter there's some accountability; they respond to police requests and frequently ban abusive users. There was nothing people could do about the vile harassment campaigns on KF (a site that grew organically from harassing and stalking an autistic sonic fan) until CloudFlare had their hand forced.
Friend of a friend knew them IRL, and was extremely upset with me for thinking they might be faking their own death. Near is likely dead as much as we don't want to believe it.
The fact that no US Citizens in Japan had been reported dead by the government in the time period that Near supposedly killed himself pretty much tells me it’s probably a hoax.
However, I do hope it was not a hoax, and not because I want him dead, but because I am not looking forward to the era where people commit fake “suicides” as the ultimate way to bring attention to a cause or argument, or just as a way to “win” and get the last word. It’s the climax of clout chasing IMO. But it takes away from people who actually do commit suicide and minimizes their tragedies, as our first instinct will eventually be to assume all suicides are fake.
We have not crossed that line yet as a society, but I fear someday we will. Already I doubt anyone has actually killed themselves because of KF.
There are many trans people who have been terrorized by KF, had their partners and parents harassed and so on. I'm not going to link their Twitter threads because plenty of people in this thread openly admit to being KF users.
edit to respond to xwdv below: Unlike you, I care about trans people and their loved ones being terrorized.
I don’t care if they’ve been terrorized what I’m saying is I don’t want people faking suicides as the next attention grabbing strategy, and as a way to wrongfully throw blood on other people’s hands. Just do not cross that line. Deaths are one of the few things that people still somewhat respect online.
>It's very hard for me to take this seriously when the same rules are never applied to trans people and their advocates.
I know that I'm going to regret stepping in this pile of community dog poo, but ...
The simple idea behind "the rule of law" and the concept of "justice" is that it applies equally to all. Regardless of what someone claims to "support" or "oppose" online, death threats are illegal (and sometimes deadly) and should be dealt with accordingly.
I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling". As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; in the absence of such evidence, which your post is, your claims are inflammatory, at best. Were there an option to report your comment (or were I intelligent enough to know how that option worked), I would have done so.
I know that I should not have to spell this out, but it is not OK to threaten people's lives. This, regardless of whether (i) you are trans, (ii) you support trans people, (iii) you hate trans people, or (iv) none of the above.
This post above is a tactic called DARVO : deny, attack, reverse the role of victim and offender.
That KF would be the ones attacking free speech by the act of speaking freely, while the people attacking Cloudflare and KF are the ones who are really, truly pro free speech.
So here's a question: is it illegal under US law to make estrogen in your bathtub with poor quality control, and then package it into small glass bottles and send it to minors who are confused about their sexuality ? Who did that, and what was Twitter user, keffals' involvement in that practice? EDIT to clarify: (Keffals being the person pushing for Cloudflare to drop KF).
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
This is the logic of vigilantes. I'm not saying what you have done is on the same level as vigilante murder or anything, but don't try to justify it as something high-and-mighty. You've once again terminated a customer on a whim. And that's your right, but stop trying to make this out to be anything more than that.
KF can (and does) say whatever they want. That does not give its users the right to doxx an individual or threaten them or otherwise illegally harass them via extra-judicial measures. It’s that simple.
It’s also in Cloudflare’s very own terms of service that KF agreed to when they signed up
Is there doxxing and threats actually carried out on KF that are not suppressed by the moderators? I've read some of the lolcow threads and have never seen serious threats or serious doxx material like addresses. I'm not saying it doesn't happen because I have not read a lot of KF content but I think people need to provide supporting evidence for these claims. My suspicion is a lot of the bad stuff is not organized directly on KF but rather secret discord/telegram groups.
There also seems to be a double standard where dropkiwifarms.net has a link to a google drive that seems to be somewhat similar to the content that might appear on a lolcow thread and could be interpreted as 'doxxing'. For example it has a copy of Joshua Moon's resume and a legal document showing his name change.
Are you sure "doxxing" is illegal in all US jurisdictions, as well as the jurisdiction it is hosted in? If it's for the purpose of harassments it may be illegal. Remember California DOJ released (doxxed) online the name and address of all California CCW holders, including judges and other sensitive holders (DV victims, etc). At least California seems to think it's peachy.
But if you have no intent to harass it would be legal then no? I mean California released names and address of judge and DV victims and other people who don't want abusers to find them from the CCW registry so they must not consider it harassments just to release the information. Those people definitely had no idea it was going to be released online, and I imagine some of the judges probably have tried very hard not to have an internet presence. They (the person who had their identification released) may have considered it harassment but without proving the DOJ "intended" to harrass...
I would argue California DoJ set the example that even releasing personal information in what appears as retaliation to an event seems to be lawful in their eyes. When California DoJ started doxxing they did it right after Bruen Supreme Court case was released.... but hey I can't prove their intent.
> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Does Cloudflare wait for a court order before taking action when it detects a DDoS attack or when it suspects that a client is malicious?
The law is by design reactionary. In this case, I don't mean that in a bad way; what I mean is that the law is designed to respond to criminals, not to preempt them. If all of your moderation decisions, even in cases that go beyond hate speech or bigoted content into straight-up abuse of infrastructure and direct targeting of individuals -- if you need that to be reliant on a court then you are giving up the ability to prevent abuse and you can only respond to that abuse.
Do you worry about due process when someone's site is getting knocked offline by automated requests, or is your primary worry about protecting your customers?
What's even worse is that by abjugating your responsibility to protect your customers even in cases where there are clear threats, and by encouraging the law to become even faster and more trigger-happy to compensate, you encourage the creation of censorship engines that are even more dangerous than the ones that you are in charge of. We should have better laws around doxing and threatening people online, but even once we get better laws, Cloudflare is still going to have a part to play in detecting targeted attacks. No just law is going to be fast enough or nuanced enough to make these decisions for you.
You can't get rid of your responsibility to such a degree that you won't need to make moderation decisions even about non-ideological and purely abusive content like doxing forums. And by refusing to recognize your role in that process, you allow people to be completely driven offline and censored in the exact same ways that your company is dedicated to preventing. It's no different than allowing a DDoS attack on one of your clients to continue because you haven't specifically heard from a judge yet that you should stop it.
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
Post the screenshot then. Show us what changed between when CF said "KF is acting within the bounds of the law and will remain online" and today.
Refusing service to customers you find contemptible is completely reasonable. Continuing to service customers out of a sense of fairness even though you find them contemptible is also reasonable. Pretending that you have a sense of fairness that keeps all legal entities online and abandoning it to protect your bottom line is hypocritical and cowardly.
Being a company that protects the vulnerable is every bit as honorable as being a company that stands for freedom of expression. Today Cloudflare proves it is neither.
If you go on Twitter, 90% of the replies aren't happy with Cloudflare's action. They want Cloudflare to do more and blaming CEO for why it took so long.
Just shows how the activists are hammering Cloudflare CEO into submission. These people want complete abandonment of Freedom of Speech/Expression despite of what CEO is saying in this thread that it isn't about FoS/FoE.
I am just terrified of what holds for our future. We used to celebrate speech as progressives back in the 90's and used to defend it with fierce opposition to any supression. They say, freedom and liberty are one generation away, if the newer generation wants CCP-style authoritarianism, they will get it.
Maybe centralizing a measurable percentage of the internet onto a single provider to the point they are frequently in this situation wasn't a great idea.
Consider this next time you consider Cloudflare. Not because of what decision they made, but because they are trying to make themselves the pipe that connects any two points on the internet.
I dearly wish there was public-sector internet that was governed by the same rules as the post office. Stay within the law and nothing happens to you, violate the law and get arrested.
We have something even better than that! The Internet is decentralised, no matter how much CF tries to pretend it isn't. Just choose not to use services like CF.
You think that would be a viable option? One half of the country thinks that we don't need to hand over internet in the hands of Gov. The other half wants to abolish SCOTUS. But in spirit, if it works well like the post office, I am onboard with that idea. The other idea would be to pass laws that make what Cloudflare is doing illegal.
The internet is global, some individual countries might have faults with their government, but the idea as a whole could be viable. It would need to be managed by a supranational, non-partisan, multipolar entity.
I disagree somewhat. rule of law' sounds like such a neat, objective solution to social problems, but in practice it centralizes a vast amount of decision-making in organs of state (courts and to a lesser extent, public prosecutors.
This in turn drastically shapes incentives, because of the cost of litigation and highly variable access to legal infrastructure: as we all know, police have no formal duty to protect despite having vast levels of legal immunity from consequences when they make bad decisions.
Hence the pressure campaign on your firm, because exerting leverage through market forces and PR strategies is simply more effective than begging some state authority to intervene. Of course, it hurts you somewhat insofar as it's harder for you to sell a service to anyone and everyone when people see that you're willing to revoke access in some cases. but then you were willing to do that already, eg to pre-empt perceived legal risks from FOSTA/SESTA.
I think sites like Kiwifarms have a right to exist, but on the other hand they don't have any particular right to DDOS protection. If a site is so chronically unpopular that it's constantly getting kicked out of nice infrastructure perhaps the operators need to reconsider their security stance or reflect on the basis of said unpopularity.
Of course, DDOS attacks can be engineered rather than being an expression of organic network sentiment, but then so can mitigation strategies.
You're not a law enforcement organization. You don't have the ability to investigate and determine whether or not the threat is genuine or if it's an agent provocateur.
Banning them creates a hazard, since now to get an opponent banned from the service, they can create content that reaches to this level.
How do you intend to generalize this case to other websites with user-generated content? Because the precedent set today is that a single threatening user-generated comment is enough to pull Cloudflare security services for the entire site, regardless of how quickly the website performs their own moderation, as long as it stays up long enough to be screenshotted and passed around on Twitter. That's basically carte blanche to deny service to any website with user generated content whenever you want.
Cloudflare's post the other day seemed like a very reasonable framework for making decisions on issues like this, but Cloudflare's actions today just severely undercut your credibility on this issue.
In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call.
I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?
There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.
You are free to make a decentralized crypto-driven platform filled with nazi's. What you're ignoring is there are very valid reasons these platforms don't exist. They become deplorable crapsack worlds that 'normies' will not visit. It is never going to have any mainstream popularity. "Oh, you're on that nazi child porn software". And it requires a massive amount of moderation to ensure such a form does not become a complete hellhole (see failures of NNTP).
When you pull your crypto driven system out of the light, you are going to have to fight what lives in the dark. If you screwed up the protocol of your system and it's taken over, well it's gone, you exist outside the law and there are no means to get it back. Do a bunch of trolls with stolen crypto generation means exist on your network and flood out all the legitimate users, well too bad.
Civil society exists between the authoritarians that want dominion over everything and those that embrace chaos and would leave the world in ruin. It is a delicate and imperfect balance, but where it exists allows humanity to flourish.
I believe we're arguing past each other. What I'm saying is there is no business model (one is even needed for free projects like the linux kernel) that motivates people to spend this effort. The people with the technical know how and desire to obtain the materials on it already use it. Beyond that group there is little motivation to expand such network, civil society tends to operate in the open.
I'm talking about an elegant technical solution to cloudflare's very real business problem. If they deliver a solid open source solution to the dark web name resolution problem, there's less pressure on them to host all sorts of marginal content.
A rare win/win.
"civil society tends to operate in the open"
... Some of us aren't up to your standards of civility and propriety, and we're going to find ways to get on without your permission.
There are at least five orders of magnitude more people who are called Nazis than there are actual people who hold all the main Nazi ideals and beliefs today.
Forgive me if my understanding is wrong, but if someone were to host a message board or similar site with UGC and have it backed by Cloudflare, and a troll makes posts and threads threatening disasters on multiple occasions even though the site's administration removes them with haste, would Cloudflare also deny service to them? Basically take the current situation but instead of Kiwi Farms, replace it with "Grandma's Cat Forum".
This is exactly the determination. The post being spread around as evidence of harm was by a user with four posts, all within the last week, all on this thread, despite being a member for two years.
If I were trying to get a website deplatformed at least the approach is clear and easy.
It is far more than just a few posts. It goes far beyond speech online.
The entire history/founding of KF is predicated around violence perpetrated against trans people.
They actively stock, harass, and cause harm IRL. Even far-right anti-trans people like MTG allege they were behind the SWATs against her - and that is not the first accusation.
This has resulted in deaths.
They recently followed a women into a different country, after they chased her from their home.
They tracker her down and someone posted a photo outside of her new residence.
like a cartel hostage sign. A not so implicit threat that they can find you no matter where you hide and are an IRL person is literally a hundred feet away.
The distinction the parent post making is that, it was an agent provocateur who intentionally did things that would have crossed the line into actionable threats of harm. If that's true, it would seem to be an effective way of silencing people.
This also is how authoritarian governments create cause to neutralize groups.
Ok, can we know what was this great threat then that suddenly made you change your position in just a few days?
Furthermore, do you believe that someone who is issuing a threat on a public platform is going to not act it out because you took it away? If anything it just sounds like it would make them even more incensed to do it, just makes absolutely no sense to frame it as some immediacy issue.
So all it takes is for a malicious actor to engage in false flag operations against me and CF will completely walk back their abuse policies and terminate my services, even if I act the best I can to moderate and remove the offending content?
I'm not saying what happened on Kiwi Farms was a false flag because I don't know that, but neither do you. It's hard to process just how antithetical your actions today are compared to your words 3 days ago.
Excellent; since you're concerned about it, it should be quite easy to provide that evidence, right? Personally, I would settle for quotes with private information redacted (usually I'd ask for archive.org copies or such, but in the case of doxxing I agree that's not ideal).
That's fair, actually; if that is the case then I very much hope to see a post in the near future explaining what happened as soon as it's no longer an active matter for the police.
> Just rang up a couple of lads down in Belfast and
asked them to plant bombs in all of those places.
also, 3 armed men will be at each place, waiting.
Seems to have been moderated/scrubbed from the keffals thread but I do see replies referencing it.
The post was screenshotted and posted to Twitter almost instantly and it seems that the post itself was quickly moderated and the user banned.
Seems like a straw that broke the camel’s back situation, but it’s very odd how CloudFlare is talking about “moderation” when it seems as though KiwiFarms quickly took care of moderating it themselves.
And fwiw, I had no idea what KiwiFarms was before this week.
I know you are concerned, or at least that you wrote that you were concerned, but given that it is a real concern why do it then, what do you accomplish? whatever threat that was supposedly being organized will still come to fruition, no?
As I asked previously, there is any indication of kiwifarms involvement? there's nothing in that link pointing to it, aside from someone calling in to say they are a specific user in the forum, which lets be honest here it's madness to think is relevant.
I looked into KF as this was all breaking last week. I don’t have any links as they’re no longer accessible, so take what I say as you will.
When I went on, on the forum’s official home page put front and center there was a link to a post written by an admin/moderator (which was also pinned by moderators) doxxing some trans woman with her address and last known location and the need to bring her to “justice”, whatever that meant.
Frankly it was appalling and I felt like from that one post alone (there were hundreds of posts) I had seen enough
Trying to make sense of this whole thing just makes me feel like i'm going mad, everyone supposedly knows that is common sense that they are guilty of several swattings, harassment, etc, but not a single person can show anything even close to resembling action, or even non-absurd obvious joke threats, while the archives do show rules against it(for whatever that's worth) and reportedly even by the detractors those threats had been deleted. How can something gain this much notoriety, show up in so many articles being blamed for those things and not a single source can give something backing it up that isn't wild speculation?
Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.
Maybe I should just stop trying to make sense of it at this point and go to bed.
The same thing happened with 8chan, and has certainly happened with other sites/organizations/etc. It's easy to run a smear campaign against a group that "everyone knows" is evil, no need to even provide evidence.
Tell me then - why does Cloudflare still offer its services to drug dealers? To sites run by terrorist groups like ISIS? To outright criminal scamming operations?
I have no faith in your principles. From my perspective, the only principle you have is your share price. That's fine, of course. I don't expect you to stick your neck out or risk your business. But don't pretend like this is some principled stand.
> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat
If one patron starts beating another to a pulp, the bartender breaking up the fight does not signify a failure of the rule of law or law enforcement. You stepped in to help. It would be nice if you were given official air cover to do so. But I and most Americans prefer a system where the government has extra hoops to jump through to halt even dangerous speech.
The bartender example is so wrong that it has wrapped around into rightness.
What really happens is that the bartender signals the cooler to throw out said patrons to settle it some place where it isn't their liability. It goes to the street, who knows where and what they'll do to each other.
And that's pretty much what cloudflare is doing here, saying "you can't do this in here" and now we get to see where the chips fall.
> What really happens is that the bartender signals the cooler to throw out said patrons to settle it some place where it isn't their liability. It goes to the street, who knows where and what they'll do to each other
This is more accurate, thank you. Either way, not a failure of law enforcement. (It is if the bartender calls the cops, they do nothing, and the victim turns up the next day in a hand basket.)
Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides.
When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.
I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me.
That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you're no longer in a suicidal state) is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
The harassment from Kiwifarms is/was reprehensible, but harassment alone, at that level, is enough to draw a social and legal response without pretending they are responsible for someone else's suicide.
> is that you alone are responsible for your actions; you're not merely at the whim of your circumstances.
It's not a choice when strangers online begin sending your embarrassing personal info to your family and friends, begin harassing your friends and show up in person to terrorize you.
Imagine if when you were suicidal, random strangers threatened the person supporting you until they told you they couldn't help you anymore because of them.
> The honest truth is, I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now. It's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
>
I can't handle this anymore. I have tried everything. I have taken every medication available. I have tried multiple therapists. I have tried closing myself off from the world. It doesn't help at all. Every night I am filled with panic attacks and dread and worry
There is some recent precedent for criminal responsibility for someone else's suicide: the (in)famous case of Conrad Roy and Michelle Carter. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging him to commit suicide over texts and phone calls.
Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.
With all due respect, that may be true in most cases and a good message to receive for most people in therapy, but it's not true in all cases. As has been shown time and time again, humans are very receptive to propaganda and brain washing, and there's only so much harassment a person can take. A "regular" person might need to hear that the world doesn't have an agenda against you, that you're responsible for your actions, and if there's something about your life that you don't like you can take action to change it. But if there's an actual campaign against you, that advice no longer holds, and eventually that kind of harassment can definitively drive somebody to suicide. The only time I've heard of Kiwi Farms before today was when Near committed suicide. There's plenty written about the tragic event, but you can start with their goodby thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640?s...
If a US national dies in Japan, the Japanese authorities report that information to the US authorities. The state department publishes a list of all deaths of US expats living abroad, and there are no deaths anywhere close to the date when Near/Byuu allegedly committed suicide:
Literally the only evidence that has been provided of his death is the statement of one of his friends and a photograph of a personalized urn. No obituaries, no police reports, etc.
The numbers provided by both countries are inconsistent with each other, and half of 2021 has no reported suicide in the State Department data. Please stop spreading this conspiracy theory based on statistics not being entirely consistent with the story, if they aren't even consistent with themselves.
Near is almost certainly not dead. There is no evidence of his death, he’s been seen alive by fellow foreign devs active in SE Asia and interacting with Hector’s Asahi Linux streams and Hector’s VTuber accounts, and he did not appear on any canonical government (Japanese or US) death lists.
Near was dealing with way more than KF. He wanted his thread deleted because it documented him absconding with thousands of dollars of donor money and dozens of rare games he was supposed to return or donate after archiving. He further engaged in rather aggressive behavior with other developers in the emulation community. His thread had actually been dead for nearly a year when he suddenly emailed Josh asking for it to be deleted (which he offered six figures). He threatened suicide when Josh gave the email to his lawyer and asked whether or not said approach by Byuu/Near was legal. Funnily enough the email and the resulting spike in activity on his thread was actually precipitated by a few posts on here about him.
Again, my stance is as follows: KF is filled with despicable behavior and people. However we absolutely must be accurate and precise when it comes to what happens there and why certain people would rather the site not exist.
