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> ...we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our s
by a_shovel 4y ago
> ...we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them.
I'm sure their LGBTQ+ employees will appreciate that when they get doxxed, swatted, and harassed every hour of the day and night because they're providing critical resources to the groups doing so.
Their position probably really does come from genuine belief in principles of anti-censorship and free speech, but the version that LGBTQ+ people are gonna hear from them is that every death threat, every picture of them taken without their knowledge, every coordinated campaign of harassment, every SWAT officer pointing a gun at their face when they wake up, every suicide after years of abuse, has the full backing and support of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and there's nothing they can do about it. And they're kinda right.
- shrubble 4y agoSo, you have at least one example of this scenario (gay Cloudflare employee gets doxxed and harassed) ready to tell us about, right?
- chc 4y agoI can provide lots of examples of Kiwi Farms doxxing and harassing queer people. Whether they happen to work for Cloudflare at the time is a matter of chance, and not particularly relevant to the point.
- Bigpet 4y agoSwatting people is illegal, if you have evidence of a crime you should bring it to the police, not to cloudflare.
- sascha_sl 4y agoOh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.
- Bigpet 4y agoThen charge them with racketeering. If that doesn't work make the part you don't like illegal. Enshrine something like the "right to be forgotten" stuff into law and make them take down threads if the people they refer to don't want them up. I know it's hard to word something like a "right to be forgotten" without making it to broad and a tool for abuse of chilling speech but it seems worth the effort if the consequences are this dire.
- sascha_sl 4y agoI already live in an EU country - as do many of the people with threads on KF. I don't even have the minuscule amount of control voters in the US would have over this, and Cloudflare only cares about US legislation (as with the anti sex work legislation in the article). If you would stop derailing the conversation with unfeasible solutions.
- dmatech 4y agoA "right to be forgotten" is probably fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment in the USA. While people have the right to their own identity, they do not have the right to absolute control over their reputations. The best they can do is sue when they are defamed.
- sascha_sl 4y agoMaking defamation lawsuits less inaccessible to a significantly poorer party would be a start.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIn America defamation lawsuits are hard because of the First Amendment, not just because lawsuits are expensive. Even if you make defamation lawsuits cheap and accessible, it will still be an uphill battle if you're trying to sue somebody telling unsavory truths about you.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
- sascha_sl 4y agoI haven't checked, but I expect the chilling effect is getting most of them to not rock the boat too hard. If you want an example for such targeting though, Liz Fong-Jones has a thread on Kiwifarms because she's outspoken and worked at Google (and thus being seen as more influential / more of a threat). The thread has also significantly slowed down after she left Google.
- ta1235414335 4y ago[flagged]
- splitrocket 4y agoWe will soon enough, now that cloudflare has published this.
- sascha_sl 4y agoAnd all that while the company refuses to acknowledge that it is full backing. Cloudflare loves to call back on the law when defending Kiwifarms, but then equate themselves to a public utility. If the law intended for it, DDoS protection would be a public utility or at least a protected class of service that can't refuse customers. And if you say that it should be and the law is just lagging behind (and I'd tend to agree with you), I can say the same thing about the technical legality of a website that enabled and (indirectly) incentives doxing, harassment or even swatting (except on Kiwifarms, people might technically have a case for defamation, but good luck getting that prosecuted).
- cowtools 4y agoThe law describes DDoS attacks as a felony. The technology makes it such that it's infeasable to prevent DDoS attacks without a centralized entity like cloudflare.
- sascha_sl 4y agoBut that still doesn't make Cloudflare the fire brigade. It is still their policy decision to value the freedom of speech of Kiwifarms more than the safety of those KF target, no matter how much they try to pretend they have an obligation to protect everyone that asks for it and are thus not at all partially responsible for enabling harassment - to the point of suicide in at least 3 cases. They don't have to protect them. That responsibility would be with lawmakers and the executive branch. Just as it would be their responsibility to enable feasible prosecution of defamation on the site. They don't do either.
- nervlord 4y ago
- Dylan16807 4y ago> But that still doesn't make Cloudflare the fire brigade. Why not? That particular service seems a lot like a volunteer fire brigade.
- devwastaken 4y agoAnd when that happens, Cloudflare is in the perfect position to provide evidence. Your unwittingly advocating for these websites to use more sophisticated methods, where their actions will be much harder to prove and prosecute. If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. We do not live in a world of no harm and never will we. All we can do is manage it.
- throwrqX 4y agoI can't find it now but I remember reading an article a while back about how the FBI with several other worldwide law enforcement partner took down a terrorist website, but behind the scenes the CIA or NSA wasn't happy about it because they had all the information in one place they could tap but now that the FBI disrupted that it made their job harder.
- zja 4y ago> If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. When has this ever been a valid excuse for bad behavior?
- devwastaken 4y agoNobody said it was.
- wyager 4y agoKF doesn't doxx people for being gay. As far as I can tell, KF has a huge LGBT presence in their userbase. They have doxxed people who are gay, but not because they are gay.