Targeted harassment for the purpose of getting people to kill themselves is illegal. People have gone to jail for less than what KF gloats about. All the free speach absolutists crying about "censorship" just shows how ridiculous their ideology is. Instead of whining about cloudflare they should be looking for lawyers.
Blocking Kiwifarms
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#442There 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…
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities
I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?
My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:
- morally obligated to host without question.
- will get you hauled in front of a judge.
The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.
But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.
I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.
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> Given that they should never be in this position
I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?
I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.
More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"
Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.
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> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".
This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic.
A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site.
Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me.
It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#443Never heard of kiwifarms before but after having a quick read on it, I don't see any reasons why any provider of any sorts would deal with them. Not sure how screwed up in their heads people need to be to engage in this kind of shit.
But why now? The site has been known for years.
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#444The admin of kiwifarms has posted the following in response: >I am so full of hate for this situation. I try to write down my thoughts and I find myself unable to focus on one thing I hate the most. The person committing crimes to frame my community, or the sex pest who groom little boys, or the journalists who outright lie, or the corporate cowardice responsibility for the fragile state of the Internet. >It is all s…
Says the man who told the NZ police that their country is a shit hole because they asked him for details about the Christchurch terrorist, and he confirmed the he reposted the video and the "manifesto" of the terrorist.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/owner-of-christchurch-s...
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#445Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…
Turns out there's no such thing as neutrality. Connecting content to the world is a choice your team approves or declines. You can complain about scalability of that decision all you want. Cloudflare is not neutral, and will never be. You're an active participant and you have to deal with your responsibility.
Yes. Also gray areas do exist. This isn't one of them.
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#446Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…
What threat exactly? How do we know it wasn't a false flag by someone wanting to take the site offline?
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#447Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…
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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#448I don't get it, Cloudflare is not the court, nor is it a monopoly. It's not some tragic Greek hero holding the line for freedom of speech. It's just a business, and business can decide to not provide service to assholes, just like your local restaurant. It already decided it won't provide hosting service to the despicables, but somehow the security service is vital to freedom of speech? I don't buy it. It's all about…
The other agenda is also pleasing shareholders and ensuring PR / damage control is mitigated at all costs.
Their stock price has been falling since Thursday after all.
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#449Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…
> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat If one patron starts beating another to a pulp, the bartender breaking up the fight does not signify a failure of the rule of law or law enforcement. You stepped in to help. It would be nice if you were given official air cover to do so. But I and most Americans prefer a system where the gover…
Nice metaphor - were the digital offenses becoming actual acts of violence in person?
Re: Blocking Kiwifarms
#450Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…
So then why did you become the liability decision maker on behalf of your customer, if you were not required by the law?
After many sales emails that we ignored, your sales guy found and called me on my personal cell when I was on vacations in Mexico City, trying to push a 5000/mo DDoS mitigation contract, and i explained to him that we are happier paying 100k/year to a net neutral company VeriSign (now down to 27k), than offloading the legal liability decisions on our behalf to your Majesty Matthew Prince.
While it makes sense to use CF for a booter DDoS-for-hire outfit accepting Monero, any legitimate company that has real money and jobs at stake should not use CF.