The standard shouldn't be whether someone is struggling with mental health.
It's whether or not that person would be alive today if it weren't for this targeted violence
As someone pointed out below people have been found liable for (at a minimum)contributing to someone's suicide.
Victims have specifically wrote this in a suicide note. And these sick people follow up on their deceased FB profiles commenting and basically bragging about what they've done.
So first of all, "violence" has a definition. We can't keep expanding the definition in order to justify actual violence in retaliation.
You can be found partly liable for someone's suicide if you've encouraged or groomed someone to commit suicide. Saying mean things to them does not constitute such an action.
We can all talk about how reprehensible kiwifarms is, that it encourages reprehensible behavior, that we would not want to spend time with many of the people there in our lives, that we would disown our children for participating there, etc. But we have to put a stop to this push to take every opportunity to increase the scope of retaliation. We can't change the scope of what violence is or who is responsible for a suicide just because we find their behavior reprehensible and want revenge, not if we want to live in a just society.
This is literally what they do though. They harass them with the message that they will never stop until they do it. It's not just random bullying that then pushes people over the edge. It's commands that you need to commit suicide. It's calling your family and workplace and telling them you've committed suicide. The "joke" there being that not only do you initially shock the family, but when your target does commit suicide, the family doesn't believe the real call.
Really? Users of the site have actually done this? Do you have any info on instances of this happening? I've always thought it was online "harassment" which is easy to avoid.
People harm themselves. that's the action. thats the violence.
I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.
People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.
You have to admit there is a very significant difference between going online and saying manga sucks and participating in an organized and targeted harassment of a particular person.
I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.
It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.
Right, and zoomers would probably broadly agree with that, but almost everyone else doesn't, so it's very contentious. "Sticks and stones" liberals still basically control the world, at least until we start dying off in 30 years or so.
Hmmm, sounds to me like such a good chance for some good old suicide blackmailing.
I'm going to kill myself if anybody tries to recommend Python for beginners to programming again. If I see a single Internet post that does this from now on, you will see my suicide note in a newspaper soon after and your Internet forum would be responsible for my death. Recommending Python to programming beginners is hateful, it's literally violence, #Cancel_Guido #Drop_The_Snake.
It's hilarious how much people keep reinventing Pascal's Wager. Again and Again and Again. "Believe my obvious nonsense or really bad things can possibly happen" seems to be a such local optimum in Bad-Argument-Space
The site and the person who host it (there is no legal entity involved here - just a person) have not done anything other than facilitating speech, which is heavily legally protected. The users of the site have done a lot, though.
The proper action would be to go after the users who do bad things, and bury the site operator in subpoenas to find these bad actors.
I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.
Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
Privacy protections should apply regardless of whether it's a megacorporation or a disorganized group of independent actors.
Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.
Still really unclear what law is being broken in that case. Unless you're proposing new speech-curtailing legislation. They're Intenet-famous. They're of interest to forever-onlines. This one in particular is of interest to women and parents who've so far resisted brainwashing.
KF has won every lawsuit (and there have been many) brought against it.
Please provide proof of the suicides they’ve caused. There are typically two presented:
- Byuu/Near, a very talented emulation developer. The problem here is that he isn’t dead. He never appeared on any list of American citizens dying abroad nor on Japan’s canonical list of the same. He’s been spotted IRL by other foreign devs living in SE Asia.
- Chloe Sagal, a transgender journalist who took her life. She openly blamed former friends in the LGBTQIA+ movement for tormenting her and making her feel like her social safety net did not exist. While she cited this in her suicide communications, she never once mentioned KiwiFarms.
The fact that Kiwifarms have won every suit against them is an example of the legal systems failings. Organizing mass harassment should be illegal.
It shouldn't be up to harassed individuals to seek justice, prosecutors should be able to go after them. If the issue is with the law itself, the government needs to effectively legislate.
Kiwifarms legal opponents aren't celebrities, or politicians, or even ordinary people. They are some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. If I had to be sued by somebody I would pick someone living with severe mental health issues every single time.
I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.
Something can be both legal and ethically wrong. You can apply your same reasoning to Cloudflare's censorship of Kiwifarms: nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
Frankly, your responses in this thread make it clear that you’re a sociopath. It takes 30s on KF to understand that it is by and large a vehicle for harassing individuals who are not public figures.
>I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.
So long as you're arguing that instead of "tHe CoUrTs ArE nAzIs", then I have nothing else to add because I'm in full agreement with your sentiment concerning law.
>nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?
Of course; Cloudflare has a right to freedom of association and fundamentally I support whatever they choose to do, legally speaking.
However, there is a consequential problem in that the internet is becoming more and more centralized by the day and Cloudflare access is one of those facets.
Generally speaking, if you're a big website you either need Cloudflare or your own CDN to distribute the load and ward off hostile entities.
Consequently, Cloudflare is able to dictate a significant portion of the discourse on the internet by simply allowing or blocking their services. This wouldn't be a big deal if the internet was decentralized like it should be, but it isn't so the internet can't route around such nonsense anymore.
What mass harassment did they organize? Posts encouraging swatting, violence or stalking are deleted within hours, if not minutes. Such things are against the site’s rules and this has been reiterated repeatedly by the site’s owner. Further, such actions are called, pejoratively, “gayops” - they’re not considered a good thing by the broader KF community.
Most of the harassment of people considers “lolcows” comes instead from smaller forums and image boards like Lolcow Farms, 4chan and (formerly) 8kun, and specialized subreddits. They have less moderators and no singular owner who has taken such a firm stance.
TL;DR: The motto of KiwiFarms can be more politely summed as “look, don’t touch”.
The site exists to document the lives of and poke fun at some of the most vulnerable people in society. Even if explicit calls for illegal actions are banned, being featured on Kiwifarms is like having a target painted on your back. Their efforts to violate these individuals privacy and pry into every aspect of their lives is just incredibly immoral.
If Kiwifarms users can't see that what they are doing already is unethical, why should anyone believe that they truly think these other illegal actions are wrong? They just know not to talk about it out loud because then you will actually get in trouble with the law.
The only reason the site has been able to get away with it for so long is because they are targeting vulnerable people who are least well equipped to legally defend themselves.
As I already explained, those more extreme individuals plan these actions in more covert locations - smaller forums, subreddits, image boards, discord, telegram groups, etc. There are no rules banning such behaviour in these places. The owner and mods of KF actively not only delete such content but repeatedly remind people of the prohibition. They also actively report users who violate US law and fully cooperated with any legal demands brought by State and Federal law enforcement. Josh has even banned mods who disagreed or facilitated such behaviour outside the forums.
That’s from two personal friends who are both extremely active in the emulation scene. Feel free to discount it - when the site’s back up, I’ll grab the screens of users in Hector’s streams that use the same exact eccentric writing style Byuu/Near did. (Archive.ph is too stale to have it.)
https://jp.usembassy.gov/services/death-of-a-u-s-citizen/ Nobody was ever able to get any of the documentation listed on this page from the Japanese side, even family, and the Japanese continually report they have no record of the death. There are also no “blotter” style documents in Japan or the USA documenting his death.
I’m willing to be proven wrong - and accept others will not believe what is hearsay to them - but as someone who has been involved in emulation for years my Bayesian prior is extremely, strongly on the side of him being alive.
It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.
This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
You provide a service and like every service provider you have a TOS/AUP. The issue is the Acceptable Use Paragraph is clear as long as the content isn’t Copyright or CSE then it’s fine as you will absolve yourself of any responsibility.
No other CDN/WAF tolerates nationalists who threaten people, Cloudflare does.
No other CDN/WAF makes the reporting process essentially doxing yourself to the threatening website. Cloudflare does.
No other CDN/WAF intentionally puts all the most vile sites on dedicated CDN hosts so they get DDoSed while the normal customers don’t.
It’s purely so then when the vile sites get DDoSes then they use those learnings to improve the controls for all customers.
Much like providing security guards for a Proud Boys rally. It’s an intentional business decision to provide those services.
You could chose not to. But you don’t.
>It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.
>This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.
Exactly.
I didn't know KiwiFarms existed before it was in the news and trending everywhere, so I don't know a lot about what really went on there in the past years. What concerns me more general with this situation. There is a lot of power in the hands of people able to rile up the mob to de-platform whoever the current very-bad-person of the day is. With the outrage on social media platforms, and then the media pressure from those reporting on the outrage, companies just do the safe, self-interested thing and acquiesce, branding it as some noble act.
It's wrong that whether someone can have a platform, or use a service, or hold a job, is determined not by some kind of objective TOS, but rather whether or not an online mob is demanding their scalp. It's arbitrary, unjust, and has and will harm harmless people.
Imagine I own a bunch of billboards around town. A customer comes to me with cash and wants to display someone's personal details and a message encouraging harassment on my billboards.
Do I have to wait for law enforcement to stop me from displaying their content? Or can I, as a private company, make a judgement call and decline their business?
I think the answer here is pretty obvious and your attempt at passing the buck is pathetically weak.
Ever think the feds have half a brain among them, and know there's no threat?
I know how gullible people are in these culture-warish times, but I still hope you've lost credibility with some significant fraction of us. Maybe those of us old enough to remember when the average techy was libertarian and opposed censorship. The Farms is right back up, by the way. But at least now you can wash your hands of it. Don't think Twitter will stop coming at you though. You need to understand those people want to punish and teach.
Thank you for the explanation, eastdakota. I've been lurking on HN for a while. I'm commenting now specifically to thank you for taking the time to post this nuanced take. Vigilantism isn't a great thing, but what choice do we have when authorities allow hate sites like Kiwifarms to stay online? After all, as Yonatan Zunger famously wrote, tolerance is not a moral precept.
I have to ask you and the rest of HN an important question though: are we doing enough? As soon as you terminated service for Kiwifarms, the owner broadcast via Telegram a link to a Tor hidden service and a .ru clearweb domain name. You did the right thing, is everyone else?
Why should the Tor project knowingly let people access hate sites? Why do browser makers like Mozilla not put Kiwifarms and other hate sites on their "safe browsing" denylists when these sites are obviously unsafe for marginalized people?
We're all in this together. We can stop hate only through coordinated action. Technology that enables access to hate is hate technology. Why should we tolerate hate technology any more than hate itself?
We as principal technologists must call on software makers around the world to adopt an "ethical source" approach to their products and build protections against hate into every layer of the stack. Bigotry is odious, and the price of freedom, as it's said, is eternal vigilance.
> Vigilantism isn't a great thing, but what choice do we have when authorities allow hate sites like Kiwifarms to stay online? After all, as Yonatan Zunger famously wrote, tolerance is not a moral precept.
In conclusion, vigilantism is fine if done against someone you dont like... cool
Whom I personally like is irrelevant. We're talking about public safety here. We opened a Pandora's box of hate and violence when we created the internet. The state, which is ordinarily charged with protecting the public from danger, has failed to respond to the threat, justifying its inaction with references to 18th century texts written before the steam engine became practical. If the state refuses to act, we as technologists must. For the good of society, we have to cut off access to hate --- not only at the DDOS prevention level, but at the browser, the network, and even operating system level. To stand by and do nothing while violent speech floods our communication channels is to be complicit in this speech.
For example: why is the Tor project facilitating the spread of hate by keeping Kiwifarms accessible? The Tor project's mission of preserving user privacy does not include facilitating access to harassment material.
I can't tell if your posts are parodies or not. This "cut[ting] off access to hate" through the entire technology stack would just function to limit people's free access to inconvenient information. Think of the Russian state. It may decide that any expression of Ukrainian identity is inherently hateful, and censor it using this system. Do we want to bring such a thing to the West? When the truth is deemed hateful and violent, such a system will be used to uphold an empire of lies. And I'm sure there will be a "backdoor" for regime-approved hate targeting its foes to slip right through ;)
>We opened a Pandora's box of hate and violence when we created the internet
With the advent of the internet, people's ability to easily communicate with each other was drastically increased. We opened up the ability for us to collaboratively see beyond the official narratives handed down through the media, government spokesmen, and educational institutions. Such a thing is of course abominable to those who desire centralized control over the demos, truth be damned, but I am grateful for it. Technologists should instead oppose anything like what you describe, and build technologies that thwart the efforts of those who wish to limit our ability to communicate with each other.
Nobody wants to deny access to information. After all, as the old Alpha Centauri game pithily put it, anyone who would deny you access to information desires himself to be your master. We must simultaneously facilitate access to information while not providing a platform for hate. It's hard to see how we can keep going the way we've been going in the software world when we know our technologies enable hate. Don't browser vendors, for example, have a duty not to facilitate access to hate sites? Why are they doing so much worse than Cloudflare?
Not tolerating asocial behavior is not vigilantism. Me not accepting your calls for violence is not a violent act in itself. To think otherwise is near suicidal.
That is fine until your side ends up on the unsafe list.
Maybe you think if there is a place that is too critical to these marginalized groups that is unsafe and should be blocked. Ok, but then what happens when somebody who doesn't agree with you gets into the a position of power? They could easily say if you support trans then you are indoctrinating kids and that is unsafe and block all LGBT websites.
You are advocating for an arms race. Are you sure you can win?
> We as principal technologists must call on software makers around the world to adopt an "ethical source" approach to their products and build protections against hate into every layer of the stack. Bigotry is odious, and the price of freedom, as it's said, is eternal vigilance.
Kiwifarms, Gab (Still uses Cloudflare), 4chan, 8kun and the rest of them are still alive even after this. It's not Cloudflare's problem anymore, it is now the internet's problem.
So are you going to write a letter to ICANN just like the Ukrainian Government did to get them to take down all .ru or all possible 'hate' domains and TLDs? I bet you won't and even if you did ICANN won't do anything.
This just made them more uncensorable and now they can't be monitored easily and they are all still alive. This doesn't solve the doxing issues, therefore nothing has changed.
Did blocking the content save anybody's life? If so, how? If you don't know, can you even articulate a theory in which blocking content could save a life imminently threatened?
I don't dispute that a life was threatened and murder may have been imminent, I'm taking that for granted. I just don't understand how this action could have any effect upon that course of events. Murder is a physical-world thing, not an online content thing.
I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas from, but not taking every threat seriously is a serious failing of internet forums over the long term.
(the next paragraph is an example and not real, do not take any intent from it, which in itself may be ironic considering the argument I'm making).
If I call out "We should kill assetlabel because I do not like their politics", in itself it is not a serious threat, as I don't know you and cannot act on it. But it would be a mistake to tolerate the statement, even in a 'joking' manner (you can see in my previous post the 'joking' manner is commonly used by fascists to downplay serious threats). Again, the issue with allowing this behavior is it normalizes it. Now we step it up, what if 4 people repeat this same threat, 10, 20, 100? With each person repeating the line the chances of someone knowing you and acting on this behavior increases greatly. Any such threat must be moderated, and sites must have a history moderating such behaviors and not tolerating them.
In the early days of the internet being anonymous was somewhat easy, and in the later days of the internet it is nearly impossible, and more worryingly you must continue to remain anonymous in the future after such threats are made against you as you have no idea how long someone may harbor aggression over the situation. Based the early days of the internet we've normalized violence and threats and carried it on much too long as it has consequences in the real world.
Unelected technocrats taking the law into their own hands and using arbitrary judgment calls to manipulate infrastructure is not an improvement on the current legal system. Especially when they are making promises they don't keep and when they then try to gaslight people into thinking this has nothing to do with external political pressure.
Every website gets threats. The Stoneman Douglas shooter wrote a YouTube comment about how he wanted to be a school shooter, just weeks before his attack, which went unmoderated. Kiwifarms immediately deleted the threatening post. Why hold small discussion forums to such a higher standard? They deleted the post in minutes; so you expect them to delete violating posts faster than YouTube?
Well, who should? Is anything with the authority going to or even inclined to in the slightest?
Cloudflare has maintained a lobbying/policy department since quite early on, but I'd argue that the post from the 31st wasn't so much that there _should_ be policy against this than that there simply isn't. Given the coming EU DSA or, hell, the comical farce that is/was Texas HB20, it seems clear that further government regulation of online speech is coming in some capacity. How is Cloudflare discussing these issues with lawmakers? Are they taking the approach that existing law and enforcement mechanisms are fully sufficient, or are they arguing that there is a common strain between KiwiFarms, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer that has demonstrated a known pathway between speech and violence that needs some sort of updated legal framework?
Josh has received no contact from federal law enforcement. He has never not complied with their requests and is open about every request he does receive. He does this by creating a post notifying the community of the post and how he responded.
He’s also pro-active in both deleting and reporting any posts that advocate violence, whether that’s a bombing, shooting or stalking.
There is no credible evidence of any physical violence or deaths resulting from KiwiFarms.
Chloe Sagal stated in her farewell messages that her pain came from negative comments made about, and to, her by fellow members of the broader LBGTQIA+ community.
Byuu/Near faked his death, as he did not appear on any Japanese or US death lists. He also has been seen by other developer expats in the time that has passed since his purported suicide.
There is no evidence for the claims being made in the drive to cancel this website. I say this as someone who has never posted there and personally find much of it reprehensible to my ethics and politics.
> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
By making that call regardless, I don’t think you’ve increased the likelihood of law enforcement (or other appropriate parties) stepping up to deal with such cases in a timely manner in the future. Maybe rather the opposite, which would be unfortunate.
There was one threat which was immediately removed by the moderators. Why is it your business to take down an entire site because one user on it broke the rules and was stopped by the site moderators?
Did Cloudflare give KF notice that it intended to take this action and enable them to avoid service disruption? Or did Cloudflare intend that KF should experience service disruption?
KF admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Sure, but KF hasn't specifically clarified whether the block was without _notice_ as opposed to just without _discussion_. And even if KF had specifically claimed that there was no notice given, I still want to ask CF to confirm or deny this. I may be suspicious of CF, but I don't want to turn around and trust KF's statements unconditionally. Also, I've attacked CF for this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32709749] and I would want to change what I said if I was wrong.
Actually it's about the fact that you don't want to spend the money to enforce an AUP, like just about every other ISP does. Instead you want someone else to make the that system for you. Every printer gets to decide if they want to print Mein Kampf, and most decide that they won't. Movie theaters get to decide if they want to show dirty movies. Liberal society recognizes human interactions beyond the merely legal.
What you're saying is you're fine hosting harassment until it gets bad enough for a court to finally intervene and order it offline. But Kiwifarms was already banned in New Zealand for hosting a snuff film showing innocent people getting slaughtered for their religion. I'm not sure what exactly you wanted: a US court issuing an order that would almost certainly be unconsitutional prior restraint? An obscenity prosecution?
Society has decided that it's your choice what kinds of speech the company you control enables, and you've decide to tell us that you're going to pretend it isn't. Well, it is. Those sites are up on Cloudflare, because you want them to be, and nothing you say is going to change that reality.
I remember many years ago with lulzsec, where cloudflare refused to shutdown their services. Whether what they did was moral or not, it was a still a crime and I imagine it was because they agreed with the message.
To the best of my knowledge nobody's life was threatened or endangered.
I'd compare it to a website shutting down someone's account because they send a meme where they might not have the rights, which is illegal, which also isn't usually resulting in a ban.
Now where you draw the line is a philosophical question.
> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
sure, but I presume CF makes the decision of whether or not to facilitate access to/sell services to other undesirable bits of the internet all the time without requiring law enforcement intervention.
* Does CF wait for LE or a court case to block or drop malware distribution or command&control channels from their cache/NS/1.1.1.{2+} resolvers?
* Would CF wait until LE intervenes to drop a known, demonstrated CP host?
* Would CF continue to cache pirated material until a court stepped in even if approached by an alleged copyright holder?
* Would any of the above actors have a right of appeal with CF?
