Blocking Kiwifarms

Cloudflare would do better to simply stop making posts every time they do something. Every other company bans users every day and have learned to stop talking about it. Or the inverse. Regardless of what cloudflare does, right or wrong, there will be mobs of people responding negatively and positively to it. People love drama.

If their policy was "we'll ban anyone we want for whatever reason." I'd respect that more because that's the truth.

Further troubling is how this is over what they believe to be illigal conduct. It may very well be, but now they're creating a precedent that they are capable of detecting and stopping it themselves outside the justice system.

This also doesn't stop kiwifarms or it's organizers. If there's illigal conduct, or even civil discovery, CF has to give up those details. All stopping Ddos support does is allows kiwifarms to receive Ddos.

No doubt they'll eventually take to tor and that doesn't have a good physical address to serve warrants to.

Surprised at the number of people on here arguing against this because of 'censorship' who by their own words pretty clearly frequent the site...

But it should do something about how 2-3 giant corporations have become effective arbiters of online speech.

>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.

When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.

When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.

When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.