I find the article hopeful for the future of free speech on the internet. Even though the ability to host content on the net is one thing and lacking access to most platforms (where the users actually are) like youtube, facebook, instagram, tiktok is another. The most important thing nowadays is access to the siloed user bases for people who try to express dissident opinions, not the access to the net as whole, even though that is important as well.
>For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them.
I find this section peculiar. Why does the company have "values"? I though companies were supposed to be looking after the intrests of their shareholders, i.e., profit. Do the shareholders consent to the lost profit being donated to political motives? This broader trend of companies becoming political organizations is terrible, frankly.
But even with that said, I find their stance in the article to be hopeful, and sincerely wish that they stay true to their words in this paragraph.
>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.
> I find this section peculiar. Why does the company have "values"? I though companies were supposed to be looking after the intrests of their shareholders, i.e., profit. Do the shareholders consent to the lost profit being donated to political motives? This broader trend of companies becoming political organizations is terrible, frankly.
> - No tolerance to anything but work. If you sexually harrass someone, instantly fired.
> - No woke HR training (no one watches it, yet no one has the courage to say anything about it)
Given that a chunk of the HR training is about reminding people not to sexually harass, I'm not sure how you can achieve both of those? Especially when you don't have an HR department. Who's investigating the allegations? In practice this kind of culture leads to "if you are sexually harrased, you have to keep your mouth shut or you will be fired".
I think we can poke holes at this but the point was in the exercise of thinking that if we were to start from scratch or rewind history, surely we can do better than what we have today. Today's corporations are not what I imagined progress should look like.
Yeah, I tend to agree, though I come down on "everything is political; but not everything needs to be strife".
Like, sports, long considered the go to water cooler talk, have LOADS of politics. From how the players are treated, to who can afford to see a game, to how we treat uninterested or rival fans.
>I use a gender neutral restroom, but our office has none. ... Political?
Yes, don't use the bathroom at office.
>I use they/them pronouns, and I ask politely for others to use them... Political?
Absolutely, it is the very visible agenda of a very loud political machine. It's nothing but political. It can be an example of "political, n." in a dictionary.
That said, you don't need to be fired over everything political you do, just like discussing a little politics with your office colleagues once in a while is not necessarily an offence. Just as long as you stay respectful and polite when someone says no, they won't use your nonsense pronouns, very fine.
>Cause I've been told that being a queer person is political.
I doubt someone actually said that unironically, you're very likely deleting tons of context.
But the long and short of it is that no identity is political unless you make it, given the stereotypical "queer" person, I absolutely empathize with whoever said that statement to you, but "queerness", whatever that may be, itself is not necessarily making you political at work, it's just the kinds of people attracted to it. In theory, every ideology of every shape and color and identity can coexist under temporary and concrete banners like "make money".
is the implication here that normative is non-political and non-normative is political? another example, would it be political to bring your non-heterosexual spouse to a company function where other employees may bring their spouses?
Not necessarily, there are plenty of non-normalized things that are not political. Like I said, being political is first and foremost an attitude, a very specific attitude that nothing matters except your very own pet issue, and the willingness to let everything and everyone burn in order to push your view or just flaunt it.
>would it be political to bring your non-heterosexual spouse to a company function where other employees may bring their spouses?
Depends on you and your coworker attitudes, but generally no. A function like this would probably be very laid back and casual, it's not even "work" by a strict definition, so I can't think of a way your non hetero spouse would be a problem. Company asked for people to bring spouses, company got people who brought spouses. If they wanted Man/w/Woman only, they should have asked for it, subtly or explicitly.
Of course, the kind of people I have in mind can still ruin this, just like they ruin everything. They can always come dressed in a pride flag and act insufferable. And that's exactly my point, being political is, as I think of it, a personality. You can be the most boring normative person in existence and still be political, you can be the most radical and norms-challenging person in existence and still shut up and fix the damn bug because nobody got the time and patience to fight your moral crusades.
Even a few "slips" here and there could be forgiven, we all get political if somebody pushes our buttons enough after all. But repeated, deliberate attempts to be pushy and transgressive and an oppressed victim? That's just something else. It can always be recognized.
Again, I am not advocating for anyone to follow this "solution" but you can discuss how Y does not want to be associated with X without discussing whether they are right or not to do so.
Talking about eating apples could be political in the definition I gave.
I don't think it is a good idea but it is a solution to the question of who get to decide what is political and what it not: everything not job related is political.
I would be perfectly content to never hearing about any co-workers personal lives, wives, husbands, what ball game they went to, how their kids are the best thing every, etc etc etc
Those principles could lead to taking on some really awful clients, though. Think of e.g. companies like IBM that provided support to organizations engaged in genocide.
Bunch of this is a legal impossibility. Disparate impact jurisprudence prohibits competence based hiring. "No HR departments" increases your legal liability risks -- a company ought to have one to at least cover their asses by saying that "we followed precedents' prescribed procedures, but alas". "No woke HR training" is the same - it's literally a legal obligation, without which your liability increases by orders of magnitude.
Wokeness itself is not a legal obligation (at least for now, but with coming generational changes in the US justice system that could also change), but training is. Finding non-woke HR training firms is a significant challenge though. Recruiting qualified non-woke HR management employees isn't easy either.
Separation of politics from economy is an impossibilty, and the company that you are describing is only turning a blind eye to its responsibilities to society.
You want to make profit the only relevant variable, denying any moral or political factors? What you will end up with is a company that is blind to the effect it has on society and to the reasons of how and why it works.
For example, say you have a lot of Nazi customers, for whatever reason (maybe you first openend in a nazi neighborhood and they like you). They say that they want you to stop selling immigrants, and following your profit maximation rules you are happy to accept, as immigrants are a minority here and would not give as much profit as the nazis. However, your opposition has to close shop because every nazi has now flocked to you and the immigrant customers are not enough to keep it running. You end up with extreme polarisation and a lack of freedom for a group of people.
This example is super simplified and perhaps not satisfying, but in the complexity of the real world and of online businesses etc. there are so much more mechanisms that can lead to discrimination, especially if they are not reflected upon. This phenomenon, where complete rational focus on one variable is disastrous for other factors that are very important in different ways, is also known as the rationality of irrationality. Please read more about it here [1], you may find that your view of society is quite naive. I don't want to diss you, but I would not be surprised if you reckon its strictly the politics job to care about gender equality, antiracism, etc., and that you like yo blame incompetent politicians for the problems rather than rationalist business people who do not see the consequences of their actions.
While profit profit profit may have kind of worked in the sixties, it is time to use our new gained knowledge about societal mechanisms and put them to good to fight more pressing problems than growing gdp.
Caring about PR is in the interest of shareholders.
If companies had to always maximize short term profits there would be very few companies around.
wrt shareholders for public companies they have a duty not to defraud them[0]; for everything else they are another stakeholder between employees, the public, the company itself as an institution, and other.
[0] For example how Musk had Tesla overpay for the failing SolarCity to save face [1]
Regarding Cloudflare donating their service fees to an LGBTQ support org, that's some genuine D-grade advocacy. I feel bad for the ERG members who were put in the position of choosing that charity.
If someone keeps starting fires on my property, I don't want you to donate to the local fireman's fund, I want you to stop giving that person matches.
It's carbon offsets for hate. And just like carbon credits, it's not really solving any problems. It's the minimum they could do that was literally not zero.
I'm with you that they did the right thing by taking this neutral stance, the peculiar section you should see as "managing optics" and keeping hysterical activists off their backs.
There are many successful protection rackets going around that work by generating bad PR and threatening more bad or worse PR, unless you donate to them and/or hire them as consultants.
ESG is primarily a mechanism for shareholders to get even more influence. This is not altruism. On the contrary, they leverage their financial advantages. Road to hell in my opinion.
It's rather disappointing that Cloudflare's policy is to not host content that is "illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public", but they do not apply that same policy to content that they provide DDoS mitigation services for.
I don't see why their policies should differ depending on whether they are hosting or protecting the content in question. Either way, they are in part responsible for making that content accessible. I get the feeling that this is just an arbitrary distinction that they've made since hosting this content is more likely to have legal consequences for Cloudflare than simply providing DDoS mitigation services for it.
> Giving everyone the ability to sign up for our services online also reflects our view that cyberattacks not only should not be used for silencing vulnerable groups, but are not the appropriate mechanism for addressing problematic content online. We believe cyberattacks, in any form, should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
My point is this: if there are certain types of content that they deem unacceptable to host, why do they deem it acceptable to protect?
I disagree that the paragraph you quoted is relevant to that. But if it is, then it doesn't seem good that their goal of eradicating cyberattacks is more important to them than actual human lives.
So, if someone is standing trial for murder and it turns out the evidence against them was collected illegally, they will end up getting away with it even if everyone knows they did it.
It's not that we value police procedure more than we value the life of the victim. We value rule of law and due process as a society more than any individual gap in applying justice in a given case.
Yes, if we ignore procedure and lock that murderer up anyway, we will have done better justice for the victim. But then we will no longer have a functioning criminal justice system, and that's much worse in the long run.
If Cloudflare allows DDoS to take down these horrible sites, the world will definitely be a better place in many ways. But then it will also be a world where we deal with problems via DDoS and whether you get to keep your site up or have it DDoSed is subject to the whims of Cloudflare. DDoSing sites won't be "wrong" anymore, it'll be a question of whether they deserved it or not.
This is not how we do justice as a society. If someone punches you in the face without instigation, we don't ask if you deserved it, we charge them with assault.
Cloudflare allowing DDoS of content they don't like would be a bit like allowing assault of people we don't like. Maybe there are some people we're happy to see punched in the face, but in the long run, our society suffers.
Protecting people from getting punched in the face, even when they deserve it, is fundamental to maintaining rule of law in society. Wrongdoers are punished after due process of law, not arbitrarily by any vigilante who decides to give them what they deserve.
> So, if someone is standing trial for murder and it turns out the evidence against them was collected illegally, they will end up getting away with it even if everyone knows they did it.
That very much depends on jurisdiction; don't assume that American laws and norms are universal, nor that they are the best way of doing things.
Absolutely, but, Canadian law would absolutely allow illegally-collected evidence. The trial against the officer invading the defendant's privacy is a separate matter; the goal of a trial is to determine the truth of matters, after all, and if the defendant did kill someone, all evidence to support (or refute) that is generally admissible.
The details are the entire thing! The principles that we should have fair trials due process are followed, but, you end up with wildly different conclusions.
If Cloudflare would like to be nationalized, I'm happy to have a discussion of applying government rules to them. Until then, they're a private company, "due process" does really not apply.
If we think that protecting sites from DDoS is a public good (and I think that's a good question), that is a task that should fall to government entities.
The point is that Cloudflare thinks due process, not DDoS, is the right way to bring down horrible websites. Thus they protect them until such due process happens.
You're making it easy more complicated than it needs to be. Cloudflare sells face punching shields and thinks every last single person should have one. Even face punchers. (They make money off this service.)
What? A quick search on the farms didn't turn anything up about that. Only thing I can find is the farm being ddosd rather than the other way around.
And for that matter, a search through google and such didnt turn up anything either. And if its just "x says they did it" without ANY evidence, then how could I believe that?
It actually doesn't matter at all. They just proved that there ARE situations that a DDoS can endanger people's lives (including more we aren't even thinking about), whether or not KF is even related in this case.
I can't tell if you're missing the point or trolling, but just in case: There's only a limited number of people in the call centre. By overwhelming the queue, you prevent others reaching the service.
I feel like this should be the end of the discussion. A crime against a criminal is still a crime. Furthermore, who decides who the ‘criminal’ is? A ‘tit for tat’ policy may leave progressive activists and whistleblowers vulnerable to DDoS.
So sick of this argument. They clearly just stated that they believe everyone should have access to protection. This is like saying "walmart, known for supplying mass murderers with guns!"
They speak to it, I wouldn’t say that’s addressing it. They’re simply repeating a variation of the liberal viewpoint that nazis shouldn’t be punched, they should be convinced of their wrongs through peaceful social means (which invites naziism right in) or law enforcement (which, well, piggies like their own kind).
If Matt Prince were the head of the Inglorious Basterds, he’d evidently reform them to vote blue instead of scalping nazis
DDoS attacks don't just hurt the target of the attack. If any link on the path to the target is overwhelmed by the attack traffic, all users of that link are affected. Large attacks are hundreds of Gbps - a datacenter with 100Gbps of internet connectivity would be effectively offline. A datacenter with that much connectivity will likely host more than one site.
I know you aren't advocating that other sites be taken down, but that is the effect of allowing DDoS against a site. Perhaps you don't mind collateral damage but it should be acknowledged as a consequence of your suggestion.
Hosting and DDoS protection are different services. Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation - one of them can morally refuse their services to people that they think are doing wrong/illegal/immoral things, the other one doesn't.
Not that I agree or disagree with this argument - just wanted to point out what their reasoning seems to be.
CloudFlare is no different than Amazon CloudFront, Akamai or many other CDN type providers. Where's the outrage for them? I don't understand all this hate directed at just one particular company that specifically acts fair to everyone.
> Think of them like a landlord (hosting) vs fire department (ddos) situation
This is kind of a ridiculous comparison. A real-world landlord is a private individual extracting rent from their tenants while a real-world fire department is a publicly funded institution with a duty to protect everyone.
Cloudflare offers both its hosting and DDOS services as a private company. They aren't morally obligated to provide anything, regardless of whether the DDOS protection is offered for free.
But that's the point! CF sees this aspect of the policy as acting like a public utility.
Is that so wrong? Isn't that better than the alternative? Maybe, if we lived in a world where the government provided CDNs and DDoS mitigation and DNS zone file hosting and resolution and such, then its a reasonable argument to say: We have an entity beholden to Higher Laws which we can hold responsible, and marginalized voices have recourse when they're failed by private infrastructure.
We don't live in that world, and its not on the radar. Sure, private companies aren't beholden to Free Speech laws. But maybe its better that some opt-in to a standard higher than "if Jassy hasn't had his coffee this morning we better have an extra on-call SRE". Or, more commonly: when deplatforming decisions are made either by a blackbox AI written by engineers who left 2 years ago, or Twitter outrage.
I think it is good that they stay neutral and I believe even banning the Daily Stormer from their infrastructure was a mistake. As they write themselves it immediately created expectations for other content to be removed. Yes, the difference here is arbitrary, in my opinion a host should stay neutral as well.
The Daily Stormer tried to unsuccessfully groom kids with cute comics. They could not have fallen any lower. An intervention here would not be required. A negative example is also an example you can learn from.
simply differing legal reqs and use cases are as unlikely an explanation as it is for why cf sets policy and behaves so much apart from rest of industry peers repeatedly who are under the same or similar constraints
On the one hand, websites like KF and the like are utterly reprehensible. On the other hand, Cloudflare taking it upon themselves to police the Internet is a nightmare in its own, given their bot-prevention services are effectively mandatory in order to even keep any sort of larger interactive website running.
What is permitted to say is something for the courts, not for the whims of private businesses, to decide.
Except that they don't respect court verdicts - e.g. in one case they lost against an Italian court "US-based Cloudflare disagreed. It countered that the Italian court didn’t have jurisdiction and that the e-Commerce directive didn’t apply to foreign companies, but those objections were rejected." How can you argue that a legal ruling is legally invalid (besides appealing it) and use this as a supposed justification for not complying with a court judgment?
Even in that article they say "While we will generally follow legal orders to restrict security and conduit services," - how can you say this? No other business says "while we will generally accept court judgments..."
> Unfortunately, these cases are becoming more common where largely copyright holders are attempting to get a ruling in one jurisdiction and have it apply worldwide to terminate core Internet technology services and effectively wipe content offline. Again, we believe this is a dangerous precedent to set, placing the control of what content is allowed online in the hands of whatever jurisdiction is willing to be the most restrictive.
It is pretty hard to suggest that someone can sue Cloudflare in a random country with either a corrupt or weak judicial system (not saying that's the case here, but in general) then get it taken down globally. To add, taking things down in a single country might not be super effective with the way the internet works, and the court might see someone browsing from a VPN and claim that a geoip-based block is insufficient for compliance.
Although, I don't know the exact case you're referring to or if it's covered by this statement.
How can we leave something for the courts to decide while at the same time dismissing all courts other than the US? Especially when you consider neither the hosting provider of the site in question, nor the target of this wave of harassment are from the US.
Yep, I think this is a critical point. People in this thread keep saying things like, "If KiwiFarms is doing illegal things, prosecute them!" while ignoring that it's Cloudflare and other infrastructure providers that enable them to do those things across borders.
At that point why bother with cloudflare? if you have a credible legal case to take down the hosting of the website you make a legal case in the place where it is being hosted and use that to get it down. I can't really see any reason for a court of law to force cloudflare to not service someone given that the obvious implications that the one asking for that to happen wants to commit a felony, or at the very least make the target susceptible to one, assuming cloudflare isn't hosting anything of course.
That's exactly what happened with FOSTA and they roll over and ask for their tummies to be tickled, because Cloudflare's official policy is that the lives of sex workers isn't terribly important.
If you pick a jurisdiction, like the US, to settle most of your disputes, that provides a minimum floor for everyone to understand and work out what should happen.
If you don't - then the legal standards you have will be those of the worst country in the world. If Iran and North Korea issue court rulings banning cloudflare, should that affect people using cloudflare everywhere else?
They've decided they want to be seen as a utility. You undermine your DDOS protection business if you drop controversial customers. They are exact type of customer who need DDOS protection the most.
> They are exact type of customer who need DDOS protection the most.
They (KiwiFarms, Daily Stormer) would be better not on the internet.
> They've decided they want to be seen as a utility.
This isn't how law works - just as you can't say "we don't have a banking license but we'd like to be seen as a bank and provide banking services" you can't say "we're not a utility but we'd like to be seen as one". Note that being a utility also comes with a host of other legal restrictions.
> They are exact type of customer who need DDOS protection the most.
> > They (KiwiFarms, Daily Stormer) would be better not on the internet.
DDOS protection only exists because some people are willing to illegally target websites they believe would be better not on the internet. It's the entire point. Folding to publish pressure for one customer weakens their case for protecting others.
Dropping nazis from your service generally doesn't weaken the case for your service. For example, when Cloudflare did this in the past, it didn't harm their business.
> Dropping nazis from your service generally doesn't weaken the case for your service
From the article:
"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.
In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us."
We've already established that they are perfectly capable of ignoring people.
The only people they listen to or care about are domestic nazis. Those nasty regimes should just register accounts on KiwiFarms and then CloudFlare will bend over forwards to help them.
Much as cloudflare is choosing to ignore victims of harassment, cloudflare could simply choose to ignore the authoritarian regimes. It is not required to follow a particular definition of "fairness".
Ok then: they have decided, and they decided not to take KF down.
Their TOS gives them the lateral autonomy to decide what breaks the TOS, whether or not something violates their TOS, and how harsh of a punishment to enact.
Right. They get to decide to host these sites, and other people get to decide to organize legal economic actions against them, like boycotting. This seems like a normal and healthy part of a free market, no?
And in other areas: uber, airbnb, various voip services have all said "we don't actually have the proper licenses for our industry but we want to fulfill the same role"
Nobody is the manager of the Internet, that's the whole fucking point of the Internet.
Your right to censor and regulate traffic ends exactly where your machines do not reach. Cloudflare own the machines in question, so they decide what stays on and what doesn't. They are the managers of the part of the Internet where their machines reach (Duh), but none else.
It's funny that I have to explain this because it's usually the other way around, some tech giant will usually ban someone for something incredibly arbitrary and nakedly unfair, and the folks crying about Cloudflare's decisions here are usually the first to start cheering and explaining to the rest of us how they're a private company and have the right to do anything they want. Well, Cloudflare is a private company too, folks, and they decided that free speech is awesome and worth it, and you gotta respect their decisions and stop raging impotently about things you can't control.
The entire reason they are mostly focusing on getting DDoS protection services to drop KF, is it's seen as the most promising approach to kick the website offline. Most other things you need to be on the Internet are either already utilities, or are reasonably possible to maintain yourself or find one provider among thousands. DDoS protection is not like that, you need an unreasonable amount of equipment and money to do it.
If CloudFlare folds, either the website will get knocked to DDoS, or it will find another of the few remaining DDoS protection services, which will be also invariably pressured to drop them, and as smaller players they will have an even greater incentive to fold to avoid a PR disaster. Repeat until they run out of DDoS protection services willing to protect them.
But, as far as I can tell both the owner of KF and its associated companies are located in the US and what they do is technically legal (they've not been convicted as far as I know). So, if they are unable to get on the Internet, that'd make a fantastic argument for regulation of DDoS protection services, which I guess is what CloudFlare is trying to avoid here.
Like with so many SaaS, CloudFlare has perhaps become too many digital eggs in one digital basket, so inevitably it will result in disappointment and bad decisions ala Twitter, GoDaddy etc.
The problem is that all those bad decisions inevitably spark from these platform companies not wanting to enforce their own AUP.
We point out a particular bad actor in violation of their own policies, and they do nothing. We complain loudly about it in the news, and they vaguely commit to "fighting" the problems that were already against their AUP... but not any specific named bad actors. Automated systems are chucked at the wall, but the actual people people are angry about are exempted in the name of "free speech" until it costs the company business.
This cycle repeats until a politician gets a bug up their butt about it and passes a law mandating platforms have more censorious policies.
The fact that Clouflare has decided it is in the better interest of the Internet that one website gets to break their AUP because they've become a cause célébre is so amateurish. Business to business relationships don't work that way. You break the contract, you're out. That's what's in the interest of the Internet. Upholding business contracts.
Reminds me of Twitter's world leaders policy they trotted out around 2017 to keep Trump on the platform. If I remember correctly Trump was even immune to DMCA 512 takedown notices, which is an absurd level of risk to take just to say you have @POTUS.
It's also sort of hard put the cat in the bag, for the service that instituted the policy and for competitors.
If you start a competing free-speech twitter competitor, you're effectively "twitter for InfoWars fans, QAnon and assorted holocaust deniers". Likewise, the headlines if Twitter themselves softened their line would hardly be about standing up for free speech ideals...
It's really not that tricky. Few sites are peers of 8chan, kiwi farms, and the daily Stormer. When you become their peer, you have a serious discussion about whether you want them as customers with several people in the company, and you can choose "no".
They can absolutely drop kiwi farms and still be in the clear, ethically. It's not like kiwi farms is even remotely close to some sort of slippery slope. It's the goddamn burning trash pit on a FOB of internet sites.
Kiwi Farms has killed and swatted people and had resulted in many direct threats of violence to individuals. It's not really a slippery slope at all. All three sites are way, way beyond the pale.
Calling it harassment is like calling the moon a "space rock" - technically true I guess, but missing the magnitude.
As someone who fears and despises Kiwi Farms, I would be dishonest if I didn't recognize the slippery slope certainty that the bar of acceptability would decrease over the next few years.
You realize the fallacy here, right? Terminating commercial agreements with three origins of stochastic terrorism is not some ratchet towards new speak. It's just three cases where Cloudflare decided that sheltering terrorism wasn't in their best interest.
stochastic terrorism is new speak itself, if redefining inaction to be action, is it redefining silence to be violence, it transitioning from a society focuses on first party liability (i.e am i only responsible for my own actions not the actions of others) to a collectivist mentality of not only am I responsible for my own actions but for the actions of everyone connected to me
It's not new speak. It's a more accurate set of words to describe what we used to call "lone wolves". Stochastic means random, statistically measurable but not predictable.
The term "stochastic terrorism" means terror attacks like school shootings, swattings, and driving trucks into protestors that happen with a certain statistical likelihood, but whose individual events cannot be predicted.
The phrase is the result of a slippery slope on the definition of "terrorism", which once referred to guerrilla groups driven by a religious or political ideology, to violent individuals lacking any ideology at all.
But the slippery slope I had in mind, however, was that once Cloudflare submits to the pressure of Keffals against this odious site, that precedent will be set, and then another pressure group will emerge targeting a slightly less odious site, etc.
Citation. On the swatting I hope we are not believing MTG now.. that would be doubley ironic
Also there is a big difference between actions of people that also happen to be members of a website and activity taking place on the website. I abhor third party liability
In the case os 8chan and daily stormer they were banned for actions and content on the site. Not for actions of people that may be affiliated with the site as anonymous users
So there, three different citations that, themselves link out to other news and reputable primary sources showing the site, including the owner of the site, are involved in stochastic terrorism and, quote, "the exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement".
>>The site posted the video and manifesto of the Christchurch shooting.
Ok, and? I 100% disagree with the active censorship around current events we see every day, from police shootings to terrorism people should be forced to confront the raw reality of the world not a candy coated version put through the filters of main stream media.
>So there, three different citations that,
No those are claims that do not really have a fact based narrative behind them, further even if the claims are taken at face value you are blaming the site for actions of people off the site that may be members, 3d party liability.
Going back to the 8Chan, and Daily Stormer they were banned for illegal content ON THE SITE, not because members of the site did things off that site.
