201–210 of 1001 posts
I am a free speech absolutist, but I read the Wikipedia page on this site and it seems bad. "Crimes were committed," "People lost their lives" bad. Unjustifiably bad. That said, is anyone willing to steelman this website? Could this possibly be construed as just a big misunderstanding?
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem. Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current lands…
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here 100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting,…
Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem. Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current lands…
I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
Seems to me it would be better for Cloudflare to keep serving Kiwifarms, and cooperate with government requests for access logs / etc. Then at least our law enforcement would have data to help with finding threat actors.
> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
> Legal process > While law enforcement in these areas are working to investigate what we and others reported, unfortunately the process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk
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How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please. They are drawing the line at imminent threats to human life. The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem. Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current lands…
Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks.
Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks.
Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem. Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current lands…
It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.