Kiwifarmers can call each other on the phone, stand on a soapbox in a park, print pamphlets and distribute them. They are still free to say whatever they want to whomever they want without fear of a Government throwing them in jail unless they break the law. Anonymous posts simply allow Kiwifarmers to say things they would likely never say to your face. Cloudflare simply chose to not allow their paid for service to support this behavior. Big deal.
So you believe that your company shouldn’t be constrained by morality? This is why I look skeptically at hiring any engineering and product leaders from Cloudflare at any company in which I work
While I agree with you that the content on kiwifarms is not covered by free speech, you should not play law enforcement and wait for a court order instead.
+1, what was the thing that changed today vs a week ago?
If this is going to eventually become precedent (despite what is said this is now the new basis from which other decisions are made) other site owners and future one’s should have an idea of what exactly wasn’t dealt with. Cloudflare’s reach is extensive and becoming a critical part the internet so there’s plenty at stake here.
The lack of transparency by Google, Facebook, etc is the worst part of this whole top-level internet moderation trend.
August 5 was a month ago and the MTG SWATing was obviously an anti-Kiwifarms troll…
> Officials said they received a second call from the suspect, using a computer-generated voice, saying they were upset about Greene’s view on transgender youth rights.
Posters in the Keffals thread believe the fake bomb threat was to blame for Cloudflare’s reaction. The account which made the post barely had any other activity on the site. The post itself was removed quickly by moderators. If it’s true that an obvious fake bomb threat which was swiftly removed was the cause for this action, Cloudflare has some hard explaining to do to its remaining customers. Fake anonymous posts and an ideological Twitter mob can apparently DoS your entire operation with Cloudflare.
If the threat was something else, I and other customers would love to learn exactly what it was.
What risk? Can you please share details? From my perspective, it seems like this is a thin excuse, and there was not actually a credible risk that you were mitigating.
Will you also ban violent threats from the left to Andy Ngo? He has been thoroughly documenting it. And published a NYT bestseller “Unmasked”, a written account of how violence from the extreme left is being ignored.
I’d like to see equal treatment, that’s the least worst option.
I want extreme objectivity at the highest level.
Edit: I’m questioning OBJECTIVITY and Andy Ngo is just a fucking example. Find some hypothetical antifa forum, the point is about standards.
Yea they’re scattered around. Just hypothetically, I want promise that at the very least we are not in a ideological hell hole.
The details of this is irrelevant IMO, let me repeat the argument I’m posing: Is there an objective standard that can be applied across the political spectrum?
We should be concerned that there is a political hijacking. That sits extremely unwell with me. We need to condemn all violence otherwise any actions by Cloudflare are just politics and frankly, terrifying.
> Arguing pure hypotheticals is rarely productive.
Posing hypotheticals is exactly how to test the limits of the system. It is a key component of the legislative and law making process. The entire field of law, millions of lawyers think about hypotheticals on a daily basis to analyze, write and interpret the law. Humans have evolved to have a dedicated frontal lobe whose job is to predict hypothetical scenarios and conduct cost/benefit/planning analysis. As a software engineer, I write hypothetical inputs to create unit tests so my system doesn't break. Thinking about hypotheticals is basically fundamental to all things in life and the universe.
We do not call "rule of law" "due process" in US. Due process is the tempering of the application of law ("Rule of Law") by the state. You start off clouding matters (npi).
> traditional rule of law systems.
As opposed to what, "modern and innovative corporate rule of law systems"?
INAL but I am pretty sure there are all sort of legal actions that can be taken before the entire "due process" is completed.
You are aware, Mr. Prince, that people can be arrested and put in jail ("Rule of Law") and have a court date at a much later date ("Due Process")?
[p.s. for hn]: It's not that I give a fig about wikifarms (which was TIL for me). But this posturing by Cloudflare and framing this as a responsible action in context of 'a broken legal system' (aka "traditional") is too much.
Yes, let's have CEOs of SV companies apply the "Rule of Law" for us. While you are at it, why don't you 'edit' the content that you are 'fronting'? "Traditional editorial systems" are also desperately in need of the wise guidance of CEOs and corporations! /s
Turns out there's no such thing as neutrality. Connecting content to the world is a choice your team approves or declines. You can complain about scalability of that decision all you want. Cloudflare is not neutral, and will never be. You're an active participant and you have to deal with your responsibility.
Is the phone company responsible for connecting content? How about your internet service provider? At what level does someone become responsible?
This is a question for the law, not for the mob. The internet, thanks to a completely fucked up legal regime (section 230), is currently very gray.
Facebook and Twitter, which are commonly used to facilitate large-scale violent riots and play host to far more doxxing and cyberbullying than kiwifarms could ever hope to, get a pass despite being the main facilitator of that communication. In contrast, infrastructure services like Cloudflare (and even AWS) have been subject to intense pressure to drop other sites where people say bad things.
Under this theory, we need to be taking Facebook and Twitter offline immediately. And maybe also the phone company too.
All levels of awareness have responsibility. While telcos and ISPs do have enforcement mechanisms when they are made aware, using Cloudflare's own suggested model, Cloudflare is closer to the content and therefore responsible earlier.
> All levels of awareness have responsibility. While telcos and ISPs do have enforcement mechanisms when they are made aware
I don't think that's right? Legally we've set things up so that no matter how despicable your site is, your telco or ISP can't decide on their own shut you off. They're regulated as infrastructure, and are required to keep doing business with you. They'll shut you off if they receive a court order, but not on their own judgement.
Telcos and ISPs are forbidden from taking you offline for speech. The process is about whether you have done something illegal that goes beyond speech (for example, accessing pirated material or child pornography).
Well, the phone company can't legally listen in on your private conversations.
In contrast, nothing prevents Cloudflare from looking at a company's public-facing website (ie as an unprivileged visitor just going to the domain) and deciding whether or not one wants to do business with that company.
> Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech
That's a clever way of spinning the issue. But no amount of spinning can change the fact that you are clearly using doublespeak. Contrary to what you say in the post, this clearly isn't in the spirit of the policy you had promised [1], or even had advertised just a few days ago. [2]
You are mostly just giving in to pressure. I can't blame you for that, given that I have to use a pseudonym here myself.
Otherwise, if this was just a matter of different principles, you would also kick out media websites who regularly dox people, or publish dumps of hacked websites, etc.
Your decision today. You took ownership before for the arbitrary decisions to remove DS and 8Chan, take ownership now and do not try to backpedal. You are Cloudflare's leader.
>That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
You failed to take ownership of this issue either way. Your response suggests you can't understand the responsibility that you continue to have and are trying to shirk it. My suggestion is, find someone who is willing to be compensated to have this responsibility if it burdens you so. That's part of a leader's job.
My guess is that the people who pressured CF to take down kiwifarms knew about this, and knew that they had bowed to public pressure before and removed sites.
There was a lot of compromising and embarrassing information on KF about the activist who started this campaign (a streamer called Keffals). It looks like the whole feud actually started when Keffals wanted to take down this site to remove the embarrassing information, solicit donations, and gain some activist street cred. Users of KF did not respond well to the initial calls to take it down, and things escalated from there.
>My guess is that the people who pressured CF to take down kiwifarms knew about this, and knew that they had bowed to public pressure before and removed sites.
It doesn't really change the situation. CF isn't a public utility, there are no sorts of 'due process' that they need to follow on cases like this, especially in extraordinary circumstances. Advertisers pull campaigns all the time due to public perception changing.
My critique isn't on Mr. Prince deciding to keep KF up or not, it's specifically on his trying to walk away from the responsibility of making a choice either way. If he does not like the unwanted attention received from having to make these difficult choices nobody is forcing him to be in that position where he's expected to.
Similarly, if KF's owner doesn't want to get banned from using companies services they can work on their moderation and public perception.
I agree with you, and I think that refusing to establish a firm line is what opened them up to this campaign.
If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
> I agree with you, and I think that refusing to establish a firm line is what opened them up to this campaign.
Additionally Mr. Prince had options at his disposal after the first time this happened. Cloudflare's a large valuable company. He could have retained a 'Director of Enforcement' after that event and told the world "their word is final on enforcement actions, I am removing myself from the moderation pipeline to focus on growing the business". Then if one of their decisions backfired, dismiss them. There's plenty of talented people willing to accept a large compensation package for that risk.
>If they had said, "we believe everyone should be respected, and any time a site coordinates harassment, we will remove it from our service," I would have had a lot more respect for them. If they had said, "we host content from Nazis and Communists, and we are not proud of it, but this is an infrastructure service and everyone is welcome," I would have had a lot more respect for them.
Probably also something to consider: this is a public company. The latter option is maybe not tenable for a large public corporation subject to the whims of shareholders. By that I mean times and beliefs change over time and a public company has to adjust to that in order to continue to attract investors. Private companies can work with whomever they feel and if it's their niche to work with 'high risk' clients, nobody is stopping them.
I can't even view the US Constitution [1] when my IP is on DigitalOcean (most of the time). Kiwifarms was perfectly accessible from the same connection last night. It's ironic talking about 'due process' when I can't even browse the highest law in the land due to this company.
They seemingly can if they just stop posting every waking moment of their life on the internet so it can be scooped up and analyzed by kiwifarm trolls.
Why should an individual doing nothing wrong HAVE to change their own behavior simply to stop being harassed? That’s not a solution, that’s going into hiding.
Also, considering people doxxed her address and kept showing up / swatting her, I doubt that would even be a short term solution at all, other than emboldening the harassers.
So then why did you become the liability decision maker on behalf of your customer, if you were not required by the law?
After many sales emails that we ignored, your sales guy found and called me on my personal cell when I was on vacations in Mexico City, trying to push a 5000/mo DDoS mitigation contract, and i explained to him that we are happier paying 100k/year to a net neutral company VeriSign (now down to 27k), than offloading the legal liability decisions on our behalf to your Majesty Matthew Prince.
While it makes sense to use CF for a booter DDoS-for-hire outfit accepting Monero, any legitimate company that has real money and jobs at stake should not use CF.
Watching company employees consistently pop up on critical threads (not fingering CF here, many including at least Stripe come to mind as frequently occurring too) feels a lot like gaming the forum. Vetted messages like this from a recognizable source will often end up pinned to the top of the thread, but I don't really think they overly contribute to the conversation in most cases, and I find myself wishing there was some rule against it.
Not to say there shouldn't be a place for official responses, just that it's kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
(The counterargument would be that the status quo provides unparalleled public access to top-level staff, I'll leave that angle for someone else to explore ;)
I don't have any huge problem with eastdakota's comment here, and I think I agree with Cloudflare's action (I listened to a Behind the Bastards podcast recently that covered an individual who was bullied until they committed suicide by kiwifarms, so I understand the stakes) but - there is nothing in their comment that presents "actual information"; it does not present any facts; it just presents the perspective that their legal team would like all of us to take on their action. dmw_ng's criticism is entirely fair.
Companies in this position are damned if they do, damned if they don't. I for one at least appreciate thoughtful, substantive responses from company leadership in company-specific threads, and I'm happy that at least on HN we are more likely to be given a real, substantive response than the corporate drivel that is shoveled to most other media outlets.
> ...kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress
People must be allowed to change their minds without being stigmatized or judged for it.
> ...displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.
Well, why should one look for additional (potentially irrelevant) context [0] when there's debate that could be had on its resolution? I mean, it is a struggle to get everyone to agree even when they are on the same page [1].
Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it.
The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.
The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
>Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.
>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
You should, as a general rule, never take a charitable view of the actions of businesses. If you start with the most machiavellian interpretation possible you will be more right than wrong. Not that you will be always right, but absent special information it is the presumptive default.
I was actually monitoring the Keffals threads to laugh at the salt on display. It was hilarious at times, then you'd run into stuff like people determining what restaurants she was likely to be at so they could detonate a bomb and kill her. It's such a brazen display that, even if it was a joke, I don't think the first amendment would be an acceptable defense if your door got busted down over it.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
To be clear, nothing I say is any sort of endorsement of Kiwifarms. Cloudflare is a business so it’s Machiavellian. Kiwifarms is… I don’t even know what Kiwifarms is. Something worse.
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.
> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
That's exactly a problem with theses sites; they are horrible and yet can slowly recruit people because companies still provide them with services that allow them to stay public.
Such groups can splinter endlessly into unidentifiable new subgroups. How do you stop those? What is your imagined end-game here — making freedom of association default-deny?
> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
> And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
>I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
Having never read Kiwifarms I don't know whether the threats are real or not.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.
I don’t know where posts are coming from when I see them online. We can only guess at the specifics (which will hopefully be released when there’s time for an after-action report) but presumably cloudflare may be able to see ip addresses and have some idea of location. If someone posts “I’m coming to kill you” a dozen times but the ip is in Europe and doesn’t appear to be a VPN then that’s less cause for concern than the same posts made by someone with a residential ISP ip that’s half an hour away from the target.
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
When the topic under discussion are the contents of a publicly available website, unless you think that Cloudflare has some kind of tooling scanning for specific terms on the CDN origin (why?), no, I am pretty confident in saying they do not have any additional information. This is not some arcane matter of network management, this is the public contents of a public website that anyone can verify.
> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.
Interesting how that screenshot on Keffals' Twitter feed crops out the number of downvotes that post would have received, as well as the replies from other posters calling that poster a fed and a glowie.
Yeah, it's a meme as old as the forums themselves. It's hilarious that this one post that everyone immediately saw through was the one that made Cloudflare react.
Am I missing something? The linked source contradicts that comment. The source only links one post by one user - a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading - and it was removed.
"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
Just say that you want Kiwifarms deleted from the internet. There is nothing tenuous or uncertain about that stance, if you own it openly. Hiding behind concern over a false and un-serious threat is a coward's strategy.
I honestly know nothing about the site, somehow before today I've missed the place existed. I can see in past history HN history it's been quite a contentious site.
If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.
You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.
Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
I know nothing here, but it sounds from other posts like it is being moderated very aggressively, and posts like these survive for mere minutes.
Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.
I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.
No, I do think Kiwifarms should have been prosecuted and unhosted, for failing to curtail frequent mass harassment threads against ordinary and mentally ill individuals, which led to real-world harm. I'm just not going to defend deplatforming by quoting downvoted and deleted jests from a few users who could also be anti-KF astroturfers.
The post you are responding to is insinuating that if a group is willing to commit one crime (DDOS) they may be willing to do another crime / questionable act like make a bomb threat post to frame KF.
Just adding some light to the escalations; there were bomb and shoot threats over the last few days.
The userbase on the site upped the tone of their "jokes"/threats after the last blog post and thats what caused the final suspension.
I don't know what happened prior to today, but earlier today there was a bomb threat which was apparently removed by the site's moderators within minutes, but it hit Twitter anyway. The fact that this isn't mentioned anywhere by the people currently leading the "campaign" already proves there's an agenda.
The “bomb threat” was an obvious farcical post in poor taste, immediately understood as such by every user in the thread (which I have been reading closely) and quickly removed by the site owner.
People have always posted (usually fake) threats in kiwifarms threads. They have always been removed promptly. The same is true of basically every large website on the internet. When cloudflare made their post saying they wouldn't remove kiwifarms, the site already had that reputation.
I think the point is that this isn't even KF's first go at the bomb threat thing. They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides... and CF was always OK with. Always.
Until now.
When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.
Until now.
I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].
One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.
Ok, the investigative journalist's thread shows literally no proof or even evidence that kiwi farms was involved in the swatting, and the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one. Neither of the other two links said anything about swatting.
I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.
Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.
And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?
No, her personal statement isn't enough, how could she know who did it? I'm sure in the heat of the moment someone going thru something like that would make assumptions and galvanize their position somewhat, it's completely understandable, but it's hardly evidence. Also the article doesn't say anything about the timeframe between her dox being posted and the incident.
The admin explicitly saying for people to stop "encouraging SWAT pranks" when speaking apparently(?) about two other elements is a bit closer but still quite weak, its an open forum from what I gathered so far surely there would be archives or some screenshot or something for said "pranks" towards the streamer being discussed right? especially if there is mention of him actually having to deal with the FBI in previous times.
I didn't overlook the tweets, I just couldn't find a single mention of swatting there.
Yes, the evidence for a causal link in swatting is weaker, but evidence exists: discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
>discussion of swatting on the site, proximal links in time between people being doxxed and being swatted, etc.
what is this proximal link? and if that link is something like 3 days or a week or something, on an open forum, i'm not sure it's that relevant, literally anyone can watch the website without participating for what I understand.
>And then we have screenshots of them figuring out her hotel room immediately after the swatting and engaging in harassment.
I saw the bedsheet investigation, but what harrassment did they engage in? the situation where the orders happenned was in a second hotel, and after a big of digging it wasn't even kiwifarms that got the dox on that one, it was Vile on doxbin[0], and he also admitted to being the one making the orders.
> There's plenty of evidence for the site being used to coordinate unlawful harassment, and moderate evidence for them being used in highly dangerous harassment (e.g. swatting).
what is the evidence for this unlawful harassment, and what is the moderate evidence for the swatting? if all you have is what was posted above for the swatting then we'll agree to disagree, which is fine, what is however the plenty of evidence for the former? And no, that twitter thread really doesn't cut it afaic.
> I think you're engaging in motivated reasoning. It's like if someone is known through extensive evidence to have assaulted others 100x, and there's moderate quality evidence they murdered someone-- arguing that they shouldn't be in jail because you personally don't find the murder evidence convincing enough. OK, um, we disagree about the murder thing, but what about all the other crimes?
Well, here's the thing, I know little about kiwifarms in particular and everyone is saying that there is extensive evidence of other crimes, articles are being written saying that they were the one responsible for swatting people and a thousand other things, and the citation/source rabbit hole just leads to a dead end, or ends up circular, so yes i'm going to have my doubts and at least want to see some of this extensive documented harassment trove, archiving things on the internet is but a couple clicks away.
I'll leave the thread for today for it is getting too late, have a good one.
- Moderators on KF felt the need to address the topic of swatting.
- People dox'd on KF were definitely swatted-- the missing evidence is to what degree the actual swatting was coordinated on KF. It's relatively indisputable that KF was in the causal chain.
- Harassment occurred, coordinated on KF to someone immediately after relocating from a swatting.
What about to people like me, who have only ever heard of kiwi farms in passing, who don't really know anything substantial about any of this stuff and want to know more? Is it obvious to us? I'd like to see what everyone's talking about when they talk about this site, and if they're right, without actually going there. Can you help me out with that?
>They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides
all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).
the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.
remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
Oh shit maybe we're all wrong then! Can I ask, then, what is the purpose of the site, if it's not to co-ordinate the harrassment of individuals by sharing their personal information?
The purpose is to document the bizarre (and oftentimes outright creepy and/or illegal) behavior of the terminally online. You know, stuff like helping your friend sell his bathtub brewed hormones to minors without their parents finding out. Or running a Discord server called Catboy Ranch that has several minors on it, and you send them personalized collars that declare them your property. Just ordinary, innocent stuff that is no one else's business, clearly.
Ok have fun doing whatever it is you do that isn’t doxing on your forum when it’s back online (after the doxing and the threats took it offline) I guess.
I dont have an account there... My HN is also not some driveby throwaway. You are putting words in my mouth now because you are out of arguments. This is a discussion forum.
There are "bomb and shoot threats over the last few days" on FB, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, CoD/CS lobbies etc everyday. Like Kiwifarms the content is removed when reported. What is the issue?
There absolutely were not, and this is a gross exaggeration. One user made a clearly satirical comment about posting IRA soldiers with bombs at every cafe in the Ulster area. This was screenshotted by Keffals and posted to Twitter as a serious threat. Everyone else posting in the thread understand it was an extremely dumb joke. The post was removed by the KF owner within minutes. If that is why the site went down, I’ll be amazed and disappointed.
these were obviously (stupidly poor taste) jokes, and they were removed as soon as the site admin was made aware. death threats are against the rules of the site. what exactly makes this so urgent that KF has to be blasted off the internet?
