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Blocking Kiwifarms

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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#901

Post by jeroenhd »

TomSwirly wrote: post #895
Slighted wrote: post #892

Not surprising at all that Cloudflare went through with its plan to terminate its contract with Kiwifarms. Reddit had the exact same process happen back in 2021 with r/NoNewNormal. People cried and whined on the site for the subreddit to be banned, Spez wrote an official post defending the subreddits existence by pointing out its freedom of speech, and not long after crumbled and banned the subreddit (And still banne…

Kiwi Farms was literally and deliberately driving people to suicide. Your argument appears to be this: "Private companies should be forced by the government to host any content, no matter how horrifying and evil it is." Your argument is morally horrifying, and legally indefensible.

The argument is that companies aren't police. Companies, especially infrastructure companies, should not have a personal view of things like these.

What Kiwifarms is doing is either illegal already or should be made illegal. Law enforcement should be the one deplatforming them and taking action against the human drivel that drives people to suicide, it shouldn't be an ISP deciding what is or isn't acceptable.

ISPs should not be filtering out LGBT+ content even if that content is considered undesirable by the general population and that argument goes both ways. With the way things are turning in large areas of the USA, I expect state-wide LGBT+ content bans to be up for debate in less than five or ten years, despite the USA's extremely liberal free speech laws. I think most of us here agree that such bans should not happen and ISPs should be dumb pipes in terms of content selection.

However, if this holds for your Verizons and Amazons, it should probably also hold for DDoS-protection platforms like Cloudflare. Cloudflare is setting out to be in a similar position to your ISP, a piece of infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks rather than a hosting company where you put your content. I think there's a perfectly fair argument to be made that net neutrality should also apply to companies like Cloudflare, especially in a position of this much power. A company should be able to host anything that's not illegal if it chooses to be infrastructure rather than a hosting provider.

In practice, law enforcement doesn't really give a damn about sites like these unless a big story hits the news. The lack of regulation and enforcement is the problem and the burden of combating these societal problems is shifting from the police to companies. Rather than forcing companies to decide what is or isn't right, concrete steps should be taken by the people that are supposed to protect and serve our communities.

What is happening to Kiwifarms will soon be happen to content other people get mad about; be it reproductive rights, gay marriage, or any other civil liberty at risk because of conservative outrage.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#902

Post by OrangeMonkey »

vintermann wrote: post #854
ok123456 wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not a law enforcement organization. You don't have the ability to investigate and determine whether or not the threat is genuine or if it's an agent provocateur. Banning them creates a hazard, since now to get an opponent banned from the service, they can create content that reaches to this level. It's a Layer 8 DDOS.

What I don't get is how online forums with free registration have been a thing for WELL over 30 years now, yet some people think that the possibility that people make accounts to deliberately post things to get the forum sanctioned is still viewed as some insane conspiracy theory - and you a monster, if you suggest the good guys would ever do such a thing "to themselves".

You are in a thread where most folks are celebrating convincing a fire dept to stop protecting a house (while holding matches behind their back).

Everyone knows what you are saying is possible but nooone will admit it.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#903

Post by pid-1 »

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…

Another often (purposely?) forgotten freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#904

Post by Slighted »

TomSwirly wrote: post #895
Slighted wrote: post #892

Not surprising at all that Cloudflare went through with its plan to terminate its contract with Kiwifarms. Reddit had the exact same process happen back in 2021 with r/NoNewNormal. People cried and whined on the site for the subreddit to be banned, Spez wrote an official post defending the subreddits existence by pointing out its freedom of speech, and not long after crumbled and banned the subreddit (And still banne…

Kiwi Farms was literally and deliberately driving people to suicide. Your argument appears to be this: "Private companies should be forced by the government to host any content, no matter how horrifying and evil it is." Your argument is morally horrifying, and legally indefensible.

The benefits of Kiwifarms existence outweigh its cons, and I say this as someone who greatly dislikes the site after having used it for an extended amount of time. The site has and still discovers, documents, and reports criminal and disgusting activity, from bestiality to the grooming of children online by extremely predatory, mentally ill individuals, and it provides a platform for uncensored speech as well as the dissemination of media that had and continues to be censored on mainstream websites.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#905

Post by jeroenhd »

unknownaccount wrote: post #744

I find it utterly bizarre that CloudFlare considers itself some paragon of free speech whilst they have been caught red handed arbitrarily shutting peoples domain names down in their registrar service, even going so far as to prevent people from transfering their domains to other registers and accelerating domain expiry dates. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353

There's a difference in that the termination procedure this thread and the one its derived from talks about is about fraud, which is defined by law and prosecuted, rather than an opinion. When you learn about fraudsters using your service you can either GTFO as soon as possible or get involved with the police unless you want to risk criminal liability for being complicit.

Make whatever Kiwifarms does illegal and Cloudflare will probably drop them through their magical detection algorithms alone.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#906

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I don’t necessarily disagree, but what does banning them from Cloudflare achieve?

Is it just that the company feels unconfortable providing them any kind of service given the nature of the currently posted content?

Because banning them should have no effect on their ability to generate/serve that content, maybe make it a bit more expensive (though I see that their site is still blocked, so maybe immediately disabling Cloudflare isn’t an option for them either)

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#907

Post by lettergram »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #480
lettergram wrote: post #366

> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site. I’m sorry, but what? Few thoughts: 1. Cou…

> That is imo a breach of contract Point me to the breach you believe exists. > You’re hijacking their website and saying “read our content” instead. They have their domain pointed to their servers. As soon as HateFarms points their DNS elsewhere people will no longer get that message.

TOS:

“We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.”

It’s clear they can cancel service; it’s not clear from the cloudflare TOS they can redirect you to their own content.

That doesn’t mean a judge would necessarily rule in kiwifarms favor or anything, but it seems obvious to me litigation could work sue to ambiguity.

Further, cloudflare could open itself to a lawsuit from police. If they already notified law enforcement then they are probably interfering in an investigation by letting the world know AND shutting down the source of said investigation.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#908

Post by troon-lover »

pid-1 wrote: post #903
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…

Another often (purposely?) forgotten freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association

No post body was provided.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#909

Post by scotty79 »

Thank you Cloudflare for introducing me to this corner of the internet I was blissfully unaware of despite living half of my life on the internet for the last decade.

There's no such thing as bad publicity.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#910

Post by jackmott »

altcognito wrote: post #140
ffwszgf wrote: post #53

Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it. The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it…

> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person. They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence. Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invite…

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