Posting mean or even offensive things on a website should never be a bannable event, and to the extent people are taking actions offsite, or offline to the point of direct harassment, swatting etc those INDIVIDUALS should be criminally prosecuted for their own actions
Posting video of the Christchurch massacre is illegal.
And if you don't think the London police department didn't put out a fact based narrative about three swatting, you are straight up unwilling to engage in any sort of reasoned discussion, and are appealing purely to your emotional attachments to your ideals.
>>Posting video of the Christchurch massacre is illegal.
Not in the US it is not.
>>if you don't think the London police department didn't put out a fact based narrative about three swatting,
Nothing in the London story has any comments from the police dept at all, it is all third party accounts by the target of the swatting who they claim with out evidence that it was a member of Kiwi Farms.
Even if that is true i bet that same person has a Twitter account, Facebook account, Reddit account, Amazon Account, and probably accounts at several other sites. Are we going to ban every site that a person commits a swatting has a membership at? or just the site that are small and do not align with your personal politics?
>appealing purely to your emotional attachments to your ideals
There is a lot of appeals to emotions when it comes to this story, I am not one of them, I have a firm principle stand in support for Free Speech to include speech that people find offensive or even "harmful" or "hateful".
First I am using your links alone, I am not "looking into things" you make the claims it is up to you to provide the sources to back them. in addition to free speech I am big proponent of another concept I bet you oppose, innocent until proven guilty, if you are going to make the claim a site should be scrubbed from the planet it is upon you to convince others of that, not just make the statement. I am #ShowMetheEvidence not #BelieveAllClaims
Second I am not disputing a swatting occurred, I am disputing that the swatting was a direct result of the ownership of Kiwi Farms or supported by the Ownership (or even the majority of the members) of the site.
Nowhere in any of your sources to the Police attribute the swatting to Kiwi Farms
> On the other hand, Cloudflare taking it upon themselves to police the Internet is a nightmare in its own, given their bot-prevention services are effectively mandatory in order to even keep any sort of larger interactive website running.
Maybe we should additionally also focus on that problem as well. It should not be the case that you need to pay a protection racket just to be able to survive on the Internet.
We definitely need more, also international, efforts to establish:
- baseline requirements on IT security (to reduce the impact of stuff like hacked IoT devices)
- quick and fast cooperation between governments to identify and contact owners of hacked equipment to get them off the Internet and patched. Maybe something similar in operation to firefighters - you don't have to pay for their assistance unless you actually created the fire or were grossly negligent?
- procedures to get nation states that are a clear and consistent threat to everyone else off the Internet either because they actively attack others or because they are shielding hacker groups, and judging by where a lot of attacks originate, that is Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Particularly regarding the last point, I'd also advocate to take factual declarations of war as what they are and strike back.
A protection racket implies collusion between attacker and defender, where the defender comes to you offering “protection”, but then comes again as an attacker to those who refuse. CloudFlare aren’t a protection racket; they’re just an ordinary for-hire private security service, for businesses in “bad parts of town.” They don’t come to anyone; people come to them. And they have any facility for originating outbound requests from any of the sites they’re protecting, so they can’t be used to facilitate an attack, either. (Any more than you’d say that the private security firm hired to guard a mob hideout “facilitated the attack” when the mob leaves their hideout under the firm’s care to go attack people elsewhere.)
> procedures to get nation states that are a clear and consistent threat to everyone else off the Internet
This is the thing: cutting off diplomatic routes is almost never the right approach, even during a hot war. Even when someone is punching you in the face, you don’t want to tape their mouth and ears shut that they could be using to negotiate no-longer-punching-you-in-the-face.
The Internet is like the Olympics: it provides a way for the common people of different countries to see each-other’s good works and learn to respect one-another; even as the leaders of those countries, and asshole minorities within those countries, are making the news and fanning hawkish sentiment. Throwing out the counterbalance in such a scenario is something you’d expect an Emperor Palpatine figure to do, to engineer a war.
Tangent: the biggest tragedy of the modern era is that the US, Russia, and China have entirely-separate popular social networks and blogging/vlogging platforms. The rare Russian YouTuber (living outside of Russia) talking to an English-speaking audience about their real feelings toward the Russian government does so much to build bridges between countries; but there would be a ton more of them if YouTube and VK had a federated video sharing arrangement, the way YouTube does with e.g. music videos hosted on DailyMotion. If a posting on VK or Weibo could “spread out” to Western audiences without someone manually picking it up and reposting it on Western social networks, we’d see so much more cross-cultural engagement and understanding. If someone on Facebook could add someone on VK as a friend, even…
I have a strong feeling that if highly-evolved aliens ever tried to uplift our civilization, they’d start by demanding the removal of any artificially-imposed culture-level barriers to human-to-human communication.
> A protection racket implies collusion between attacker and defender, where the defender comes to you offering “protection”, but then comes again as an attacker to those who refuse
For the average Internet citizen, the practical difference doesn't matter: unless you're hiding behind one of the powerhouses, everyone can shoot you off the Internet by renting a botnet for the equivalent of a dozen pizzas in Bitcoin, without having to fear any consequence. In real life, someone disrupting my business for hours would be carted off by police and I could sue their butt off for damages.
> This is the thing: cutting off diplomatic routes is almost never the right approach, even during a hot war.
There are diplomatic routes beyond the Internet, and additionally, at the moment for these four countries access to the Internet is like we'd let their landing ships take harbor at a port and let them unload their tanks in peace. We're not doing that in real life, we should not be doing that in cyberspace as well!
> The Internet is like the Olympics: it provides a way for the common people of different countries to see each-other’s good works and learn to respect one-another; even as the leaders of those countries, and asshole minorities within those countries, are making the news and fanning hawkish sentiment. Throwing out the counterbalance in such a scenario is something you’d expect an Emperor Palpatine figure to do, to engineer a war.
Given the Great Firewall of China, the almost-complete censorship in North Korea for everyone not a high-ranking party cadre and the Internet restrictions in Russia and Iran, it's hard to claim that the Internet in these countries actually fulfils that role.
This do next to nothing though. Most of the DDoS-traffic, while initiated in these places, originates from botnets all over the western world. Smart fridges, enterprise routers, that sort of things. Many of them seem to come from small businesses.
And to be even more pessimistic, cutting off Russia's Internet would do nothing to stop these, because these botnets can be set up by viruses, which can in turn be initially spread by just dropping random infected USB sticks on the street in other countries. No need for a Russian-IP-hosted CNC coordinating the attack.
This is a little confusing. You talked about protection rackets, then you said this company should collude in taking entire countries off the Internet.
I think that would make them… A protection racket.
Heh, I'm not calling for tanks rolling on anyone else but the Russians at that moment. But taking down national assets? Hacking them back to steal information just like they do against us? Why the fuck not?
If you let bullies bully around without consequences, they will only escalate, and it's high time someone takes on these four.
> Heh, I'm not calling for tanks rolling on anyone else but the Russians at that moment. But taking down national assets? Hacking them back to steal information just like they do against us?
What makes you think the US military + CIA aren’t already doing plenty of this to Russia et al? They don’t talk about it, because plausible deniability is an asset. And because the US has so many allies to route traffic through, that plausible deniability can be very plausible.
DDoS-protection is only part of it. You also need the ability to distinguish automated browsers from real ones, or you're going to have several full time jobs' worth of cleaning up spam comments from everything that even slightly resembles an input field.
Except it's absolutely up to the whims of private businesses, if you want to be consistent with how businesses are understood in the US.
In the US corporations are people and money is speech. Cloudflare can try to become a public utility if they want but right now they're a corporation and they're making a political decision to continue to take money from customers that use their services to operate harmful social spaces that are used to coordinate targeted harassment campaigns and drive vulnerable people into suicide.
They frame selling DDoS protection as a neutral and good thing because it prevents cybercrime. But would you accept the same argument for selling ballistic vests? Plate carriers? APCs? Clearly selling defensive equipment to both sides of a conflict is still involving yourself in a conflict. If you want to be neutral, you don't involve yourself, you don't sell.
And to make matters worse, the general consensus is that the party they're selling DDoS protection to are "the bad guys" in this conflict. The guy operating it literally had to create his own hosting company because he ran out of hosting providers willing to do business with him. He had to resort to crypto wallets because payment providers have long banned his site.
Even if there wouldn't be any evidence that he encourages and participates in the harassment campaigns his site is known for (a site, by the way, that was literally created to harass one specific individual), the person maintaining that site still took a principled stand to allow this behavior to continue despite what it cost him. And now Cloudflare's CEO took the same stand to continue doing business with this person.
Why do you think it makes a difference whether Cloudflare meets California's public utility law? The law, which could change, doesn't solve the moral objections you have here.
Or does it? Do you think it's OK to provide network protection to Kiwi Farms is California politicians say so, but not if Cloudflare says so?
Corporations are people because you can sue them. This is good.
Money is not speech, but spending money on your speech is legal (and good), just because money flows through a corporation doesn't mean speech that would be legal otherwise can be restricted. This is good.
Whether Cloudflare meets the legal definition of a public utility doesn't matter. Nobody, including Cloudflare alleges they have to provide the service. The provide the service becauase they want to prevent network attacks from everyone.
This position is mutually exclusive to protecting people from other, non network attack harasssment.
From their words they want to address and remove the negative externalitiies of network attacks, and you can't do that if you pick and choose at all.
We should be so glad that sites like KF can even exist, where free speech is not only practiced, but the owner of the site actually stands up for their users' rights and even goes to court to fight for them when people wrongly sue and try to take things down that is not the responsibility of KF to even be policing.
You may not like the content its users choose to post, but I for one am glad sites like it exist as it gives hope that the First Amendment continues to be respected and legally tested... otherwise I fear that censorship will keep creeping up until it has gone too far.
then why don’t they publicly invite back 8chan and the daily stormer, possibly for a discount/free? similarly, are they lobbying to get FOSTA revised so they can bring back Switter?
their opinion is that it is (almost always?) ethically wrong for them to withhold security products. for the two websites i mentioned, nobody is stopping them from providing services. for a third, they could lobby to fix fosta and/or not transit switter traffic in the us.
But if they "invoked" the removal of 8chan to say that they shouldn't have done it, I don't understand the relevance. Since you simply changed defended to "invoked," it seems that you're also aware that they aren't defending removing "8chan et al."
That's what is so sad about this. Cloudflare is NOT a utility, and they don't lobby to be one. If they were, then their arguments would have some merit. Instead, they're saying "look, we're a utility! We have to act like one! But we're going to keep the benefits of being a private company; we're just not going to exercise our private discretion because then we couldn't pretend we were a utility when it suits us."
As a dev who was once entirely on board with CF and recommended their "workers" environments to anyone that would listen, I'm very sorry to have to terminate both my business with them and my evangelizing of their services. But I'm certainly not going to stay in business with or recommend a company that would rather hide from their responsibility than to take the political heat for sensible business decisions (like removing poisonous clients).
They dropped support for 8ch after successive terrorist attacks, one of which killed 50 innocent people. The CEO has stated that he regrets dropping them.
8chan users radicalize each other and encourage each other to commit mass shootings. KiwiFarms users post the personal information of people and encourage each other to harass them to the point of suicide. I don't see how they aren't comparable.
What is the distinction you are drawing between a death from a swatting and pulling the trigger yourself?
Is this some "I didn't kill you, I just tied you up and left you on the tracks at 11:55 for the noon train" distinction?
And just because the attacks aren't explicitly coordinated on the site doesn't mean there's not culpability there... if an 8chan user is radicalized by 8chan and attacks a target suggested by 8chan, that doesn't mean 8chan isn't responsible just because the user didn't explicitly type "yes I am going to attack on Febtober 7th at 2pm".
That's sort of the problem with the whole "stochastic terrorism" thing... there's a transparently thin veneer of deniability for everyone involved, even the leaders. We obviously don't tolerate those excuses when dealing with jihad, you're going to get sanctioned or even bombed even if you're "just their spiritual leader and not actually involved with planning.
> KiwiFarms users post the personal information of people and encourage each other to harass them to the point of suicide.
Both of those things are EXPLICITLY against the rules and are heavily enforced. They only take public information and are point and laugh, but don't touch.
Reprehensible for sure, but your portrayal isn't accurate.
That’s a technicality and you know it. No one is stupid enough to believe they’re posting this personal information to laugh at it, right? What’s funny about a phone number and or a street address?
Is this in fact the case? Of course it is being claimed, but I always perceived that KF's nastiness was relatively self-contained, e.g. when someone encourages suicide, it's performative to other Farmers, rather than reaching out to a potential victim or their loved ones. All bark, no bite, and caged.
The current push for cloudflare to unlist kiwifarms is in response to a well known twitch streamer's attempted killing via swatting. They literally had to leave the country (canada), and the new address was found, and they were swatted again.
Their "nastiness" (suggestion: terrorism) is never self contained. I know several people who've been doxxed on there - every single person had to move and change their legal name. If a thread on someone in KF is active, they will find every member of your family, your workplace, friends and loved ones. Then if they find your friends are "degenerates", they will doxx them too, and all their family workplace friends and loved ones.
The fucking point of the site is harassment - they post ADDRESSES and PHONE NUMBERS, why would those ever be allowed if it was supposed to be self-contained?
Here is the how the southern poverty law center describes Kiwifarms:
> KiwiFarms – a forum with roots in 4Chan culture that has become notorious for engaging in extreme trolling, harassment, and even stalking
I can see no reason why the owner of kiwi farms would want to believe that kiwi farms wasn't directly responsible for suicides (and terrorism via swatting). /s
So does Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every large platform. There is so much harassment, doxing, and other disturbing behavior on all the platforms.
This is a remarkably facile comment; on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram you can find people who aren't out to drive trans people to commit suicide, and content which isn't about how to best call SWAT teams to people's homes. On KiwiFarms, that is all there is.
I see plenty of posts on Kiwifarms that don't seem to be advocating for anything like that. Where exactly are all these posts? If the only thing on Kiwifarms are posts like this I should be able to easily see them.
The forum whose members spend a lot of time harassing people has a book club thread! They can't be bad people if they spend some of their non-harassing time reading!
There's lots of people on Facebook who talk about abusing children. So what? If you want to say the majority or a substantial percentage of the forum members harass people then show some evidence for it.
And each of those platforms you've mentioned have explicit rules AGAINST harassment, doxxing, swatting, and other reprehensible behavior KF engages in.
Sure, it may be posted, but lots of it is removed as soon as it is identified and/or reported.
Kiwifarms has a policy against illegal behavior (which would include some harassment and swatting). I am not sure if doxing is illegal?
Policies don't mean anything when a huge amount of it stays up and the platform does nothing about it.
There are posts literally and explicitly calling for people to murder others on Twitter. The posts have been there for multiple years (at least the last time I checked). Twitter and the other big players completely fail at content moderation.
I'm not sure that it is the main purpose of KiwiFarms. There appears to be a large number of posts not related to any of that behavior. I don't use KiwiFarms so maybe I just don't know where all these doxing posts are?
Also, due to the sheer size, Twitter and the others almost certainly have significantly more of these types of posts.
KiwiFarms has a policy against illegal behavior. If your argument is that having a policy and half assing it is sufficient for Twitter then you should be consistent and allow KiwiFarms the same excuse. The size is irrelevant. If anything it should mean Twitter should be held to a higher standard due to the sheer reach of the platform. Twitter has significantly more resources to stop this behavior through both automated and manual processes. Stop justifying Twitter's complete and utter failure.
KiwiFarms has removed posts that were doxing people in the past. I am not sure how frequently they do it though, but since they do it sometimes 'half-assing' seems appropriate.
Finding KiwiFarms posts that currently dox a user are going to be hard, because now that the site is under increased scrutiny from the public there is likely to be an attempt from moderators to remove posts. We can clearly find posts however that doxxing has been part of the sites history for years.
I don't know that IP addresses are doxing. Maybe, but doesn't seem like much for that.
Past addresses isn't doxing.
You have one example. I do appreciate the example. I don't really think 1 post is really systematic though. You could easily find an address on any of the big players. They appear to remove posts that get reported so it is possible this one wasn't reported.
I don't think this is accurate. I've only looked at KF briefly, but it seems like the causal ancestor is actually that KF tracks people who are loudly and publicly doing crazy stuff, which correlates with people who are at risk of loudly and publicly killing themselves.
8chan literally had sub boards dedicated to child pornography. Kiwi Farms is where people make fun of other people. They're really not comparable unless you believe "not being made fun of" is a human right.
> They're really not comparable unless you believe "not being made fun of" is a human right.
This is meant to be sarcastic but a lot of people basically do believe this. Most arguments about "stochastic terrorism" would implicitly aim to devalue/censor any sort of speech that "punched down".
A more charitable version of this argument would build in a series of degrees as to how likely those denigrations are to make stochastic terrorism occur. For example, vague insults directed at a group of people are less likely to cause terrorism than ones associated with a single person. Insults that come loaded with implicit threats (like doxxing) are much more likely to cause stochastic terrorism than those without. Insults and threats against groups who are marginalized in society are more likely to cause terrorism. Insults made in a space full of mentally deranged people are more likely to cause terrorism.
With all of this, it's clear that if you're going to argue that stochastic terrorism even exists, you should believe that it is happening at Kiwi Farms. Incredibly personal, incredibly specific (doxxing), directed at marginalized people, and in a space full of people that are already predisposed to acts of violence.
This is meant to be sarcastic but a lot of people basically do believe this
Indeed they do, and they're free to go on arresting their fellow citizens for teaching dogs offensive gestures. But Cloudflare is an American company, and they're under no obligation to enforce politeness on their customers.
That depends. How many lives were ruined thanks to those boards on 8chan? It's plausible the answer is anywhere from "very many" to "zero". The harassment caused by Kiwi Farms is serious and located somewhere in between.
Remember, while they took down 8chan, they left up ISIS sites hosting ISIS-made videos of ISIS members burning people alive, popping off their heads with detcord, and the like.
8chan bad, ISIS ... well, not as bad?
I will never stop reminding people that the CEO said he woke up in a bad mood one day and took down protections for one group ... but left murdersites alone. Can't be undone.
Remember that whenever they pretend to be unbiased.
> I will never stop reminding people that the CEO said he woke up in a bad mood one day and took down protections for one group ... but left murdersites alone. Can't be undone.
> 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.
> For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them. We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes; we do them because they are aligned with what we believe is morally correct.
These are the two strongest points for me. The former is one I already believed, and the latter makes me more hopeful as someone in that specific minority community.
In addition, I think it's touched on but Cloudflare is huge. Even if they changed their mind on terminating amoral customers, how would that go down? Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? Ask the LGBTQ people banned from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google/etc. if those systems really work all that well. All too often person A implying that X group deserves violence skirts the system, while the actual text calling out Person A's beliefs from an advocate is considered hate.
And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives.
These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?
Those two statements are not in contradiction though. If KiwiFarms is trying to get people to commit suicide in a willful way that breaks the law, surely they can be brought before the law. If you are attempting to DDoS the infrastructure of somebody because you disagree with them, you are committing an illegal act too. Perhaps terrorism is a bit far, but what gives the people who commit the DDoS the right to do so? No society should allow people to be punished without a due process.
I also can't go shoot up suspected criminals, that's called vigilantism and is criminal. Even if I knew they did it.
Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Someone walks up to it and sets it on fire. Should the local fire department put it out? Assume it's not going to spread to other buildings/etc.
First of, not all fire departments are government services. Sometimes they are private associations of volunteers that receive marginal if any taxpayer support. Other times, they are for-profit corporations. This is particularly true when another company needs specialized firefighting services because they are remote or handle materials and situations the local government-supported firefighters aren't equipped to handle.
> Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere.
A shed in the middle of nowhere, so let us suppose the nearest government supported fire department is a two hour drive away, and so KF hires a private for-profit firefighting company. With that modification to patmcc's comment, what is your response now?
Cloudflare is not a private association of volunteers. Private fire fighting services are not called fire departments commonly, are plural, and are not local frequently. My response is still the analogy is bad. We can understand the situation better without trying to imagine what fire would be like if it didn't spread.
I did not compare cloudflare to a private association of volunteers. I am suggesting they are comparable to a private for-profit firefighting company. Can you respond to this?
If KF farms hires a private for-profit firefighting company, and then political activists commit arson against KF, should the private for-profit firefighting company put out the fire? Or does your political ideology oblige firefighters to side with arsonists?
> I did not compare cloudflare to a private association of volunteers.
The point was your lecture on fire fighting services was irrelevant to the context.
> I am suggesting they are comparable to a private for-profit firefighting company. Can you respond to this? If KF farms hires a private for-profit firefighting company, and then political activists commit arson against KF, should the private for-profit firefighting company put out the fire?
I did respond. I said the analogy had negative value. Continuing to mutate the analogy is just more evidence of it.
> Or does your political ideology oblige firefighters to side with arsonists?
Can you explain why the comparison between a private fire department that frustrates vigilante arsonists and a private DDoS protection service that frustrates vigilante DDoSers is an analogy with "negative value"?
It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.
I can see you're not interested in discussion at this time. No worries, we all have those days.
I did not say it was a government service, I said a platform functions a lot like a government service, especially when multihoming is limited due to switching costs.
> I did not say it was a government service, I said a platform functions a lot like a government service, especially when multihoming is limited due to switching costs.
You said it was like a government service is typically provisioned. And the costs of switching governments dwarf the costs of switching online services.
> I can see you're not interested in discussion at this time. No worries, we all have those days.
Some users of KiwiFarms may have the agenda of wanting to drive people to commit suicide, you seem to be accusing the website as a whole of a) having an agenda and b) that agenda being to drive people to kill themselves
What evidence is there for this? I haven't kept up with the website recently, is Null telling people to harass people to death?
> What I fear more than losing my
site, being sued, or dealing with police is living in a world where fat eunuchs can groom little boys into castrating themselves and
nobody is allowed to say anything about it.
They do have an agenda for sure. That wasn't the question, tho. The question was whether they condone or even encourage their users to target people with the goal of driving those people into suicide?
This might be well the case. I am not one of their users nor am I educated in this matter, so I'd like to know too. When somebody makes this claim, as has been made multiple times in the threads here, with demands to therefore remove kikifarms from the internet, I think it is reasonable to ask for at least some evidence of such a claim.
For context, because I didn't know and I'd think others might not either: Apparently Chloe Segal killed herself by going to a public park and lighting herself on fire, telling witnesses in a spoken suicide note her reasons were homelessness and mental health issues.
Josh Moon then playing "Fire" ("I am the God of hellfire and I bring you fire") is in extremely bad taste and outright vile. I can very well see this as gloating.
And yet, it does not prove kiwifarms direct involvement. It's a short extract from a stream he did. Playing devil's advocate for a second, it for example might very well have been a response to media at the time already claiming he/kiwifarms was to blame for the suicide and therefore a rather misguided attempt to poke fun at what he might have considered unfair reporting.
I don't see him gloating about getting Chloe Segal to kill herself in that tweet or video. What I see is him making fun of her death? Reminds me of a video I saw of a photo of Donald Rumsfeld being burnt when he died last year. What am I missing?
Are you suggesting that not removing those posts is tacit agreement with their content rather than a principled stance on free speech for it's members? It could be both of course, but I always err on the side of charity even if you don't think they deserve it.
It is support -- kiwifarms isn't a free-for-all, they have their list of "lolcows" (people who have a thread dedicated to them), and only moderators can add new threads.
So only moderators can add new threads, and I assume users can post in threads, and I assume the users are the ones posting that the people should kill themselves. So how does this translate into the moderators or site operators/owners endorsing the content of user posts?
Edit: to be clear, "allowing content" does not entail "endorsing content" per my original reply.
Perhaps the context where priests are part of an international organization that has paid off and silenced victims and covered for the priests for decades while the concern about transgender folks being groomers is all bullshit?
There's a big difference between talking shit about people and telling others to harass people until they get to the stage they commit suicide. You've shown me that he talks shit about people, you haven't shown me him having an agenda of trying to get these people he's talking about to kill themselves, which was one of my original claims.
It's difficult to take comments like this in good faith when the Github profile linked on your account prominently features your signature on a letter calling for Richard Stallman to be reinstated to the FSF after his resignation, following his comments defending sex with minors and child pornography.
The website does have an agenda of not being shut down, yes, this is why it is so intent on following US laws and cooperates with US authorities. The person trying to shut it down was being described in the terms above, so its not surprising this is the characterization being used. The website defends free expression under US law, i suppose that also is an agenda.
What law? She's not giving anyone hormones, you know. She shares information about informed consent clinics, the effects of hormones, and places to buy safe supplies.
Yeah, but not all parents have the best interests of their children at heart. This is generally recognized, and the reason why there is increasing clarification of the boundaries between the rights of parents and the rights of children. It's the reason that forced marriage and child brides have been outlawed in many countries. It's also the reason why child labour and child welfare, and protective services for children exist.