100% they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. First you pretend you care about free speech for a week and gesticulate in public. Then you come up with some extraordinary circumstance so it doesn’t seem like it’s the new normal.
After hearing about the drama and reading kf's pov, I can definitely understand why the people ddosing kf want it down. The stuff they do is illegal and absolutely vile but overlooked by the people in power because it suits their politics. It scares me as a prospective parent.
Thank you for this comment. The only possible negative here is "Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online." Cloudflare supposedly being "concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency" is disingenuous at best.
They didn't say that there was "dangerous escalation" in the past two weeks. They said that there was a pressure campaign over the last two weeks, and they also said that they didn't want to comply with this campaign.
They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?
Cloudflare didn't say that they contacted law enforcement in the last 48 hours; they said that they've been in contact with law enforcement for weeks and law enforcement hasn't acted (i.e. to give them a court order to shut the thing down.)
Maybe, but people shitposting about blowing up half a city just to annoy a streamer doesn't really sound like the kind of threat that would make a company do a 180 on their position..
Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one hand, yes, this specific site is terrible. But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible, and I respect them for that.
It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral.
> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
> They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
My reading of that blog post and this one is that they now think that cutting off service to the Daily Stormer and 8chan was the wrong call.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I mostly agree that is the claim that they are making. I already quoted the relevant part of the earlier blog, so here's the part from today's:
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
If they think those earlier decisions were the wrong call, then why haven't they rescinded them? There's no law that says that after you kick someone off your service, you can never invite them back on.
Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.
If rapists and terrorists used their water or electrical service as a primary means to rape and terrorize, then those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct, and to cut off the rapists and terrorists who violated those terms.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?
Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many sites that violate FOSTA. They only cared when Switter made the press.
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
Perhaps “making the press” is one limit that legal council use to decide whether CloudFlare is knowingly (according to internal legal theory) breaking the FOSTA laws: i.e. that the legal liability exceeds their appetite for risk. Their exact internal rules for deciding to terminate a sex-worker site are unlikely to be published by CloudFlare, and it could depend on non-public correspondence sent to CloudFlare. “Knowingly” is very legally vague as per this article: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-politics-of-section-2...
I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
I think what you’re saying is true for water and electricity, but if you were to talk about phone lines I’m not sure that argument holds anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of phone numbers being disconnected for abusive behaviour.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence.
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
You've picked a very specific time period here (1933-1945). I presume this is because that is the period where the Nazis were in control of Germany.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
It is so disappointing seeing you be downvoted for sentiments like this. The neurodivergent and unempathetic nature of this forum really rears its head from time to time.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
It’s unsavory to me insofar that it completely ignores the comment being replied to which doesn’t mention revolutions at all, doesn’t refute or even acknowledge any of the points, and the lack of anything other than the quote comes across as very smarmy with a touch of “destroying X with facts and logic”/“lol gottem!”.
> Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi.
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise.
Stupid thing to say, your countries Supreme Court constantly have thousands of lawyers arguing over the distinctions, definitions and interpretation of the 1A.
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
The difference between fraud and a bad investment or a foolish purchase consists entirely in the worlds spoken/text written.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
“the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
"Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed.
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
So that's not cool, I don't see anyone saying "go to their home" in those screenshots but I get the implication. So my question is, when will there be criminal charges? If this is directed incitement it's criminal, has anyone been charged or convicted for it from kiwi farms?
Even if KF was cooperating with law enforcement(I think they were, or said they would comply): how long should some company choose to help KF continue though? Is it when criminal charges get filed? After someone is hurt? After someone is arrested? How many people being hurt or arrested is enough?
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
Tremendous difference between refusing service and taking their money and blocking them. One of them is acceptable for a private business, one of them is fraud.
If I was kiwifarms I'd be suing for services not rendered and tie them up court for as long as I could. They're huge, so they're guaranteed to settle. Easy money.
They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier.
I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
No, it really isn’t. This is an explicitly political decision with an obvious progression to banning others. The idea that banning Nazi sites could even be neutral is a joke. Nazis didn’t kill as many people as communists and the treatment of Stormfront and Jacobin is not equivalent.
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.
> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1]
Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server?
Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
"Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs.
My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible
I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in.
Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
>The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy.
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
> As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Cloudflare. Their core product is security done the wrong way. They have the potential to do evil things at an enormous scale with little to no recourse.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I think Cloudflare did think it was a dangerous site, but they would really prefer not having the responsibility of being the arbiter of what can and cannot be hosted, as well as all of the negative publicity that comes with being so. At the same time, I believe they believe that current legal process surrounding how things like this are handles are so woefully underdeveloped that turning a blind eye is not being neutral, it's being irresponsible.
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
A person, claiming to be a moderator on Kiwifarms, swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene (but unfortunately misspelled it as "Kiwifarm" in the note claiming responsibility). I have no doubt that this person did it with the express intent of getting Cloudfare to withdraw their services. Up until then Marjorie Taylor Greene had been quite popular on Kiwifarms.
Correction: someone who claimed to be associated with KF swatted a member of Congress. The username mentioned (which I will not quote here) denied all responsibility on the site. Surely we're not taking artificially voiced 911 calls from VoIP numbers at face value here are we?
Cloudfare really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. Their Wednesday post was fantastic, and for once I had an ounce of hope they’d do the right thing.
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
I don’t think companies just get to decide to be a utility company anyway. It is clearly a play to disregard responsibility. If governments started treating them like a utility and started requiring things like free services to people who don’t make a certain amount of money or price caps you bet your ass they would fight it tooth and nail.
CF could have said to KF "For various reasons we no longer wish to do business with you. In 24 hours we will stop redirecting to your servers. Please make appropriate arrangements." Had they done this, they would not have actually been censoring KF. They would also have been behaving like a responsible service provider by not cutting off service without notice.
Instead, they seem to have made the decision to do this in a way where they actually block access to KF, rather than in a way where they simply chose to stop doing business with KF. I could be wrong about this; maybe substantial notice was given, and CF reasonably believed that KF could have avoided service disruption. But given that they wrote a bunch of copy to go with this decision, including the copy for the redirect page, I'm inclined to think that this went off exactly as CF intended. They didn't give notice and attempt to prevent their customer from having service disruption because they wanted them to have service disruption, and they wanted everyone to know they wanted this.
CF should not do this. I don't care who KF is or what they've done. CF should either do right by their customers, or stop doing business with them in a responsible way. Not in a way designed to injure their customers. Especially after taking their money, but that's hardly the point.
I think a lot of people in the comments don't understand what Kiwifarms is.
I say this as someone who occasionally browses there and gets some (admittedly sick) enjoyment from it: the main draw of the website is a place for people to get together and bully mentally ill "weirdos".
It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, into the mainstream web and real life too.
While I'll personally miss watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout, this is a wise and fair decision by Cloudflare, and there's a good chance they may have saved Keffals' life.
What specifically makes their victims 'weirdos' and why do you feel the need to comment that you get off to 'watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout'
That's exactly what you are doing right now.
They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
And gay children...
What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
The site was set up to target Chris Chan in particular, but later shifted to "lolcows" in general - ie people that continue to give the bullies the bizarre reactions that they're looking for. They don't exclusively target trans people, nor do they even go to trans spaces looking for people to insult. After all, the average trans person would just block them and move on with their life and that makes for a boring thread.
>why do you feel the need to comment that you get off to 'watching people do fucked up shit for internet clout'
Because I'm on HN, and it's more important here to show that you know what you're talking about rather than show that you're a good, law-abiding citizen. If you seriously can't understand why people enjoy looking at trainwrecks, you need to speak to more people.
>They target trans women like Lizzy Waite and Clara Sorrenti.
I don't know the Lizzy Waite saga, but Clara Sorrenti specifically had that whole Catboy Ranch thing going on, plus the constant drama with other streamers and just a general behavioural pattern of always feeding the trolls.
>What is so weird about kids who need support from the Trevor Project hotline?
Yep, that shouldn't have happened. (But then again, neither should anything else on this site...)
As someone who got exposed to 4chan far too early in life, I think I can answer the first bit. Ever heard of Hoarders? My 600lb Life? It's the same reason people watch that garbage.
Being gay isn't a mental illness, and it isn't the same thing as reality TV. The LGBT community is, at present, an easy target. There are also a large number of LGBT people who struggle with mental illness (shocking in a society where KiwiFarms exists, I know), and mentally ill people are also easy targets.
I've never even heard of Kiwifarms until now. Judging by your comment I can see why. Sadly, I think this will be a "Streisand effect" moment and will likely draw more attention to this site.
The admin already admitted that he would make a torrent of the site while considering his giving up scenario - public pressure on providers to drop their service does make continued access and community harder and less organized
I'm not familiar with kiwi farms besides hearing the noise about them periodically and second hand accounts of them doing this or that, but I'll be candid here, how I feel about it really depends on what they mean by "weirdos." If they're just harassing trans people or whatever I can understand the outrage. If they're exposing child predators on discord (I've heard this said in this thread, don't know if it's true or not) I wouldn't say I'm unsympathetic.
This is what you have? A clearly very angry man with a default judgment against a single anonymous someone on the internet threatening to have him involuntarily committed for life in retaliation for what exactly? A family photo posted online of someone counts as child abuse? Note that the author of your link didn't link to the thread. So "on record" is a bit of a stretch to say the least.
I've got to admit, it is a bit unsavory if it is true, and I think the author is probably not making it up, but it's not quite as scary as it's being made out to be IMO, and I've still seen no actual proof of the accusation, whether I believe it or not is irrelevant.
This is a lie. Children are off limits. People who write Josh to say they were minor teens when their thread started can get them taken down. It's about the only exception he'll ever make. We're protective of kids there, because believe it or not, we're regular people. We just like being able to speak our minds about whatever we find ridiculous or repulsive. That's something you're not fully allowed to do here, or much of anywhere that's left online. There are HN users in here who know you don't have knowledge of what you're spreading motivated misinformation about.
What's happened here is that they (and you'll see this has happened across a lot of the extreme right in America) have started to label trans people as "pedo" or "groomers", in an effort to make it seem like trans people are really child predators, which makes many people more tolerant of their attacks and more sympathetic of anti-trans policies such as bathroom bills.
So, can you show me any instances where a trans person was accused of being a child molestor by kiwifarms when they were not, or any attack on a trans person that has occurred as a result of this? I don't think requesting such information is unreasonable, you're asking me to form a hateful opinion of a group of people, which I'm completely OK with doing if I actually see actions that give me good reason to hate them.
I searched the page for the words "kiwifarms", "kiwi farms" and "kiwi" and got no results. It appears your response has nothing to do with my question. I didn't ask if it were used by people against gay people, I asked if there were instances of kiwi farms calling a trans person a child molestor who was not one, and/or if a trans person had been harmed physically as a result of a false accusation by them of this kind.
Cloudflare bans websites for unproven claims but is perfectly happy to provide protection for ddos-for-hire websites that so happen to help their bottom line by generating a reason for people to use DDOS protection for which Cloudflare is one of very few options that does not have a fixed limit.
Cloudflare has to be in bed with the US government, otherwise it would have been shutdown for ignoring illegal activity (ddos-for-hire) that's been reported to them (aka ignoring complaints is meant to remove your S.230 protection).
I'm sorry but no. The law is the minimum level of enforcement for a working society, not an ethics guide. You're allowed to do better than wait for the situation to go from multiple suicides to a PR crisis before taking action.
If I offered protection to a group of unreasonable actors and discovered they needed protection because they like to bully people into taking their own life for fun, the last thing I would want is to accept money from them, let alone offer them protection.
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem.
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
That's not what happened here. They made an appropriate decision.
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
To be even clearer, in this case it’s not even really quite clear that this was legal content at all! Coordinated stalking of people!
Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy!
And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
Because we’re a U.S.-based company subject to SESTA and the one site in question we took down affirmatively told us they were violating SESTA. SESTA is a very bad law. But, if you’re violating it, don’t wave that fact in the face of your infrastructure providers who are liable under the law for providing service to you. We continue to work to overturn or repeal SESTA.
We never told you we were violating SESTA. We never waved it in your face. You could have given us some warning, but you didn't.
Until you show evidence on your work to overturn/repeal SESTA, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
Cloudflare knowingly fronts many other sites that are clearly violating SESTA, so obviously you don't think it's that big of a liability as you claim to be.
Not to mention your Head of Sales reached out to us offering Cloudflare services a year after kicking Switter off when we mentioned we were dealing with DDOS attacks as an escort directory.
Cloudflare will ignore reports of DDOS-for-Hire websites that are illegal almost everywhere in the world, including the US. So, you see yourself as free to ignore laws when you feel like it?
I do understand that Cloudlfare can't just violate SESTA/FOSTA.
That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.
This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.
But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.
And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.
I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
Is that a rhetorical question or a sincere one? Legal liability. American law has lots of direct liability for Cloudflare under SESTA/FOSTA for being involved in sex work websites. There's not equivalent liability for hate websites.
It is rhetorical. CF admits that they have contacted law enforcement several times about contact in kiwi farm. They clearly get the hosting of the “problematic” content. They understand how that site is used. That seems like an admission of guilt to me!
Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
As far as I'm aware, KF didn't come with the kind of direct liability under US law that sex work content does. I welcome the chance to learn that I'm wrong here!
This seems like the correct thing. They realise the content is dodgy.
Report to law enforcement repeatedly hoping that they look at it and give them a legal reason to shut them down.
If they shut things down as a private company, so long as the customer is not in breach of the service contract and the content is not illegal, couldn’t they mount a defence?
This sounds like a reasonable strategy. I don’t understand this need for private justice.
> And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
It's not difficult to say, but it can be difficult to live at any meaningful scale. That invites endless pressure campaigns and similarly endless accusations of acting arbitrarily, capriciously, or with insert-bias-or-agenda-here. None of those are free to handle in any responsible or timely fashion. Never mind what happens should a genuine mistake be made.
It puts the company in the same position as Facebook in regards to moderation. It's endless, expensive, and your work is never good enough. Not a desirable position for most.
> It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
They can't directly remove your physical freedom but corporations especially when acting in unison can remove most of your economic freedom. If enough precedents are set where large service providers deny service to groups and individuals at the behest of the mob, eventually it will become politically and financially expedient for these providers to pre-emptively deny service to a whole basket of people.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.
100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous.
The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1].
On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here).
>100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes)
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
There were no good choices because they didn't think through their ethics in advance -- even given their history with other sites like Daily Stormer... They decided they were "just" an economic entity, not a moral one. Unethical use of the services was something that tainted the buyer, but not the seller, and besides, should they really take on the obligation to think about such difficult non-technical things when that could be pawned off on lawyers or politicians or something?
The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.
I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.
This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.
I put Infowars forward, there has been an actual libel conviction, the perp openly lied in court and was called out by the judge and when it’s all said and done infowars will be doing the same thing and Alex Jones won’t be materially that much poorer, in fact some of the right wing media is calling it an assault on the first amendment and potentially going to market it. (I think it was Kirk on The First that I saw claiming that it was a liberal attack on the first amendment)
Complete and pure free expression seems like a concept for gentlemen and we are very much in a post-gentlemen US right now. I agree that there should be a legal process but by the time it can execute, kiwi farms will have morphed in to something new.
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
Yeah regardless of your stance on KF, you have to support cloudflare as an independent business to decide who they want as a customer. KF has many other options to serve their site. It’s really their own fault for using a product like Cloudflare that can be easily coerced into dropping a client through a Twitter mob.
I think Cloudlfare’s choice to block them is fine and CF was probably fine allowing their use of the service before, given the damage to their reputation they apparently considered acceptable.
Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
>Hate speech in the United States cannot be directly regulated by the government due to the fundamental right to freedom of speech protected by the Constitution. While "hate speech" is not a legal term in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.
There is no government involved here though. If Cloudflare has a hate speech company policy, then as a company they can choose who they serve.
Kiwifarms is free to get another company that aligns with their goals.
I'm having trouble understanding how 1) everyone thinks Cloudflare is the singular hole through which the internet flows and 2) how a private company does not have the freedom to do what they want.
If you don't like what Cloudflare is doing, then speak with your wallet and don't use them, there are numerous other providers of ddos protection
See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.
We know. US Americans have made very loud and clear they tolerate hooked crosses and Nazi shouts in their streets, everyone has seen those images by now.
The problem isn't that nobody understands that free speech is not limitless, the problem is that literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech and how to enforce it; there is no perfect answer. Cloudflare was taking the position that it's not their job, and they're not alone as far as internet services go. There are, in fact, other hosts that do basically the same thing, see Nearlyfreespeech for example.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
I don't understand trying to hide behind an argument other than "my tribe is in power here so you submit to our rules". The post you linked falls apart with how you define various concepts (how you define the terms of peace, etc.). The argument is eventually settled (like nearly all of them these days) by who is in power. They'll define the terms of peace and in a way that paints their causes as good and their enemies as evil.
This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.
> literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
Are you suggesting that large services like Cloudflare shouldn't exist, and instead there should be an ecosystem of DDoS-filtering reverse proxies? I do agree to that, though I think the problem remains that most of them do not want to be in the business of trying to decipher law and morality. So at the end of the day, the buck does stop somewhere.
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
> Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL gate acts is not free speech
“Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
It is in America, for the most part. You can absolutely organize to harass people if the harassment is in the form of verbal abuse, for instance. Cloudflare is saying that something happened in the last few days on KF that was a genuine "emergency". I don't think this is just an excuse, actually – Prince seems unusually committed to honesty about this sort of thing. I presume people were organizing specific violent acts on KF, which is not "free speech" even in America.
If hate speech is not free speech, then they who define what is hate speech, define what you can or cannot say.
If there's defamation, harassment, or incitement to violence, we should deal with that in an open court with juries of our peers, not in some dark board room.
That's easy. Are they calling for illegal actions against people?
That's a pretty easy litmus test.
As a colloary, it's akin to comparing "I don't like the president" vs "Let's go kill the president" (this is a comparison of allowed vs unallowed speech in the USA, not a call to).
Advocating voting against is 100% legal. Advocation of killing is 100% ILLEGAL.
Kiwifarms was doing the latter, up to and including actions threatening violence, "assisted" suicide, and murder.
I see that policy works extremely well in cases like <https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885>. As long as you give all the information necessary for someone interested to interact in a harmful way, it's fine, but you have to frame it in a way that doesn't suggest harassment. Just speculate about all the locations they could possibly be having lunch, and trust that nobody will harass them.
Spreading rumors about them and interacting with friends, family, and known associates is fair game. Also posting their public contact information is also fair game.
I presume users on kiwifarms (KF) use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction techniques to publish private information elsewhere (such as private addresses) so that the information can then legally be reposted on KF. Coordination-of-information has an accomplice role in some of the illegal activities "reported" by KF.
> free speech as a philosophy is about allowing all speech, cause other it's just mostly free speech
Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.
Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.
In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
Hate speech is often about saying other people ought not be able to express their ideas and opinions, and that the most effective way to bring about this result is for them to not be not alive any more.
Eliminationist rhetoric is a subset of hate speech overall, but it certainly exists and is trivially easy to discover. It's odd to me that none of the self-professed 'free speech absolutists' ever seems to engage with this point.
Most eliminationist rhetoric is still protected in the States under current precedent. It advocates unlawful action but without "imminency". It could have been forbidden under the old "clear and present danger" standard.
Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.
All of this is irrelevant and besides the point, 'hate speech' is not a magical word you say when mean people on the internet say things you don't like.
If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
Hate speech always leads to further extremist behavior and death threats. Now, the US is very tolerant of hate speech in itself. The problem is haters are completely incapable of avoiding the next step wherein they call for the call for the deaths of those they hate. The very moment they do that I am perfectly fine with all of our existing laws on things like terroristic threats being wielded against those making the threats.
You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to repercussions, in specific when those actions are a call to harm.
