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Blocking Kiwifarms

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#571

I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now . It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right? Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to…

There are two parts of the issue at hand:

1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;

2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.

However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.

Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if my understanding is wrong, but if someone were to host a message board or similar site with UGC and have it backed by Cloudflare, and a troll makes posts and threads threatening disasters on multiple occasions even though the site's administration removes them with haste, would Cloudflare also deny service to them? Basically take the current situation but instead of Kiwi Farms, replace it with "Grandma'…

This is exactly the determination. The post being spread around as evidence of harm was by a user with four posts, all within the last week, all on this thread, despite being a member for two years. If I were trying to get a website deplatformed at least the approach is clear and easy.

It is far more than just a few posts. It goes far beyond speech online.

The entire history/founding of KF is predicated around violence perpetrated against trans people.

They actively stock, harass, and cause harm IRL. Even far-right anti-trans people like MTG allege they were behind the SWATs against her - and that is not the first accusation.

This has resulted in deaths.

They recently followed a women into a different country, after they chased her from their home.

They tracker her down and someone posted a photo outside of her new residence.

like a cartel hostage sign. A not so implicit threat that they can find you no matter where you hide and are an IRL person is literally a hundred feet away.

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369... https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman...

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#574

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'…

So you admit you had support. What about the people who don't?

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#575

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…

"Our decision..." who are you?

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#576
post #530

It always starts as a one off, "this was a special circumstance" type thing. I feel like I've read this post thousand times before at this point. I remember when it "just Alex Jones" getting deplatformed from social media. And it had to be done - he was just too dangerous! But then it expanded to a few more people, and from there a few more. And within the span of just a few years Twitter had gone from Alex Jones to…

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#577

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…

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#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 concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.

(https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...)

Edit: And to be fair, they do link to that post: "As we outlined last Wednesday, we do not believe that terminating security services is appropriate, even to revolting content.", "The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy." - did I miss the part of that post where they tack on "well, except for the times when it's really bad"? I went and skimmed over it just now to see if they left themselves a loophole that they're using today and I'm not seeing it.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#579
post #530

It always starts as a one off, "this was a special circumstance" type thing. I feel like I've read this post thousand times before at this point. I remember when it "just Alex Jones" getting deplatformed from social media. And it had to be done - he was just too dangerous! But then it expanded to a few more people, and from there a few more. And within the span of just a few years Twitter had gone from Alex Jones to…

There's always tor and other networks.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#580
post #575

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…

"Our decision..." who are you?

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