Should someone be providing HRT to children? Generally no. Has the child been prescribed that medication, and the parents are refusing, unable to, or actively preventing the child from getting that medication? Absolutely!
If this was in relation to insulin, antibiotics, or any other generally accepted medical prescription, the individual would be lauded. Because of transphobia and ignorance, sites like kiwifarms are being targetted by a bunch of relentless shitweasels who are hiding behind Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Expression, something which Cloudflare is under absolutely no legal requirement to provide.
I don't want tech companies to become the arbiters of free speech, but I also don't think companies are obligated to provide services to a website owned by a person who gleefully celebrated the suicide of a victim of harassment.
Now that I am not an employee there anymore, one thing I am absolutely thrilled to say is that the Fastly approach with a Good Neighbour policy is awesome, and that alone (among many awesome things over the 5 years I was there) makes it a better company to work for than CloudFlare.
Do you actually have something to add to the conversation? Your comments haven't particularly meaningful or insightful, so that's a genuine question.
There isn't a complete picture here. In this particular case, Keffals shared that she was supporting alternate paths to get HRT, and providing support for folks who were legally blocked from receiving gender affirming care due to laws passed by a government largely captured by right wing politicians.
Given the complexity of pursuing HRT, it's not unreasonable to reach the conclusion that a child in those circumstances being denied care is largely related to a lack of parental support, or from being actively prevented from getting treatment that doctors were clearly providing (since the government had to ban medical treatment in order to stop it).
What do I have to add? I am giving the opposing opinion here which from anecdotal experience is also the opinion of almost every parent I've met (n~=40) in contrast to the opinions of some people trying to give the impression that it's normal for children to be getting drugs from people they know online because that's what they want.
If the government bans some form of medical treatment and Keffals is trying to bypass this ban then this obviously would raise questions of legality.
An argument should be able to stand on its own regardless of which people believe in it or use it.
As for the Twitter thread I've heard plenty of similar arguments before but I'm not a particularly big believer in them. Lots of people have very awful company (take for example Hollywood actors associating with predators) but that doesn't particularly mean that they are promoting or in agreement with the actions of their company.
> * An argument should be able to stand on its own regardless of which people believe in it or use it.*
Which is why I continued on with addressing the argument.
> Lots of people have very awful company (take for example Hollywood actors associating with predators)
False equivalency I'd say. Yes, the entertainment industry as a whole SUCKS. But if you think about it for even a second, you'll realize there is a difference between being an actor and being an open Nazi.
You didn't give me an argument you gave me a twitter thread. The argument I interpreted from the thread was if you let your bar be associated with a Nazi (because you served them) then down the road they will invite their other Nazi friends and eventually your bar will become a Nazi bar. In the context of this HN thread I take this argument to mean, well Null is associating with people who harassed this woman to death, therefore Null supports it. Which is why I gave the response I did.
Close, but you're missing the point. It becomes a Nazi bar, regardless of the owner's intentions for the bar. So arguing the semantics of one admin's beliefs is irrelevant.
Metaphor for what? Supporting harassment to the point of suicide? There's lots of harassment on almost every social media site so the question of what defines it 'going over the edge' so to speak is a very important one to me.
> Do you believe investigative journalism has a place in our society?
Yes and KiwiFarms is not investigative journalism - they're harrassing and doxxing private individuals with clearly personal malicious intent. The key part of investigative journalism is the "investigative", which there is no evidence of on KiwiFarm's part. No attempts to hold power to account, to expose serious breaches of power - just a horrid, all-consuming hatred and failure to respect other people's right to exist.
Do you think CNN should be driven off the internet? Back in 2017 they threatened and harassed an anonymous reddit user into apologizing for making a harmless gif [1]. How is CNN better than kiwifarms?
And that would make sense when it comes to people like you or others with aliases, but an alias like "wyre" or "pc" aren't exactly hiding themselves, just using a nickname, similarly to how in high school my peers called me Seneca (because my first day I wore my old school's t-shirt). I wasn't hiding who I am by going by that, just not using my real name.
But "throwawayacc2" doesn't get that same meaning.
Imagine thinking this drivel somehow applied to this thread.
You shouldn't make new accounts for this sort of thing you know - cowards who hide from perfectly legal doxxing and "investigative journalism" in defense of such "harmless" actions come across as sus. Why should you be ashamed of your opinion - you are entitled to free speech right?
The group they're trying to target here is a terrorist group. Not even in a metaphorical sense. It's people who try to harass random transgender people to the point of suicide or murder.
If they are a terrorist group (or otherwise doing something "wrong"), then the appropriate means to deal with that is courts and law enforcement, not a CDN.
No one is claiming that, in a perfect world, this would be Cloudflare's problem. Some other authority would step in and take care of it I suppose.
But we don't live in a perfect world. It's a pretty weak response to say "this should not be their problem" - because, for a bunch of reasons, it is their problem.
There are bigger, harder questions along the lines of "how do we as a society deal with this kind of issue." Cloudflare does not need to solve the general case before it deal with the specific actions of this specific website - and the desire to solve the general case is not a defense against confronting the specifics.
IANAL. KF appears to me to be woefully in violation of US Federal law since it is a forum more or less dedicated to cyberstalking.
> The federal law concerning cyberstalking is 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2). It provides that it’s unlawful for any person to engage in a course of conduct through electronic communication that makes another individual reasonably fear death or serious bodily harm to themselves or another (including a pet or service animal). The behavior may also be illegal if it causes or could cause “substantial emotional distress.” A course of conduct means two or more acts suggesting that the individual has or will continue the behavior.
Our justice system is far from perfect, but it's better to have due process and transparency than to have corporations or mobs selectively enforcing "the law" however and whenever they see fit.
There's no reason to think that just because police exist people can't do anything about other people's bad behavior though. For example, when someone says something you don't like you aren't allowed to silence them because that violates their rights, but you are allowed to use your own rights to speak out against them and what they've been saying.
Crimes should be dealt with by our legal systems, but there are plenty of other ways to deal with things that simply offend us.
I agree, I wish we had a law enforcement apparatus that cared about protecting transgender people. But we don't have a clear path to that at the moment, and in the meantime we want to avoid more people being killed. Thus you have people trying to argue for more informal procedures that revolve around social pressure, telling companies basically "This is obviously way beyond the pale, you should not associate yourself with this." It's not a good state for things to be in, but pretending things are better than they are is an even worse solution.
What evidence is there for the law enforcement apparatus not protecting transgender people in this particular case? Have their been similar cases for cisgender people where the law enforcement apparatus has cared more? I am not sure saying we need mob action to stop other mob action is a good long term solution.
Law enforcement are doing the right thing responding to potentially emergency situations. The problem isn't that they are responding to SWATing, the problem is people calling them in when there is no emergency.
I can't think of any instances of people being persecuted for being cisgender. But I suppose you can draw a reasonable comparison to The Pirate Bay, which has received much more attention from law enforcement for cutting into record labels' profits than Kiwi Farms has for terrorizing queer people.
Things involving industry and large sums of money have always gotten police attention easier. What is in question here is regarding discrimination against transgender individuals compared to cisgender ones with regards to harassment.
Jesus Christ dude, there's people dying here and you're arguing over technicalities. The site is still up!! No one's been arrested! You'd rather people keep dying while you argue that both sides are bad, while one side is killing people?
No, I'd rather people report things to the proper law enforcement authorities if they believe there is criminal activity going on instead of trying to pressure CloudFlare into taking down websites for their moral or political beliefs. They have already resisted pressure from Ukraine regarding Russia which no offense is a directly killing far more people than Kiwifarms ever indirectly will.
KF's policy is very straightforward - do not engage with the people involved. Doing so or conspiring to do so is grounds for an immediate sitewide permaban.
That was not my definition. Kiwi Farms will post their target's private info, the private info of everyone their target knows, send death threats to their target and their family, report false crimes to try and get SWAT teams to kill their target, etc. Ben Shapiro doesn't seem like a good person and I suspect he is probably sympathetic to many terrorists, but he is not himself a terrorist as far as I know.
They are the top suspects in the swatting of the Twitch streamer Keffals and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene just in the past month. There have been many news articles about it — I would suggest Googling and picking the source that seems most credible to you, since I've found linking specific sources tends to lead to people debating the source itself. (I'll be honest, I'm skeptical on the MTG one, but they are still the top suspects there.)
I read about the Marjorie Taylor Green incident. The swatter apparently claimed to be a specific moderator from the website (by username, not actual name), while commiting a serious felony against a prominent politician... If anything, it looks like a two-for-one swatting, getting the moderator and the site a visit from the feds in addition to Marjorie Taylor Green.
The fact that they post dox (names, addresses, other personally identifying information) makes that a pretty weak defense in my mind. If you write up this long post about how someone is a terrible human being and include their PII right next to it, what happens next isn't exactly hard to guess. And these people are not stupid, they know what will happen next even if they don't actually ever harass the person.
I wouldn't have a problem with them discussing other people among themselves, but including addresses and phone numbers and such is such a bad faith "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you ha ha ha" that I wouldn't mind seeing them burned down on principle.
DDoS is a product of an inherent weakness of the internet infrastructure, namely BGP. Cloudflare "solves" this by acting as a middleman, and charging for their service.
I don't know if I would describe a DDoS attack as "digital terrorism", but it is annoying and hard to stop on an individual level because of the design of the internet.
DDoS attacks would still occur if we used a routing protocol other than BGP. It's not created by BGP, it's created by the fact that the Internet is end-to-end oversubscribed.
The weakness in the internet that allows for DDoS is that you can't tell your peers to filter incoming traffic on your behalf, so you need to discriminate on the edge. The attacker still gets to eat up your bandwidth and CPU time.
I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. People in the US don't like that word, but there's a good many things that are terrorism that we don't call such. At the end of the day, violence with political aims is terrorism.
For certain things I will measure/compare harmfulness relative to potential outcomes because sometimes doing enforcement is suboptimal. In this case, however, we're talking about someone co-opting the governments monopoly on violence, which is more of an issue of principle. Once you let people co-opt that, it's a fairly run-away train. That's a long way of saying, for me this situation is very binary. There's no degrees of vigilantism.
Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to equivocate terrorism, which actively targets/kills innocent civilians, with DDOS attacks against services which are responsible for moral atrocities? Could it be compared to vigilante justice? Perhaps. But comparing it to terrorism is unfair, to put it mildly.
You seem to be treating all political conflict as terrorism. Couldn't you say the same about people who organize on Kiwifarms and flood social media with specious allegations of bad character or nefarious actions? For that matter, the site has been heavily associated with doxxing and swatting.
The Technolytics Institute defines cyberterrorism as
The premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives.
The National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization of legislators created to help policymakers in the United States with issues such as economy and homeland security defines cyberterrorism as:
The use of information technology by terrorist groups and individuals to further their agenda. This can include use of information technology to organize and execute attacks against networks, computer systems and telecommunications infrastructures, or for exchanging information or making threats electronically.
--
Just taking the first two, they could easily be extended to Kiwifarms, where information on individuals is compiled and shared in public fashion and discourse revolves around how such people deserve to be harrassed. I haven't been following the Keffals episode in particular but Kiwifarms already had a reputation for facilitating and fostering personal harassment.
Terrorism includes attacks on infrastructure, not just bodily harm. Firebombing an empty building still counts. In this case, it would fall specifically within cyber terrorism.
>the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives
History has shown that reprehensible acts can be done for the greater good. Getting Kiwi Farms off the Internet at all cost might be good, digital terrorism be damned.
No. Clearly you're having trouble understanding basic logic so I'll spell it out for you:
1. Terrorism is not a judgment of the target but of the action.
2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism.
3. DDoSing Nazis is thus terrorism.
By parity of reasoning, I pointed out that murdering a Nazi is still murder, regardless of the fact that the target was a Nazi. The nature of the target is immaterial to the classification of the action taken against them.
Who is being defended as a consequence of being against DDOS is completely irrelevant, as it should be.
Attempting to boil it down to Oxford's definition is quite reductionist, especially when literally anything can be a political aim(even a rejection of politics can be seen as a political opinion) as well as violence not being that set in stone either. Encyclopedia Britannica said it best: "Definitions of terrorism are usually complex and controversial, and, because of the inherent ferocity and violence of terrorism, the term in its popular usage has developed an intense stigma."[0]
But even under your definition I fundamentally disagree that this instance of it doesn't fit. It is an unlawful attack on infrastructure with clearly political aims against a service used by civilians, it is clearly being used to intimidate hosts to drop them so that the DDOS doesn't create more collateral damage for their other customers as well.
It's fine to agree with terrorism, one man's terrorist is another freedom fighter and all that, but I doubt most people would agree that it isn't terrorism.
> Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation.
The intent of the DDoS in question is very clearly a form of intimidation. DDoS in general does cause real economic harm and not merely inconvenience.
> Keep in mind who you're defending here.
That's irrelevant. Murdering Nazis is still wrong and illegal.
> The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism.
If it were they would have been charged. You're imputing intent and actions without sufficient evidence, because if that evidence existed we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Extra-judicial actions of this sort, no matter how plausibly justified, are not how society works. We have laws and a justice system because mob "justice" is wrong.
Perhaps you should ask yourself why you think the ends justify the means. After all, you can only despise Nazis due to some underlying principles, and yet you seem to have trouble understanding that other principles may also matter.
I just don't want to live in a world where society is governed and censored by big corporations. Wanting them to do so to further my worldview invites others to further the worldview of people I oppose. Leave the governing to the government, especially when it comes to systems with very broad usages (social networks, internet infrastructure, etc.)
Agreed. IMO, people encouraging Cloudflare and other corporations to take political stances are very short-sighted. With the amount of Saudi Arabian and Chinese investment and influence continuing to grow in major corporations, you have to imagine that large tech corporations being aligned with west-coast US Democrat politics isn't going to last forever.
As the article says, "... [not providing services based on moral character] is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."
Very similar to the short-sightedness of encouraging and celebrating creative circumventions of typical government checks and balances (Executive orders and judicial rulings used instead of legislature, etc.), only to be shocked and appalled when the game is flipped back on them when the 'other team' gets the ball.
Call the cops, file restraining orders, and get a good therapist.
Assholes and trolls are still going to exist regardless of what any platform does.
You can’t have what you want by trying to pressure cloudflare, it won’t make a positive difference. Do something real instead of advocating for something toothless and symbolic.
Attack other users like you did in those first two sentences will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. No more of this, please.
Selling drugs is already a crime, no need for eBay or Facebook to implement their own bespoke judicial system. Something being illegal doesn't mean people won't do it.
Yes you can, convince your friends to deactivate their social media accounts where\when they're harrassed or aggressively block those who harrass them. Teach them tips and tricks to bully back (bullying is really easy). Find them mental health professionals and services, and possibly help them financially with those services.
Harassment isn't something that Just Happens and it's not something that's impossible to stop or prevent. If a group of people is shooting others, would you only teach people what to do if they've been shot or would you find and take action against the people shooting others?
Great analogy, too bad it's hyperbolic and doesn't actually say anything about the situations it's supposed to help us think about.
People need to get it through their head that speech is not violence, words are not weapons. Your Exquisite Analogy about how speech laws should Akshually reflect gun laws or martial laws doesn't work, never worked, and never will.
Every single argument against free speech is a general argument against living in any kind of large networked society. Your problem is not the tools the harrasser uses, your problem is the harrasser themself, the tools they use is the same tools used by dissidents and freedom fighters to "harrass" the oppressive governments they are rebelling against.
We went through this entire tiresome arguments before with the debates around cryptography and anonymity, people just keep Missing The Point. Yes, building backdoors into encryption standards and harvesting data without users' permission will allow you to catch The Big Bad Pedos, but it will also allow Putin and Ibn Salman unprecedented power to catch their own type of enemies. "Oh, we just want to do bad things to the bad guys only" no, you can't, believe me, you can't and you won't, every single thing you advocate for can and will be used against you.
This reeks of "both-siding" which is insanely frustrating for me. Look, I get opening a can of worms and "stay out of my business" but at the same time, we need to be able as a society be able to and be unafraid to say when things are clearly bad.
I do not want corporations acting as government regardless of whose side they are on.
I do not want to normalize or encourage such regulation by corporation.
If some behavior is so bad, advocate for a law against it or for the enforcement of that law.
If it is not so bad, let it exist even if you don't like it.
The whole thing about rule by the people is that having individuals or small groups that get to arbitrarily make rules and enforce them is bad. Monarchy and despotism is bad, whether or not you like what they're doing.
Despotism by corporation is just as bad and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not different because you're trying to get them to arbitrarily create rules that agree with you.
Yes, it pretty much is. Over here it's against the law to futher it. What's wrong with enshrining this principle in the actual law, that 1) affects the whole society, not just users of one particular corporation, 2) it's enforcement is dispensed by an actual court, not a PR department pushed by a twitter mob?
Whose law? US law? KF operates outside the US. Are you ok with the US government deciding what's allowed on the internet and what isn't? What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people? Do we have to keep waiting for a law in that case too?
Is it reachable within the US? Are people interacting with US persons? Are you doing business with US companies (i.e. Cloudflare)? Then you're crossing the border and operating in the US.
>What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people?
It doesn't. You don't need an adjective between murder and people.
Also, harassing someone to the point of suicide isn't murder, it can be manslaughter.
No new laws are needed. Go bother your local DA or US attorney or legislative representatives to get charges filed for the actual harassment and the conspiracy to harass that lead to what should probably be manslaughter charges.
Make actual differences and actually hold the people who do these things accountable.
Don't go cheerleading for Cloudflare to do something meaningless that wouldn't and won't stop any of this in the future.
Why do you think the generation who actually fought and died against Nazis nevertheless held that displaying a Nazi flag is protected speech in America?
Do you think you understand something they didn't? Were they naive? Are you perhaps more intimately connected to the evils of Nazism than they were? Maybe they didn't understand that an entire country could fall to the evils of Nazism if they were not stamped out aggressively?
Or. Maybe they understood these things even better than you. And maybe they believed freedom of speech is even more anti-Nazi than banning Nazis.
> I just don't want to live in a world where society is governed and censored by big corporations.
You already do. And that's actually a good thing. It means that in free societies like the USA, these companies are free to choose to do (or not do) business with whomever they choose. They are not free from the market reacting to those decisions, though.
Which is effectively mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. I don't want dominating corporations to be run by people afraid of offending a vocal minority.
Everything is mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. Most companies have principles on how they do business, and they adjust those principles based on how people (internally and externally) react to them. That's why Google shut down its search engine for the CCP - it's mob rule at Google, and if you decide to do something that enough people find unethical, you won't hear the end of it until you stop. Why do you think this is a bad thing, or that it's somehow not the way the world works?
I understand your point and largely agree with the idea that corporations shouldn't become de-facto governments with regard to morality/free-speech/etc. However I think it's important to acknowledge that there's a really difficult problem to solve here with regards to spam, astroturfing and harassment/trolling (if not more areas) where allowing everything that is technically legal would make most online spaces unbearable to participate in for the vast majority of people (e.g. 4chan and its ilk). And the line between moderating those things and censorship is incredibly blurry
Although I'd agree there is a difference I think these issues are closer than you think, for example if Cloudflare was providing network services to a website dedicated to spam, trolling or harrassment. These things in many jurisdictions are not illegal but many companies will refuse to support them because they are actively bad for business (driving existing or potential customers away, making their own products worse, etc.). Ideals can be great but trying to apply them without considering the effects, intended or not, can lead to poor results
Cloudflare choosing to continue to provide their security services to Kiwifarms won't do anything about the fact that they're unregulated, and can offer or revoke services from whoever they choose and whatever time they wish. If you want to turn Cloudflare into a regulated monopoly, or utility company, then I would be open to that argument, but if you leave them as an unregulated, profit-seeking enterprise then you have to be critical about where that profit is coming from and what moral tactics you're okay with them to further that profit.
I don't want to hear cloudflare's opinions on social matters. If kiwifarms or whatever is doing something illegal, let the law go after them and encourage that.
I don't want to force cloudflare to be a public utility, but it is probably bigger and more dominant than any company needs to be, like many others it should be broken up into smaller pieces.
Cloudflare is not a public service, the comparison with firefighters is not apt.
I’ve been seeing this confusion more and more recently, probably because of the size and omnipresence of corporations.
I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance, but the distinction has to be emphasized. Corporations and public services are completely different beasts, with different legislations, incentives, etc.
The point here is that Cloudflare's core product, despite being run by a private for-profit company, is as close to an essential service as it gets in the digital world. This is not the same as saying "posting on Twitter is a civil right"
So then the answer is for Cloudflare to restructure their company. If they want to be seen as a utility so desperately, make it so!
Not having the legal obligations of a utility, while acting like one (i.e., getting to pull the "neutrality" card in the face of public pressure to drop nazis) is not okay.
Private companies are allowed to do a lot of immoral things because lobbying prevents the law from accurately reflecting the values of the voting public.
Nazis shouldn't get a website, even if the law permits it, and everyone has a moral obligation to fight fascism.
Everyone has a right to speech, even speech that is not good. That applies to gay people at Stonewall and the KKK marching in DC equally.
If you would restrict one then you restrict both. The freedom is absolute or it does not exist for anyone except the current favored group.
It's like laws on the treatment of prisoners of war - we don't have those rules because we love our enemy, it's because we want our brothers to not be tortured.
What change would that be? I don't know of anything they could do to make themselves a utility besides behaving like one and publicly starting that they intend to do so.
I really mean my original question. I think what CF is doing is trying to behave like a utility, and i think it's arguably in their best interest[1]. You seem to think that it's very obviously not in their interest. Care to elaborate on why?
[1] because their business scales very well, so they'd prefer to be considered reliable, so that competition doesn't have that available as a differentiator; any attempt at applying content-dependent rules either uses lots of heuristic automation or is reactive in response to Twitter storms, neither of which is predictable and reliable
I think it’s an easy and attractive talking point for them to posture publicly and internally, and to feel a connection to their personal philosophies. So far Cf has at most discussed the thought and process behind their policies and actions. I don’t see them offering up real public control and accountability of their service policy and enforcement. They’ll want to keep control over their business operations and seek the business dealings convenience of perceived neutrality, which they can do through thought leadership bs etc.
If they actually wanted to offer up control to the pubic in some way, how would they go about that? I guess they could create an appeals process for their decisions that's independent of them; or do you have something else in mind?
There are ways in which they are "completely different beasts" and ways in which they are similar.
In that they are both organizations made up of human beings providing important services to the general public, they are the similar. I think that's the similarity that was being emphasized by the analogy.
The analogy still works if you imagine private firefighters (the kind you might contract for a farming operation) instead of public firefighters.
There are ways in which water and oil are similar. There are also analogies which are of little use. When you reach for a group “made up of human beings” as a similarity, you clinging on the latter.
Quote it as written: "organizations made up of human beings providing important services to the general public"; not merely "group made up of human beings."
An organization is more specific than a "group."
They both provide services to the general public, i.e. they are indiscriminant in who their clients are. This is different from, say, a corporate law firm that might decide to take just a handful of cases at a time and be selective about it.
And finally, their services are important, as in livelihood-saving. Of course, firefighters are sometimes life saving, so a better analogy would be firefighters working for agri-business, but "firefighters" still fits better than, say, "AMC theaters" because of the importance of the service offered.
Even an arsonist should be rescued and treated for burns. They should also be arrested, tried, and inprisoned. Only combined do public services execute the moral values of the people. An arsonist should also probably not be sold gas.
A gas station has a moral obligation to sell gas without discriminating by race, etc. A gas station does not have a moral obligation to sell gas to arsonists.
I'd be suspicious if a gas station made a press release about how they'll sell gas to anyone but also donate to charity to "make things even". Sounds like they want arsonists to know where they can buy gas.
I think this brings up an important topic though that we need to grapple with as a society - at what point do we recognize that we NEED public services related to the internet?
Something similar to basic Cloudflare but run as a public service by the government that is free to all might be a good thing to have. If there are majorly amoral actors that use it we should be going after them for their crimes (from a legal sense) which other parts of the government can of course aid with.
>Something similar to basic Cloudflare but run as a public service by the government that is free to all might be a good thing to have.
Until the government decides your content no longer deserves protection because of your politics or religion or whatever.
This is the same problem as government "regulating" social media companies and forcing them to publish certain kinds of speech against their will, which people also seem to want. Inevitably it boils down to an end-run around the First Amendment, as it gives government direct control over speech at a far greater scale than any corporation, backed up by a monopoly on violence.
I do not think that the government needs to be the ONLY source of this public service. Cloudflare of course can still exist as a private company. The government would just provide a "free" public service to those that need it.
If a cooperation becomes a de-facto monopoly the rules that apply need to change. If there is no competition you can go to and there is no way around it then the government has to step in.
The right to speech is strong, at least in the United States, at least for now.
Seeing how vital the Internet is for participation in society, it is my opinion that the baseline for "duty to serve" is that everyone has the right to a modicum of hosting and the ability to have their site accessible. That means a FQDN, SSL certificate, and network connectivity.