I do think, if there was competent legal governance in this space, that's the conclusion they would have reached. I think you understand my larger point, regardless.
To be fair, there is the entire concept of cancel culture which basically is all about organizing to harass people and is basically supported by every large platform.
Let's not obscure things by calling it an issue of "hate speech." That is an impermissible broadening. As they said, "hard cases make bad law." The only way to mitigate the badness is to make the decision as narrow as possible.
It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
This is such a bad faith comparison and in no way related. Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
> Facebook hosts its own content/infrastructure. Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and Facebook as a whole are not related.
Pretend for the sake of argument that Facebook did use Cloudflare, or that my example were about some other platform that does.
> A more accurate claim would be, if someone makes a Facebook post containing an illegal threat of violence, they (Facebook) _do_ ban the account of who made a post containing illegal threats of violence.
Exactly my point. When someone does something banworthy on Facebook, we let Facebook ban just that one person, rather than banning all of Facebook.
>It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here?
edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it.
the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right?
The big counter celebrating the number of people they've harassed into committing suicide? People have gone to jail for it. CF should be the least of their concerns right now.
On the one hand, I would have supported Cloudflare in continuing to provide service to Kiwifarms as someone not employed there if that was their conviction.
On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
Not just immoral and reprehensible, the campaigns of targeted harassment they undertake limit the victims' speech. If you care about people being able to freely express themselves, today is a good day. I don't know why the free speech defenders miss this (I do know).
And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
Is it censoring free speech when the goal of the speech is to actively harm people? I’m not sure of any nation that has no caveats to their idea of free speech
Is declining to participate by re-transmitting such speech even censorship? You can't force a company to take you as a customer, being a shit head isn't a protected class.
That's only a few providers and too expensive for anyone but someone using Google ads to fund their operations, because Cloudflare created that cost by its illegal actions.
Regardless of the behavior of the people at kiwifarms, I still find it odd that we have protected classes of people that are more equal than others. Everyone should receive the same rights.
Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Hate speech is outside of that scope, otherwise we wouldn’t have another term for that (all calls for violence could be hate speech, but not all hate speech is calls for violence)
Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
Is it really though? If so, then more than half the rappers would of been locked up for this by now.
I suppose who ever put such a law in US court system is holding their breath for the guy who got on International TV / web streaming / a huge crowd of people in Ferguson (?) and said 'burn this bitch down' - burn this mutherfucker down.. [1]
I dunno, maybe he was arrested for this and it is a real thing, if so I missed the news about it.
Or maybe it's technically possible to have to go to court for such a thing, but maybe only a few ever have, and the outcome of such a thing is anyone's guess, even those really into speech law [2]
My interpretation of hate speech is that it attempts to "dehumanize" a category of people with malice.
Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.
Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.
I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important.
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
> Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
> true threats and "incitement to imminent lawless action" are separate doctrines
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
There are plenty of laws that prohibit speech used that is a call for violence.
>Under Texas law, any threat of violence to either person or property can be the basis of a terroristic threat charge. However, that threat of violence must be accompanied with criminal intent to either follow through with the threat or terrify another into believing you may do so. There are six specific types of intent covered by Texas law, and the prosecutor only needs to prove you had one of them to obtain a conviction.
cause a reaction of any type to his threat by an official or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies;
place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, room, place of assembly, place to which the public has access, place of employment or occupation, aircraft, automobile, or other forms of conveyance, or other public places;
cause impairment or interruption of public communications, public transportation, public water, gas, or power supply or other public services;
place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury; or
influence the conduct or activities of a branch or agency of the federal government, the state, or a political subdivision of the state.
> unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action
So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
That makes so much sense, it seems like it would go without saying. If the violent act itself was legal (like a war, or an organized boxing match), why wouldn’t it be legal to solicit or petition for it?
>So it’s fine to call for violence, as long as the violence in question would be legal if it were acted upon?
No. It's fine to call for violence as long as your call is not designed to provoke and cause imminent lawless action. Brandenburg advocated for "revengeance" against the government if their demands were not met, and that was protected speech. Hess v. Indiana also affirms that advocating for lawless action is protected speech.
The point is more - you can legally say "kill Joe Biden" on the internet, but it becomes illegal if you're saying it to someone holding a gun to Joe Biden's head, who then fires it.
That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation.
Hosting content, more moderation.
I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction about why providing a CDN is fundamentally and completely different from hosting. Still coming off your servers eierher way.
It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too.
“It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle.
And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
I think the internet is just irrecoverably broken in a way such that technical problems like DDoS or NN escalate to social problems. We should not even be having these discussions in the first place: It should be infeasible for attackers to conduct DDoS. It should be infeasible for ISPs to surveil their users. The internet as we know it was designed to facilitate communications between non-antagonistic peers, that design is no longer suitable for use by democratic society at large.
This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters.
The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists.
The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so.
Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service.
The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.
The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.
It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
Well this particular example is a US website. The relevant (inadequate) legal framework for handling the situation is US Federal law, which ideally Cloudflare would have had to reference to determine whichever outcome should have happened here. So, while I'm far from an expert on policy, I imagine that'd be the place to start?
Is it? I thought that it was hosted outside of the US, and that while the admin was an American citizen he didn't live on US soil. That's from vague memories from years ago though, so maybe not accurate or up to date.
Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
It’s a fundamental issue though — there’s no “figuring it out” that a government can do that won’t either censor or facilitate. 25 years has been long enough to find tactical policy changes that make it easier, but there aren’t any, which is why nothing has happened. The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Practical dichotomy — that’s why this thread exists. You either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
> either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
Nobody has been legislated to do anything here. Cloudflare is dumping Kiwifarms. There are other hosts. That's one middle ground: a diversity of opinions on what constitutes unacceptable speech. Here's another: the government has no right shutting down Kiwifarms in the absence of a true threat [1], but Cloudflare is free to.
If you look at the history of communication technologies, particularly public ones (e.g. the printing press and television), this pattern recapitulates. An idealistic explosion of creativity. Weaponisation. Scrambling alongside states over-reacting. Then a middle ground.
We don't have anything close to consensus on the Internet, save perhaps for X-rated content. So private actors are figuring things out. We'll probably see a government response carving out protections for both speech and platforms, though hopefully nothing as onerous as what was done with TV [2]. And then over decades an equilibrium will arise. An equilibrium between "de-shrining free speech" and "entrench[ing]hatred."
The middle ground that already exists - the right of free speech doesn't guarantee an audience, and the right to assembly doesn't guarantee a platform. Censorship is permitted within the marketplace of ideas as an inevitable consequence of the fact that coerced speech cannot be considered free, but the government is far more limited.
If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
> The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
Most of us never enshrined free speech above all else. It was never controversial that free speech had limits, that sites had the right to moderate content and ban accounts, or that businesses could refuse service to anyone. Prior to 2016, something like this would not have even been newsworthy.
Painting this issue as black and white is just wrong. Both sides have immense ramifications for the world. Accountability for censoring bodies and people on these platforms is not easily solved.
> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.
They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.
They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
The notion that government should be in charge of effectively eliminating speech we don't like so that private companies don't have to is _far worse_ than the current state of things.
Why shouldn't we prefer private parties administer the free speech which is most fitting for their platform, as opposed to overly broad legislation at the national level by a government which doesn't appear like they'll catch up on tech within 5 years?
Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation.
In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people.
And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
The problem is who defines what is hate - don't trust a govt to make that - they are the last people I would trust.
We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
I am honestly dumbfounded about the government hate on HN. It's elected by you and your peers. You can influence it and you can even be part of it yourself. If you want change do it and stop spreading FUD.
Right. Centralization of morals and ethics simply causes mass polarization and, eventually and inevitably, war over "which side wins." Those in favor of the rational gray area will be trampled on by both sides.
I'm basically happy right now with private companies being the de facto moderator of speech because your alternative of government censorship is unacceptably risky to people's freedoms, and private companies are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
----
> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
----
> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic.
A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site.
Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me.
It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.
> I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
Yes, of course it would be. The end result of litigating free speech in the court system, is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time.
The courts have extremely strong protections for speech. They are way way stronger than what private companies do.
Just adding the word "government" doesn't make something more scary. In this case, adding "government" to the enforcement mechanism for speech would mean that basically nothing gets banned.
> is that the court system would rule in favor of the speech, almost every single time
This is kind of a run-around. Cloudflare's blogpost argues that it wants to get this content offline, it just wants courts to be in charge of that process. It acted because it believed the courts were too slow.
If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur. The actual argument in that case is whether you want this moderation to happen at all.
I take Cloudflare at their word that they actually wanted a court to tell them to deplatform this content. And because of that I take them at their word that they believe the government could feasibly pass laws that would censor the content people are asking them to deplatform.
> If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”.
It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset.
Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”
Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
> Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something.
It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
This isn't going to be the popular opinion, but the reality is that they could've ignored the complaints and it would've eventually died down. This is an internet slap fight pushed by a histrionic personality with plenty of skeletons in their own closest. The media would've moved on. Now they've opened a pandora's box that despite what they're claiming, will be abused in the future.
The only truthful thing in Cloudflare's statement is that Kiwifarms is almost certainly not going to go away. There's an entire country that just became persona non grata to the first world that is well versed in IT.
>Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting.
Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.
If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
>If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law.
>However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting.
Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied.
>If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare
Cloudflare has a really clear and seemingly mandatory option which is to just assert what we all know to be true: They can boot clients whenever they threaten their business. Everybody does this. There are near constant stories of users getting business-critical Google or Apple accounts suspended without warning or explanation. Those companies are ruthless about protecting themselves from liability and will err on the side of losing customers even when the violations aren't proven. Cloudflare wants to be seen as being above the fray and they just absolutely aren't. Anyone who thinks "it's just politics" is delusional. These are real people doing real things with real consequences.
i think this is the sort of thing that exposes a general failure of capitalism.
the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce.
FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here ...
I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention.
Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them.
This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue.
If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say."
Which government? surely each country gets to choose for itself - the US 1st amendment is only a US law, it doesn't apply world-wide - the internet however is a world-wide entity and once a company like CF, or Google etc gets big enough it needs to obey the law everywhere
Agreed. There should be (and I thought there was with Section 230) a very, very clear line between being a platform--"dumb pipe"--and a content provider with moderation and censoring capabilities. I agree with others that the law has a lot of catching up to do... but when it does catch up, that doesn't mean it will favor folks demanding censorship of this type of content no matter what.
Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc).
But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
> But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively.
Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves.
The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself.
The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong?
And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat?
The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA.
Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
> figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet.
I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech.
What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals.
How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
> What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article).
A lack of moderation to remove hate. Hate breeds hate, and drives good people away. In a similar way that bullshit breeds more bullshit unless removed.
Let me try an analogy for technical people.
Say you're a person deeply knowledgeable about computers and technology, and you're posting in an audio related forum.
Somebody posts a glowing review of an expensive device that claims that shaving the edge of a CD and painting the border with a marker will give you a bigger soundstage, more clarity and make the audio sound crisper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-QxLAxwxkM
You can try to explain why it's bullshit, but it's hard. You have to go into details about how a CD actually works, why this BS about reflections has no effect on a CD mechanism, how error correction works... you'll have to write several pages of deeply technical information that you have to boil down to something understandable to mere humans. It's a tough job. Not only you need technical understanding, but you also need to be good with words, and good at explaining complex concepts simply. And you have to have the time and dedication to spend an hour or two writing about it for free. That's a lot of unusual characteristics for a single person to have.
Then somebody goes "shut up nerd, it sounds better!" in response. And they proceed to post more reviews of volume knobs that somehow improve the sound because the wood is special, gold plated optical cables, and other such junk.
It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit. So eventually the smart people will get fed up and leave. Especially because they can find places where they're appreciated -- they'll find a home on a more specialized home where their expertise is actually valued. Meanwhile the original forum will get even more BS.
Same happens with social topics. It's easy to spread conspiracy theories and hate. It's hard to explain complex social issues. Without moderation the first will trivially overwhelm the second.
> they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line
No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
> We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign.
Given their principled stand just two days ago, this sounds like a pretty weak "haha we totally don't cave to pressure, it's just coincidence, so don't think pressure campaigns work on us!"
Has Cloudflare proactively blocked any websites without a pressure campaign?
"Cloudflare has been made aware that your site is in violation of our published Terms of Service. Pursuant to our published policy, Cloudflare will terminate service to your website. Cloudflare will terminate your service for switter{.}at by disabling our authoritative DNS."
The only thing that bothers me about this decision is the fact that they made a wrong-headed announcement of principle that calls the decision into question.
Free speech absolutism which extends beyond legal protection, and which demands private organizations and individuals to materially protect and service all speech is hopelessly naive. Volunteering to do it is past the point of absurdity.
By engaging in that absurdity, they undermined the credibility of their motives making this decision today. They knew there’s a red line, and if at least two adults were in a room before the previous statement was issued it would be almost impossible to believe that they hadn’t discussed that red line. That knowledge should have guided them against making any statement at all, because even clarifying their red lines would create perverse incentives.
I don’t begrudge Cloudflare their principles, nor their decision to deviate from them in the face of reality. I also don’t doubt their motives as written in both statements, though I think they may wildly underestimate how much trust and good will that requires… and how little reason they have to assume it’s present. I do personally wish they’d reached this decision sooner, as a non-binary person who could certainly be targeted by KF campaigns. But I have a strong free expression instinct too, and a set of privileges of my own which sometimes delay my recognition of real present danger that I don’t experience directly.
If any Cloudflare staff is reading this comment: you made the right decision. Please try to use caution when such a decision is potentially on the horizon but hasn’t yet been made. Just as real human lives are at stake when you provide (or don’t provide) services to any particular customer, real human lives are at stake when you damage your credibility making that decision.
I don't get it, Cloudflare is not the court, nor is it a monopoly.
It's not some tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech.
It's just a business, and business can decide to not provide service to assholes, just like your local restaurant.
It already decided it won't provide hosting service to the despicables, but somehow the security service is vital to freedom of speech? I don't buy it.
It's all about their legal exposure, and it looks like the heat's too much this time.
If Matthew Prince didn't style himself as the tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech then yes, most of this disappointment would not have happened.
People are mostly not claiming they have no right to drop them, or an obligation to keep them up, but claiming one thing and then 3 days later buckling under pressure is extremely disappointing. Especially when the underlying implication is that the website would hopefully be taken down by actually illicit means, those being DDOS attacks.
They muffed it. They were proving to the world how reliable they could be and repairing the damage from the Stormfront debacle, and again they just showed how prone to caving to pressure they can be. What a joke.
I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.
I was referring to Stormfront there and how you called that situation "the Stormfront debacle", as if the bad thing about the situation was CF stopping working with them.
Both times, people organized a social media campaign to try to get CF to drop services for a site they disliked, and both times CF first refused in the interest of free speech, safe harbor, let law enforcement handle it, etc, then flipped like a switch and dropped their services when the mob didn't go away fast enough.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
And it's a huge strawman to imply I said people just wanted SF gone for aesthetic reasons.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It is not possible for violence to occur via the internet. And if you believe that posts on the site somehow constitutes harassment to an illegal degree, contact law enforcement.
Now that KF is back up (good job, CF), please find me one post on KF that involves the planning of violence which wasn't either deleted or ridiculed into oblivion by the other posters there. If it's so common, this should be an easy task, right?
Exactly. You can go on Reddit right now and find calls for violence, extermination of various groups, etc etc etc, but you’ll never see cloudfare take action then.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
Generally in agreement with you here, but are you aware the specifics around why CF dropped services for Stormfront?
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
I guess what makes it difficult in this case is that the amount of power CF has is so great that any use of that power is immediately troubling.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
But there are alternatives, cloudflare isn’t the government, they don’t even have a monopoly.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman (albeit a controversial one) was probably the straw the broke the camel's back. Hard to lobby congress (Which Cloudflare does) when you protect a forum actively swats its members.
Prove your accusation, please. That the person that made that call not only said they were KF, but a certain user from KF and gave their account name, should be evidence to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds that that was almost certainly a false flag.
>I'm guessing KF members organizing the swatting a US congresswoman
This never happened. It was just blamed on KF by the people currently criminally DDoSing it.
I'm amazed by the credulity and lack of critical thinking in this whole discussion. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in hearing from KF's point of view ... which is now at any rate impossible because they've been banished from the internet. There are two sides to this conflict and you aren't allowed to hear from one side, so the other side can just relentlessly make shit up, exaggerate, take things out of context, and it will be taken as gospel.
So many comments like "I've never heard of KF before but I looked at this hysterical out of context twitter thread and wow I guess it does need to be censored-via-DDOS".
I agree that MTG almost certainly wasn’t swatted by KF.
I have, however, spent time reading Kiwifarms well before this controversy. I have zero interest in arguing about the conclusions I reached: I just want to put down a marker and say that you’re wrong. Many people who disagree with you have taken the time to read the site.
Neither KF nor its members swatted MTG. It was absolutely done to place blame on KF and doesn’t even comport with the image those who dislike the site paint - that KF is a radical, right wing forum designed to harass minorities and political opponents.
I don't understand where the myth of a "free" Internet comes from. Since privatization in 1993, you've always been held to _someone's_ terms of service. Even if you become your own ISP--get an ASN, IP space, a place to rack equipment--you still have to find someone to peer with, and if you bring enough heat you'll find yourself dropped.
Not to mention DNS which is subject to the laws of the country of registrar; plenty of pirate sites have had their domains have been seized by the US gov't.
I’m depressingly amused by that. If you’re a free speech absolutist to the point where you’re unwilling to draw a line between Kiwifarms attacks and the real world consequences, surely you shouldn’t blame the anti-KF campaign for the way KF reacted?
The problem here is that Cloudflare didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that the words on Kiwifarms might be stifling to the free speech of their targets. Which, of course, they were, just as the anti-KF campaign made KF unhappier and more aggressive. Words have real physical consequences. Often they’re predictable.
Hope the tech elite who naysay journalism take note that it wasn't the 3 suicides, or the swatting, or the death threats or the stalking or the harassment that compelled Matthew Prince to stop hosting kiwifarms.
I agree that what you are saying is literally correct, but I don't think it's really a good thing that it's this obvious. They should have either caved much earlier, not at all.
The heat, they were clearly prepared to weather. However, if one or many of their high-profile clients threatened to pull out, that would have been very difficult to sell to their investors as a good thing.
Typical weasel word announcement from a big company bending over backwards to satisfy the prevailing voices of a political narrative. This has nothing to do with 'free speech' or 'due process'. It is about ensuring a brand stays appealing. I say this because they weren't specific about the credibility of any 'threats' made. They invented an enemy and then used it to justify suppressing Kiwifarms --as a whole--. Very convenient since it allows them to dismiss ignoring their supposed values while satisfying the legions of mad people who want them to act a certain way.
I also want to point out that Kiwifarms is not an organization. As far as I'm aware: they are a simple, public forum. This means that talking about what 'Kiwifarms' has done is misleading since it only applies to what some users are posting. It would be like saying Facebook are terrorists because sometimes terrorist groups try to use the site for propaganda and recruiting. You need to differentiate between the actions of a user/s and the site. In the case of Facebook they are allowed to stay up and remove offending content on the basis that this is the nature of public communities. This is actually standard practice for websites who may also receive copyrighted material. Otherwise someone could easily take down a website by posting copyrighted material.
If there really was a 'life threatening situation' Kiwifarms should have been allowed to handle this themselves. By either removing the content or taking whatever action they felt necessary. But Cloudflare didn't do this. They provide a service that fundamentally undermines the integrity of the Internet. Makes it less resilient. And now the hens have come home to roast: they are dictating how others should run their sites. Eat a massive bag of dicks, cloudflare.
The problem with cases like this one is that they really show the inadequacy of the geographic government model in the age of the internet.
