This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.
Popular endorsement of harassment to the point of suicide seems like a worse sign, personally.
When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.
Private institutions have every right to stand behind whoever they choose. As a user, I have no intention of using Cloudflare because (even as a queer individual) I don't feel safe using a platform that would censor me if enough people were mad enough. I would much rather choose a platform that stands by their TOS as-written, instead of stepping in to arbitrate on a case-by-case basis.
Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.
You'd think that, but historically this has only encouraged niche businesses to crop up catering to that crowd. Look at Epik (or Vultr) for example, businesses that exist solely to counter this kind of threat. Yes, they still reserve the right to remove abusive users, but that's defined by legal statutes and technical limitations rather than 'icky feelings'. Both services have a surprisingly solid track-record servicing the roughest of customers.
Failing all that, KiwiFarms doesn't need a business to stay afloat. The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network. To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website. Websites don't harass people, people do.
At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.
>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network
I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.
Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.
> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.
I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.
It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site). If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate. The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
>You'd think that, but historically this has only encouraged niche businesses to crop up catering to that crowd. Look at Epik (or Vultr) for example, businesses that exist solely to counter this kind of threat.
And Cloudflare had no problem hosting Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer until they crossed a line. Cloudflare's history doesn't exactly paint it as bleeding-heart liberal who can't deal with 'icky feelings.' I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
>To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website.
Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
>Websites don't harass people, people do.
Guns don't kill people, people do. Except people with guns can kill a lot more people faster. That's why guns are a thing.
Whether or not you want to be a free speech absolutist, you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters. If it didn't, no one would be up in arms about deplatforming. Yes, it's literally and technically true that a website can't harass people, but having a platform meant to organize and facilitate harassment is a force multiplier for the people doing said embarrassment. Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters, even if it is a person pulling the trigger.
> I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
Indeed they do, which makes me a happy customer. Knowing how inflammatory their other customers are, it brings me great comfort in knowing that their free speech is honored as much as mine. If either of them pulled a "Cloudflare moment" at the same scale, I'd probably start looking for other hosting providers.
> Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
...did we do that, though? The past 2 months have done nothing but put KiwiFarms in the spotlight. Instead of privately petitioning Cloudflare to change their policy, we drew battle lines and took to Twitter. All KiwiFarms ever wanted was attention, and we gave them more attention than they could have ever hoped for. Do people seriously think they're going to struggle to bounce back after an attack like this? Giving online organizations a platform has been a huge mistake in the past, like treating "Anonymous" as anything other than the default name for 4chan posters.
> you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters
Absolutely. That's why I'm afraid that attacking the platform now will cause it to become harder to attack. It's already increased it's reach, the recent media hubbub has ensured that everyone knows about KiwiFarms. I guess the Streisand effect is lost on modern internet users...
> Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
Right. Now imagine how much worse things would get if there wasn't a website, but a Tor hidden service. Or a closed Matrix homeserver. Or an IPFS bulletin board. The sky is the limit, and I'd go as far as to argue that they were the least harmless on the surface web. Only time will tell, though.
> And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters
Well... no. This is something that has been proven time and time again in America; banning certain types of guns doesn't work. Banning an AK doesn't stop someone from chopping their Glock 17 and clearing a room at half the price. Gun legislation doesn't correlate with a reduction in firearm violence. The capacity, rate of fire and caliber never mattered, just the fact that the gun existed in the first place. If we're not going to ban guns outright, what's the point in picking-and-choosing which ones are-and-aren't perceived as harmful?
Obviously it's a reductive argument, but the same thing goes for free speech. By choosing to draw the line somewhere, we're giving other people the go-ahead to draw different lines. We're giving world governments the tools they need to oppress LGBT users. We're drawing the blueprints for a new era of information suppression, and nobody seems to care since both sides have started beating the "muh terrorism" and "think of the children!" drums, respectively. And when has that ended well for internet freedom in the past?
how about basic Internet literacy taught from an early age explaining to children that words are literally incapable of harming you on the Internet and that when you make a public Internet persona you're painting a target on your back, this is just how the world works, there's nothing you can do about it, human nature is just inherently like this. but in lieu of doing something actually productive like that, sure, let's all celebrate cutting off one head of an infinitely-headed hydra and pat ourselves on the back for making the world a temporarily better place, I guess
Sure, words can't hurt you, but coordinated harassment campaigns can, and, for the mentally feeble, like CWC, words can coax you, over enough time, to act in your worst interests.
Tangential question: When the Wayback machine retroactively excludes a site's content – e.g. a site owner adds a robots.txt that specifies exclusion — the data isn't deleted, right? Just flagged to prevent being found in search again. In other words, if exclusion of KF turns out to be an unnecessary or unwanted (or if researchers want to study the KF data in the future), it's just flipping the flag, right?