Should it be a legal requirement? I'm not yet convinced. But I don't think CF is wrong to host orgs they morally oppose.
I see people are still desperately clinging to this "websites aren't public services" narrative but as the years go by it's becoming increasingly clear that it just isn't entirely true.
The whole logic behind the "it's a private space/service so they can deny service to whoever they want" argument is that, if a user is denied service, they can seek service from an alternative provider elsewhere, usually without much difficulty. If the other providers also don't want to provide the service, fair enough. But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives. If you are denied service by cloudflare, you can't just go to another cloudflare down the street. Same with many other major online services that are effectively monopolies in their field.
Which of those provide a similar feature set to cloudflare for the same price?
Even ignoring the fact that none of them have a free plan, they all cost significantly more than cloudflare's base paid plan and almost certainly provide less. I can't even see Fastly's prices without signing up.
That means cloudflare is such a good company for offering cheap and good service, yet somehow we find a way to attack them because their competition is not “as good”. What a shame that this company that is not supporting their competitors?
Nope. Do we elect the board? Do they charge mandatory taxes in the currency only they can emit and will they have an armed force arest you if you don't pay?
> But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives.
Facebook and Google really are a monopoly in the West and that's a problem with must deal with. Cloudflare, thankfully, is far from being a monopoly anywhere but in our tech bubble.
I have been waiting for someone to mention this board stuff. A question for you: If facebook opened up their board for votes by public, imposed mandatory taxes on Americans and had a police to control the population, would we still be living in a democracy?
The only way I can kind of envision what you’re saying is for Facebook to be nationalized. Is that what you’re referring to? If so, sure, it’s a democracy still.
But see this is where I get tripped up. I don't think laws should dictate morality. So barring the fact that it's the way the law is written in the United States. Why is Illinois morally required to protect speech and Cloudflare, who almost certainly has far greater control (theoretically) over speech not?
This is fast approaching the whole, "why is anyone morally required to do anything?" sort of existential discussion.
The US Government has laws in place like this because those were written as founding principles and interpreted in certain ways by our legal system over time. That's only it. But it's all calvinball in the end. Congress could strike the 1A from the constitution, or all our courts could start ruling against the 1A tomorrow. We're just making it up as we go. Now this would likely result in a mass uprising, but that's besides the point.
The only reason why this is a thing right now is because CloudFlare(a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms (and thus force them to fully own the consequences of their speech), and (b) has explicitly chosen not to do anything about it, much to the chagrin of myself and a whole lot of other people. My belief, as is the belief of others, is that Kiwi Farms are violating their TOS and should be removed. That's it. CloudFlare, like Calvin when playing Calvinball, is deciding to make it up as they go, and we aren't happy about that.
You seem to be pretty active in comments for this post and you have made several arguments around the ideas that:
* CF is not a utility and is not bound by the First Amendment (although you keep saying free speech)
* CF is somehow immoral because they are otherwise compelled to remove content/service protections for stuff you disagree with (however correct you may be that the content is morally reprehensible).
The first point may be technically true but the second doesn't leave room for the possibility that CF might have a more absolutist approach to free speech in which case they find it more immoral to remove content/protections from one of their customers that the content itself. Since neither you nor I work at CF, we probably have to take them at their word in this press release. Trying to adjudicate what violates their TOS, what is immoral for them to do, or what is good/bad for their business from the outside is a foolish exercise.
There was a time the ACLU defended neo-nazis and it wasn't because they agreed with them. Just another aside, if you feel this strongly about CF, then don't patronize them if you are in the position to not have to use their services, but I'd avoid taking a moral stand only when its expedient to do so if you otherwise don't live with that level of conviction (presumably you didn't stay at Microsoft for 6 years because you aligned with them morally).
It's precisely that their leadership (rank-and-file employees I know have different feelings) are taking an absolutist approach. That's pretty evident when their stance is that banning nazi sites was a mistake.
My position is this. That is not a good stance to take. And people should now use their wallet to influence Cloudflare's leadership to reconsider their extreme position. The small part I can play in that today is already underway, so it's not just words on hacker news, no.
You're being intentionally dishonest. Their stance is not as simple as "banning the nazis was wrong. We need to bring back the nazis to our platform." They are pretty explicit in saying no company should be exercising the power that they did - if someone is willing to pay for DDoS protection on their site, they should take a neutral stance on the content of their site. Anything that is blatantly illegal is for the government to act on.
Do you think people should vote with their wallet in regards to the ACLU? What about the idea of public defenders generally? Should society not be footing the bill to be provide legal defense to hate crime offenders/rapists/etc?
Your characterization that their position is extreme is also dishonest. It's been the MO for American citizens/corporations/institutions and ingrained in 20th/21st century American jurisprudence to take a neutral stance when it comes to providing a service or defending rights. It's, frankly, one of the last few admirable things about our society.
You can promote an activist mindset if you'd like, but you should also consider that your opinion is only shared by a vocal minority and the fracturing of commerce into parallel economies won't benefit you or the communities you care about the way you think it will. I'm not sure what I need from CF, but after reading your comments/opinions on the issue, I'm inclined to just order shit from them now.
I don't think discussing the limiting principal behind your stance is waxing philosophical. We live in a liberal society that generally upholds free speech, that society is made up of institutions, corporations, and individuals; arguable, CF is more important because of how information is currently distributed than even the ACLU or public defenders but I'll bite and put the philosophy aside.
Here is a more direct question: why is it a good idea for a company to exercise censorial power if the content is not otherwise illegal? Reminder that we are talking about companies that run infrastructure not something like Twitter that hide behind BS "community guidelines"
I'm genuinely struggling to see how this answers my question. You continually discuss laws when I made it abundantly clear that because laws are, as you put it, Calvinball they are irrelevant to what should be done.
> CloudFlare (a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms
So too is Illinois to stop police protection of Nazi activists. I ask again, why SHOULD one organization protect speech and another shouldn't, given our agreement that any specific laws/amendments do not dictate what SHOULD happen?
I think you're losing the plot here. Nothing has any moral obligation to do anything in this universe. Morality doesn't exist. And we're all just making it up as we go.
Now that we've established that nothing matters, the reason is because a lot of us feel that Cloudflare should do something about it.
Bloody hell, I am definitely losing the plot. The reason you feel that way is because a lot of other people do? You have absolutely no rationale or thought process for the disparities between organizations x and y except that people are mad at organization y and not organization x?
I'm throwing you a real softball question and you've whiffed it like 5 times in a row.
You personally find it ethical to systemically take a stance on the exact same speech in some situations and not in others for what you yourself describe as arbitrary and meaningless distinctions. Why?
You should entertain the idea that they claim they have a stronger responsibility to the principals of free speech than the communities you claim are harmed by their customers content.
This is pathetic. If this is your rationale for why KF should be denied DDoS protection then I hope you fail. Nothing matters so do what we want. If nothing matters why does it matter if your favourite streamer is killed by a SWAT team, I'm sure a lot of people want it to happen too.
Illinois is not morally required to protect speech. They are prevented from using government powers to restrict or punish speech.
If counter protestors show up and shout over the Nazis, Illinois is not morally required to silence the counter protestors so the Nazis can speak.
And if Nazis want to gather on private land, Illinois is not morally required to force the private landowner to permit that.
The morality of equality is compromised by the practical execution of law. It’s legal for a cop to pull a gun and force you to the ground; it’s not legal for you to do that to me (or vice versa). So we place constraints on when the government can apply those special powers.
Islam is incompatible with tolerance. Women's rights, depictions of Muhammed, etc.
If we accept the paradox of tolerance you must either be anti-Islam or the paradox is broken.
The fix is not new and is older than the paradox of tolerance: your rights end where mine begin. You have a right to write and speak what you will - I have a right to not listen. I do not have a right to stop speech I find offensive. Islam has a right to exist and take offense, but it may not use violence or law to get it's way.
you’re implying the spread of islam is the spread of activists who incite action toward its worst parts, the same goes for christianity of course: I’m ok with prohibiting (and socially over state violence…) speech that incites active participation in applying its worst parts which oppress. btw it’s stinky to use islam as your example and in an american context when it’s as obviously applicable to everything else and not something special to islam over most any other popular religion. the same shit applies with womens rights and christian movements in the US which are in fact taking oppressive political action with wide impact
Women can't drive or have attorneys in Islamic nations and you think my use of them in an example is stinky? You want to argue about abortion rights when women literally can't leave their homes without a male guardian and hiding their face?
Per the existing law, but given the Constitution can be changed, should they have to allow? Arguing they have to because the law currently prevents them from doing otherwise seems a different argument than it being good for government to have such restrictions because the benefits are worth more than the detriments (or vice versa).
Maybe a better one would be privatized health care? What is the standard for who does or doesn't deserve medical care?
> I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance
Also, my guess is ignorance. Cloudflare is essentially restoring a platform on the internet that is difficult to get and keep for small creators. Their posts on this topic strike me as the super libertarian types who take no issue with privatizing public services.
> I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts
I see more than one political group purposefully conflate this in order to push their own agendas.
For example, when a private company says that won't tolerate hate they claim "free speech" infringement but when government silences a critic they don't like it's "law and order."
> We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes
in a post that further goes out of its way to say, "look at these morally good things we're doing (Galileo and Athenian) that aren't themselves part of the abuse process, and then has their logos as two of the three images in the article body? Okay, sure, this may not strictly be marketing material insofar as it's not an ad the marketing team purchased, but c'mon, did ya'll put those in place to help explain the abuse process or because they're nice "but look, we also do good things!" window dressing on an article you think otherwise may not have the best reception?
I somewhat agree with these two points as well. When you're running a business, you'll often have customers you find disagreeable. That doesn't mean that they're invalid customers, but you may feel gross helping them. For the exceptionally bad cases, why not jack up the prices 10x and donate those proceeds?
> Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? Ask the LGBTQ people banned from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google/etc. if those systems really work all that well.
This is so, so true. Both automated and human review systems often times don't handle or protect minority users well.
(Reasonable Disclosure: I still terminated my services with CloudFlare over this.)
> ...we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them.
I'm sure their LGBTQ+ employees will appreciate that when they get doxxed, swatted, and harassed every hour of the day and night because they're providing critical resources to the groups doing so.
Their position probably really does come from genuine belief in principles of anti-censorship and free speech, but the version that LGBTQ+ people are gonna hear from them is that every death threat, every picture of them taken without their knowledge, every coordinated campaign of harassment, every SWAT officer pointing a gun at their face when they wake up, every suicide after years of abuse, has the full backing and support of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and there's nothing they can do about it. And they're kinda right.
I can provide lots of examples of Kiwi Farms doxxing and harassing queer people. Whether they happen to work for Cloudflare at the time is a matter of chance, and not particularly relevant to the point.
Oh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.
If that doesn't work make the part you don't like illegal. Enshrine something like the "right to be forgotten" stuff into law and make them take down threads if the people they refer to don't want them up.
I know it's hard to word something like a "right to be forgotten" without making it to broad and a tool for abuse of chilling speech but it seems worth the effort if the consequences are this dire.
A "right to be forgotten" is probably fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment in the USA. While people have the right to their own identity, they do not have the right to absolute control over their reputations. The best they can do is sue when they are defamed.
In America defamation lawsuits are hard because of the First Amendment, not just because lawsuits are expensive. Even if you make defamation lawsuits cheap and accessible, it will still be an uphill battle if you're trying to sue somebody telling unsavory truths about you.
One problem is that one can't bring a prosecution oneself; not only does the state maintain a general monopoly on the use of violence, but it typically maintains a monopoly on prosecution. If police or prosecutors dislike you (perhaps because you are a member of some socially disfavored out group) what recourse do you have?
I already live in an EU country - as do many of the people with threads on KF. I don't even have the minuscule amount of control voters in the US would have over this, and Cloudflare only cares about US legislation (as with the anti sex work legislation in the article).
If you would stop derailing the conversation with unfeasible solutions.
I haven't checked, but I expect the chilling effect is getting most of them to not rock the boat too hard.
If you want an example for such targeting though, Liz Fong-Jones has a thread on Kiwifarms because she's outspoken and worked at Google (and thus being seen as more influential / more of a threat). The thread has also significantly slowed down after she left Google.
And when that happens, Cloudflare is in the perfect position to provide evidence. Your unwittingly advocating for these websites to use more sophisticated methods, where their actions will be much harder to prove and prosecute.
If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. We do not live in a world of no harm and never will we. All we can do is manage it.
I can't find it now but I remember reading an article a while back about how the FBI with several other worldwide law enforcement partner took down a terrorist website, but behind the scenes the CIA or NSA wasn't happy about it because they had all the information in one place they could tap but now that the FBI disrupted that it made their job harder.
KF doesn't doxx people for being gay. As far as I can tell, KF has a huge LGBT presence in their userbase. They have doxxed people who are gay, but not because they are gay.
And all that while the company refuses to acknowledge that it is full backing.
Cloudflare loves to call back on the law when defending Kiwifarms, but then equate themselves to a public utility.
If the law intended for it, DDoS protection would be a public utility or at least a protected class of service that can't refuse customers. And if you say that it should be and the law is just lagging behind (and I'd tend to agree with you), I can say the same thing about the technical legality of a website that enabled and (indirectly) incentives doxing, harassment or even swatting (except on Kiwifarms, people might technically have a case for defamation, but good luck getting that prosecuted).
The law describes DDoS attacks as a felony. The technology makes it such that it's infeasable to prevent DDoS attacks without a centralized entity like cloudflare.
But that still doesn't make Cloudflare the fire brigade. It is still their policy decision to value the freedom of speech of Kiwifarms more than the safety of those KF target, no matter how much they try to pretend they have an obligation to protect everyone that asks for it and are thus not at all partially responsible for enabling harassment - to the point of suicide in at least 3 cases. They don't have to protect them. That responsibility would be with lawmakers and the executive branch. Just as it would be their responsibility to enable feasible prosecution of defamation on the site. They don't do either.
I think one easy thing they could do, is stop hosting for forums dedicated to doxxing and harassing people, preferably before they inevitably bully their victims into suicide.
The whole point of my comment is that I don't think it is easy. It'd be great, but it certainly isn't easy.
If they get rid of Kiwi Farms, ultimately it's not going to fix the problem. They're going to find a new, harder to harass vendor for CDN. Cloudflare's detractors are going to find a new website to talk about.
If you're talking about all websites that do this kind of thing, I have my doubts about how this would look in practice. Take down websites that use hate speech? Work to debunk hateful myths would likely get caught in that. Suspend websites that get X number of reports? Congrats, you've given botnets a far more effective tool for DDOS. Don't suspend those websites until a human analyzes them? That'd be ideal, although it seems like that's the system they have. Those humans appear to be instructed to only intervene when Cloudflare itself is the one causing harm. Kiwi Farms is hosted elsewhere using Cloudflare as a CDN.
> Our decision to disable access to content in hosting products fundamentally results in that content being taken offline, at least until it is republished elsewhere. 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: [...] Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.
The article says that providing CDN and DDOS protection services for KiwiFarms doesn't constitute hosting. The GP commenter clearly disagrees. I'll be honest: it really does seem like a distinction without a difference to me. If Cloudflare stopped doing business with Kiwifarms, it wouldn't be online. Kiwifarms is doing a great deal of harm to the world by being online. At the end of the day, Cloudflare has a moral responsibility to—at the very least—stop contributing their security and networking resources to the cause of "Keep Kiwifarms online".
Thank you, this is a more interesting argument than the people reacting emotionally without reading the article.
Assuming we all agree that KF is reprehensible, the question is where is the line of moral obligation to stop supporting them. In the most reductive case, you could argue that anyone selling food or water to white supremacists is supporting white supremacy. Or that firefighters who put out a fire at a white supremacist's house are supporting white supremacy. But I don't think people generally consider that to be providing support, whereas they would consider, say, hosting a conference and paying white supremacists to speak at it as supporting white supremacists. So where is the exact line where it becomes "support"? It's ambiguous.
Cloudflare is in an unenviable position of being exactly on the line where moral obligation rests, further complicated by providing different products around hosting and DDOS mitigation. IMO, there is a clear distinction between hosting content and providing DDOS mitigation services, as the article suggests. And just as you wouldn't want your electric company unilaterally deciding that you were a white supremacist and cutting your power, I agree with CF's stance that they shouldn't be making extrajudicial decisions about which customers to use their DDOS protection.
> In the most reductive case, you could argue that anyone selling food or water to white supremacists is supporting white supremacy.
This, incidentally, is why the term "racism" (and similar supremacist terms) must be understood to refer to embedded social structures that may include honest, and often honorable, people unwittingly perpetuating them and not just being mean to the target. So, the question you are in effect raising is how Cloudflare can be ANTI-transphobic and not simply trans-supporting, and whether it has a moral or other obligation to do so. To me, it's a very easy answer with an extremely difficult execution.
> This, incidentally, is why the term "racism" (and similar supremacist terms) must be understood to refer to embedded social structures that may include honest, and often honorable, people unwittingly perpetuating them and not just being mean to the target.
When you speak of honorable people unwittingly perpetuating racism, do you really mean grocery stores that don't perform ideological purity tests on their customers?
I think you might be prone to overestimate the net harm of kiwi farms and you understate the harm of centralized groups like cloudflare making decisions like this.
The harm of kiwi farms is centralized and immediate and obvious, the harm of centralized control is insidious, long-term, and surprises you without warning once you establish the precident years later.
> If Cloudflare stopped doing business with Kiwifarms, it wouldn't be online.
Someone said The Daily Stormer and 8Chan are online today.[1] But this would mean Cloudflare can stop doing business with Kiwi Farms without limiting speech.
It is so interesting that you draw that conclusion. I draw the opposite: that whether Cloudflare withdraws services or not is going to make no meaningful difference to whether KF remains online
> It is so interesting that you draw that conclusion. I draw the opposite: that whether Cloudflare withdraws services or not is going to make no meaningful difference to whether KF remains online
This policy seems to only apply to content that they host. It appears that they don't intend to apply this policy to websites that they are only providing DDoS mitigation to, such as KiwiFarms.
Whether Cloudflare is hosting the content or mitigating DDoS attacks against it, they bear some responsibility for the content being accessible. I see no good reason for them to have different policies between their hosting and DDoS mitigation services if they actually care about not propagating the content they refuse to host.
There's a discussion that could be had about whether it's appropriate for ISPs to block sites that are strongly associated with terrorism.
I don't think that discussion can reasonably happen on this forum, but I think there are interesting philosophical positions that are valid that we should put against one another.
> That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires
This is a false equivalence, because fire departments are public utilities provided and regulated by the state. Cloudflare is a private business. If Cloudflare was democratically elected by its constituents, and it was accountable and answerable to them, then I would agree with them that they have a responsibility to make their services available to all of their constituents, subject to the due process of law.
But they aren't a public utility, and they don't get democratically elected. Cloudflare is a private business, and it exists to capture the surplus value of keeping more websites online and marketing their security products to more corporations. They can do business with whoever they choose to. And they choose to do business with Kiwifarms. Honestly: in effect, Kiwifarms functions as a free success story for Cloudflare's sales folks—"Look at how many people hate this website, and yet they're still online, thanks to Cloudflare!". I think that's probably the reason that Cloudflare's support of Kiwifarms rankles so much with people who are victims of the website—the fact that Kiwifarms is still online is Cloudflare working exactly as intended, but amorally.
> For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them
Okay, you donated the fees, but why continue to accept the money from the site that opposes LGBTQ+ rights in the first place? Cloudflare still got to keep the benefit of increased revenue, and a larger customer base, and the world still got worse. Did the donation they make actually offset the harm done to the world by keeping that site (whatever it is) online? It seems unlikely.
> In addition, I think it's touched on but Cloudflare is huge. Even if they changed their mind on terminating amoral customers, how would that go down? Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords?
No, it would go down, ideally, the same way it does today and the same way it did for the Daily Stormer and 8chan. Terminating services for customers like Kiwifarms is a big decision, and it's one that shouldn't be made lightly, and frankly: there just aren't that many harassment websites that are as big and as long-lived as Kiwifarms. I can maybe think of one or two others off the top of my head. I'm okay if Cloudflare decides to terminate one or two of the biggest, most important harassment sites using their platform per year—doing something is better than doing nothing.
> I'm okay if Cloudflare decides to terminate one or two of the biggest, most important harassment sites using their platform per year—doing something is better than doing nothing.
I'm sorry, I'd only ever heard of Kiwifarms yesterday. I am also okay with that, but I do genuinely believe there will always be a next one. People forget they made the exact same comments before caving on 8chan and the Daily Stormer. As these incidents get closer together I predict we're reaching that 1-2 site a year rate. If I can backpeddle a little on my parent comment, I far less care about any of these specific websites than the implications of Cloudflare not giving the big "We hate to do this" speech beforehand.
You make a good point that policing who is who is difficult enough that letting bad guys pay $20 month or whatever is "cheaper" than actively validating who they are and then kicking them off your service for moral reasons. I get the feeling that 9/10 times these bad actors are on the cheapest cheapo plan available so it's actually very expensive to deal many tiny customers versus one huge one.
Oh, but wait, CloudFlare HAS the resources to validate and act, since they know whose fees to send to rights organizations.
And as for being the fire department? Excuse me? They are a company that exists to make money, not a public service beholden to a specific, lawfully mandated social contract. Their first point is a false equivalency and they can go fuck themselves for even bringing that up.
This statement from them is PR fluff.
Paradox of tolerance. You must be _intolerant_ to these intolerant people or they will fuck up everything for everyone. Cloudflare is letting cancer of society erode public trust, just like every other hyper scale tech company, because businesses exist to make money.
> They are a company that exists to make money, not a public service beholden to a specific, lawfully mandated social contract.
Part of the reason for my position as stated above and throughout the thread. I believe that SPECIFICALLY at Cloudflare's scale, they have more control than most governments in the realm of speech. Therefore, they are MORALLY (not legally) required to enact the same social contract. I believe any alternative where they break that social contract will have unintentional repercussions for minority groups.
To have my position changed, I would need to be convinced those repercussions wouldn't happen in practice.
> the latter makes me more hopeful as someone in that specific minority community.
I'm curious what you think the "balancing" donation/action/whatever cloudflare could do to counteract the very real harms kf causes are?
This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it.
I think this kind of "but we donate!" approach is both an admission that they enable harm, and a completely inadequate to the situation here.
Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.
So how is cloudflare going to make this one right to their ERG?
> This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it.
I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan.
> Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.
This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid. It feels incredibly odd to me to look at a coordinated campaign of harassers and think "it should be easier for organized groups of people to control the conversation". You can look at my comments in this thread or in others, I'm totally cool every time hateful shitbags are taken off the internet and I fight back when they're defended. I'm just not in favor of any broad policy that puts one organization in control of speech.
> I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan.
I didn't say it was? I don't see why the fact that cf is paying for their ddos protection instead of kf paying for it themselves is really relevant to the enablement of harm.
Honestly that makes it even worse: in the other situation, cf is taking money from a bad actor and funneling it towards a good one (both allegedly). Here cf is paying expenses (probably in the marketing line of their expense sheet) to keep kf accessible, including storing, replicating, and distributing their content, doxes and all.
> This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid.
I think this is a contradiction of your own making? The problem people have isn't that the targets of kf are being "silenced" in some Renaissance ideal sort of way. It's that they are put in a position of fearing for their own lives and the lives of the people around them. There's no contradiction here unless you think the people who want the site to stop are secret free speech absolutists.
Anyways, while we're talking about perfect worlds where police actually do anything about stuff like this and no one has to resort, in my perfect world the internet doesn't break because cf does, and cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech. But we can't always get what we want.
> in my perfect world (...) cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech
This is literally the only thing I'm advocating for. I'm a trans woman that openly speaks about my and others' experiences. Trust me when I say, codified systems for reporting abuse are themselves the target of the same abuse. I've gotten the "Sorry, we're leaving this up" from reporting anti trans content on Facebook. I've had comments saying sex != gender reported/removed so many times, a Reddit account I used straight up isn't allowed to comment anywhere anymore. All the YouTube shit you hear conservatives whine about straight up just scans the autogenerated transcript for any mention of political phrases like "LGBT" or sexually explicit language like might come up in discussing my transition. All these reasons are why I'm fine with Kiwi Farms coming down but I don't think Cloudflare should change their stance on avoiding it in almost all situations.
The donation thing is that Cloudflare refuses to profit off of this and is therefore incentivized to avoid such customers. Companies are always going to pick the path of greatest profit so engraining morality in that path is better than not doing it.
Trust me when I say I'm aware and that I have very specific reasons to feel the way I do.
But the thing is that cf absolutely is profiting off this. They provide this service to make themselves indispensable, to make themselves an attractive product for people to use. By holding the line here, they will drum up plenty of business that's really happy about their stance, even if it only toes the line kf crosses with impunity.
The goal of the campaign against cf (and anyone else providing them services) is to make it less profitable to provide services to kf. This is the only tool left in the capitalist world we live in.