If a Czech citizen, currently living in Slovakia, doxxx a British person resident in Canada on a site hosted in the Maldives and managed by a Japanese citizen, protected by a German server owned by an American security company, which government has the right to order the content to be taken down?
All of the above countries, including countries not mentioned in your example, have the right to order the content to be taken down, following their own country's regulations.
"Taking down content" can range from blocking the site from being accessible from inside the country, to organising measures together with other countries where the site is actually hosted to take down the site at its roots, should the country allow it.
North Korea, China, Russia are prime examples of blocking being heavily used to control the Internet.
A government's model will never be "inadequate" as long as people live there and abide by the country's law because of various incentives (economical, sociological, familial, ...).
>Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online, as the Daily Stormer and 8chan did themselves after we terminated them. And, even if they don't, the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.
Yeah no shit, of course this is going to happen. It's clearly just a way to save face from Cloudflare - though they definitely needed to do it as this problem was never going to go away for them if they didn't. The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable, and that's not going to change with them dropping KiwiFarms. As terrible of a website as it is, it's just going to come back up with a provider that has even lower moral standards than Cloudflare.
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
That isn't the point, the internet protocol is designed as a distributed networking system that was adopted by corporations; if you want censorship resistance or privacy that isn't part of that specific protocol. (For example check alternatives such a CJDNS, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc; or application-layer protocols such as I2P/IPFS/TOR)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable
I find this interesting, is this the point of the internet, Or is this a personal value or feature people overlay on the internet? At a history/protocol level I’d be pressed to say the internet was designed to be uncensorsble, fault tolerant perhaps at best
> The entire point of the internet is to be uncensorable,
It's not the 1990s anymore. Hate is becoming increasingly unwelcome on the network, and that includes white-shoe hate that directly threatens marginalized communities (e.g., race-IQ pseudocience, "gender-critical feminism"). Lives are on the line.
> Hate is becoming increasingly unwelcome on the network
Oh sweet summer child.
So when are you going to write a love letter to ICANN and RIPE to call for the total ban and removal of IP address associated with websites that you don't like?
I bet that you won't do it since even if you did, ICANN and RIPE will not do anything, and they shouldn't do anything. The Ukrainian government tried that same emotional censorship tactic on Russia and ICANN, and RIPE rightfully rejected that ridiculous request.
Either way, all the sites in question will still exist on the public internet and it doesn't solve whatever is going on in KF.
We understand that you love censorship. You don’t need to use the emotive language to argue for the suppression of your political opponents. It’s a poor tactical choice in a community that mostly includes the ability for analytical thought.
There was more time between Cloudflare dropping 8chan and KF than between Cloudflare dropping Stormfront and 8chan. By the (very dubious and limited, but) only metric we have, the rate of Cloudflare's "bad site" removals is slowing, and its a factor of 20 or 30x from monthly like you're claiming.
The sky isn't falling, and the slippery slope is demonstrably not there in this case.
Boy, this sure would have been a lot easier if they just dropped Kiwi Farms with little fanfare the instant it was clear they were using CF. I bet they'd have been able to even keep the perception that they're a super neutral platform, too.
Seems to me it would be better for Cloudflare to keep serving Kiwifarms, and cooperate with government requests for access logs / etc. Then at least our law enforcement would have data to help with finding threat actors.
The forum already deletes anything illegal (in the US) and hands out info to law-enforcement when asked.
The operator posted this on their Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Not going against your point, just that there is no need for Cloudflare to provide the government info on a site that already provides the government with info.
they did, but law enforcement were simply too slow.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site 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.
> Legal process
> While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
According to whom? Cloudflare? What would be an appropriate time for Cloudflare for law enforcement to respond? And to what threats?
You say "simply" but these are not simple questions.
Cloudflare can shut off service to anyone, sure, but in any other industry there would be some termination notice, right? Unless its something like terrorism, where LAW ENFORCEMENT sets the boundary, not the private company.
The obligation for a termination notice, time to cure any violations of terms, etc is something that would be in a contract you agree to. A service provider is able to have terms that allow them to cut you off instantly if they decide to put that in their terms - apparently, CloudFlare has terms like that.
Would I want my ISP or CDN to cut me off without notice? No. Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond. But also, I wouldn't operate a site like KiwiFarms, so I'm not terribly concerned about my CDN cutting me off for the same reason. If it became more of a widespread pattern with CF I would understand their customers getting nervous.
> Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond.
From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
I hope we can all join hands and say "DDOS'ing is a crime and we all hope that the FBI finds people participating in DDOS attacks and put them in jail."
An exclusive focus on getting legal repercussions for the people who acted against KF and not any focus on legal repercussions for KF is some false neutrality.
>We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign.
Haven't been following this story, but it seems they haven't considered that whatever antagonists the site has could have posted the putatively objectionable content there themselves, due to the website's nature as a forum for user-generated content. Furthermore, the article throughout seems to suffer from the "anthropomorphic fallacy", in failing to acknowledge that it is speaking about a web service rather than person, and falsely attributing to it emotions and intentions.
I wasn’t familiar with Kiwifarms, so I read up about it - and oh, boy. The fact that something like Kiwifarms can exist in the United States without legal or civil liabilities is really problematic.
Regardless of the content or how bad it was it's what this represents that is terrifying. It's simple to always laugh and say "good" when obvious bad actors are effected. Hell, domestic spying and drone strikes "only effected bad people". Right up until they didn't.
To allow a single company, government, etc the ability to exercise total control is a dangerous thing. I've long waited for cloudflare to overstep their governance and start censorship. Surely, we will see many more websites go down now that pandora's box is open. Maybe it will even swing with the tides of whoever is in power, or whoever in congress is getting their palms greased.
Instead of simply turning off their service and sending them packing the letter appears to imply kiwifarm will continue to pay for their services until they move. This is censorship, and kiwifarms could have an unironic day in court over it. At the very least, they will be able to sue cloudflare for services not provided.
EDIT: Will one of the crybullies please reply to my post to tell me where I am wrong other than "kiwifarms bad" before downvoting me.
How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please. They are drawing the line at imminent threats to human life. The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...
Is it really so hard to understand that it is still censorship even if it is legal?
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
Somehow it's Freedom when a company refuses to make a cake for a gay couple, but Tyranny if a company providing hosting and DDOS protection services decide not to work with a company who explicitly violates their terms of service.
I'm not saying they are equivalent. I'm saying that all the people screaming that this is tyranny hold very different views on denying other people services based on a protected class. I'm pointing out how silly it is to be okay with a baker refusing gay customers but thinking this is the end of freedom on the internet.
The subject of both is a business denying service. The difference is the motivation for denying the service. The folks who complain the most about denying services to bigots and trolls who violate terms of service are completely okay about denying service based off of innate characteristics. I'm not suggesting that if you support one you need to support the other, rather that it's very curious which things these people most vocally support and which things are unacceptable to them. Just like you'll literally never find them defending leftists who get kicked off of these services either.
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
>How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please.
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
No single company has "the ability to exercise total control" on the internet, otherwise Kiwifarms / DailyStormer / 8chan would all be offline. This is not censorship, it's cause and effect or consequences or the free market depending on your slant.
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
Drone strikes and domestic spying have always had huge literal and figurative blast radiuses. Ask someone who is on the no fly list because they have the exceedingly common name of Mohammad.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd put money on that. Your wager is "by September 2027, Cloudflare will remove sites critical of the imperial powers using hate speech as a cover for removing said critical content"?
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
They’ve lost numerous hosts already. Very few companies want to be associated with this kind of thing. So as they were discovered they tend to get dropped.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
There's a logical fallacy called the slippery slope. It's not an effective thinking strategy. Cloudflare simply chose not to protect a site full of bullies. As is their right. They hardly silenced anyone.
More importantly: they're not protected by a reverse proxy anymore. Behold, people can attack freely. Uptime will turn to shit, people will grow bored of trying to access it.
Meta, but: Hoping the moderators on HN are doing good this evening as I can't begin to imagine the amount of sock-puppetry they're dealing with right now
They should ban green accounts on anything that relates to gender, queerness, harassment, discrimination, race, etc.
Basically non-tech things that stir up a lot of gross opinions masked behind sock puppets and throwaway accounts.
HN is becoming painful for me to read. Just so much hate, which is especially disconcerting to see it on a forum like this one. Which is supposed to be a place for smart discussion.
Additionally, a single deleted post (or even a handful of them) being a cause for attempted removal from the internet seems like a precedent that would kill every host of user generated content, including hackernews and twitter.
And, just like that, the internet lost one of its most staunch defenders. I don't care for KF nor did I used to care about 8chan or stormfront, but it just shows that all the grandstanding from Matthew Prince was for show all along. and the worst of all? its fro nothing, the people doing whatever they were being accused of, which i'm still trying to piece together, are just gonna be in discords or the nth-chan that shows up to host it.
Well I hope he enjoys suddenly having his huge customers from saudi arabia or whatever else start calling things worrysome and prey on that weakness.
The law, at least in the US of A, puts freedom of speech in a sacred position. There is a reason for the Bill of Rights amendments, and the way they are written. You are claiming "rule of law" to act in a way the law would not allow were you government instead of a private entity. Your claims here, like in the past cases where Cloudflare has committed vigilante censorship, are disingenuous at best. While you strike at the things you hate, you cry that /you/ are the one wounded! Your hypocrisy is disgusting. You and your company do not deserve the position you now hold in the infrastructure of the internet.
This is your daily reminder that the last time Cloudfare did this, they left up ISIS murdersites, featuring videos of people being murdered by ISIS (gunshots to the face, decaptitation via detcord, setting people on fire in a cage).
The only conclusion one can come to is that it was a PR move as they caved under pressure.
I can more than guarantee they only did this because they felt their rear ends were on fire. The individuals targeting them with their, at best, comedic DropKiwifarms campaign are unhinged individuals that are capable of stuff nobody would want to be on the receiving end of, hence said decision - in the end KF was nothing more than a forum, granted, the community on there was specific at the very least, but most of the arguments used against them were false (looking at the "suicide" of a developer and a suicide of some person named Chloe, who distinctively stated in their suicide note that KF was not related to said suicide). In the end, this does nothing other than prove that Cloudflare is not a good platform for posting anything that will not side with the current popular agenda.
This is really concerning. I feel like it’s easy to justify now because every major infrastructure provider is on the same side culturally, but what happens when services without competition become ideologically opposed? Imagine an ISP shutting down service to a Visa data centre because they allow cannabis purchases LOL.
If you're so worried about your ideological-divergent subject matter from being entirely unavailable in the future - why not start an ISP, hosting company, DNS provider, DDoS Protection Racket, Server Farm?
Then YOU could proudly serve the content of those poor under-served souls which you preemptively mourn
I have to wonder if everyone calling this site a cess pool has actually visited it. It was, in general, more civil and better moderated than, say, Twitter or Reddit which regularly generate a circlejerk of hatred and violent rhetoric. The subject matter may be distasteful, but the website was not at all what you everyone seems to be making it out to be.
Are you for real? It takes 30s on KF to realize that the whole purpose is harassment. It has entire subforums targeting individuals. The quality of the moderation is not the issue here.
Doesn’t this decision to arbitrarily moderate content compromise the possibility of CloudFlare being legally classified a common carrier?
I also find it hilarious CloudFlare pretends to care about free speech here when they have been caught red handed arbitrarily canceling peoples services and domains + even going so far as to prevent people from transferring their domains to other registrars¹
The idea that an internet infastructure company like cloudfare should be making moral decisions like whether or not a website "should" remain online is ridiculous. Thats like the water or electricity company trying to decide whether a house should get service. Obviously they will make stupid and nonsensical decisions and deny innocent people basic services because that is outside the scope of their company.
Twitter is responsible for more swatting, doxing, life ruination threats and harassment than kiwifarms could ever dream of. But we are tacitly ok with it because everyone understands that twitter is not responsible for the content of its users. But all anyone has to do now to take down a smaller website that hosts content they don't like is post some fake death threats to themselves and screenshot it.
> This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with.
"We'll keep doing it of course, even after we said we wouldn't do it any more."
After all, it's been all of 3 days since they wrote,
> Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.
Edit: And to be fair, they do link to that post: "As we outlined last Wednesday, we do not believe that terminating security services is appropriate, even to revolting content.", "The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy." - did I miss the part of that post where they tack on "well, except for the times when it's really bad"? I went and skimmed over it just now to see if they left themselves a loophole that they're using today and I'm not seeing it.
If you take your phone line and start making a lot of harassing calls with that phone, they will cut you off and tell the police. It does not seem that KF posters wanted the speech there to stay private.
That's besides the point; I'm not personally arguing (here) that CF shouldn't cut people off, I'm pointing out that CF just said that they didn't think they should cut people off, and proceeded to turn around and do that while still saying they shouldn't do it. You can be for or against CF cutting people off, but either way you can be unhappy with them saying one thing and doing another.
Technical question: Cloudflare says they are currently intercepting requests for Kiwifarms and redirecting them to the linked blog post. What does Kiwifarms need to do to remove their dependency on Cloudflare and make their forum visible again [edit: at the original address]? Can they do it unilaterally by changing an DNS address and waiting for it to propagate? Or do they need Cloudflare's cooperation?
When you set up a Cloudflare account, you tell your domain provider (Namecheap, Godaddy, Google etc.) that you want Cloudflare to have complete control over your domain by setting the domain's nameservers to Cloudflare's.
If you want to get off of Cloudflare, you just go to your domain registrar and set your nameservers to some other DNS host, whether it be DDOS-Guard (which is what kiwifarms did with their .ru domain), the domain registrar's own, or any other. It will take a bit to propagate but should be pretty quick. Of course if you bought your domain on Cloudflare you may be kind of screwed, but I don't think that was so in this case.
EDIT: It was https://who.is/whois/kiwifarms.net so they might be screwed. Depends on if Cloudflare still lets them access the dashboard and transfer the domain to another registrar.
CF is incapable of "taking" any website offline - the only "power" they have, is the choice to not providing free DDoS protection, and/or to stop resolving the site's URL
> Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent.
OK, but you should be clear about the definition of hard cases.
What exactly constitutes "an emergency threat to human life"?
Hypothetical example: Suppose you're providing DDOS protection for a website belonging to country X, that acts against the interests of your country. War erupts between the two countries, and the website plays an important role in the information warfare by propagating fake news.
Would that constitute an emergency threat to human life since it helps perpetuate the war?
A shameful decision was made. It had to be justified obviously but still not any more or less terrible.
BTW Cloudflare is effectively hijacking kiwifarms.net by re-directing visitors to their blog page.
When government agencies bust websites associated with criminal activity the most they do after taking control of the homepage is put up a jpeg of the taskforce responsible and a few notes then call it day.
I've only recently learned of this site, and being a NZer, with the name Kiwi in the title I assumed some sort of connection to NZ.
But it looks like there isn't? It's American based, and when the NZ govt made a request related to the Christchurch mosque massacre, the admin told them to pound sand.
It's a corruption of the old name of the site, which is a reference to another site, which is named after the first and possibly most famous victim of that community's stalking. See the History section of its Wikipedia article. It has nothing to do with New Zealand or kiwis, indeed.
Unless law enforcement was actively telling you to do this, you really dropped ther ball.
So people post info they find via a Google search. Them not posting it on Kiwifarms isn't going to make the information any less readily available.
Pulling screens of random users posting threats is disingenuous. Other users actively discourage such activities constantly.
This all started because people wanted to laugh at someone being ridiculous on Twitter, but then they kept digging and found more and more deplorable stuff. The only reason the campaign to drop the farms exists is to cover up the activities a narcissist openly talked about on social media.
The site is no more dangerous or racist than Jaime Cochran was.
I'm sorry, I'm generally Mr. "Raw raw free speech", but let's not kid ourselves; by all accounts KiwiFarms is (and always has been) a cesspool of horrible people. It's not like 4chan or something, where it might have started with reasonable intentions and just became horrible; KiwiFarms was started for the specific purpose of bullying Chris-Chan, hence why it was initially called Cwcki Farms. KiwiFarms has been implicated in multiple suicides, and countless cases of bullying (and possibly doxing), and Null's response to all of these allegations has been almost entirely ambivalent.
At some point, we have to ask: is this the world we actually want to live it? I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron, but even I think that the doxing and SWATing campaigns against her lead to a really bad world to live in, and that's not even getting into people I actually like.
I'm just some idiot on the internet, but I think that the world is a better place without KiwiFarms.
Didn’t the swat call announce they were a kf user? Seems a little odd. Moreover, are home addresses of congress people public info? It seems like a lot of people were fine with posting the addresses of Supreme Court members.
I don’t think Whataboutisms are a good arguing tactic. I am against the doxing of anyone, even if I don’t like them. Hence why I mentioned that I think MTG is a moron, but I’m still against her being doxxed.
I couldn’t find anything about home addresses of congresspeople being public. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if that was public info. I could be wrong.
> It seems like a lot of people were fine with posting the addresses of Supreme Court members.
Even if you think that kind of protest is a step too far (I do), you surely agree that there's a fundamental difference between peaceful protest at the home of a public figure (which is quite clearly what happened) and the practice of SWATing, which even in its least dangerous form is a perjurious accusation of a serious crime.
IMO it's more likely that one member of the anti-KF crew was responsible for the false flag. Most of them are also far to the left, and MTG is a fun target for them.
Aren't far left people generally against police? Sure they'll call the police when they need them, but they wouldn't go out of their way to contact the police unless they themselves had been harmed.
Far left activists are often against police, but it appears that they like the SWAT teams (ironically). MTG herself has had at least 3 SWAT calls on her. Many other public right-wing figures have also had a lot of SWAT calls.
The part that’s missing here is that the people KF are fighting are on the exact same level. Keffals doxed the KF owner’s mom, lied about the mom being an active KF user and called for her firing:
Do you really think a KF user would SWAT a GOP Congresswoman in the middle of this fight over their DDoS protection, and the call the cops to identify themselves as a specific Kiwi Farms user (moderator “AltisticRight”), one who denies any involvement in this? To me that sounds highly suspect. We will likely never know the truth.
And here’s a box of the Internet pharmacy hormones Keffals instructs kids to buy and self-dose in secret, without medical evaluation or parental knowledge:
I don’t recall defending Keffals as I do not know who that is, so I have no intention of addressing the first half of your post.
In regards to your second point, I don’t know. If it is the case that someone from KiwiFarms is SWATing people, and Null is ambivalent about it, then a world where KiwiFarms is tolerated is not one that I would like.
Considering how much of a jackass Null was in regards to Byuu/Near’s suicide, it really doesn’t seem out of character.
Keffals is the person leading the now-successful campaign to get Cloudflare to drop Kiwi Farms. Keffals is a male-to-female transgender streamer with a large underage audience, and a sordid history that Kiwi Farms has documented. See my earlier comment.
Let me clarify; I don't know who Keffals is, but I also don't care who she is either. Even if you proved that she was literally reincarnated Hitler, it would change nothing about my opinion on KiwiFarms. Destroying her credibility would serve no purpose to me, because my concerns in regards to the forum are unrelated to her.
I've been lightly following KiwiFarms for years now, have seen the level of bizarrely "proud ambivalence" exuded by Null for the actions of the forum members, and have thought that the site was a skidmark on society for most of that time.
That guide is a useful resource for trans people of all ages.
If your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health and your parents will send you to torture camp for being on hormones, then taking hormones in secret is the moral thing to do.
Doctors not performing tubal ligations on women and other afab people under 30 is pure, unadulterated misogyny.
Oh, and also, if your gender dysphoria is destroying your mental health then focusing on fertility is just patriarchy. At the individual level, reproduction is a morally neutral act. Improving your mental health is a morally good act, so it clearly takes priority.
It absolutely is not. Children cannot consent to sterilizing medical procedures. Doctors are prohibited by law from performing tubal ligations on women under 18, and most won’t do it on women under 30.