Here's an example of a site that was retroactively excluded by webmaster request, but was later (forced?) to remain in the searchable archive:
edit: to answer my own question, seems like retroactive exclusion has, at least since 2007, not been interpreted to be a mandate for actual data removal:
> Hello, I want all old content from immortal ia.com REMOVED permanently from The Wayback Machine. So I read the exclusion policy, placed up a robots.txt file and requested the Alexa bot go to my website. Then checking The Wayback Machine, I got a notice that the site was blocked by the robots.txt file. But after I removed the robots.txt file, the archived pages reappeared. Is there a way to permanently purge all old pages of a website so that they will NEVER reappear in The Wayback Machine? Am I obligated to keep the robots.txt file in place forever?
Well I guess there is now limited ways for someone to evaluate for themselves on whether KF was posting horrific content without significant moderation. Guess we at least have Taylor Lorenz to tell us exactly what is going on here in a full and unbiased way.
Someone here at HN at least posted this link which told more of the story than I have seen anywhere else. Also search the HN archives (for now at least it seems) for interesting discussions on KF prior to these latest events.
Thanks for spreading this some more. Funny enough, I got that link from reading an archived version of Keffals' thread on KF while trying to get a bead on the situation myself. At best, KF threads are a simple public record of a person's online presence, (that they themselves posted publicly initially) content which I believe should absolutely be online. At worst, the popularity of threads about trans/autistic people on KF amounts to an incentive to provoke the "lolcow" into providing more "milk", which I would say is definitely a form of harassment.
Perhaps this will lead to a successor site with a similar "mission" that consists only of what would be a thread OP on KF, without the thousands of pages that follow wherein people say the n-word as many times as they can.
I think that for sites like this, the best approach would be to archive but not allow access to archives for some arbitrarily long period of time (10 years? 100 years? the point being largely to preserve the contents for the benefit of some hypothetical future scholars of history and culture).
I think it's better if such archived sites are free for all to read, just as the site originally would have been directly on the internet. There's no good reason to hide it.
the more you look into it the more it seems like desperation to allow them to claim whatever they want about the website and not be bothered to show archives to prove it... this comment section alone...
Agreed, it seems like an unprecedented amount of effort being put in to entirely memory hole a website that exposes unsavoury deeds.
Have we seen this happen for any other site? Even Wikileaks itself couldn't be brought down, despite the main man still languishing in prison, and being targeted by government agencies.
Web forum spun up to harass an intellectually disabled man into ruin (for those following along at home, objective: achieved), and then proceeded to attempt to ruin the lives of other people as well.
I have no experience as a user, but I've heard about it in the past and have been following the keffals story. From my understanding it was a site largely dedicated too, or encouraging, or at a minimum allowing people to dox trans people and harass them by contacting employers/friends/family etc with pedophilia accusations. Keffals has been lobbying Cloudflare to drop hosting/DDOS protection for them after being forced to move to a new country, and due to them having a large online following for support they're having way more success than a lot of other people that they've harmed in the past
kf was the most accessible and moderated forum for gossip of internet personalities (mostly negative in the same way traditional gossip magazines are typically negative)
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors
A few years ago, they realized it would be in the public archival interest to ignore robots.txt for gov/mil sites, and then possibly more types of sites. They have long had a manual process for submitting takedown requests by email; here's someone on reddit who claimed to have successfully gotten a page (presumably not under their control) removed from the archive [1]
Kiwifarms was a archive of the horrible behavior of the terminally online. If you're wondering why it was attacked with such vitriol, Google "bathtub hrt".
Wikipedia is reliable to non-controversial topics only. Anything controversial is taken over by one side of the argument and only information that confirms that groups bias is allowed on the page.
I'd be cautious. One of the people editing these articles has extremely high Wikipedia privileges yet has publicly campaigned for the elimination of the site. There is absolutely no neutrality here.
Its not the first time. Before than it was censoring content content that Scientology disliked. There was also the case of Snopes not being archived until a year ago, even after it got more involved in declaring more serious topics, rather than just internet urban legends.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
Good, in principle, I guess. I think this is a meaningless act, as I am unclear that archived threads were ever of any value to KF members.
Controversial opinion, but I think the internet archive shouldn't exist, and that the right to be forgotten trumps the right to outsource and automate the business of remembering. Maybe there is content worth saving, and maybe it ought to be manually scraped and preserved by a suitably interested individual.
Why they try so hard to memory hole this site? Ok, you are scared that they harass you, they are gone now, off the internet, they can't do anything now. But why do you want to memory hole the data they have on you? Maybe because there is something bad there that you are not very proud.
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