What cf is doing here is less like advocating for free speech and more like the social version of providing a free open smtp relay. They obscure the true cost of doing something reprehensible.
And they do it at great financial expense completely by choice, because it likely drums up more business for them than it costs.
Never thought I'd see the Left trying to weaponize corporations to suppress speech they dislike. Reminds me a LOT of Evangelicals in the 2000s - I know that comparison has been made frequently but that's the last group that made a serious censorship push.
I wonder how all of this will end? I support CloudFlare here - they should act as a utility, not as an arbiter of content. This ends poorly and one day will bite the people that are pushing for this.
Yeah, I remember when "net neutrality" was something that the left was demanding.
Once they realized that they had a systematic advantage in petitioning hosting companies to deplatform disfavored content without due process, however, all of the underlying arguments for net neutrality were quietly discarded.
Net neutrality was never about deplatforming, due process, or censorship. It was about ISPs prioritizing traffic or providing free bandwidth for their own services and throttling or charging extra fees for third party services (e.g. Time Warner providing access to their own streaming service without counting towards your bandwidth cap, but not doing the same for Netflix).
The two can't be disentangled. Woke censorship is often justified through economic self-interest nowadays. Do you really believe activists 20 years ago would be placated if ISPs had simply promised to throttle only based on politics rather than economics?
Hosting content and distributing it are different things (in the same way that printing letters for someone is very different to operating a mail service carrying everyone's letters).
It's nothing like the evangelicals by any stretch of the imagination. The fact of the matter is that Kiwi Farms is a cesspit full of people who revel in obsessing over people and then harassing them not only at their jobs but even through their private communications (phone numbers, personal email addresses, etc). How you react if dozens of people just started calling you at all hours because you're trans and are visible in a social network? How would you react to having to explain to your employer that it's just "some kids" constantly badgering you and them when you're busy doing work? How would handle the act of them calling the police with false reports that result in a SWAT raid? This isn't hypothetical, it's happened many times due to Kiwi Farms and other forums.
It's nothing like the SJWs by any stretch of the imagination. The fact of the matter is that Reddit/ResetERA/Twitter/DailyKos is a cesspit full of people who revel in obsessing over people and then harassing them not only at their jobs but even through their private communications (phone numbers, personal email addresses, etc). How you react if dozens of people just started calling you at all hours because you're Christian and are visible in a social network? How would you react to having to explain to your employer that it's just "some kids" constantly badgering you and them when you're busy doing work? How would handle the act of them calling the police with false reports that result in a SWAT raid? This isn't hypothetical, it's happened many times due to Reddit and other forums.
Yes, I remember the "Moral Majority" era. I remember the religious right, the fundies, the evangelicals, and the grasp they had on speech. I remember how they tried to ban porn in the late '90s and the courts had to smack it down. And I saw how the left has taken over institutional power since then, still crying about victimhood status while holding government majorities, running education and the media, and so on.
It looks like the pendulum has started swinging back in recent years. I don't really want to go back to the late '90s in terms of culture and government (especially culture) but I won't be at all surprised if it happens and the right shows the same lack of magnanimity as they were shown this past quarter century. And a good way to make sure that happens is to continue to stifle their speech and give them every opportunity to cry victim and wish revenge. The left made hay from these opportunities and the right has been watching. A lot of their activists have read Rules for Radicals too.
A really key difference that I feel gets missed is the "who swung first" aspect.
A great deal of what gets called "cancel culture" is people reacting to someone behaving in a way that harms others, including but not limited to...
- Discrimination (gender, orientation, religion, race, whatever)
- Harassment
- Threats, ranging from the subtle to the overt
- Actual violence
Quite often, the targets of this behavior have done nothing beyond exist and be honest about who they are and how they see themselves. Their harassers swung first.
To take your porn example (I too am old enough to remember the 90s), the moral majority was swinging first. They were offended by porn, but no one was forcing them to consume it. No one was threatening or harassing them.
Maybe the right wing (which is where the moral majority centered as well) should consider why they keep swinging first instead of why sometimes people swing back.
That's great that you think that, but there's this group of jerks that keeps swinging first.
At some point you have to start addressing the people who are actively trying to make others' lives worse through harassment, discrimination, and violence.
So you're fine if I post your SSN on this site? And let's assume the mods also co-sign that decision in this hypothetical, so you're okay with your PII being out there for anyone (and I mean anyone) to see and use? You wouldn't even try to subpoena Y Combinator for my information on file such as my IP logs and email address (necessary for registration) to serve me notice? I seriously doubt that. I'm sure you would lawyer up rather quickly and probably contact the mods here to have my comment deleted and my account permanently banned. So don't pretend you're some kind of "information wants to be free" maximalist because when it comes down to it, we all want privacy and no one should be using the Internet as a cudgel to gain compliance from anyone when you can just leave well alone. But it seems you're fine with Kiwi Farms literally posting SSNs, bank balances, passwords to accounts, and much more. The contradictions in your mind must border on some kind of Escher print.
> But it seems you're fine with Kiwi Farms literally posting SSNs, bank balances, passwords to accounts, and much more.
Small correction, this doesn't happen on Kiwi Farms. Kiwi Farms is focused on discussing much more mundane, public drama. Just interactions between people, mostly on public social media like Twitter, Youtube and others. Things like hacking, private financial information, DDoSing, swatting, are all heavily policed on Kiwi Farms. Additionally, directly interacting with the subject of a thread on Kiwi Farms is also bannable.
Their ethos is watching monkeys in the zoo, not going out and poking them themselves.
There's actual shady forums out there that do those illegal things, generally hosted in foreign countries or behind Tor.
Your correction is incorrect. People have shown forum posts by users posting passwords, bank balances, and SSNs. They called the SSNs 'Minecraft numbers' to try to skirt any moderation attempts, so don't try to sweep this stuff under the rug. Their users are doing this and their mods know it. They only delete such information an attempt to put a fig leaf on the matter. Too little, too late.
I'm not sure how you jumped to that conclusion from my post. If I have reason to believe that you committed a crime by acquiring and posting my SSN and I was victimized by it, I would try to get restitution, sure. I don't see how that's in conflict with what I've previously said, though; if a crime was committed by someone doxing someone else on KF, that person is free to subpoena KF and try to bring the doxer to justice. Go for it.
But before you do, you should make sure that a crime was actually committed, and mere criticism, or sharing information you posted yourself, or sharing information which can be found via the 21st-century equivalent of a phone book, is not criminal in the United States. And that's usually what a "dox" is; very rarely does it involve hacking into government databases or something like that.
I am saying that if someone is harassing you when you haven't done anything to them, it should be pretty OK to tell others about the harassment and others should be able to say "I'm not going to interact / do business with that jerk."
"Beliefs and practices" is, again, leaving aside the "who swung first" aspect. Have all the beliefs and practices you want that don't involve harassing others. If your beliefs are homophobic/transphobic/racist/sexist/etc and you choose to then "practice" those beliefs by harassing people you don't like, you swung first and you shouldn't be surprised if society looks down on you for it.
Show me how SJWs are going around with PII like your social security number, bank account number, passwords to social media accounts, and other sensitive data? Hint, no one that's a supposed SJW has ever done this on a large scale whereas Kiwi Farms users have and do.
>Yes, I remember the "Moral Majority" era. I remember the religious right, the fundies, the evangelicals, and the grasp they had on speech.
They still do, where you been? In cryo?
>I remember how they tried to ban porn in the late '90s and the courts had to smack it down.
Again, where have you been? Max Hardcore was sentenced for 4 years in prison (I think he got out sooner but still). And that was around the early 2000s. The fact you ignore that even the current government treats even OnlyFans like content creators as the same as sex traffickers (see EFF's FOSTA articles) is amusing to me.
> And I saw how the left has taken over institutional power since then, still crying about victimhood status while holding government majorities, running education and the media, and so on.
Exactly where has this happened? The left does not exist in the United States. The CIA knocked us out during the 60s (COINTELPRO). The fact you seem to not know this means you're probably under 35, so I'm not sure I should bother discussing this with you.
>It looks like the pendulum has started swinging back in recent years.
It never swung. We've still a solidly right wing neoliberal society. Just because you might see a gay couple kiss each other's cheeks and hold hands on prime time TV don't mean we're some kind of social democracy or a socialist state.
>The left made hay from these opportunities and the right has been watching.
Again, what Left? Don't say the Democrats who literally have millionaires among their ranks like most of the currently seated party members (Pelosi has a net worth in the tens of millions) and have many of the most well known capital owning members of society on their quick dial.
It baffles me how someone like you can exist when history of the United States is well documented for the last century but all you seem to say is talking points from Mises.org or some other right wing claptrap. And you even think DailyKos is far left which amuses me. Wake me up when DailyKos and company support the abolition of intellectual property like an anarchist does (hint: I'm a mutualist anarchist).
You seem to think there's no left wing in America when self-avowed leftists if not socialists are the ones who have been doing this whole #DropKiwifarms campaign in the first place. If there's no solid leftist base in America and western society as a whole, where is this opposition to supposedly alt-right fortress coming from?
As for my age, I'm 40, which means I went to college between 2000 and 2004 - and was awash in leftist propaganda there, to the extent that I did not feel comfortable in some classrooms doing anything other than regurgitating what the professors were telling us despite what I actually believed. I've heard the situation has not improved since then. To say that leftists do not have institutional power at least in academia is ridiculous, but of course it goes far beyond that.
>You seem to think there's no left wing in America when self-avowed leftists if not socialists are the ones who have been doing this whole #DropKiwifarms campaign in the first place.
Some are socialists, but in terms of actual politically power individuals? No. Seriously, no. There's no socialist or social democratic institution that has power in DC or even a state government within the United States.
>If there's no solid leftist base in America and western society as a whole, where is this opposition to supposedly alt-right fortress coming from?
Liberals, seriously go study some political history. Liberalism is not left and it's not anti-capitalist. I don't think you really understand political history and theory which is surprising since I barely crack open political theory works by anyone since I find the subject boring.
>As for my age, I'm 40, which means I went to college between 2000 and 2004 - and was awash in leftist propaganda there
Same here, I'm 42. I'll say there's not much in the way of any leftist positions or professors beyond a few colleges here and there. Most have aged out and been replaced by social liberals (again liberalism is not left nor socialist).
>to the extent that I did not feel comfortable in some classrooms doing anything other than regurgitating what the professors were telling us despite what I actually believed.
That's probably because your views are further right than you want to divulge here. I won't press or bully you but I'll say that maybe you should ask yourself why you see socialists everywhere when everyone else who is a leftist or comes from a leftist position (I come from Mutualism but I use to be into Syndicalism) doesn't?
>To say that leftists do not have institutional power at least in academia is ridiculous, but of course it goes far beyond that.
Having a couple college departments is not having the commanding heights (I love FA Hayek's use of phrases). These aren't people who shake hands with Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, McCarthy, or McConnell. These aren't the people that get their proposals even into the hands of Biden's undersecretaries of any department. They don't get much play at billionaire retreats either. So, I'm absolutely confused as to what you define as power because it sure doesn't seem like it.
Eh. You win, I guess. I've already argued too much about politics on the internet than I should have. Everyone just gets angry and nobody's mind changes.
You have your perspective about reality, I guess, and I'll have mine.
>Eh. You win, I guess. I've already argued too much about politics on the internet than I should have. Everyone just gets angry and nobody's mind changes.
I'm not mad, I just don't buy your anecdotes as solid proof of some kind of Marxist vanguard dominating media, education, and the like. That kind of John Birch Society stuff isn't factual. And I speak as a former ditto head from the 1990s, even then I didn't buy the Bircher nonsense.
>You have your perspective about reality, I guess, and I'll have mine.
I'd have it no other way but I don't brook arguments that border on the conspiratorial, sorry.
Big turn of the tables. Back in the 2000s Bush administration we had pornography site raids and suppression, now we have ideologically-motivated censorship of a different form.
> Reminds me a LOT of Evangelicals in the 2000s - I know that comparison has been made frequently but that's the last group that made a serious censorship push.
It's the exact same pattern: Zealots trying to use censorship to suppress those that don't adhere to their ideology. The reason it's confusing is because you're looking at it as a left/right issue when it's not. It's an authoritarian/libertine or extremists vs everyone else issue.
Never thought I'd see the Left trying to weaponize corporations to suppress speech they dislike.
It is a terrible fact of human psychology that being abused in a particular manner make you much more likely to abuse others in the same manner, not less.
> I support ButtFlare here - they should act as a utility, not as an arbiter of content.
So then advocate for them to actually be a utility. Right now they get to benefit from being treated like one, but not being held to the same legal standard of an actual utility.
Being a utility doesn't make them any less of a de facto arbiter or any better of a company. Utilities can suck too. And, worse, they do it with the political backing of the state.
The irony of using a throwaway account to advocate for a site that doxxes people.
You guys are the ones undermining the legitimacy of freedom of speech by passing doxxing off as merely being an opinion while it in fact surpresses actually bipartisan discussion. Disgusting.
The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The push to platform everyone you don't like is accelerating radicalization. Instead of just existing as a small number of weirdos on mainstream platforms with millions of users, they are now building their own silos. Forced from internet infrastructure and payment networks, they are forced to build their own platforms and banks. This is happening now. The end game is an entirely segregated society. As the bar of allowed speech continues to zoom past opinions of large numbers of normal people, they too will be forced to move on to the alternative platforms.
> Instead of just existing as a small number of weirdos on mainstream platforms with millions of users, they are now building their own silos.
This is _not_ about that - these people are building their own siloes; Cloudflare are hosting them. If Cloudflare stop providing services to them it will reduce their ability to host their own siloes.
> If Cloudflare stop providing services to them it will reduce their ability to host their own siloes.
Yeah no it won't, well at least not in the long run. If anything good comes from all of this, it is that the internet by necessity will become more resilient. Unfortunately, enhanced resiliency will come at the cost of bifurcation. We told the exiled to just 'build your own platform' and 'build your own bank' but we didn't think that they would listen.
Police are also a reason the left need a strong gun culture (I mean we are talking about the same groups of people, police and right wing extremists, terrorist groups, white supremacist gangs etc). BP didn’t go far enough and were hamstrung by lack of support from the left due to racial division within working class and those in poverty
It’s bad as ever, I’m not suggesting we’ve reversed those divisions. And now the left have gained an anti-gun stance on top of it, and in typical liberal fashion, have started with giving up their own individual gun ownership before addressing ownership at large in society
I'd argue that while initially having more guns causes the probability of being raided to go up, with enough guns that starts to fall.
The police/FBI raid you because you are a threat to them. Become enough of a threat, and they will think twice about raiding you.
Of course you won't win against the military, but that becomes an issue of popular support - the BP didn't have enough political power at the time. I expect this is the reason the response to the Capitol raid was muted - As much as a military response could be justified, doing so against a reasonably well supported group would escalate the situation.
gun ownership itself doesn’t make an organization a threat to the police or fbi as is utterly evident. nor does the possession of guns itself cause organized criminalized activity to be treated with severe force, as is also utterly evident
also bear in mind the military doesn’t operate with nearly as much ease on america’s own population, when you’re comparing pig threat to movements or peoples in the US. there’s also your neighbor to worry about
btw BP were raided when they started taking direct action to support their communities through programs like the free breakfast service. guns didn’t do BP in, socialism did
Perhaps we should discuss the problems with the term (and implications of) "stochastic terrorism" -
namely, the conflation of a terrible, deliberate act with clear and consenting, perpetrators (terrorism); with that accusation that the wrong kind of free speech might lead to terrible consequences, and the implied accusation of malicious intent.
Lets approach this as if ST was literally a crime - do the recipient communities of said terrorism bear no responsibility e.g. those that choose to be provocative? Will they also be accused of ST and be told to shut up? Or just those with no stake in the matter?
There's a HackerNews user, goes by the handle Chris2048. And I just don't know what his problem is you know? Back in my day we had a solution for those types of people. If he wasn't hiding behind the internet I bet he wouldn't be so tough.
Just imagine if we knew who he was and he couldn't hide like that, wouldn't that be great? I recommend you all go look up his posts. That's Chris2048 on HackerNews, have a really good look at the things he's said. People shouldn't be able to get away with saying stuff like that, you know? One day he'll slip up and I bet someone will do something about it.
So tell me Chris2048, do you think the last two paragraphs, maybe said by a speaker to a large audience, show no malicious intent?
Can I kindly ask you to explain what is the problem with this kind of message?
I see this all the time - journalists critique pseudononymous internet writers. All through these pieces there's references to "who they really are" and "could they get away with saying this in public with their real name".
Why is this a bad thing? I know the NYTimes isn't the most moral upstanding institution, but they are hardly stochastic terrorists?
The implication of ST is you aren't targeting a specific individual, so this analogy falls short there - "Chris2048 on HackerNews" is definitely targeted. People rail against HN and its "tech bros" all the time.
The definition is widely accepted now to include targeting either a group, or an individual[1]. The "stochastic" component is that no individual or group is being specifically directed by command to carry out the attack, but the speaker is knowingly or negligently adding rhetoric to incite someone to do so.
But you're also conflating terms: criticism is not an incitement to violence. An incitement to violence is specific: "I think it would be great if some implied violence happened to that group I don't like".
It's specifically not considered ST to say something like "I hope some legal consequences happen to this person who I think is committing crimes" because amongst other things, that's a call to the application of the justice system, not terrorism.
It's also worth noting that other incitements, like encouraging someone to commit suicide has been found to be a punishable crime - and this is the sort of action Kiwi Farms specializes in and openly supports against their targets.
Perhaps, but then "individual or group" seems to be pretty relevant to me, especially if you provide information specific to that individual/group versus a "tribe" of distributed individuals.
Plus, the "terrorism" aspect seems to apply to a wider group, or who else is terrorised? Presumably, individuals or groups with similar principles.
Your example also doesn't incite violence, just heavily implies it.
This is called fedposting and it's basically the message board version of what the FBI does to entrap Muslim terrorists and white supremacists IRL. The problem you're going to have with making it a crime is, where do you draw the line?
If someone gets in front of a big crowd and says "Donald Trump is a fascist, he's the next Hitler", and then one of those people takes the matter into his own hands - do you think the speaker should be found guilty of a crime?
The speaker is pretty obviously guilty of incitement to violence if they were inciting violence. Which my parody above is demonstrating pretty clearly. Now, is one incident sufficient cause? Probably not.
What if I launched a sustained campaign across multiple media against that HN user? What if that user starts receiving harassment and death threats? I am running a sustained campaign of making specific, targeted references to how desirable "doing something" about that user is with specific violent imagery, but stopping short of directly declaring that I want something to happen.
You're far too comfortable pretending this can't be a crime, or shouldn't be a crime, because in reality you're pretty comfortable it won't happen to you.
If someone actually does something, then yes, they should be guilty of a crime. I don't think it's possible to come up with a definition of "stochastic terrorism" in the way that you want, which doesn't result in a massive curtailment of civil liberties. How many acts of speech are necessary to make it into a crime? How many listeners / readers?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological/political/religious battle. That's not what this site is for, regardless of which ideologies or religions you prefer. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction, relative to the GP. We want comments to step in exactly the opposite direction. This is not a site for ideological battle, which destroys the curious conversation HN is supposed to be for.
I'm afraid I haven't been keeping up on it, so it may have deteriorated. If there are comments breaking the site guidelines egregiously, please flag them and/or email us at hn@ycombinator.com. (I don't mean this just to you personally, but everyone who cares!)
You absolutely can, and that's how CloudFlare got into this situation: by posting people's location on the internet they can be made vulnerable to SWATting.
> we've shifted away from violence as a means of enforcing social order
The intent of KF and similar absolutely is to use violence as a means of enforcing social order, by encouraging stochastic and opportunistic terrorism against trans people.
They're referring to a niche academic term that has within the past few years started gaining usage outside of academia. It can be approximately defined as[0]:
> The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.
irrelevant degree for the term. you’re like a meteorologist flaunting their academic credentials to show that thundering herd is not a real thing in software engineering
And? That doesn't make those sites pro-swatting unless they had no other legitimate reasons to allow this content, and as much as people hate doxxing it is clearly not only useful for swatting or other illegal activities.
I've owned something similar to a shell company before and used my home address as required by local laws. Obviously some more nefarious actors would not but plenty of stupid criminals around.
No one actually believes this outside of brain-rotted partisan contexts. eg. The fact that I'm not donating all my money to combat malaria in developing nations does not make me pro-malaria.
Is ycombinator's failure to delete the posts of me and others in this thread also indicative of an intent to "use violence as a means of enforcing social order, by encouraging stochastic and opportunistic terrorism against trans people"?
> Is ycombinator's failure to delete the posts of me and others in this thread also indicative of an intent to "use violence as a means of enforcing social order, by encouraging stochastic and opportunistic terrorism against trans people"?
Do you think your comments and this forum increase stochastic and opportunistic terrorism against trans people? Probably you don't think Kiwi Farms does either. But you chose a different argument.
Null isn't banning these people. He's encouraging them with a wink or a nod. It's like Nazis and bars. See a Nazi, 86 the Nazi or the friends will show up and make your bar a Nazi bar.
I don't understand why Cloudflare believes it is their responsibility to protect content that they admit to finding morally reprehensible when they are under no moral or legal obligation to do so.
It seems that Cloudflare believes that they are the only ones who can protect the websites hosting this content from being DDoS'd out of existence, and thus they are protecting their right to freedom of speech. But the owners of these websites can just use a different provider that is more aligned with their sense of morality, and Cloudflare doesn't need to protect websites that they morally disagree with.
DDoS-Guard still exists and I have no doubt they would be perfectly happy to protect websites like The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and KiwiFarms. They have shown themselves to be capable at mitigating large-scale DDoS attacks against the Russian government, so it's not like Cloudflare is the only place these websites can survive.
Cloudflare should only continue to provide services to websites like these if whatever they gain by having them as customers outweighs their moral disagreement with them. And I can't see how a few thousand dollars per year does that.
Other people who might want to host content that certain groups of people and/or governments don't want kept online are surely noticing and may start or continue using CF as a result of this message. Even someone in this situation who is completely opposed to KF's content should be able feel some comfort in that.
I feel like you missed the core points of this post.
- Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments. Refusing to deplatform isn't about protecting Kiwifarms, but protecting other groups in a global environment where they face legal and social pressure on differing and conflicting views. A hands-off policy on moderating the content of their customers removes the possibility of using deplatforming to suppress human rights.
- They rarely get paid by any of these sites, and when they do, tend to donate the proceeds to charities opposed to such awful websites.
Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments.
Cloudflare isn’t a court, its decisions are not legal precedents, it can decide on a case by case basis who it wants to do business with.
If authoritarian government comes knocking, just say no. What are they gonna do?
> Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments. Refusing to deplatform isn't about protecting Kiwifarms, but protecting other groups in a global environment where they face legal and social pressure on differing and conflicting views. A hands-off policy on moderating the content of their customers removes the possibility of using deplatforming to suppress human rights.
Except this is a bullshit excuse, because a) you can just tell those authoritarian governments "no", and b) they have been removing customers like sex workers for many years already, this is not some novel change. The only change is that it affects literal fascists now.
"Banning nazis means we also have to ban human rights organizations" is some grade-A spin doctor bullshit, and I would expect better from people here than to fall for that.
I don't. My personal position is that corporations are awful at moral judgments, and I'd vastly prefer infrastructure companies not decide who can and can't be on the Internet. I think it's imperative we solve this legally by pursuing a proper takedown of Kiwifarms, not by trying to encourage DDoSes to deal with it and then getting upset a company which prevents DDoS attacks prevented DDoS attacks.
I'm not trying to encourage ddos, I'm saying only that Cloudflare doesn't need to protect them from ddos. You might argue that those things are a distinction without a difference, but I would disagree.
Imo, kiwi farms will be the target of ddos no matter what, that's table stakes. So to me, the only thing I see is "is Cloudflare stepping in to help kiwi farms (at their own expense) or not".
Cloudflare isn't "stepping in". Anyone can sign up for Cloudflare. So you're asking Cloudflare to explicitly step in and strip protection from a particular website against their policies of basically non-interference, presumably to enable a DDoS attack to succeed.
These are all sites hosted with CF DNS, who provide services that are literally the opposite of free speech -- they are in the business of _suppressing speech_, for money (or for free!). They are the providers of the service CF protects its paying customers against. There could be no more simple definition of a shakedown racket than this: Pay us for DDoS protection, or risk being brought down by one or more of our (non-paying) customers!
For all their completely defensible talk about free speech, this is a category of customer that is indefensible, and completely identifiable.
Except for one thing: If they were "relegated to the dustbin of history", so too would be CF's business model.
So before defending CF's stance on "free speech", take a good look at their business model, and who they support.
According to completedns.com, instant-stresser.com has been using Cloudflare on and off for almost 8 years, and continuously for the last 3 years. It's also the 2nd result on Google for searching "free stresser". It seems impossible that this site hasn't been reported to Cloudflare by now, indicating that they have made the decision to continue protecting it. Very bad.