The science on trans youth is evolving rapidly; the UK, Sweden, and Finland just severely curtailed use of blockers and hormones on minors due to the clear risks of harm and unclear risks of benefit. I expect the US to follow suit in a few years, once our current political fever breaks and the medical evidence remains. The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine is a good place to review the science and track new developments:
This is a bit unsettling, I thought that the emergency threat was moderated off the site (as mentionned by the main [1]).
I know that place is horrendous, but it feels like CF blocked it because of the media attention instead of the threat itself. There is plenty of content online that actively partakes in stochastic terrorism as well as direct threats that are serviced by Cloudflare.
The question of what makes content worth dropping, without the involvement of law enforcement, from such low level infrastructure services is a scary prospect, especially when you consider the issues that current internet has[2].
The moment they caved in, Cloudflare stopped being a simple infrastructure provider, and we can be sure that there will be actors, big and small, that will pull levers to make this happen again.
The silver lining is that a hateful forum will probably cease to operate for good.
Where are these "escalations" and "agressive" contents? Why was law enforcement "too slow" and who judges what is an appropriate time frame for law enforcement? Does Cloudflare?
One thing I wish CF would address is their hand-waving about what "security services" actually means. Based on the original post from Wednesday, this seems to include caching services (though it is only mentioned once in the post). Despite saying they're not the host, providing caching services is effectively hosting. Consider, for instance, the "always online" feature, which literally makes sure your site stays online even when your hosting is down.
Yes, caching is also (in some ways) a security service, in that "security" can mean protection from resource utilization attacks. But that very feature also necessarily makes the cache the source for the content in the overwhelming majority of cases.
It doesn't irk me that Cloudflare provides security services to kiwifarms. I don't think, for instance, McAfee should withhold virus protection from 8chan, or clinics withholding vaccines from people they're ideologically opposed to. But it does irk me that they essentially provide hosting but wiggle out of the repercussions of providing hosting through some corporate doublespeak. It's one thing to have morals, but it's another thing to use loopholes in your own morals to (try to) avoid the consequences of those morals.
They're type of caching is definitely hosting, to the point that I would argue that it's not (just) caching.
They're providing the HTTP servers that serve the client requests.
IMO they're both hosts that work together. Want to prove that the downstream server is the real host and isn't just part of the hosting? Okay, point the DNS directly to the downstream server.
Many people appear to be missing the point here. Cloudflare claims there was an imminent threat to life created by KF. That's a factual assertion that's either true or false (and well probably find out which.)
If true, free speech is not applicable. Blocking the walkie-talkies of terrorists coordinating
a bombing does not restrict "free speech" under any reasonable definition.
This level of tactical coordination to commit violence appears to be what they are hinting at in their post, and I take them at their word .
It may be they are lying and caved to pressure in regards to KF being generally heinous, but until we find out the specific information that caused them to assess an imminent threat to life, we can't really judge the wisdom of their decision.
So even when Cloudflare bended the knee, nothing has changed and Kiwifarms is still in service via Tor, .ru and have become even more uncensorable, just like 8kun, 4chan, Gab, etc.
This sounds like a total failure to bring them down, even Cloudflare knows it.
Noone actually expected them to stay offline. I guess people expect DDoS Guard to be substantially less resilient again DoS than Cloudflare.
> On 1 June 2021, cyber-intelligence company Group-IB reported that they had found DDoS-Guard's database, containing site IP addresses, names, and payment information along with its full source code, for purchase on a cybercrime black market forum. The authenticity of the allegedly stolen data was unverified.[6][7]
They really don't. Keffals, who has been spearheading this effort, has effectively been the target of hate from this one site which has stalked her across two continents. As far as I can tell she just wants to be able to live a normal life without worrying that taking a picture or posting a tweet could be used by this organized mob to figure out where she is and fuck with her life.
It's worth noting that she's based in the UK where it is really mainstream to be a TERF, it's the default position in most tabloids and magazines and plenty of TERF columnists get a lot of column inches to complain to their hearts' content. The likely next Prime Minister recently shouted "A woman is a woman" to screams of delight from a crowd - TERFs are not an oppressed, downtrodden minority there.
I very much doubt someone looking to get on with a normal life would gloat about supplying drugs to children without parental consent, lie about how officers treated them in jail on television, tweet they are hopeful a specific person gets swatted or parade around on social media when their harassment campaign gets users like Destiny banned from platforms.
I’d provide screenshots but documenting the escapades of public figures must be relegated to the memory hole these days.
They really don't? They really really don't? So people involved in this campaign have hit their goal by getting CF to drop KF, and they won't do any more of these sorts of campaigns in the future against any other targets?
This is not a slippery slope leading to suppression of all dissent, 1984-style, if that's what you're asking. If another site starts up to dox and harass trans people, I could see a similar campaign against them.
Okay, so you are saying that these people are no longer going to campaign to take any sites which stop short of criticizing trans people. Let's just wait and see about that.
Is this a new buzzword to blanket a group and opinions? Something like "I dont think transgenders should compete in elite sports" would now label me a TERF. All these defenitions are made up on one side and can change on a whim.
Keffals decided to leave North America after one SWATing of unknown attacker provenance. Josh Moon, owner of Kiwi Farms, has been SWATed numerous times (as have been many larger Twitch streamers) and even had trans activists show up at his house with weapons.
What's interesting about their SWATing is that the police took them in for questioning and confiscated their phone and hard-drives. Can anyone think of a single SWATing where the police showed up, noticed that there was no hostage/slaughter, and started collecting evidence / detained the victim? A victim that then raised $100K to flee the country and 'go into hiding' while Tweeting about their current location, planned future locations (never going back to the country that detained them though for some reason)..
Woah.
I personally wish that Cloudflare had taken action sooner, but I understood the position. I disagreed with it, because as a free and private entity, Cloudflare can choose to serve whoever they wish (so long as they do not discriminate against legally "protected classes"), and as such, I'd prefer to see them refuse a customer that blatantly courts hate speech, but I understood their commitment to free speech.
This decision seems hard. Crime prevention forces should have stepped in already to protect people. But cops protect and serve capital, not people, so the police response will be weak and ineffective until capital becomes upset. Like Cloudflare, I'm also not comfortable with decisions of public safety being handled by corporations, but the police aren't interested, so here we are.
Cloudflare is a private busniess and can refute service ofc, but should the owner not get some notice of the termination to move to another service in time?
The operator posted this on Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Actually I think Cloudflare holds the DNS names for the .net name, as well as possibly others. The reason I think this is because they are DNSSEC validated, and the .ru name does not have DNSSEC.
If you want a termination notice you should work with a hosting provider that guarantees one in their terms. I wouldn't be surprised if most providers have special clauses that entitle them to cut you off instantly, though. There are probably cases where law enforcement would demand that they do it anyway.
I don't believe rhetoric is ever a threat to human life so I disagree with this move by cloudflare. Even if illegal credible targeted threats are made, the threat to human life is the threatener, not the content of the speech.
Cloudflare would do better to simply stop making posts every time they do something. Every other company bans users every day and have learned to stop talking about it. Or the inverse. Regardless of what cloudflare does, right or wrong, there will be mobs of people responding negatively and positively to it. People love drama.
If their policy was "we'll ban anyone we want for whatever reason." I'd respect that more because that's the truth.
Further troubling is how this is over what they believe to be illigal conduct. It may very well be, but now they're creating a precedent that they are capable of detecting and stopping it themselves outside the justice system.
This also doesn't stop kiwifarms or it's organizers. If there's illigal conduct, or even civil discovery, CF has to give up those details. All stopping Ddos support does is allows kiwifarms to receive Ddos.
No doubt they'll eventually take to tor and that doesn't have a good physical address to serve warrants to.
Their transparency actually makes me sympathetic to the weight of the decisions they're making. Their acknowledgement that it could make things worse is also very honest and refreshing. I hope they continue making these posts especially since they control such a massive percentage of internet infrastructure.
> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users. Harassment stemming from Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.
We've had this conversation for well over a decade. People who cry "censorship, free speech and first amendment" vis-à-vis private corporations don't understand the issue and don't care to educate themselves so to continue to talk about it with them is pointless.
When private companies start having so much power they can literally make or break voices from being heard at all, this argument of "private companies are private therefore they do what they want" becomes much harder to defend.
I'm eager to "educate" myself about how this kind of things, truly.
Then work to get some laws passed outlining what private companies can and cannot do in the new internet age. Until there are legal guidelines, they are free to use their own discretion. If "Big Tech" doesn't want your content, you're free to set up your own server.
KF has their own server, own ISP/router boxes, own IPs, and their own colo hardware. The issue is that it's not that expensive on an absolute level (hundreds of dollars to take them out for a day) to just saturate their gigabit downlink. You get another gigabit downlink, they saturate that too. Ten gigabits, a bit harder, but still pretty easy. You need to have hundreds of gitabits of downlink on standby (at least, I assume Google has terabits of downlink and clever load balancing). That's not something even a well resourced city newspaper could set up at their headquarters without digging major fiber interconnects and hooking up to fiber lines going to the couple closest internet exchanges.
Edit: this assumes some level of BGP filtering and monitoring of what IPs send you packets, you really need cooperation from your upstream providers and your own BGP router to even survive this much.
I don't know anything about KF but they sound like a vigilante group and people are responding to them with vigilante tactics. The internet has some flaws that people take advantage of and I support ongoing research to mitigate these. The internet still seems like the Wild West in some ways.
The fact people here are defending KiwiFarms is very concerting.
"Escalating threats and the potential risk for human life has compelled Cloudflare to block Kiwifarms from being accessed through our infrastructure."
Because the post in question was removed by KiwiFarms moderators, in accordance with KiwiFarms's long-standing (and long-enforced) rules against threats of violence etc.
Give it 5 years. The internet will be divided along political lines and private companies will decide who's political message is true, and what is legal and not.
>However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
If this is true, couldn't they be a little more descriptive? What happened in the last 48 hours that hasn't been happening for the last eight years?
This is probably a worst case scenario for Cloudflare here. I'm generally in favor of them and I agree with their abuse policy they posted the other day.
But now twice Cloudflare has posted they won't moderate content, and then two days later done... exactly that while posting that they don't like doing it.
For folks concerned about abusive and harmful internet behavior, Prince has made it clear he doesn't feel responsible to take action and will avoid doing so as much as possible. And for folks concerned about free speech and censorship, Prince has made it clear he can be pushed around with enough pressure (regardless what the post says, it's how it will be read).
Cloudflare could've arguably taken either position with some level of righteousness, but by essentially caving to both, he proves himself to neither.
I’ll admit I was totally ignorant to this entire situation. In the last few days I’ve read through some of the content that KF was hosting.
I’ll say this: the behavior of the people who are apparently behind the campaign to get them removed is abhorrent. Well beyond anything I would have imagined in my worst nightmares.
He/they is not dead. The person who claimed that Byuu/Near committed suicide claimed he confirmed it with the Japanese police. The Japanese have to report every American citizen who died to the US, which is then included in an online database here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
No US citizen died by unnatural causes in Japan in the entire second half of 2021, and not on the 28th of June. Byuu/Near was still alive and posting well after the 11th of May, the last time an American citizen died by suicide in Japan in 2021.
Did I say that? No. I said I was surprised to learn the other half of this story, and that the behavior of the specific people behind the campaign to have them removed is horrifying.
They stated they would commit suicide, a major news outlet and people close to the victim stated they committed suicide, and they haven't been heard from since then.
I dunno. Given that this is the only counter-argument people seem to have, maybe the police just forgot to update the database. It's certainly a lot more likely than whatever conspiracy theory Kiwi Farms is pushing about them faking their death and being in hiding for over a year now. Also, Near went by they/them.
Which is more likely, that the Japanese police failed to record the death of an American expat or that Near stopped posting under that username and got a friend to lie for them?
I find this sad, and perhaps this comment will die amongst the rest, but there really is a misunderstanding on what KiwiFarms is/was.
The website was one created by a lunatic who wanted to say whatever he wanted amongst other people who felt the same. A true free speech advocate, who abided by every law the US has regarding content moderation but did nothing additional.
The bulk of KiwiFarm users were not Nazis, they were just people. Everyone is a bit fucked, and some people like being able to say anything about odd people on the internet. The downside to that, is you will get genuinely harmful or crazy people who take it too far.
But that's nothing new, Facebook has hosted live massacres, snapchat is a vector for nude stealing and distribution, Pornhub hosted child or underage porn and probably still does.
The point is, KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, it was the small minority causing huge problems as they always do. What will change now that it's gone? Nothing.
You'll still have the same people who take it too far, you'll still have the regular people who just want to be able to talk without having to care how other people feel, you'll still have the oddities on the internet, they'll just disperse somewhere else. No issues have been fixed, no problems addressed, but everyone will pat themselves on the back and feel good. Another pillar of the internet gone, and we'll see what is the next to go.
KiwiFarms going down changes nothing, but the act of it being taken down by such a formerly neutral, and vital part of internet infrastructure is a terrible precedent. When everything is political, when everything is responsible for everything else, then only the most milktoast, party-line response will be allowed, and since politics is pendulum shaped, everyone celebrating this now will unfortunately reap the rewards when it swings again.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site 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’m sorry, but what?
Few thoughts:
1. Couldn’t people be joining Kiwifarms and acting aggressive to get it banned?
2. Why is cloudflare reporting anything to police? That’s effectively implying they are regularly reviewing content… which is weird if your providing DDoS protection.
The main issue I take is that cloudflare isn’t hosting the content… it’s providing protection from DDoS. So kiwifarms is literally having their security turned on them.
That is imo a breach of contract. It’s one thing to just drop them as a customer it’s another to:
> Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
You’re hijacking their website and saying “read our content” instead.
I’m sure cloudflare complies with all lawful orders to police and any unlawful activity reported to them that’s verifiable. It’s standard cover your ass policy. You can’t expect a corporation to put its own politics in front of its shareholders
> The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy. We continue to believe that the best way to relegate cyberattacks to the dustbin of history is to give everyone the tools to prevent them.
This is just doublespeak. No matter the merits of this decision, clearly this not the policy they advertised they have on Wednesday.
I am a free speech absolutist, but I read the Wikipedia page on this site and it seems bad. "Crimes were committed," "People lost their lives" bad. Unjustifiably bad.
That said, is anyone willing to steelman this website? Could this possibly be construed as just a big misunderstanding?
Hi debacle, I was not a user but I perused the site and was fascinated with it. It appeared to be a big 'mumsnet', or a Facebook, but the only rules were to gossip about people others found interesting, to not interact with them directly, and of course, no child pornography. The website is cited I think for killing 3 people, a transgender male to female by the name of Chloe Segal who blamed KiwiFarms in her suicide note, but it is noted that her partner stated there were major issues with Chloe way before KiwiFarms and that she struggled with a lot prior to her death. I cannot remember the second, but the third was a fella in Japan who is cited as killing himself by a friend of his. I think the Kiwis gathered Japanese data from the police of deaths of foreign nationals and there were no American deaths for the timeframe the guy was meant to have died. It appears he may not be dead.
In terms of crimes, I think there were people who did make threats, there were two users if I remember who went on to commit shootings, but my counter to that is that Facebook too has had users who committed mass shootings. I believe the KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, more the actual users who did the crimes.
A majority of laws were written before the Internet existed. Be careful what you advocate for, because if you want police to be able to take down a domain via the registrar due to a possibly security threat, then that is what you'll get.
I think the "neutrality" framing is pretty interesting, because this basically confirms that the CF policy is not actually ideological, but instead a direct reflection of what they think the worst-case scenarios are.
Broadly, to the left, the worst-case scenario is that this policy terminates with a part 2 of Black's _IBM and the Holocaust_. That is: a scenario where eventually the public _believes_ the company to be materially responsible for a terrible outcome, even if it was legal at the time. They think these harms are both on the table and imminent, and they are willing to deplatform KF/Stormfront/_etc_. as a result.
I think CF believes this is not plausible, and is instead worried about a worst-case scenario where (I'm guessing) an audience like Trump voters are not allowed to host websites.
I think this issues is unlikely to make real progress until both camps can find a way to talk about these material outcomes, and get aligned on which are plausible.
Anyone willing to stick their neck out with a HN-undeletable prediction of who'll be the target of the next pressure campaign? (which of course wasn't the reason for blocking...)
The rumblings I'm detecting now seem to be related to misinformation.
Ovarit took part in the harassment campaign, so hopefully they go next. Don't know if Cloudflare hosts them though.
Edit:
And 4chan is always bigger but more diffuse. Hard to say who's more of a pest.
Edit edit:
I think the important lesson here is that direct targeting of fascist employees and ex-employees of enablers is very much a live tactic. It worked, it works, it will continue to work.
I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now. It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right?
Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time.
"Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink"
Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts.
"It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod"
All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who are now claiming that they want some sort of "reasonable" policy from infrastructure providers. It has been demonstrated time and time again that people who don't oppose deplatforming on principle are actually fine with it whenever it suits them.
1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;
2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.
However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.
Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.
It sucks the legal system can’t move fast enough. We really need a way for the fbi to arrest the site operators more quickly. Of course, This is revolting content of the highest order but that really shouldn’t and doesn’t figure into the calculas.
This move was correct because it protects cloudflare shareholders. Taking the site down has serious downsides. It puts all of society at risk. Law enforcement now loses transparency on what is going on with these forums, whose connecting to it, how users are interacting with it. Driving these sites underground means they are more difficult to interdict and may ultimately increase danger and death.
Seems kiwifarms was prepared for this and already transferred to new infra at another dns I won’t name
Attempted murder, I only wished that sites were brave enough to keep them up and work with law enforcement rather than take them down out of fear of legal risk
I've followed this story loosely here from HN posts, but does anyone have a blog/TL:DR post around the chain of events that are discussed in this post? (the early events the bubbled this up to ppls attention, and then the new imminent threats?)
so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?
how could Cloudflare write that entire justification without giving an example to someone that wasn't following the drama? To me it looks like Cloudflare arbitrarily took someone down specifically after writing that they wouldn't, in the same blog entry.
>so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?
We dont know.
Being that Kiwifarms is an open forum, and I assume Cloudflare has computers, they could show us the proof, but it is actually in their best interest not to. Now anyone can make their own fantasy what "dangerous content" is.
Good. Now that we've finally established that Cloudflare isn't impotent after all, it's time to go down the list. No more faux "conversations." This isn't the only site they already know they need to drop.
I spend 30 mins on kw (through archive.org). It is a very pathetic forum with low value. I don't have any problems with cf disabling them. Free speech does not include assistance from others.
An edge service having problems about edgelords. Almost poetic.
Targeted harassment for the purpose of getting people to kill themselves is illegal. People have gone to jail for less than what KF gloats about. All the free speach absolutists crying about "censorship" just shows how ridiculous their ideology is. Instead of whining about cloudflare they should be looking for lawyers.
Well I run a service with 100 million registered users and this is why we don't use Cloudflare. We use VeriSign BGP DDoS mitigation which is more expensive than Cloudflare (about 27k per year with our traffic) but i don't have the luxury of losing the business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor, their lawyer or even his Majesty Matthew Prince Himself making a preemptive liability decision on behalf of my own business.
I know that Google takes those deplatforming decisions with ease, because they have billions of users but with Cloudflare's much more finite enterprise userbase, I would be careful to aspire to Google's heavy handed approach: for Cloudflare's customers, real money and real jobs are at stake.
I sort of have the same thought. Cloudflare isn't really public facing so they don't have the same pressure to ban people, and any time you start banning sites you risk scaring off business. I don't have a large website, but I do have my own project/personal sites and with those I specifically use hosts that have a reputation for high uptimes even in the face of censorship (like Epik domains or terrahost)
It seems especially weird too considering how they just made a blog post promising not to do this (https://archive.ph/gJXgF), and then not only did it but used broad, over the top language which sounds, if I'm honest, a bit disingenuous. Like if someone's life is in imminent danger, you shouldn't be playing games on the internet you should be calling the cops
I think a downside of their CEO & C-level spending so much time on Twitter and HN (spending any time there at all is already "a lot" for C-suite) is that they might overestimate the size and importance of social media mobs. Practically every hashtag is botted these days, especially ones people feel passionate about.
