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Blocking Kiwifarms

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#661

Post by andywood »

initplus wrote: post #455
eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading 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…

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides. When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they eng…

He's been taken to court around 7 times. It's almost as if he didn't break the law, and people just think he must of because it be so nasty!

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#662

Post by carso »

mjr00 wrote: post #173
Icathian wrote: post #40

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,…

There were no good choices because they didn't think through their ethics in advance -- even given their history with other sites like Daily Stormer... They decided they were "just" an economic entity, not a moral one. Unethical use of the services was something that tainted the buyer, but not the seller, and besides, should they really take on the obligation to think about such difficult non-technical things when that could be pawned off on lawyers or politicians or something?

The moral actors in their vision of the world are the "end users" -- the specific individuals using a platform for morally questionable purposes -- and the "government/legal system" which should be doing more to stop them from doing so. Platforms are these magical things that only have technical, legal, and financial obligations, not moral or ethical ones.

I personally don't agree with that view. Any large company doing business faces various ethical challenges. Failure to grapple with them in a serious way means Cloudflare's ethical challenges lead to 'one off' band-aid solutions rather than building a platform upon which to build to handle future difficult decisions.

This is over until the next one, and nothing obvious was learned.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#663

Post by josephcsible »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #257
Icathian wrote: post #40

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…

This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters. The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists. The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhi…

Should we ban Signal if people use it to coordinate acts of terrorism?

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#664

Post by [deleted] »

xupybd wrote: post #519
notatoad wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>rather than free speech i encourage anybody who is calls themselves a "free speech advocate" to consider what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech". their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is. if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been…

Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#665

Post by lanstin »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #578

> This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with. "We'll keep doing it of course, even after we said we wouldn't do it any more." After all, it's been all of 3 days since they wrote, > Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have conclud…

If you take your phone line and start making a lot of harassing calls with that phone, they will cut you off and tell the police. It does not seem that KF posters wanted the speech there to stay private.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#666

Post by voidpointercast »

croes wrote: post #526
worldofmatthew wrote: post #154

Cloudflare bans websites for unproven claims but is perfectly happy to provide protection for ddos-for-hire websites that so happen to help their bottom line by generating a reason for people to use DDOS protection for which Cloudflare is one of very few options that does not have a fixed limit. Cloudflare has to be in bed with the US government, otherwise it would have been shutdown for ignoring illegal activity (dd…

Kiwifarms and unproven claims? I don't think so

No post body was provided.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#667

Post by andywood »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #499
initplus wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides. When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they eng…

> and is responsible for multiple suicides. I've suffered some cases of extreme, acute depression in my life, and I was lucky that I had some support that prevented my depression from killing me. That said, I'm really uncomfortable with the language that somebody else can be, as you put it, "responsible" for someone's suicide. One of the things that is really driven home in therapy for depression (that is, after you'…

Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#668

Post by initplus »

Cyberdog wrote: post #540
initplus wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides. When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they eng…

Perhaps the reason that they haven't been taken down by the US legal system is because none of what they do is illegal by US law.

Yes, that is the problem that I was describing.

Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#669

Post by systemvoltage »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #486

I think a lot of people in the comments don't understand what Kiwifarms is. I say this as someone who occasionally browses there and gets some (admittedly sick) enjoyment from it: the main draw of the website is a place for people to get together and bully mentally ill "weirdos". It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, i…

Is it like libsoftiktok?

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#670

Post by pornel »

BrainVirus wrote: post #569
eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading 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…

Unelected technocrats taking the law into their own hands and using arbitrary judgment calls to manipulate infrastructure is not an improvement on the current legal system. Especially when they are making promises they don't keep and when they then try to gaslight people into thinking this has nothing to do with external political pressure.

The law is on Cloudflare's side. It's a private company free to choose who they do business with.

If you would like Cloudflare to be legally obliged to act like a utility or public infrastructure, lobby for actual laws to regulate it.

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