I haven't checked the other sites you mentioned, but if this pattern holds, it definitely changes my perspective on Cloudflare.
Wait, you’re suggesting they had board room discussions where they consciously, actively chose to protect and encourage ddos-for-hire sites because the threat of ddos attacks helps keep cloudflare in business?
I'm saying that, despite frequent reports of DDoS-for-hire sites using CF for protection, they do nothing. And they do nothing because they profit from their existence.
Again, this isn't free speech -- it is the antithesis of free speech. That's called hypocrisy.
And yes, of course they cooperate with the FBI on specific cases (or, at least one specific case) of DDoS-for-hire prosecution. Not only because they are compelled to do so by law, but because they are the only company that can identify where the perpetrators are actually hosted.
So, the claim is that Cloudflare is acting like the window glass shop that drums up business by running around smashing windows at night? That's quite the claim.
Here's a recent report on a DDoS-for-hire outfit that was criminally charged and convicted, related to downthem.org and ampnode.org
Interestingly, the affidavit in that case does note that Cloudflare provided services for downthem.org and ampnode.org. However, this is a criminal indictment of the guilty party. I suppose the issue is, what kind of 'public reporting of criminal activity' is needed to provoke CF to drop services? In cases like this I also imagine CF cooperates with FBI investigations.
> In cases like this I also imagine CF cooperates with FBI investigations.
Seems to be the case,
> The FBI’s Anchorage Field Office and its Los Angeles-based Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit investigated this matter. [...] Cloudflare, Inc. [...] assisted this investigation.
> So, the claim is that Cloudflare is acting like the window glass shop that drums up business by running around smashing windows at night? That's quite the claim.
That is not my claim; they don't operate any DDoS-for-hire sites. My claim is that their "free speech, we won't shut them down" claims are utter hypocrisy when they do nothing to shut down their support for DDoS-for-hire sites, the ultimate (on the internet, anyway) anti-free speech perpetrators.
Cloudflare has always hidden behind this stance as a way to justify doing awful things.
When I worked at Malwarebytes we had regular issues with malware being hosted on Cloudflare. Now I don't mean like "hey download this file so you can learn"- that kind of thing we fully supported. I mean that these files were being explicitly used in drive by exploit attacks- if a user with a vulnerable browser went to the wrong webpage, that webpage would load exploit scripts from the Cloudflare network and then inject the malware.
To me this is a very simple example of abusing a network. It is not a free speech issue, unless you think punching someone in the face is free speech. We proved that this was happening by providing pcap files showing the entire network transaction and the fact that users were not initiating this on purpose.
Their response was to ignore us until we started blocking their end nodes, at which point they came to our forum and straight up lied.
> Unfortunately, the new system is unlikely to resolve the current controversy which is more political than technical in nature. The current controversy involving Malwarebytes blocking CloudFlare IPs is centered around one site. To be clear, this site does not distribute malware itself and visiting it will not infect your computer. It does, however, provide information on how to create malware. Philosophically, we believe there is a difference between distributing malware -- which we will prohibit through our network -- and distributing information about malware. We do not believe our role is to play censor to any information on the Internet, even information we find disturbing. Publishing the Anarchists Cookbook does not make you a terrorist. Blocking sites based on the information they contain, as opposed to the actual harm they do, takes a step down a slippery slope I find deeply troubling.
This was a 100% dishonest lie, and it's the same pattern Cloudflare has been following for a decade now. In this case they lied claiming we were blocking educational material, which is something Malwarebytes never did. He said all of this after we sent the pcap files proving that this wasn't an issue with educational sites.
From my perspective Cloudflare has always been willing to hide behind free speech even if it isn't relevant. It's their go to excuse for any bad behavior.
Ironically the last time I really criticized them one of their higher up security people (who no longer works there) started to digitally stalk me. This guy followed all of my accounts everywhere and went out of his way to troll me.
He was employed on their security time. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out a ton of their staff were kiwifarm users.
Hosting a DNS zone file is not tantamount to enabling attacks. Its like saying Google enabled murder because Maps provided the directions for a murderer to get to the victim's house.
> It's also not tantamount to saying "relegating cyberattacks to the dustbin of history" either.
Are you certain of that? Could it be that CF's demonstrated history of cooperating with law enforcement actually makes identifying and shutting down these sites easier if they have fingerprints all over CF's network? They'll exist with or without whatever services CF offers; its better that they exist within an entity with the mission to action on their misbehavior.
Sure; smarter site operators just don't use CF. Many aren't smart. But some are: and bingo! We've hit the same outcome you want, but we gained something tangible toward our goal along the way.
This isn't hypothetical. This is literally how CF operates.
> Maps isn't a service used for suppressing free speech.
It sure is! But, to be fair to the analogy; Google Maps isn't a service that claims any element of free speech in defense of its policy enforcement.
Anyone can use Maps to navigate anywhere, then assert their own morals and values on others at their destination. Leftist protestors use it to attend abortion rallies. Rightist protestors used it to find the Capital during the riots. Police use it to find innocent black people to kill (ok, forgive me for dramatizing the illustration here).
The Tool wasn't necessary for their actions; just like CF isn't necessary for these DoS sites. But it did enable them to do it nonetheless, and they did use it. That is the dual-edged sword of Tools; their creators rarely get a say in how they're used.
Internet Services are, maybe, among the first tools like this where we have this voice dictating control over their usage, and the creator has the Power to listen. Its a New Capability. Dewalt power tools and Git are both probably used in the development of weapons by enemies of the state; there's little to be done about it. Do you believe the CEO of Toyota felt pride seeing so many Toyota pickups powering ISIS' war machine (well, its a pretty harsh environment, kudos to their engineering no doubt)? Sure, export controls, laws, policies against who you sell to, all crude tools from the stone age compared to DELETE FROM users WHERE.
The problem isn't that certain customers are bigots, but that they actively seek to allow harm to be done by their own end users like Kiwi Farms. The fact they have an exhaustive wikipedia for one person (Chris Chan) should have been the "nope" moment for them. Like if I was a host or a provider of a service and Josh Moon came to me with his site I'd just turn him away because he's like nuclear waste dangerous. It's not a matter of morals, it's a matter of social vs anti-social. Josh Moon, his own mother, and many of the loudest users on Kiwi Farms are anti-social to such an extreme that if they even tried to do their antics in real life beyond SWATing and cyberstalking, they'd probably be in prison now. It's not a matter of dealing with something like some religious organization that thinks being gay or trans is immoral, it's a group of thugs that skirt the law through various means and sometimes even cross into illegal acts that are hard to track/monitor (ex. SWATing).
Swatting is illegal, users of the site are doing the swatting, and KF simply pretends they aren't. They aren't arrested because the reason they use swatting is so they can't be tracked and thrown in jail themselves.
Meanwhile people's lives are ruined, their friends and family contacted, harassed, and they live in terror of people who congregate, anonymously, on that site, which is hosted out in the open with large corporations providing them services. A donation to the trevor project does nothing to protect those people, it just tells them their lives are expendable and they'll try to save someone else's.
Something must be done to stop them. I haven't heard any legal arguments for what could be done to stop them - one is told simply "you can't fight back, and you can't protect yourself, legally". When people are told that, they take more drastic measures, because the system that exists won't protect them.
Honestly a good proposal I've heard is to at minimum shut down SWATTing or add consequences and tracking of the requestor. Police being able to be consistently deployed on a ruse is, to me, insane.
Honestly, I agree that there needs to be work done. I think the first step is to get the police to not be as ignorant as they are. The fact that Keffals tried to notify the police of a potential harassment effort and they chose to ignore her should've never happened. Police today are poorly trained and educated but still get an exorbitant budget. I think it's time for people to declaw them or retrain them or possibly both on top of dealing with Kiwi Farms directly.
Quite agree, but it also seems like that won't change for many years. This is why the campaign to get service providers like cloudflare to drop hate and terror sites is the only real solution for the short term. Now that cloudflare has declared that they will keep providing services to the hate and terror sites (and the sites that attack them, remember), its an open question what will happen next.
"The problem isn't that certain customers, in my personal biased subjective opinion that is subject to no oversight whatsoever, are bad people who advocate doing bad things. The real problem is that certain customers, in my personal biased subjective opinion that is subject to no oversight whatsoever, are bad people who advocate doing bad things."
Things being subjective doesn't mean they're not true. What you mean to say is my arbitrary or biased view, which also doesn't invalidate their truthfulness. The fact that folks like you think subjectivity means arbitrary or biased or that it has no truth or factual value is disturbing and your position is also a deflection. In the United States, you can be sued at any time by other private parties. The fact that Josh Moon refuses to reign in his site users because he agrees with them (you can look in the posts he's made) means any business you do with them sets you up for liability. And guess what? Cloud Flare's CEO is endangering the bottom line and if I was a minority holder I'd be calling up the board to override his decisions, even if it meant a complete stockholder revolt against him. Letting the rejects of the most rejected group of people congregate and do misdeeds that either are explicitly illegal or border on illegality isn't a sound business decision. Wake me up you have an actual argument rather than trying to do 4chan level antics and mockery.
I definitely think some things are objectively good or bad, I just don't think me or you or any individual is qualified to adjudicate that for all of society. That's what the law is for.
The CWCki is not operated by KF, and at any rate is critical of Chris but not at all wishing death or violence on him. (And it is a wiki, not "a Wikipedia." Wikipedia is itself a wiki.)
And what does Josh's mother have to do with anything?
That’s a lot of words to say they’re not dropping Kiwi Farms. In spite of the fact that I think they plainly meet this condition for removal:
> Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.
That was under “Hosting Products”, KW probably falls under “Security Services”.
> Hosting products are those products where Cloudflare is the ultimate host of the content. This is different from products where we are merely providing security or temporary caching services and the content is hosted elsewhere
It's an artificial distinction, and I reject it. They know inciting violence is wrong, but they argue that providing services to people who do so is okay because they have a higher purpose of preventing cyberattacks. I think that's absurd.
Which is the most frustrating thing about this document, because CloudFlare is ostensibly explaining why their AUP for hosting services is different from their AUP for security services; but instead of talking about the points of their AUP, they talk about how they don't want to terminate security services just because they feel the content is "immoral or disgusting" or "reprehensible".
They are adopting the same strawman that critics of "cancel culture" believe exists: they are answering the question of "Why don't you cancel security services to people whose content is 'immoral or disgusting' or 'reprehensible'?"
But that's not the relevant question. One presumes Kiwi Farms would violate CloudFlare's Hosting AUP not because they're "immoral or disgusting" or "reprehensible" either (because those aren't stated violations of the hosting AUP) but because it "Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public."
So the question they should be answering, for each of the AUP violations they prohibit in their Hosting AUP, is why they allow these activities for services protected by their security services:
* Do you, or why do you allow security service subscribers to distribute material that violates intellectual property rights?
* Do you, or why do you protect security service subscribers' ability to publish defamatory content?
* Do you, or why do you protect security service subscribers' ability to distribute malware and control botnets?
And if it turns out you don't allow them to do that, then why would you make a special exception for the last plank of your hosting AUP:
* Do you, or why do you protect security service subscribers' ability to distribute content that is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public?
Those are the activities in question, not whether something is "immoral or disgusting" or "reprehensible". So why the misdirection? Why not answer why you think it's important to provide security services specifically to people that incites harassment to people?
In my opinion, it's because they are overcorrecting and actually favoring groups like Kiwi Farms exactly because they're repugnant and reprehensible, and giving them a special bye that they wouldn't to, say, a revenge porn site. And that's participating and aiding in the targeting of Kiwi Farms' victims.
I see more that as a consequence of a failure of the US to legislate hate speech. Cloudflare, as a private company, doesn't want to police hate speech (which I fully understand and support, personally).
In my country, France, this website is simply illegal. It would be prosecuted, and only then the hosting company (such as Cloudflare) would have to shut down the website.
This is a great point. Regardless of how one may feel about hate speech laws, it is disturbing that a large percentage of citizens believe that Washington D.C. is completely impotent. People have given up on the idea of their government helping, to the point where it's not even brought up as a possibility.
> I see more that as a consequence of a failure of the US to legislate hate speech.
What’s considered “hate speech” is completely arbitrary and liable to change depending on who is in power. There’s untold “hate speech” against Christians, straight white males, wealthy people etc - where does it stop and why is criticizing one group of people “hate speech” and another not?
I disagree with CloudFlare's distinction between "hosting" and "security services". From a technical perspective, CloudFlare is still holding the TLS certs[0] for servers behind their reverse proxy and fronting the bandwidth for those sites. Legally speaking, there is also no basis for this distinction; the law does not chase pointers.
The CloudFlare argument dances around the central complaint people have with their service today. That is, distributing personal information is a cyberattack. Doxxing and harassment are forms of speech-shaped censorship that exists to cause people to stop talking and delete their account. Forums that act as clearinghouses for dox are using their reverse proxy, and CloudFlare refuses to act against a violation of their own AUP under the belief that this would somehow create a precedent against other sites we don't find abhorrent.
My nightmare scenario is actually the opposite: CloudFlare does not act on harassment campaigns, someone important gets mad about it, and they pass a law creating a new kind of intermediary liability specifically designed to force CloudFlare to do so. The history of intermediary liability[1] is such that most companies do not bother defending their customers over it, and just chuck it to automated systems or underpaid and overworked reviewers that will operate on a guilty-until-proven-guilty system. And like I mentioned, the law will not respect CloudFlare's internal distinction between origin and proxy servers.
So we have two choices:
1. CloudFlare enforces their AUP on at least the most obvious targets of criticism.
2. They do nothing until some country makes them do something, and the state of Internet hosting gets slightly worse.
We're currently on track #2 here. Safe harbors are something the EFF and friends had to fight for, and they are being slowly chipped away at as platforms get more and more power that they either do not use or abuse.
[0] Remember when principled techies hated CloudFlare because they were an effective MiTM on all web traffic? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
[1] DMCA 512, EUCD Article 17, EU TERREG, FOSTA, and others
In my experience Cloudflare goes too far with offering their security services to everyone.
There is a website that's constantly ripping and stealing artistic content from a community I used to be part of. They have an automated process for ripping and reuploading content not meant to be downloadable from small independent artists in this community without informing the artist, obtaining permission or anything. Outragingly, when content is marked as "private", they upload it anyway but charge "credits" for users to "purchase" the download for the stolen private content. This website is clearly not existing in good faith, even has the word "rip" in its domain name, and they ignore most takedown requests.
Their website and any information about their true host is protected by Cloudflare. Over the course of a year I have sent several abuse reports about this website to Cloudflare and have never heard back. They seem to absolve themselves of any responsibility by saying they just forward reports and leave it up to the host or the website owner(???) to take action. In this case, the owner and the host already know they're stealing content so they just ignore the reports.
Due to the fractured nature of the community, no single artist so far has had the time or money to take legal action or even the knowledge of who to take legal action against (the owners are anonymous), so it appears the website will continue existing, proudly protected by Cloudflare.
You're 100%, undoubtedly, focusing your anger at the wrong party. Taking CF out of the equation of your problem won't fix the problem. It won't take the site down. It won't stop their behavior.
What I think is happening: you've exhausted several paths of recourse; the no-name website operators aren't responding; the fly-by-night hosting provider in eastern europe says they won't do anything; but you hit a stroke of luck. In some small, insignificant way, in a tracert or a dig to the perpetrators site, an American Big Tech company popped up. Finally; a name I recognize; someone may listen. Anger is given focus.
CF could act. It wouldn't change anything. Not for the site; not for the artists you support; not for you. I don't know what the right course of action to fix your problem is; I don't have any experience in that domain. I hope you find it, because that situation does suck. But I do know: you can blame CF today, maybe they act, and tomorrow it'll be someone else. You'll be stuck on that treadmill forever.
> Over the course of a year I have sent several abuse reports about this website to Cloudflare and have never heard back.
why would you send abuse reports to cloudflare about a website that hosts copyrighted material? why not send the reports to the website itself? and if that website ignores them then there are other ways to get that content offline, no?
This is not a Cloudflare problem. The copyright holders should follow the procedure in the DMCA to protect their content. If they're not willing to spend the time to do so then what can they expect? No one else is going to do their job for them.
And by time, you really mean money. Because if you send a DMCA notice and the hosting company ignores you, the next step is court. Can they afford to get justice? How much does it cost for an indie artist to take a fairly anonymous website host to court? How do you serve a company that's anonymous thanks to Cloudflare?
File suit against John Does 1 through x. Then during the discovery phase, ask the court to compel Cloudflare to reveal everything they know about the alleged infringers. Amend the suit accordingly.
This can cost an indie artist as much of as little as they want, depending on whether they hire counsel or act pro se.
I think I know what site this person is talking about, and I can say that the legal system is typically out of reach for a lot of people creating the art that's stolen. It takes a lot of money to bring a lawsuit against someone, and it might not even go anywhere.
I’m glad Cloudflare is taking a neutral stance to this. I’ve long said if a service provider, in any capacity, starts moderating content without a court order then it’s a slippery slope. I’m not saying the sites are good, but, why does Cloudflare need to be the internet police here? They can’t and shouldn’t be.
Neutrality is key, how would you feel if your content was suddenly pulled because someone on the internet disagreed?
Cloudflare is doing an admirable and thoughtful job of trying to ethically navigate its anticompetitive monopoly control of internet access.
It is, however, a design flaw that a publicly traded corporation run by some dude (a cool dude) is in the situation of determining who can and cannot communicate on the Internet.
I am amazed at how cloudflare has turned around and become a reputable, reliable company re: arbitrary breaches of contract based on the CEO's personal opinions. After he breached contract with the Daily Stormer because of "a bad mood" I was sure it'd just devolve into a no-holds barred censorship-fest.
Instead he's managing to hold the line against all of the authoritarians and individuals wanting to rip each other down. I never thought I'd say this, but, well done cloudflare.
It's not actually commendable to host content for white supremacists and transphobes. Free speech may be deserving of protection, but white supremacists using the internet to coordinate real-world activities (such as terrorist attacks) doesn't actually qualify as "free speech" deserving protection against "authoritarians and individuals wanting to rip each other down".
>Free speech may be deserving of protection, but white supremacists using the internet to coordinate real-world activities (such as terrorist attacks) doesn't actually qualify as "free speech" deserving protection against "authoritarians and individuals wanting to rip each other down".
Then I'm sure these activists will have no trouble moving proving their arguments in a courtroom, which is the proper space for such an assertion to be adjudicated.
Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to prove allegations of abuse by skilled actors that know how to use their tools (tools that are really easy to use).
KF's lead admin states it plainly: use a VPN, because KF complies with subpoenas. If folks were committing high-end acts of terrorism against elected officials regularly, the baddies might not be safe.
But if you're a trans streamer with a small following, if the folks coordinating attacks on you are diligent enough to make sure they're doing so off-platform, behind a VPN, calling folks while obscuring their identities, and so on? There's no chance for you.
I led a team in infiltrating a small community that acted as KF does. Even with screenshots in hand, even being on Discord, the Discord T&S team couldn't do very much for us because we didn't have nearly enough evidence in hand. We had to do a public exposé with what we had in hand and basically bluff that these folks could get in trouble as a result. Only that, along with the fact that we had bits and pieces enough of their identities, got them to go away. There's absolutely no way that I can tell that anyone would be taking anyone else to court. The best we could do was make our group so hard to attack that it wasn't worth it.
How is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this?
> Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to prove allegations of abuse by skilled actors that know how to use their tools (tools that are really easy to use).
Cloudflare is one of many such tools, but I won't contest that CF didn't affect the situation I was in.
That doesn't mean they don't lower the barrier to entry for good, bad, and ostensibly not bad but we all know whose side they're on actors alike. Just means my comment and lived experiences were just not perfectly applicable.
Have you thought about the reverse side of your argument? Someone falsely accusing you or your persons of insert-your-favorite-harm and then having your life upended by the social justice mob or corporate actions?
It needs to go through a trial. That's what its for.
Of course I have thought about the reverse side of this. Everyone involved in the matter on my end treated it with the seriousness it deserved. And for what it's worth, I too used to believe that words couldn't hurt people and that justice was out there for those who do get hurt.
Having experienced it firsthand, I know that to not be the case. Good luck serving the subpoenas on Large Faceless Internet Giant(tm) and John Does 1-100, especially when you don't have anything near the standard of evidence necessary to do that or the law degree necessary to make such filings. Good luck doing anything less than that, because no one actually cares as long as the money keeps flowing.
The only way I could prove malice was by infiltrating their community. The only way I could shut them down was to sow enough distrust that they couldn't operate and to expose their malice to the world. And you know what? Our coordinated effort won out. We only had to fight an uphill battle against complete strangers, with our real lives put at risk. And they aren't so much as banned from the platform. They just know well enough not to mess with us again. Just the one group, because any other group could swing by and make our lives hard again.
And I'm not even the person who was being attacked. I'm privileged enough that I could have turned away and told them they were on their own. Just like some folks running some companies that help these folks do their dirty work. I didn't, because helping someone without any other recourse was the right thing to do.
> Have you thought about the reverse side of your argument? Someone falsely accusing you or your persons of insert-your-favorite-harm and then having your life upended by the social justice mob or corporate actions?
I doubt they'd be as happy if sites that host speech critical of MTG were being held responsible for contributing to the three SWATings she had recently, to name the most recent example, but this is too emotional and I think people want the corps to respond because they know that the law is harder to change.
I mean, given that most signs point to the culprit site there being kiwifarms, yes, yes!
More generally, swatting people is bad (and also illegal!), people should not do it. Sites that encourage it should not be supported. No equivocation there.
> I mean, given that most signs point to the culprit site there being kiwifarms, yes, yes!
So, when someone does a thing that's designed to hurt both Kiwifarms and MTG and your assumption is that KF is responsible?
> More generally, swatting people is bad (and also illegal!), people should not do it.
I'd agree, anyone caught doing this should be imprisoned for attempted murder. I worry more about people trying to expand this list to anyone adjacent to them or critical of that person who does not engage in such harassment or any platform they use to speak, even when that platform removes anyone doing such things.
That said if we do go down that road, FB, Twitter & co. should be first on the chopping block and I won't miss them.
> Sites that encourage it should not be supported.
I don't visit KF, except that I read their response earlier regarding the byuu thing (when they were being DDoS'd which prevented them from responding much) and it didn't seem like the platform had meaningfully encouraged this or interacted with byuu in any way.
It's a sad loss, because I was loosely acquainted with byuu and byuu's work and you can see some of those comments between us here on HN. I also did what little I could to try to help find that package of lost video games, not that I actually was able to contribute anything, but I tried.
Despite KF getting lots of blame, I didn't actually see any proof of them participating in that in any meaningful way. Maybe I missed something, because again, I don't actually use that site and I only went there to look at what was going on with the story since it involved byuu.
But the response was pretty clear that there was a small thread with people not even interacting with byuu and it's hard to see a link between that and driving someone to suicide. None of the articles I read about the whole thing actually did anything but quote someone who said there was a link, so with no evidence but some person I don't know's say-so, I'd say that case is rather weak by people who already hate KF.
Feel free to point to more showing that KF is bad, because to me they're just another angry part of the internet, kinda like FB or Twitter, that I tend to avoid for that very reason. I'm suspect that they in particular should be deplatformed compared to the other platforms, though, because to me they're all angry nasty things that have driven people to suicide.
And I'm pretty sure that on FB in particular, someone was successfully sued for that, which already puts them a level worse than what I've seen proven of KF so far.
KiwiFarms can both be guilty itself of attacking some people while also having it's name used as a false-flag by other terrorists who exploit existing grievances to escape blame.
Byuu was targeted by 4chan terrorists who just used his history with KiwiFarms for misdirection. Taking down KiwiFarms may stop some, but not all of the terrorism associated around it.
>So, when someone does a thing that's designed to hurt both Kiwifarms and MTG and your assumption is that KF is responsible?
When kf doxxes someone, and she's swatted the next day, yeah I'll blame the site that posted her address the day before and is known for inciting swatting attacks.
> That said if we do go down that road, FB, Twitter & co. should be first on the chopping block and I won't miss them.
I don't follow, KF doesn't remove, and even tacitly (and not so tacitly) encourages, harassment, while that isn't true of FB or twitter or even reddit.
Does KF refer to the posters on the site, or the site itself? When you say "KF doxxes" I assume you mean the posters, but it's not clear and in that case they would generally have no liability from 3rd party posters.
> I don't follow, KF doesn't remove, and even tacitly (and not so tacitly) encourages, harassment, while that isn't true of FB or twitter or even reddit.
If "harassment" is the legal type (i.e. true threats), that's not first amendment protected and those who post it can be charged criminally. That's not generally something the platform is liable for.
That said, FB and others have been sued in similar circumstances:
I'm not sure what your point is. I've never made any claim about legal liability. I said that sites that support/encourage/facilitate the things that KF (as a site) does should not be supported. We are under no obligation to define morality based on legality.