The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.
I agree, I think in his attempt to be overly transparent he's made himself a target for these social media mobs. At the end of the day he's a businessman and if his business' financial needs require it to shut websites down then that's unfortunate but that's life as a business. But to air out all their thoughts and deliberations makes them seem vulnerable to persuasion efforts.
I actually think the other half of the reason why Cloudflare became such a target is because of their 404 cloudflare site that displays when the origin host goes offline. It's essentially an ad for cloudflare, there is no technical need for them to show this. Only: if my site protected by akamai goes down, I dont believe my users will see that it was protected by akamai. It's just offline.
The best protection cloudflare has is to stop making it so easy to see who is protected by them. In fact, they should even stop giving out information on who they are protecting and put it into their TOS that social media sites are not allowed to broadcast the fact that they are protected by cloudflare.
These would be practical steps to massively help Cloudflare mitigate further risks.
I have no idea what kiwifarms is. The timing is interesting - they say it started with rhetoric to take them offline, then this site escalated and so cloudflare took them offline?
A false flag sounds entirely plausible, without details of the posts or the nature of the site.
> Feeling attacked, users of the site 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
What are they talking about? From what I've seen, this is somewhere between grossly exaggerated and completely fictional. Did they see someone post the "300 confirmed kills" copypasta and think it was serious?
Finally after trending on Twitter for days they do the right thing. This forum kiwifarms was outright attacking doxxing harassing people and yet were defended by CF over and over again.
> However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
I have been monitoring the Keffals thread on Kiwi Farms. I haven’t seen any real-life threats anywhere close to the extreme extent Prince mentions. I am very curious if we’ll ever get to know what specific threats were involved here. Perhaps they were made off-site and attributed to Kiwi Farms. It’s possible Kiwi users were behind such threats, and I’m simply unaware as a new observer. It’s also impossible for me as an observer to tell.
From what I’ve seen alone, I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision. I’ve summarized what I’ve seen on Kiwi Farms in recent comments visible on my profile. They’ve mostly been aggressively flagged for some reason. If you have showdead and want a steelman pro-speech perspective you can read them.
There are lots of factual errors and partisan exaggerations baked into this report. I tried to address them in a recent comment but got instaflagged by Keffals defenders, so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say if a non-friendly outlet digs into this story, I expect some swift edits and amendments.
I hope the people who called in the false police calls are caught. I hope Keffals is investigated for distributing controlled life-altering drugs to adolescents and grooming them sexually, as has been documented.
It’s a bit more complicated, as I’ve tried to understand and explain. This is a case of the worst people on the Internet fighting. Trans streamers who send sketchy hormones to underage kids behind parents’ backs vs. versus the very worst trolls from 4chan and 8chan. Doxing and SWATing has been practiced by both sides. The owner of KF and his mom have been doxed; two mentally unwell trans women with weapons showed up on his doorstep. Severe mental illness has contributed to suicides which one side wants to blame on the other, rightly or wrongly. I don’t fully understand the history, but what I’ve seen of the Keffals story has been alarming.
The point I’ve been trying to make is that KF as a platform at least has strong policies against offline harassment, and Keffals (their current nemesis) has an extensive documented history of child-endangering behavior, such as hooking minors up with life-altering drugs without involving parents or doctors. If KF users were really behind these SWATings in an organized way, I’m not sad to see the site gone. I am however worried that the point about Keffals will be lost, and that this was in some sense the purpose of the exercise. What this person was up to on their drug distribution website and Discord full of sexualized minors is monstrous.
All the data that was dug up on Keffals has been archived. I guess it’s up to real journalists to take that ball from here, if any will.
To be clear, "Drug Distribution Website" is a common resources list for sourcing HRT when you do not have supporting medical access to it. This is a far reach from "Distributing Drugs".
Telling underaged children to buy hormones made in a sketchy lab in Brazil that say “Hide from parents” on the anime loli-themed box art, all without medical evaluation or oversight, is reckless and monstrous. Children cannot consent to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
This is explicitly and exactly what Keffals and co-owner Bobposting do on the DIY HRT Directory. See “Homebrew Sourcing,” first vendor:
Isolated and confused children are sexually lobotomizing themselves to the encouragement of their favorite Twitch streamer. This is without even mentioning the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, now scrubbed, where a nearly 30-year-old Keffals charged sexually and shared photos privately with minors.
None of this has been include in NBC or anyone else’s reports, except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog. Now that Keffals can illegally DDoS KF, the archive links will be harder to find.
You can visit the archive links and live site yourself, the blog I mentioned adds nothing new. I mentioned them to illustrate the lack of attention paid to this point by the media; only such an obscure, relatively partisan blog has picked it up (so far).
This has nothing to do with Kiwifarms, it's just same story all over again. It happened before and I bet it will happen again.
1. Some awful website uses Cloudflare.
2. Something ignites outrage that Cloudflare is protecting that awful website.
3. Cloudflare initially refuses to take it down, arguing that they are neutral infrastructure providers.
4. Twitter-amplified outrage keeps growing
5. Cloudflare caves in and kicks that site off, posting about that this is only due to very recent emergency (which is nonsense, they serviced these sites for years and nothing materially changed).
6. ???
7. No profit, go back to step 1.
My prediction: because they cannot stick to their stance, every cycle makes it more probable that next attempt will succeed, until nobody will believe in infrastructure provider interpretation and they will be forced to estabilish some moderation.
It always starts as a one off, "this was a special circumstance" type thing. I feel like I've read this post thousand times before at this point. I remember when it "just Alex Jones" getting deplatformed from social media. And it had to be done - he was just too dangerous! But then it expanded to a few more people, and from there a few more. And within the span of just a few years Twitter had gone from Alex Jones to banning the president of the United States.
I don't care what Kiwifarms did, this kind of thing has to be left to state. If Kiwifarms is doing something illegal law enforcement will deal with it. This move means Cloudflare is now a company that will remove content they find problematic. Or put another way, if they don't remove content we can now assume it's because they don't find it "dangerous" enough. So all those racist and transphobic blogs calling for race wars and celebrating trans suicides, well I guess Cloudflare just doesn't think they're that bad. And that's why these things always progresses, because turning a blind eye is no longer justifiable position. If you cast judgement on one piece of content, you must do so for everything. Now they've made this move the pressure to remove more content will only intensify. And it will be even harder to say no next time because now they've now lost the ability to say they're neutral.
But whatever. I have no hope of a free internet anymore. At this point I think if the West is ever to truly value free speech again we'll need to learn that lesson the hard way.
Twitter has the right to ban anyone for violating their ToS, including the (thankfully, ex) president of the United States. I don’t see any problem with that. You don’t have a _right_ to a space to promote your ideas from a private company, this is not how free speech works.
And no, the right to ban someone does not translate to an obligation.
What's regrettable isn't that twitter bans an ex-president, what's regrettable is that we've allowed corporations to capture the public square on the internet to the extent that they can de-facto ban the ex-president from discussion.
Where does twitter get all of its money from? Not directly from users, but instead from ads. They are not directly beholden to the interests of their customers but instead other corporations.
He was actually the sitting president at the time (during the "lame duck" period after he lost the election) and I think that matters for something. You might actually be saying this, but I wanted to inform anyone else reading.
Never heard of kiwifarms before but after having a quick read on it, I don't see any reasons why any provider of any sorts would deal with them. Not sure how screwed up in their heads people need to be to engage in this kind of shit.
I think those who are arguing against it either don't know quite how extreme KiwiFarms is, or strongly agree with the hatred, doxing and SWATting of minorities and vulnerable people that their members do.
I suppose you're right, and a bunch of them seem to be throwaways, or perhaps people who only made an account to defend their site (I'm basically on a throwaway too). Sad they fell into the same persecution complex thing people seem to get trapped in... like you're really defending the site where they welcomed the Christchurch shooter's manifesto? You really think you're doing something? That's what you want to fight for?
It's a modern day witch-hunt. I grew up in an environment where thinking that deviates from what's commonly acceptable is deemed not worthy and such person should suffer the consequences. It takes time, maturity and probably most important seeing a lot of world to get it changed. I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life, so they end up focusing on extremely negative things as a way to justify their actions or escape their reality.
FYI people are interpreting this as saying the witch hunt is the KF users being targeted, and not what they did to other people (who FWIW might be bad people and do bad things, but this weird disconnected cyber-vigilantism teeming with "far-right" overtones is just not the way to deal with that...).
I read it that way too at first but it makes no sense in light of your OP.
By writing witch hunt, I've meant that KF users hunt down certain individuals they may not agree with, for whatever the reason. I definitely didn't mean that KF users are being hunted.
LMAO. Kiwifarms was created for the explicit purpose of harassing a mentally disabled man. That's not "thinking different" or even speech. That's direct action. Grow up and learn that your actions have consequences.
What kind of actions? I don't chase up people around the globe just because I disagree with them. I don't support in any shape or form doxxing or swatting anyone. People need to be mental to engage in this kind of nonsense.
I've never understood the attitude that there should be zero nuance to free speech. That somehow we can't collectively look at the Christchurch manifesto and say, "that's over the line".
Yes, I believe there are laws that are unjustly applied, but this is a) not a law and b) so obviously different from any sort of edge case. The only people who think kiwifarms should exist are sociopaths.
Yeah, those comments are either extremely ignorant or disingenuous. It takes about 30s of browsing KF to realize that it is coordinated harassment - there are entire subforums devoted to harassing one individual person with thousands and thousands of messages each.
It's one of the most awful places I've ever seen on the internet, and I have zero respect for the people who try to launder large-scale harassment into "it's just free speech!"
I cannot think of a valid argument against taking KiwiFarms off of Cloudflare (unless the FBI finds it useful to have them on a domestic service, or something). The only troubling thing about this traces back to a question that sits in the backs of all of our minds: how much do we trust these companies to do good with the ridiculous amount of power they have over society? Even when Big Tech Megacorp™ does something good with that power, it can still be unsettling to see that power being used.
I have looked at the site and it's doesn't seem that extreme, unless there's a bunch of content not visible to guests. It looks like any anonymous IB from the early 2000s. The people who are calling it "extreme" seem to mostly be trusting other people's descriptions of the site.
> SWATting of minorities
As far as I can tell, the only people verifiably being swatted are KF site operators. I have yet to see a case of swatting with compelling evidence of attribution to KF.
If you anger certain members of the community - e.g. by being a vocal trans person - you'll be targetted by members who will attempt to find your personal information, your full name, your birth name, your phone number and address or other information that can be used to harrass you. An example from the "Main Character" on KF right now, Keffals, is this: https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885?s=20&...
Look up "fedposting" - it's where you post a deranged/terroristic comment in a thread with the goal of attracting law enforcement or other unfavorable attention. That's pretty clearly what that post is. It very clearly isn't a credible threat.
As Keffals admits, site admins deleted the offending post immediately.
Also, isn't Keffals the one who allegedly was trafficking hormone drugs to minors? I believe that's why they were on KF in the first place.
I read the site sometimes, although my argument is that anything against US law is against the site rules and this whole thing is disingenuous. But it's also censorship whether or not you frequent the site.
I get how if you just read about it that KF sounds awful. Not sure how legit any of that is tho. Do the people you suspect of being readers of KF seem like awful degenerates to you?
I guarantee you any article you read about it was biased against it, as they are the pariah du jour and the media lie constantly. Once they are back online, I encourage you to peruse it with an open mind and make your own decision. Maybe you'll find it to be just as bad as they say, but I think it's just as likely you'll realize that the media has lied to you again.
Unfortunately internet discourse in the last 10 years has tended to descend into echo chambers. If you’ve managed to avoid interactions with the content being posted there and in other spaces like it, you have done quite well.
Worse than that, the mentality pushed forth in echo chambers like this seems to crystallise peoples thoughts, to the point that alternative thoughts to the zeitgeist therein these spaces are not tolerated or even heard without revulsion or aggression.
I’ve seen this in both the extremes of Right wing and Left wing politics in the last ten years.
Currently in my opinion, the extreme right wing seems to be the more dangerous of the two. In part due to the volume of adherents to the ideology and the secondly proportion of people within who are die-hard adherents, thirdly globally, the political centre appears to be a good bit further to the right of where it was 20 years ago, it seems that more extreme right wing political thought is more accepted now.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
> Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Isn't Kiwifarms the site which uses their so-called 'lolcows' to 'milk entertainment'? Sounds like a prime example of people dreaming themselves masters.
you are a 8 hour old account making comments that add absolutely nothing to the conversation other than snark, it would be weird to not be flagged by everyone.
It's a forum dedicated pretty much entirely to doxxing, swatting, stalking and harrassment. It's also where the Christchurch New Zealand mass shooter's live stream and manifesto were hosted.
Cloudflare doesn't just offer DDoS protection, though.
Websites like Kiwifarms play a cat and mouse game with hosting providers, who typically don't want to host them. Cloudflare's other services make it easier to conceal which hosting provider is involved, making it harder to (legally!) pressure them. DDoS isn't the only way to take a site down.
"Here's the personal info on this person that we all hate and constantly talk shit about. It includes their address and contact information. We're totally putting this out here for innocent reasons. We trust you guys won't go harass these people now because that's against our rules!"
This is nonsense. No man is an island. You are effectively saying that fame and peer pressure don't exist.
There's obvious motivations to take things "just one step further" with a community that eggs such behaviors on.
And that's true from a legal perspective as well. Tons of law deals with people who were not the individual to did the criminal deed, but instead offered the opportunity to do it or encouraged it.
We don't live in some libertarian fantasy where every individual operates wholly separate from one another. It's just not how we as a species are wired.
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
It's obviously not the only place they was hosted, or the place they were originally posted (I think the manifesto originated from 4chan and the stream would have been Twitch or YT or some other live-streaming platform - no idea which).
Kiwifarms is a site that is implicated in several deaths, several swattings, and had knowingly hosted videos of, for example, the Christchurch shooting.
It is a hotbed for stochastic terrorism. It should be welcome to exist online, but Cloudflare providing it protection undermines Cloudflare's own reputation.
Yes, KF hosted videos of the Christchurch shooting, as well as many others. That's unrelated to your assertion the site, which is of many thousands of people, are "implicated in several deaths". It is not. Nor is it a participant in swattings.
If there were a shred of credible evidence of those things, then you should be communicating with the FBI or any law enforcement agency you're able to engage with.
I hope KF's owner sues the absolute crap out of the media outlets and any personal not hiding behind a nym for defamation, as I think this level of speech has risen to it.
> Kiwifarms is a site that is implicated in several deaths, several swattings, and had knowingly hosted videos of, for example, the Christchurch shooting
How are they "implicated"? How is it different than other social media websites?
> It is a hotbed for stochastic terrorism.
Which existed before the Internet...
> but Cloudflare providing it protection undermines Cloudflare's own reputation
London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting. Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her. I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.
I read through the Keffals thread a bit. Swatting is abhorrent, but KF did nothing but document Keffal’s actions and document some probable sex crimes against minors.
I didn’t see anyone call for swatting, but I also didn’t read all 140 pages or whatever.
well the shooter was wearing a shirt that said "kiwifarms sent me". He also left a sworn testimony at the scene of the crime that said "i'm doing this because of kiwifarms"
cloudflare’s servers were hosting and redistributing abusive material and private information non-consensually leading to suicides?
KF is still on the internet, they’re free to handle their own traffic and find a cdn willing to take their (apparently blatantly neonazi named) operating company’s money
I've heard people claim this, but I've never seen any evidence which supports it. I've read threads on the forums there, and have never seen anyone trying to get anyone else to commit suicide. In fact, interacting or even promoting interacting with people whose actions are catalogued and talked about on the site, is heavily dissuaded.
Do you actually have any evidence to the contrary?
Says the man who told the NZ police that their country is a shit hole because they asked him for details about the Christchurch terrorist, and he confirmed the he reposted the video and the "manifesto" of the terrorist.
1. Christchurch terrorist had no known account on the site so there was no information to give.
2. That Oceanic law enforcement were trying to arrest anybody who so clips of the shooting video or materials related to the shooting under the same laws as child porn.
I don't trust any screenshot coming out of Kiwifarms since I've seen an edited screenshot tweeted with 10 thousand likes from a (now suspended) popular KF user.
You could only see it if you know what to look out for, there was a masking error on the overlayed image in one corner. And the tweet's text was most likely edited with dev tools.
Ok, well these things were posted publically on Twitter so there will be many first hand accounts and possibly backups from trusted 3rd parties. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out. I have personally seen some of these tweets as I watch Destiny from time to time and she comes up.
Maybe it's possible to game archive.ph, but seems more likely this person's humor has a consistent strongly misogynistic theme. Very happy to see a site causing actual suicides taken down, but the champion of the campaign doesn't come across as any kind of hero
It's also interesting to juxtapose comments here against the fact it was so easy to find the original thread on Google.
I do a lot of diligence before I believe anything. I have also seen this person doing targeted harassment with my own eyes on twitter. I am often skeptical of claims that wikipedia is obscuring information, and while this is a small creator, it is spooky to me.
That's not what I'm saying. I don't think anyone deserves any kind of violence or harassment. If they are engaging in such, vigilante justice is not the answer.
You’re deflecting and at the same time declaring yourself on the side of KiwiFarms. Fair enough, but I don’t think you realise how laws around discrimination work in the USA, you may want to look that up (hint just put “protected class” into Google, that’ll get ya started)
I understand law enforcement which is not on the side of anyone inherently other than ideally justice. You, apparently, are not. I suggest you look up "due process" to get a jump start on some crucial points.
It’s a basic matter of human decency. They’re hurting people every day. Cut off their fucking access. There is no business or humane reason Cloudflare _should_ be a morally neutral arbiter; it’s a weird fetish of their CEO.
I've never used CloudFlare but this move just solidified the fact that I will never use them EVER! Really odd timing too since "Court Documents reveal Over 50 Biden Administration Employees, 12 US Agencies Involved In Social Media Censorship Push" news dropped the same day!
My understanding was they were able to configure a simple page that was hosted by Cloudflare that was shown whenever the origin servers were not accessible. They put a joke about trans suicides on it.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
A CDN caches (= stores) the bits they provide. In other words, they are hosting contents on others behalf. I can't speak to a legal distinction, but if you torrent child pornography, I'm pretty sure you aren't going far with a claim that you were "just a CDN".
That is a very easy case to make in the US. ISPs have incredibility broad safe harbor laws (even more so when just providing transit instead of actually hosting like this case). They have very broad protection from the consequences of their users' actions.
They are not just providing transit. They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response. Transit is someone like AT&T or Sprint.
>They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response.
When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
> Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
In this case cloudflare isn't the host though. They have hosting services but kiwifarms only makes use of their ddos protection (which is a reverse proxy). That means they aren't the actual host.
I doubt anything would happen. At the end of the day it is a web forum it doesn't exactly cost many resources to host it (from archive.org most posts seems to just be text and outside links). I'd bet the benefit they get from using cloudflare has nothing to do with caching but only with ddos protection. Without cloudflare (or some other ddos protection) their servers are going to be offline from ddos attacks anyways.
In this case cloudflare was the ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from directly hosting the website. No backend servers in this case were ever hosted on clodflare's network.
You are still talking about proxies. You misunderstand what Cloudflare was providing, and you are instead talking about "backend servers hosted on clodflare's network" as if that was ever their offer.
I'm confused by your comment. The issue here is people were mad that cloudflare was providing ddos protection (via reverse proxy). What are you talking about?
Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.
That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.
Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.
reply