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Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

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Re: Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

#14
No one can speak up, your identity is not the reason for backlash, people use identity as the first attack vector or reason to dismiss an opinion that they don't like.

Social media is broken - having a fight on the street has real world consequences, having a fight online has none. Many people use fighting online to a proxy to assert their status they can't achieve in the real world.

That being said, Free speech and other base rights like privacy, association are activity being reduced in most countries. Take free speech for example once you remove actually hateful people you encounter less of those people, so the extreme things you do see become the new vile, and so on until no one can speak without being labeled some proxy for a reason you should not listen to them.

While I have no idea what kiwifarm or whatever is, blocking those already loney people is just going to make them express themselves through violence.

Book burning is now commonly practised, the books of today just look different. They are videos hosted online.

Re: Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

#15
During the Second World War, the Allies raced to create the atomic bomb to defeat the Nazis and the Axis powers that stood by them. After all, who would be against destroying Nazis? After the war, though, the secret of atomic weapons was known and more and more states became able to create them, leaving the world in danger of annihilation.

While I agree with what has been said about the vileness of Kiwifarms, you who now celebrate a way to suppress speech you disagree with seem to somehow fail to understand that you are falling into the same trap. Now that it is accepted that "corporations do not have to serve customers they don't want to", the wealthy and the politically powerful will seek to take advantage of the loophole and they have persistence, time horizon, and clout to make it happen. Who is to say that Cloudflare and the other tech companies will be owned by people aligned with your interests fifty or one hundred years from now? And when they get that control, it will be your websites that will go dark, your beliefs declared "inappropriate", your adherents who are denied service.

Remember, when you build a muzzle, it fits on anyone, even you who created it. When the muzzle slips over your face, what will you say then in repentance to those of us who tried to warn you?

Re: Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

#16
I completely agree with you on this. It's wild how many posts go grey on here that call kiwifarms exactly what they are, a site whose purpose is harassment. Coordinated harassment. Off site harassment. They have people who aren't completely stupid who coordinate things less directly on the site but off the site just for situations like this where they could be like look nothing bad's happening on our website why are you mad at our website... But the freaking nerds here in hacker News are like oh no free speech! What the! I don't know who to trust here anymore I don't know who to take seriously and I don't know who is acting in bad faith or who actually can't read in between the lines... It's wild.

You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media...

They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.

Re: Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

#17
post #5

Incitement is already illegal. SWATing and making true threats are also illegal. What we need is not nuking entire websites from orbit because they have bad actors, but actually upholding the law via law enforcement. Private corporations should not be the arbiters of online speech. Freedom of speech is also our freedom to read or freedom to hear. When tech giants delete entire websites from the internet, we've all lo…

This is my opinion, through and through. Regardless of your views on regulating companies (breaking up cloudflare because it's too important vs not doing that), I believe we can mostly agree that companies should not be making moral decisions on what content we should access.

Moral decisions are a two-edged sword: we may all agree kiwifarms is bad and should be blocked because we agree trans people have a right to live without harassment; and if Cloudflare agrees with us, they'll block kiwifarms and we'll rejoice. But what if Cloudflare had a different value set from ours? What if they decided to block all pro-abortion-rights websites? They would, after all, be within their right.

It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened?

Re: Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

#19
> What's the precedence set by continuing to do business with kiwifarms?

Continuing to do business with Kiwifarms is an acknowledgement that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and any illegal activity such as swatting is the fault of the individual.

Are Mark Zuckerberg and Meta responsible when people livestream murders or plan terrorist attacks using Facebook? Obviously no.

Now I will acknowledge that there's some dispute over Kiwifarm's actual role in any illegal activity here. Did they encourage or organize criminal activity? As somebody who hasn't followed this drama from the beginning and who doesn't know what actually happened on Kiwifarms, I'd be a bit interested to try and read the source to try and somewhat figure out the truth of what happened for myself free of bias about who did what to who. Unfortunately, after shutting the site down, it's now impossible to get an objective answer after the fact and piece together the truth about this drama for myself. And trusting corporate claims or biased actors on any side of this story is just about impossible in today's hyper-politicized world.

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