Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service • Hacker News Board

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#121

Post by Beltalowda » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

Borgz wrote: post #82

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's coherent. Twitter for example has been the host of many many harassment campaigns which are propped up by its algorithms, it also hosts videos of murder, decapitations and other gruesome crimes. There are also regular death threats, doxxings and hate speech on twitter which are tolerated. Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illega…

Do you believe that KiwiFarms is making a good faith effort to remove objectionable content to the same extent that mainstream social media platforms are? I think it's pretty clear that they're not, simply based on the prevalence of that content on KiwiFarms, and the relative lack of it elsewhere.

I don't think Twitter makes much of an effort; some of my reports on clear-cut cases like "shame if his face would be smashed in with a brick wink-emoji wink-emoji" have been rejected as they are, apparently, not promoting violence.

I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#122

Post by philliphaydon » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

r721 wrote: post #89

philliphaydon wrote: post #14

Wonder how long it will be before it’s back online or if the owner will throw in the towel.

Further in the OP thread there is a screenshot of owner's statement: https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566746606396997635 He says he has a "family emergency" and will be unavailable for a "week or more".

Guess he’s taking time to reflect if it’s worth the effort. Hopefully it’s the end of kiwi farms.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#123

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

Borgz wrote: post #32

tomohawk wrote: post #23

Quoted post unavailable.

Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. Until then, it doesn't seem likely.

Reminder: a 13 year old minor survivor begged Twitter to remove a video sexually exploiting him.

Twitter reviewed the content and said NO.

They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time.

The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#124

Post by TechBro8615 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

dmitri_ignat wrote: post #20

schleck8 wrote: post #10

They host (or shield) a bunch of high-profile piracy sites (the largest repacker for example) and hosted Parler after it was kicked from AWS. I've never heard of anyone being suspended by DG. Great achievement, that surely wasn't easy.

It's rare, but it has happened before. 8chan/8kun and Hamas managed to get suspended by DG.

That’s more action than Twitter has taken against the Taliban accounts active on Twitter. They even issued a statement [0] about it, months after banning the President of the United States:

> Twitter gave the Taliban a green light to keep tweeting while noting the social media site would “continue to proactively enforce” its rules on the “glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam.”

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma...

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#125

Post by rep_lodsb » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #50

oneplane wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The word "Nazi" seems to have expanded in meaning a lot recently, not sure the 1940s Germans would recognize these people as Nazis.

Twitter users are conducting a special military operation to denazify the Internet.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#126

Post by concordDance » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #92

nemo44x wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is hate speech? Was Charlie Hebdo hate speech? Rushdie? A lot of people certainly think so. I see hate speech across nearly every internet platform including this one. There’s no shortage of hate speech against wealthy people or white men, etc. Is that allowed?

I'm not here to define hate speech, and I think that you'd agree that HN was not designed to encourage and promote hate speech. You absolutely can not say the same thing of Kiwifarms. Let's not be deliberately obtuse here.

Depends on what you mean by "hate speech". It's a literally Orwellian term designed to be bad but not specific.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#127

Post by flumpcakes » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

washadjeffmad wrote: post #113

flumpcakes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone. It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people. Is…

Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group. Does it make a difference to you whether it's happen…

Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"?

If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.

I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact.

There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?).

If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#128

Post by concordDance » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

arcatech wrote: post #112

nemo44x wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean? That the forum operator doesn’t have moderation facilities that suits your tastes in what is and is not hate speech? A forum dedicated to the principal and culture of free speech is designed to promote hate speech?

Hate speech is clearly defined in various laws against the concept. So it’s not really up to taste. Most popular services attempt to remove hate speech, but doesn’t look like KF does. Btw, a forum dedicated to the principle and culture of free speech would absolutely (by definition) be promoting/hosting hate speech.

Most laws on hate speech don't use the term hate speech.

What is your personal understanding of the term?

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#129

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

Borgz wrote: post #66

concordDance wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.

Yes, I've looked at the site quite a few times over the past few years. Even if you can't find people explicitly organizing there, you do see their effects across the internet in the form of off-site harrassment campaigns, generally of internet personalities, that seemingly come out of nowhere.

[deleted]

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#130

Post by Bakary » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

armitron wrote: post #84

that_guy_iain wrote: post #45

The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and…

It's not hard to feel bad for anyone getting censored/booted off the Internet. I see that "Gossithedog" lives in England, which - I reckon - makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right (a list that doesn't include England). We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to…

I often hear this argument, but the US is currently on a much clearer trajectory towards increased authoritarianism than most EU countries/CANZUK despite all of this freedom. The situation is more complicated than just straightforward definitions of what freedom is. What really matters is not edge cases where some forum or other is banned, but whether your society is populated with authoritarian ideologies and to what extent these ideologies are present in the institutions.

It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.