Like, your defense here seems to amount to "what they're doing isn't technically illegal", which, sure, but that's not a defense to most people.
Well, the answer to "it's not illegal" is to change the law to define what should be illegal to make it match up with morality better. I conjecture that most such changes would possibly take down FB & Twitter, but I've already said that I don't really think that would be a net loss.
Agreed, we have a justice system based on what we agreed as a society. The rule of law.
If you want to prohibit speech to white supremacists, fine, let’s pass a law and if it doesn’t hold constitutional muster, go ahead convince everyone to amend the constitution. But since our founding fathers made this process difficult on purpose, let’s take a different approach: that’s what social justice is. It is anti-democratic mob lunacy where corporations and governments are playing a proxy authoritarian game.
This appears to be describing a parallel universe. The justice system we have in America today is arcane, strongly favors monied interests, is subject to perverse incentives ("tough on crime" DAs, lack of interest in pursuing crimes against groups without institutional power), frequently produces results that go against the common understanding of what is just, and is generally inaccessible to the most vulnerable people in society.
The idea that this is what "we agreed as a society" is absurd. The justice system is a thing that evolved in our society largely as a result of powerful people feeding it when it protects their interests.
> The idea that this is what "we agreed as a society" is absurd. The justice system is a thing that evolved in our society largely as a result of powerful people feeding it when it protects their interests.
The people elect representatives to pass and/or change laws.
What you're saying is we should disregard voting because you know best - an argument famously supported by every genocidal maniac in the 20th century.
Note that the older "fighting words" doctrine is probably obsolete and even then only applies to face-to-face conversation. For more on that see the prior link to Popehat.
Which jurisdiction are you speaking about? Do you have legal qualifications to dispense this advice?
The US is rather unique in their absolutist view of free speech and other countries don't work the same way. Generally, for example, this would be a violation of UK law.
Read the 10th amendment. The powers not delegated to the government are delegated to the states, or to the people. What you describe as "social justice" is constitutional, if you want to fix that, change the constitution and make it illegal, but you're quite right, the founders made that difficult, perhaps because they believed mob justice had its place sometimes, I mean in the eyes of the British, what were the Unionists but a mob rallying behind blatantly illegal ideas?
There are two elements of this position that I urge you to consider:
First - if KF is guilty of crimes that would stop CloudFlare from providing them services - then it's both reasonable and normal for people to encourage CloudFlare to act before a verdict. It's extremely common for commercial actors to have policies based on their impressions of likely criminality (i.e. credit card transactions are marked fraudulent before a court of law weighs in). Also, even though it's impossible to perfectly provide services to all 'good' customers and deny services to all 'bad' customers - it seems desirable to minimize the services you provide to 'bad' customers. I.e. It's good to cut off likely fraudulent transactions before a court verdict and we should encourage companies to act ahead of verdicts.
So if you think a customer is probably doing something you'd cut off service for if it was determined in court, you should generally change your posture towards that customer somewhat. This is often a difficult determination and a difficult line to draw - but it's clearly a good thing to try and do.
Second, the ability to prove a case in court depends on a great number of elements aligning. There are a number of scenarios where an actor is doing things that, could they be proved in court, would get them denied service - but for reasons unrelated to the actions themselves a determination cannot be made. The moral weight of providing services to those actors is the same and it's still desirable for companies to seek to avoid providing services to bad actors. Your legal responsibility is different, but you would still like to avoid serving clients whose actions you abhor.
Otherwise, you get into the position where moral action is impossible outside of the opinion of an authority. Let's say you see a stranger's bag grabbed by someone else on the street - would you say the only moral course of action is to cooperate with an official investigation (if one happens)?
Ironically law enforcement are part of the problem: if you want someone murdered over the internet in the US, by far the easiest way is to make a bogus phone call to the police. Doesn't work all the time but it's pretty risk free for the perpetrator.
And yet there are compilation videos of streamers being swatted on stream[0]. If someone has an address, all it takes are some anonymous calling techniques / a burner phone to traumatize the occupants by calling in a fake hostage situation or something of that caliber.
what % of the videos in the compilation involve an "unarmed police shooting" vs. a "swatting"? The original assertion by GP was that actually dying at the hands of police during such an event is extremely rare, an assertion that your link does not seem to refute.
KF users have already SWATed someone if I recall correctly. So, they're already in the worse possible situation if any further evidence comes to light.
Except this isn't a "we should record everyone's interactions to stop terrorism" it's "we should stop hosting propaganda for terrorists, especially when that cessation doesn't harm others (dropping hosting for their website does't impair other people's liberties, whereas spying on everyone's messages would)"
In a courtroom you wouldn't get away with absurd hyperbole like this. It would hurt your case more than help. No wonder the activists want to avoid court and rule through social media where hyperventilating emotional blackmail is pretty effective.
I'm glad that Cloudflare didn't bow to the pressure here. I don't want to live in a world where people can extrajudicially boot a site off the internet by running a social media campaign for a few days to get their DDoS protection removed and then paying criminals to DDoS the site.
The site in question is one of the most notorious doxxing and harassment forums, linked to multiple suicides of their victims over the years. I'm not sure what principled political speech you think is being protected here.
Transparency in a society is extremely important. It is a fundamental right to gather and publish information bringing to the publics attention harmful, disturbing and potentially illegal behavior.
What principled political speech should be protected you ask? My answer is investigative journalism.
If you believe investigative journalism should exist and plays an important function in society, you should have no problem with outlets doing that.
How exactly is Kiwi Farms helping with this when the vast majority of their forum threads are like "LOL tr--ns talking about X." Seriously, just go skim their site, tell me exactly where they fulfill this function?
Guess we should take down traditional media as well then when they dox LibsOfTiktok and other creators so that the Twitter mob can harass and SWAT them, since they can't hide behind 'journalism'. Or does it only apply to the bad guys?
It's a pretty big false equivalence to say revealing the name of a prominent psuedonymous account linked to doxxing, harassment and bomb threats is remotely the same as what KF or Libs of TikTok do.
KF is not "investigative journalism." It's just a site where people gather to point and laugh at mentally ill people with a web presence. Anything they dig up on someone is in service to that singular goal. There's no reason to pretend that they do what they do for any other reason. Clouflare shouldn't be shutting down websites because of their content, but making fun of mentally ill people is not "an important function in society".
Civil society is a good, but it is not the highest good. We do not need to throw free speech away because it might infringe on civility. Especially when it's out and away from public and attention minding it's own business.
"Hate speech" is ill-defined, basically it's just "speech that people with enough power don't like." and what that is can changes at any time.
Many people more intelligent than you (and me) have spent many decades thinking about this issue. E.g. if you can show in court that KF is defaming someone, you can go after them, or if you can show they're involved in other illegal activities. But "I don't like some of the things they're saying on their own forum" is NOT a valid reason.
The Daily Stormer is a Nazi website dedicated to promoting genocide and organizing people who support genocide. That's not "things that I don't like" unless your argument is that we shouldn't actually do anything about genocide until the genocide has been done.
You could say that about a lot of things that are normally covered by abuse policies. For example, we expect hosts to remove content that violate copyright, why is copyright more worthy of protection at the corporate level than defamation?
The DMCA specifically requires hosts to remove content upon an allegation of copyright infringement. There is no law requiring hosts to remove defamatory content (without a specific court order). Congress has deemed copyright protection more worthy of protection at the corporate level than defamation. If you are unhappy with that situation then you should contact your members of Congress.
> It actually is commendable because white people have a right to exist, and to mutually organize to advocate for themselves, same as any other racial identity.
This is clearly not what the Daily Stormer were doing - they were discussing ways to harm other ethnic groups, and deny them their "right to exist, and to mutually organize to advocate for themselves". The claim that "X group should be afforded their human rights" (effectively how your comment frames it) is completely different from "X's affordance of their human rights allows them the right to believe themselves superior to others and to act against them on that basis".
White supremacists are not fighting for the right of white people to exist or advocating for anything. They would just as easily readily throw a gay or trans white person under the bus. They are terrorist groups that fester through spreading conspiracies about other races and peoples and want nothing less than ethnic cleansing
That said, it's commendable that Cloudflare hosts them while making sure to donate to an equivalent cause to offset the grime. I don't really want them to be a censorship authority
You seem to be operating under a definition of "white supremacy" that is at least 5 years out of date.
You see "whiteness" is an illness that uniquely afflicts white people, and causes them to act in their group's self-interest (which is only bad for white people as we all know). Unless you fight against this urge by being actively "anti-racist," i.e. agitating for the benefit of non-white people, then you are a white supremacist (because by simply existing as a passive not-racist white person, you are supporting the white supremacist superstructure).
> terrorist groups that fester through spreading conspiracies about other races and peoples and want nothing less than ethnic cleansing
Given the above definition who exactly is spreading conspiracies about races and agitating for ethnic cleansing? Who is inculcating white children with self-hatred?
Spend 10 minutes on TikTok listening to POCs talk about "palm-handed" people, "mayo demons," colonizers etc. with billions of views and the support of academic, media and corporate orthodoxy, and compare that to some basement dwellers at Stormfront most people have never heard of. Should TikTok be banned?
> Instead he's managing to hold the line against all of the authoritarians and individuals wanting to rip each other down. I never thought I'd say this, but, well done cloudflare.
Are you aware of what site this blog post is about?
Leave it to HN to prioritize this weird bastardized philosophical theory of free speech over actual people who have been harassed, doxxed, and driven to suicide. This isn’t even a case of “simple” hate speech which this community views as morally gray, it’s straight up harassment and violence.
It doesn’t help that the focus of these harassment campaigns are people that right wing tech types have little sympathy for, but this thread is one of the more ridiculous examples of how much “free speech” has become an infallible ideology that must be defended regardless of who it hurts, or kills in this case.
Well Cloudflare isn't going to do anything, so maybe try running and write a letter to ICANN or RIPE, like what the Ukrainian government did and stop them then? (It didn't work)
I'm going to keep this simple. The ToS nonsense and other things are distractions. The entire argument for "dropping" is pretty much as disingenuous as it gets. They aren't just essentially arguing but LITERALLY arguing that CF should drop a legal site because they don't like that site and CF's services keep the site from being ILLEGALLY DDOS'd off of the internet entirely.
That IS the other side of this debate! "Stop protecting them from our illegal attacks!"
I think I'd take a similar approach. Basic services, transit and etc would involve less moderation. Actually hosting someone else's BS on my systems more potential moderation.
Personally I wouldn't host some jerk at my house, I still would argue they deserve basic protections, even if they're horrible.
They talk a lot about "human rights" in this post. At what point does someone's right to personal safety and privacy trump another person's right to host whatever they want on the internet?
In this case, the police are involved, and part of the problem: a KF user got somebody SWATted. The police are amazingly useless at dealing with organized harassment; there have been a couple of cases where people have already been in touch and told them "you will probably receive a hoax call about me", and still got SWATted.
What KF user got someone SWATted? Please name and shame them if you have evidence.
KF makes a very convenient scapegoat and there's no reason for someone opposed to them to false flag as them when calling in a SWAT, or for someone to SWAT themselves or just fake a SWATting entirely and blame it on someone at KF or just KF in general. I'm not saying for sure that has happened in Keffals' case, but it can't be proven that something like that didn't happen yet either.
> At what point does someone's right to personal safety and privacy trump another person's right to host whatever they want on the internet?
If you're willing, I'd be interested to hear your own answer to the question you ask. It's an interesting question (though I'm not sure I agree with the premise(s), but I think that's a different conversation).
Also interesting would be to hear your answer to the reverse: At what point does someone's right to host whatever they want on the internet trump someone's right to personal safety and privacy?
> Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers
> Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
> Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
In my opinion, it's a relatively clear case, though I reckon sometimes there might be a grey area.
Article 19 says you're free to express your opinions and ideas to others through any media. So you should be able to do so on the internet as well.
Article 12 says that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.
To me, this means your thoughts and ideas you express cannot arbitrarily interfere with others privacy, home, correspondence, or attack their honor or reputation without due cause.
This means that doxxing is not acceptable, hacking and revealing private information you obtained without consent isn't acceptable unless you have due cause (whistleblowing for matters of laws being broken). Harassment is not acceptable either, because it's interference with ones right.
You'd need a court to establish what right you broke, and this is probably what we're lacking today, since a large percentage of the voting population doesn't actually value all human rights equally, I think the courts have been hesitant to enforce them, and so the right to privacy isn't particularly respected, but the right to express opinions or private information and harassment is strongly defended. Since the courts are failing, people are having to take the case to the public spheres.
Finally, Article 1 says that everyone is endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. I included this one because it too clearly rejects harassment and hate. It clearly mandates that people must act in spirit of brotherhood with everyone else. Obviously all behavior that go against that is not supported by the human rights.
It's a thoughtful document and I appreciate the time it took to write it.
I think there may be a missing factor in their decision-making process. I'll quote the document itself: "We also believe that an Internet where cyberattacks are used to silence what's online is a broken Internet, no matter how much we may have empathy for the ends."
That seems correct to me. It is intuitively understandable how it applies to some people who want Kiwifarms to go away. It is, perhaps, less clear how it applies to Kiwifarms itself, so let's dig into that some.
First: if it's bad to use cyberattacks to silence what's said online, it's presumably also bad to use other forms of attack to silence what's said, online or otherwise.
Second: does Kiwifarms (or sites like instant-stresser.com, noted in another comment) overall have a silencing effect?
That's a hard determination to make! I actually wouldn't want to be in the business of making that decision. You need to have a clear public rubric and evaluation process, you should be very transparent about it, and you should be willing to defend your decisions and not allow your criteria to slip based on pure public opinion. I am heartened by their description of their ability to make that decision for the Daily Stormer and hold to their principles despite attempts to create slippage -- that tells me that, as an organization, Cloudflare is capable of making nuanced decisions.
However, we shouldn't avoid hard decisions just because they're hard, or even because we might make mistakes from time to time. We should do a real risk analysis, evaluate the effect of making mistakes, and compare that to the effect of not making decisions at all.
I'd encourage Cloudflare to go back and consider whether or not the principle of maximizing the ability to speak has implications about providing services to sites which are in the business of making fun of people -- sometimes lethally -- for things they say.
It is not "less clear" how this applies to Kiwifarms. Their TOS says they "may" remove content that:
"Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public."
Kiwifarms doxxing and swatting is documented six ways from Sunday, and it's hardly just keffals.
To be perfectly clear about my own bias: I think Kiwifarms is among the worst Web sites on the Internet, I think it's caused immeasurable harm, and I don't want it to exist.
However, I am (probably) talking to people who aren't convinced of this as well as people like you and I, and I also strongly understand the desire to form general principles above and beyond a single person making decisions, so I wanted to come at it from a relatively neutral direction.
I think that you have to take responsibility when your actions (doxing) result in a higher probability of other actions (swatting). The exact degree of responsibility varies.
You believe the same thing. Cloudflare dropping Kiwifarms wouldn’t directly result in Kiwifarms going dark; it’s just a highly predictable outcome. If you don’t think a company is responsible for anything but their direct actions, the argument for providing service to Kiwifarms becomes much weaker.
It is deeply weird to read the sentence "We also believe that an Internet where cyberattacks are used to silence what's online is a broken Internet, no matter how much we may have empathy for the ends." as a defense of KiwiFarms.
So, Cloudflare is basically saying they would host Daily Stormer, 8chan etc. from this point on. I bet this policy will go over like a lead brick in media coverage.
No they aren't. They are saying they would provide *security services* to these companies. They won't host it, but they also won't let it get taken down through cyber attacks. They are preventing vigilante justice against these companies, that's all.
I disagree extremely with cloudflare's position here.
One area I'd like to call out is that they think they are a utility. But they are not bound to the same legal restrictions as a utility. It's greedy and slimy to fall back on that argument.
If you're actually a utility, then change your company so you're treated like one legally. I'm sure you'll love it, Cloudflare leadership.
IMHO, the legal definition of "utility" is not necessarily useful. The law is slow, while the real world quickly becomes dependent on pieces of tech. I believe that one day the law will finally catch up and these providers will be likened to utilities.
This just reads like Cloudflare trying to dodge all culpability / wash their hands of the harm caused by those they knowingly provide services to by shifting the buck elsewhere.
Pretending courts are oracle machines that perfectly determine which sites should be permitted in countries and inferring selecting websites to provide security services to is a totally binary choice.
I would be very interested to meet the lawyer who cleared the phrase "While we will generally follow legal orders to restrict security and conduit services," for publication
>>Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things
I've been thinking about this for a few days, in regards to all the Kiwi Farms stuff.
Where do we want censorship to happen? It seems like most people agree that "bullying people to suicide" is something we shouldn't tolerate, but where do we stop it? No DNS hosting for them? No CDN, no DDOS protection? Go after their hosting directly? Alternatively, we could start at the other side, build a great firewall and have ISPs route everything through it. Make Apple/Microsoft/etc build "safety" filters that check packets as they leave your computer. Or hell, we're nearly at the stage where a keyboard could have enough processing power to real-time censor what you write. Why not do that?
I wish Kiwi Farms didn't exist, it sounds like a terrible place. I'm not convinced Cloudflare should be in charge of deciding that.
Law enforcement, charging by government attorneys, criminal courts and civil courts.
If you’re being harassed, the communication venues on which the harassment happens should be compelled legally to unmask the harasser so they may be charged and served with restraining orders.
Who cares if kiwifarms exists if you have competent and empowered law enforcement and judicial systems that can bring justice to the people actually taking illegal actions?
I mean, sometimes you need a CDN because your hosting costs would be untenable otherwise, and CloudFlare’s the only one that’s free / a flat $20 for as much traffic as people can throw at it. So losing CloudFlare can mean that your only other option is to pay egress-bandwidth bills / other CDN service bills you can’t pay; and so you just don’t bother to put your site back up at that point.
As shown here, it wouldn't just be denial of service attacks. It'd be legal attacks on their DNS provider, their registrar, their hosting, their hosting's upstream providers, etc, etc.
If they allowlist Cloudflare IP addresses, they should be careful that list only includes the IPs of the caching servers, and not of the exit nodes for the free WARP VPN service.
These both share the same AS number, I think. I’m not sure if Cloudflare segregates WARP traffic or publishes a list of WARP exit IP addresses.
Aside: It’s not that simple of a problem, is it? Because there’s also CF workers, which execute on caching servers and can therefore send outbound requests with the IP of the caching server. (That said, I don’t know the details of this routing config, although I’m now curious to test it.)
Anyway, I think an IP allowlist is probably the most crude starting point - I’m pretty sure CF has some products that are better suited for it (mTLS maybe, and that server side WARP VPN product they had at some point - I’m not up to date on this).
Two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.
In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.
Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.
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.
I take this to mean they now think they shouldn't have terminated the Daily Stormer or 8chan, and won't be terminating Kiwi Farms.
In retrospect I was a little naive in the 90s. I read The Hacker Manifesto, I read "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", I didn't stop to think what would happen when weev was in charge.
Exactly their position and they are right. Cloudflare also protects good things which are illegal in less good places. Every action they take to take content down weakens their position that they are neutral which allows them to keep up the argument that they aren’t there to enforce laws in places where the laws are quite a bit more disagreeable.
Do you want them to be forced to deplatform planned parenthood in states where abortion is now illegal? There are certainly a lot of people in this country who think PP is far worse than 8chan.
When you involve yourself in the politics of censorship you can’t claw yourself out.
What this really says that they opened a hole which got them into a questionable legal area by removing them, and they regret not just remaining neutral.
> I take this to mean they now think they shouldn't have terminated the Daily Stormer or 8chan, and won't be terminating Kiwi Farms.
That's certainly a possible interpretation, but I think it's more a call out of a fallacy, stating explicitly that "precedent doesn't make right." i.e. just because something was done before, doesn't mean it was correct.
In other words, people will argue "you should take down KF because you took down <x> and KF is worse" and they are saying, "yes we did take down <x>, but just because we did doesn't mean it was the right decision. It might have been right, it might not. We just don't want to make a decision now regarding KF simply because we did something in the past."
An extreme response to help illustrate the fallacy might be, "just because <x> committed genocide against <y> doesn't mean genocide against <y> was correct and should be used in support of genocide against <z>"
Considering cloud compute providers and similar services a la Cloudflare are at this point basically necessary utilities, I am beginning to wonder if the ability to select who can and can't use the services based on a lawful use case is truly the prerogative of the service provider.
See: AT&T being prevented from shutting down dial-a-hate lines by regulators and courts in the name of the first amendment
Chloe Sagal seems to have had mental health issues - if not Kiwifarms then it would have been something else that trigged her suicide.
It really baffles me when people are targeted by trolls - trolls have been around since the days of Fidonet and BBS - without strict moderation it is a wild west.
Also the solution seems kind of obvious to me - just disconnect yourself - delete social media , curate your feeds and stop posting about your real life on twitter , your job or where you live and find another avenue not twitter to engage with.
4chan, kiwifarms - another site will just pop up to cater for trolls.
> Chloe Sagal seems to have had mental health issues - if not Kiwifarms then it would have been something else that trigged her suicide.
Harassment is associated with suicidality.[1][2]
> Also the solution seems kind of obvious to me - just disconnect yourself - delete social media , curate your feeds and stop posting about your real life on twitter , your job or where you live and find another avenue not twitter to engage with.
This was prompted by the harassment of a professional Twitch streamer if I understood right. Just delete your career.
If that is your chosen way to make money then you need to consider it to be be part of the job just like the possibility of getting shot at when you join the police or armed forces - a actor or popstar with stalkers.
If you look at what really happened saying "Kiwi Farms killed her" isn't exactly fair.
- The thread about her didn't have a post for 6 months before she killed herself
- Facebook locked her profile when she posted about suicide. Why is Kiwi Farms to blame for this?
- She was thrown out where she was living a few days prior because the people she was living with decided they could no longer take care of her
- She had severe mental health issues unrelated to her being harassed
- She threatened to kill herself after that and was taken into custody, spent 2 days in triage at a mental health facility but was never properly hospitalized and left
- She cited homelessness and mental health problems as reason for the suicide
> Also the solution seems kind of obvious to me - just disconnect yourself - delete social media , curate your feeds and stop posting about your real life on twitter , your job or where you live and find another avenue not twitter to engage with.
It seems for a number of people, online social media is the only viable, but paradoxically abusive outlet for social connections.
There are safe avenues on the internet but you won't get as much attention or likes but then I am a boomer and never got this oversharing on places like TikTok.
I understand the point CF is trying to make; however, I still have a hard time trying to ignore many of the content that is being protected by CF.
With that being said; I have seen cases where the T&S team flagged legitimate sites by mistake so... I get why CF wants to be careful with any action they decide making on this regard.
It comes down to content moderation. If a company begins to moderate content that travels through its network, it can be held liable and forced to remove things that any entity or governmental body could disagree with.
For example that means if the Republican Party was hosting on Cloudflare and the Democrat Party disagreed with the Republican Party, they could force Cloudflare to remove the Republican Party's websites from transiting their network.
Another example is if the Washington Post and Fox news both went through Cloudflare, and Fox disagreed with the Washington Post they could force Cloudflare to remove the Washington Post.
The moment you set the precedence it becomes an expectation -- by Cloudflare remaining neutral they can't be forced into that position.
> It comes down to content moderation. If a company begins to moderate content that travels through its network, it can be held liable and forced to remove things that any entity or governmental body could disagree with.
Cloudflare already does this, especially to services involving sex workers.
There must be a lot of times when Cloudflare's leaders wish that they were a janitorial supply company. Or a roofing firm. Or a ball bearings manufacturer. Or anything where there was ~zero public expectation that they would monitor and be "held responsible" for the business models, behaviors, and morals of the millions of people and organizations using their products & services.
No, these are hard and important issues. I trust our team to think them through and would never want to outsource or shirk that responsibility. Having what you do matter is the highest job satisfaction. We may not always get it right, but I’d never not want to be in the arena.
But please try to make sure that the situation around you & Cloudflare never gets bad enough that you're needed as heroes in any historic crisis or disaster.
If you’re the digital equivalent of the Fire Department and shouldn’t refuse service, why are you treating hosting differently?
Is it because they can get hosting elsewhere? Well they can get web security elsewhere too, what’s the difference?
By the way comparing Cloudflare with the Fire Department is silly, as neither is Cloudflare the only game in town, nor is not having a website life threatening.
And if Cloudflare is the last line of defense for free speech, why do they refuse to host the same site?
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth for Cloudflare to somehow paint themselves as the good guys in this scenario, at most they’re the Swiss Bank, willing to do business with the despicables.
Not sure what the law says here. There are many sites built with SSGs today that can never work without the cf cache. In practice, cf hosts the sites. From a dev perspective it is much easier to understand how cf works if you treat cf as a host also for proxied content not hosted by cf, as recommended by cf btw.
Is Cloudflare buying.... Hate offset credits? It's like buying carbon offsets for the carbon you emit. Except they are donating to offset the evil shit they protect?
For how long will the majority of internet users be policed by special interest groups though? How far along till we all noticed it's gone too far?
There are minority groups that propagate general hate too only that their brand of hate is sanctioned. Cloudflare can't make it up for whatever loopholes that exist outside the law. I wouldn't expect any company to go any further than required either.
> In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.
So, that's the reason then? It becomes hard to justify also not shutting down activists or dissidents and such. But why can't they just say "no"? They are a US company, if someone from some authoritarian regime wants them to make logical or consistent decisions or points out some "hypocrisy", they can still shrug and say "so what, we wanted to terminate that service, but we won't terminate this other nonprofit organization's service you want us to, tough luck".
Or, perhaps, they do want to have a nice relationship with those authoritarian regimes, and keep getting business from them...
That's a lot of words to say that they don't want to drop Kiwifarms.
It's interesting how companies like Cloudflare will stylize themselves as public infrastructure when it comes to who they should take money from but would fight tooth and claw if you argued they should also be regulated as such.
This is simply free speech fundamentalism posing as being "unpolitical". Free speech taken to the extreme results in the suppression of speech (not to mention all the other reasons most countries have laws tackling demagoguery, hate speech and incitement). The "Paradox of Tolerance" still applies.
So when law enforcement fails, instead of demanding better action from the Government, people try to force companies into doing arbitrary policing to their taste.
If you get someone in trouble, harmed or killed - you get jail time. If it doesn't happen, it's first and foremost an issue with dysfunction of law enforcement, not the mailman being liable for delivering the mail when you think he/she should step in because the policeman didn't show up to work.
I don’t understand why CF insists on protecting platforms that obviously spew hate. Not being their ddos load balancer doesn’t mean they’re gone from the internet (how pompous would one have to be to think that… maybe CF is…) but it just gives them an opportunity to find ddos protection from somewhere else and washes the hands of CF of being handmaids to hate and terror and all that is shit in this world. They took a stand on free speech absolutism when they shouldn’t have.
I'm surprised at the number of people making the argument that if something is not illegal corporations should keep their own feelings on the morality of that thing out of it.
That has a real risk of leading to the law being expanded to cover those things. I think we are better off with the law as a second or third layer of morality enforcement rather than it being the first layer.
> Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.
Talk about a catch all term “… or is otherwise harmful …”
I understand there are examples, but this literally leaves the door open to anything they deem harmful. Free speech means enabling potentially “harmful” content. Really depends who seems something “harmful”. Dead naming on Twitter is considered “hate speech”, does that mean an old website that deadnames can be harmful?
Imo just stay out of the regulation business unless someone MAKES you. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.
Which it appears they realized, after being rather aggressive in their “canceling” of others:
> 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.
My bet is they also opened the door to companies from Russia who would allow said free speech. From a business case, when I saw cloud flare drop customers I recommended everyone I know to move to someone else (at least one large company I know of moved due to this incident). Why risk your business with someone who arbitrarily changes policies and terms?
Kind of a side question, when did CDN services became rebranded as DDoS protection? I've never used Cloudflare because I wanted DDoS protection, though that's a nice side effect, but I normally use it to cache content and deliver the content to my users faster and without more costly hosting/DB reads.
> While we believe we have an obligation to restrict the content that we host ourselves, we do not believe we have the political legitimacy to determine generally what is and is not online by restricting security or core Internet services. If that content is harmful, the right place to restrict it is legislatively.
Agreed, but realistically: for the near future there will be no legislative restriction in the US on harmful content. Congress is far too grid-locked for that, not to mention the question if meaningfully combatting hate speech and bullying can actually be done via laws or requires constitutional amendments - which are even more unrealistic.
Meanwhile, sites like KF (or rather: their users) will cause a lot of harm, including cyber-bullying people to suicide. At what point will you draw the line? Or clearer: how many dead people will it require?
The whole insistence on "we need a legislative solution" reminds me way too much of European inner politics on refugees: politicians all over the EU said "we won't deal with refugees on our own, we want an European solution" - all while knowing that thanks to the destructive-obstructionist Polish and Hungarian governments there was no chance of such an "European solution", and as a result nothing changed - and thousands paid with their life [1] as a result as they drowned in the Middle Sea.
In the end it's always the same: placing abstract morals over clear and provable actual harm to people's health and sometimes life.
This is a crazy take on responsibility. It isn't Europe's responsibility when people decide to take unsafe passage on the sea and drown. Could they do more? Yes, I'm sure they could, but are they directly responsible for drownings? No, this is too far.
I'd argue the same for Kiwi Farms. If people are cyber-bullying (ie, reaching out to people and harassing them) then those people should be addressed. Arguing that any speech you or someone else deems "hurtful" or "hateful" should be banned is nuts, since no one has to go and read those words, its an opt-in process. AND, if people can disagree about whether something is really "hateful" then its even more difficult to justify taking action simply for communication of ideas that we find offensive.
CloudFlare is in a tough spot that they put themselves in. If they'd like to avoid legislation then they've got to be the pipe, not the moderator. Once they switch to moderator they are responsible for all moderation. They can't pick and choose. Imo they'd be better served by acting as a utility and staying out of the moderation game. We've already seen a ton of attacks on free speech by powerful Internet companies, in the US at least the 1st amendment (freedom of speech) needs a defender like CF to help.
> Yes, I'm sure they could, but are they directly responsible for drownings? No, this is too far.
Several European states have chosen to prosecute volunteers rescuing the drowning, so they've definitely taken on responsibility for making sure that they drown.
> This is a crazy take on responsibility. It isn't Europe's responsibility when people decide to take unsafe passage on the sea and drown. Could they do more? Yes, I'm sure they could, but are they directly responsible for drownings? No, this is too far.
"With great power comes great responsibility", a principle as old as civilized humanity. Germany alone is the fourth largest economy by BIP, and the entire EU as a whole the second largest.
We have the capacity to help the people fleeing from the bullshit that was mostly caused by us in the first place, we actually have the rights to asylum in our constitutions, but we're not doing anywhere near what we actually could do.
>Agreed, but realistically: for the near future there will be no legislative restriction in the US on harmful content. Congress is far too grid-locked for that, not to mention the question if meaningfully combatting hate speech and bullying can actually be done via laws or requires constitutional amendments - which are even more unrealistic.
Alternatively, such restrictions would just be unpopular, especially if they were seen as likely to be enforced in a way that lacks due process. Asking for powerful private companies to effectively restrict people's rights as an end-run for democracy and due process is rightfully unsettling.
Indeed. Plus these sites invariably come back online, it doesn't make a difference anyway. I just checked - The Daily Stormer and 8Chan are online today.
Why does it have to be a US legislative solution? Any country CloudFlare serves could come up with a harmful-content policy for issuing takedown orders; and CloudFlare would likely have to obey that takedown order globally (not just to that country’s view) in order to be in compliance, such that their only other option would be to remove their POPs from that country and block all clients from that country.
Cloudflare showed themselves to be profit-driven and irresponsible years ago when they said they could not and would not take down blatantly illegal sites they host / facilitate (I don't buy in to their bullshit attempts to redefine "host") [1].
I get that you shouldn't be able to contact them, or any other entity, and just make a claim to get a site taken down (look at abuses of the DMCA), but when the illegality is unquestionable, it's just a sign that Cloudflare clearly doesn't want to set any kind of precedent about doing the right thing.
What's unquestionably illegal, you ask, because you're about to tell me how much of a grey area that is? Bank of America phishing sites are unambiguously illegal. Any reasonable human would say that anyone pretending to be Bank of America to try to steal credentials has no place doing so, and that there's no reason to not take direct action.
Sites hosting Adobe Flash "updaters" are also unambiguously illegal.
The fact that Cloudflare says they can't take down sites like these because they're protecting "First Amendment rights" shows that they don't want to be bothered with abuse complaints and they care more about profit than anything else [2].
It's disingenuous at best and purely evil at worst. It's saying, "I have the tiniest thread of a reason to continue facilitating illegal behavior because who really knows who BoA are?"
They said the same about Adobe Flash "updater" sites that provide Trojan / virus downloads.
If that's not bad enough, they refused for many, many months to answer a question directly, without diversions. I asked them:
"When I send abuse complaints to abuse@cloudflare.com, I get a form response that implies, but does not clearly state that action will NOT be taken unless I also visit Cloudflare's web site and fill out an abuse form there. Is it true that no action will take place unless I also fill out that form?"
They refused to answer directly, instead constantly telling me that filling out the form helps them improve abuse handling, et cetera. They would not answer yes or no, even when asked directly to answer yes or no. Who does that except assholes?
The form, by the way, has all sorts of issues which makes using it arduous and time consuming, which is, I suspect, exactly what they want.
When people have an opportunity to communicate unambiguously yet choose to double down on being vague, they show themselves to be assholes who want to manipulate others. They did, after many months, finally answer my question and acknowledge that they don't process abuse complaints if the web form is not filled out, but this was only after months of repeatedly asking.
I get that some people use their products and want to assume the best about Cloudflare because they like the products, but any shitty company with shitty, profit driven people running it can still have good products. I encourage those who think Cloudflare is good because their products are good to consider the end result should Cloudflare get their way.
Imagine this: a majority of the world hosts using Cloudflare's DDoS protection. They all have Cloudflare in their WHOIS. Much of the world also use DNS-over-https in their browsers. Cloudflare becomes a monopoly and gladly continues to ignore court orders and legal subpoenas. Network admins can no longer control their own networks - they can't block exposure to malicious sites using DNS or by blocking networks, can't stop CaC access, can't stop exfiltration of data because everything is going to and coming from Cloudflare, legitimate and malicious.
Not only have they re-centralized the Internet and have become a big, glaring, single point of failure, but they've weakened our networks and taken control of them away from us. They're privy to every DNS lookup we make and every web site we visit. As an entity based in the United States, all of this data is almost certainly available to the United States' surveillance apparatuses.
[1] "hosting" is providing material services without which certain things on the Internet wouldn't function. Consider the fact that Clouflare wants to redefine "hosting" to mean directly hosting a web site (not DNS, not email, not proxy services), but hosting existed before the web existed.
[2] It doesn't matter if scammers use Cloudflare's free services; the motivation for profit means they want everyone to use them, good and bad, so people can't easily block the bad without blocking the good. Protecting scammers sets precedents that discourage people from trying to blame Cloudflare for facilitating and hosting. Also, they want and intend to be a monopoly, so enticing people using free services is still profit-based, for those who can't think that far ahead.
It's very telling that this post does not mention Cloudflare dropping switter, a social media site by and for sex workers which was, at the time, not violating any laws. They regret dropping self-described Nazis but not legal sex work? Cloudflare has an ideological agenda which they are masking behind supposed neutrality.
> It's very telling that this post does not mention Cloudflare dropping switter, a social media site by and for sex workers which was, at the time, not violating any laws.
Not true, it was dropped in response to SESTA being signed into law less than a week earlier which greatly expanded their legal liability.
I have been reading news but I am yet to see a law broken by the website, I've seen it claimed but yet to see anything conclusive. I thought asking someone making the claim might be able to provide some evidence. I guess not.
Cloudflare still fronts many sites that are most definitely violating SESTA, but presumably Cloudflare chooses to look the other way when they're taking money, or the CEO doesn't have a problem with the site.
Realistically they either don't know about what those sites do or their legal department updated their advice after reviewing SESTA and applicable case law.
It's worth noting, for people unaware, that there are no suicides associate with the KiwifFarms. There have been people with threads who kave killed themselves, unrelated to them having threads, and one person who poorly faked a suicide after failing to extort the KiwiFarms into removing his thread. The site is a gossip site, not some boogeyman Law&Order-esque cyberhateden dedicated to cyberbullying gay people to death. It's absurd seeing the caterwauling the site has generated--they don't even reach the level of paparazzi who really do stalk people. All the KiwiFarms does is collect information that was already publicly available.
This Kiwifarms website uploaded Keffals new address and pinned it to the site. Someone has already taken a picture of her apartment and has already been swatted.
This is a cycle. Some day, fascists will attack Cloudflare for protecting a site that hosts e.g. the home addresses of supreme court judges that ruled in favour of reducing civil liberties. Everyone criticising Cloudflare now had better remember it when the time comes and they realise that they don't actually care about frameworks and values, only about winning.
Really? Why is hosting the home addresses of supreme court judges (presumably relatively public information) because they rule against civil rights against their ToS, but not hosting the home addresses of the entire extended family of some random private person because they happen to be transgender?
wow, so many comments that leads nowhere (law/technical/etc)... what about a counterprotest? Like bigots voicing their opinions on a street corner would attract.
I assume everyone here have a VPN...
would be fun to post some trans positive messages on their rotten kiwi farm.
Well the actual reason is of course that the people involved with this movement do not want their threads read. It shines a light on everything shady, dishonest and bad they have done, social media influencers want to appear holy as a saint in front of their audience as it increases their influence, so telling your entire audience to engage with a thread that makes you look like a horrible person is a bad move.
It's interesting watching the responses roll in here. What CF is laying out here was essentially the standard viewpoint of western society until something like 10 years ago. "I disagree with what you say, but I'll protect your right to say it" is a basic tenant of liberalism. If you find that shocking, you should examine why that is.
No, just America, and even then the famous free speech has always had significant exceptions. Usually by the process of defining stuff as "not speech" or "obscene". Free speech surrounding sex is censored, most recently by FOSTA/SESTA.
The stable consensus also relied on mass media not being a complete free for all. The airwaves are censored by the FCC. There's a limited number of big producers who are vulnerable to political pressure, giving you things like MPAA censorship and the conflict with the RIAA over rap lyrics.
The phenomenon that you can say to a mass audience "this person is a degenerate, wouldn't it be great if someone harmed them" and sit back and wait for it to happen is genuinely different.
(Only the other day I found out about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corp._v._Industria... , in which for a period of about 20 years the Supreme Court held that films weren't free speech. Going back further you have to explain Comstock laws, and so on.)
Exactly this, for an example, consider Blackstone's ratio[0]:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
This was not some minority view among scholars and has been hugely influential on our (Western) legal systems for a long time (at least two centuries).
I don’t understand how this can be true and yet our legal system looks the way that it does now. And It used to be even more unfair.. Maybe it’s true for scholars but not elected officials?
So you agree that Cloudflare should be criminally liable for hosting extremist content? (yes, providing CDN service counts as hosting, as the content is stored on Cloudflare's servers)
"Protect your right to say it..." from _the government_. There has never been a reasonable expectation that private businesses are or should be required to allow all speech. Doing so prevents the business from exercising their own first amendment protections.
"There has never been a reasonable expectation that private businesses are or should be required to allow all speech. Doing so prevents the business from exercising their own freedom of speech protections."
it still holds. Freedom of speech does not mean that a company should be compelled or required to host speech it disagrees with.
Correct, yet for a particular category of companies providing foundation utility-like services, there's a well established tradition of taking a liberal/neutral stance.
This is the law but everyone is free to adhere to the principle of free speech themselves. If you need to be compelled to do it, you simply don't share the idea of free speech, which is regrettable.
I may be missing a trick here, but what - exactly - gives Cloudflare - a company that provides web services - the moral authority to flatly claim:
"that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."
... and use that as a defense for inaction?
It's like saying "Oh, well I can't give the poor money, they might spend it on drugs."
Since they claim that their own moral compass aligns with those asking them to fire a customer, what precedent - exactly - would be set? Are they relying upon the notion that the moral tides might sway, and that the vulnerable and marginalized communities might become those under fire next? Why- given their moral standing- would they be complicit?
This doesn't add up. It feels like they're only paying lip service to a corporate moral stance that lacks any real substance (if it exists at all), and requires that they do nothing in public that might upset their customers/shareholders. It's rote, corporate apolitical cowardice. Morals sacrificed upon the alter of profit.
In conclusion it seems to me that claiming to know better than the marginalized and vulnerable people clamoring for action is a really deeply condescending take. Coupled with the narcissism dripping from the fire service analogy this all serves to do them rather less justice than just... saying nothing, or sticking with "free speech absolutism".
And... that's quite a feat, for something that only really intended to say "Sowwy, taking too visible a political stance is bad for business but we pinky pwomise we're tooootally on your side."
What gives you or anyone else the moral authority to censor legal speech? I know doing so is a common fad in California/SV but it's doing tremendous harm to society already.
I fear the definition of legal speech on our respective countries differs too vastly for me to venture any reasonable answer to this.
I suspect our personal interpretations for what constitutes censorship might also. To lay out my position- I don't believe that a DDoS attack is a foregone conclusion if protections are removed, and I don't believe that a DDoS attack resembles censorship any more than a traffic jam resembles imprisonment. Which - I suppose - means I concede that it does, somewhat.
Inaction of what? They're saying they're not the opinion police.
Look at the list in the beginning of the article that has clear criminal violations, human rights violations, the like. They comply with take-downs in that domain, as they should and are legally required.
Yet they go on to mention that the vast majority of the complaints they get has nothing to do with those, rather they are take-down requests for things the reporter considered "offensive".
There's no right to not be offended. Further, the bar for "harm" is so low that it's on the ground. You can't let Twitter rage mobs on either side of politics decide on who gets to use internet infrastructure.
This stance to preserve the freedom of expression, opinion and even the right to insult is not apolitical. It's classic progressive liberalism, one of the pillars of our society.
I don't know. If I claimed to uphold the sacred tenets of free speech and expression I probably wouldn't want to be associated with a website that has a profound chilling effect on free speech and expression.
Is hate and ridicule expressed publically and unchallenged not just a DDoS against a group of people's right to expression?
When it's evident that some speech can quell other speech, which speech do we choose?
Cloudflare say "both" by taking money from the oppressor and giving it to the oppressed. I'd suggest this is- while something of a poetic justice- wholly insufficient and that Cloudflare should exercise the morals they claim to possess.
"Is hate and ridicule expressed publically and unchallenged not just a DDoS against a group of people's right to expression?"
The way I see it, the internet has enabled entirely new categories of negative behavior, using that term as a wide umbrella.
Half the things people say on Twitter, if you'd say them to someone's face in a bar, would make you wake up in the hospital. On the internet though, you can get away with it. Worse, you can organize a large amount of people to target an individual, organization, group of people, etc. This capability is near-impossible in the physical world.
These new ways are seized by hysterical activists on both extreme ends of the political spectrum and over time further normalized into the mainstream. These people feed on polarization and absolutely cannot be trusted to have the power to shut down infrastructure.
Large corporations policing free speech is a horrible trend that often enough goes absolutely wrong and the only way to prevent censoring content inappropriately is to not censor anything at all. There are laws and courts that judge over what content should stay online and it should stay their responsibility. If we give that up, we replace democracy with a technocracy, that already showed us plenty of times is not something we want. If it means that a website like Kiwi farms has to stay up, then that's what it takes. A twitter mob should never have the power to take any website offline. I doubt anyone in their right mind would lay their trust into every Twitter mob. It's just luck that this mob is in line with your opinions, but others might not.
> This is not a free speech issue. Please be precise with your terminology.
Let me take a stab in the dark: you think "free speech" refers only to the United States' First Amendment, and not a universal principle, which:
* according to Wikipedia, is "a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction"
* or, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is the "freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
That's not true. The concept of free speech, and what is specifically allowed and disallowed by the First Amendment of the USA, are two different things. Not least which is that the latter applies to a small fraction of the world's population.
Censorship of ideas by a private company is not a first amendment issue. It is a free speech issue.
And let me get you out the way so gp doesn't get sidetracked. Nobody needs pedantry when the subject under discussion is existentially important, and every normal person already knows what the problem is.
Firstly, this is not existentially important aside for the people whose lives are ruined (and will continue to be ruined) by Kiwi Farms. Secondly, "every normal person already knows..." doesn't mean anything, because (a) you don't get to declare what normal is, and (b) you don't know that.
It is a free speech issue. It is not a First Amendment (or equivalent in non-US jurisdictions) issue. Legal provisions that protect speech from government interference provide a minimum level of free expression; in a health society private citizens and organizations will generally go above and beyond that minimum.
Just a reminder that (lowercase) "free speech" always has a giant fucking asterisk after it. It has never been, and will never be, absolute.
"Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Additionally, private companies can always throw you off their platform for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service.
As another commenter already pointed out, you’re treating first amendment and free speech as synonymous. If you request that others be precise with their language you should too.
This could be a free speech issue although not a first amendment issue. America does have a constitutional protection for citizens from their government in terms of free speech but we also place cultural value to it and laws that codify or restrict certain speech.
1. KiwiFarms was explicitly created for essentially that purpose
2. It's far more extreme. Part of the reason it exists is because people on these larger sites (notably, 2000s-era SomethingAwful) were getting progressively more concerned and uncomfortable with the behavior. Sure, it's a concern in other places, but there are checks there. KiwiFarms has none of those checks because the behavior is the intended use of the site.
So, sure, you could go after some of these other places, but KF sounds like a very good starting point.
Twitter mobs can drive people to get fired, websites or companies to shut down... But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.
People are worried more about ending a website than they are worried about ending actual lives.
>But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.
Are you actually implying that Twitter mobs haven't done all of these things too? This is obviously wrong.
So we should keep up Kiwifarms because something similar has happened on Twitter? Is that the logic? Instead of removing one of the evils let's keep them both up because fairness or something like that?
> to characterize a platform as broadly evil based on its worst users.
It's literally the purpose of KiwiFarms. It's all their users. Any forum board not dedicated to "lolcows" (what they call the people the harass, because they can be "milked for laughs") is in the off-topic section.
I don't think you're aware of what KF is. It's not just a free-form social platform like Twitter. It's specifically for documenting, and scheming to harass lolcows.
> Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.
> 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.
> archive.ph links don't work for me for some reason, so I can't see if there's any evidence in there.
Alright, so you're ignoring the bulk of the evidence. Site works on my machine.
>I have seen some screenshots claiming to show underage people talking sexually in the Catboy Ranch server, and it's been confirmed that those screenshots are not actually from the server.
Says who? By the way, Keffal's hard drive was confiscated in the Canadian police raid. It was immediately after they took this drive that Keffals fled the country.
>Keffals shares information on informed consent clinics and safe sources of HRT supplies. This is not illegal.
They specifically encourage minors to buy blockers, hormones, and needles online with Bitcoin from sketchy labs, and to self-dose behind the backs of their parents and doctors. Keffals' close friend Bobposting, who together with Keffals runs the "DIY HRT directory," has bragged about sending minors controlled substances via the mail; this is expressely illegal. See link in my parent post for details.
>The money is going to be used to sue the police department that swatted her. Suing a police department is very, very expensive.
I look forward to news of this nonexistent lawsuit. The police chief in question has made strong public statements about officers' videotaped conduct.
>Call it a false flag if you like, but I'll trust Occam's Razor on this one.
Occam's Razor means something different for people like Keffals who have a history of lying, theft, manipulation, and doxing and harassment of others.
Thanks for being a voice of reason on this issue. I'm also not a Kiwifarms user, but I've been following this via feminist Twitter accounts and the thread on that forum.
Though, I can't say I'm particularly astounded that he's getting away with this and grifting the heck out of his supporters. Seems commonplace for people to excuse this sort of behavior these days. Safeguarding has been all but obliterated in the past few years.
They are not a utility, owned by the public, volunteer-led, a nonprofit, or are anywhere close in relation to the wonderful services of a fire department.
This is a company that is harboring and upholding the very act of terrorism and violence being sickened on a population.
They are upholding fascist hatred, and so are you if you aren't seeing that.
Every individual in a society is "enforcer of public morality". Corporations are just different to regular people in that they wield a disproportionate amount of power and capital.
If you want to abolish the system allowing corporations levels of power effectively equivalent to public utilities and branches of government, we can have that conversation. But if you want to continue them to have that and are still outraged about their decisions it's not because of a principled stance about them being "enforcers of public morality", you just disagree with their morality.
As we see with Facebook getting pressured by the FBI to preemptively censor information before evening finding out if it's misinformation or not (or even coming from Russia or not). They were basically trusting the FBI to have people's best interests at heart and letting the details work itself out later.
All of these attempts at moderating the internet always get misused, the scope forever expands, and usually does little IRL to stop ideas from spreading (even the FBI example resulted in a massive Streisand effect, because censorship immediately makes people pay attention).
Trusting billion dollar tech companies with this responsibility should be treated like crazy-talk. Even stuff like transparency on motives, transparency on algorithm changes, processes for challenging it, etc etc, are usually not part of the deal.
The intolerant minority bandwagon expecting big companies to take political stance to progress further their agendas, provokes me a utter sense of disgust. Democratically elected governments and regulators decide what should be censored. Not the loudest person in the room
>For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them.
I find this section peculiar. Why does the company have "values"? I though companies were supposed to be looking after the intrests of their shareholders, i.e., profit. Do the shareholders consent to the lost profit being donated to political motives? This broader trend of companies becoming political organizations is terrible, frankly.
But even with that said, I find their stance in the article to be hopeful, and sincerely wish that they stay true to their words in this paragraph.
>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.