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There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is ju

There were no good choices for Cloudflare here, and everyone across the internet who jams their fingers in their ears and shouts their position repeatedly is just contributing to the problem. Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape. Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think. I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.

_2d30 4y ago
“Moderators of free speech” - an interesting idea.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc). But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively. Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
  - subsistence234 4y ago
    It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself. The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
    - Pxtl 4y ago
      And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong? And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat? The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA. Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
  - stealthygeek 4y ago
  - gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
    > But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively. Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves. The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.
DennisAleynikov 4y ago
Yeah there was no winning move here. The pressure from both sides was too great
- fallingupwards 4y ago
phillipcarter 4y ago
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point. This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  Yeah regardless of your stance on KF, you have to support cloudflare as an independent business to decide who they want as a customer. KF has many other options to serve their site. It’s really their own fault for using a product like Cloudflare that can be easily coerced into dropping a client through a Twitter mob.
  - graygoose 4y ago
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  It's fine for a business to do anything but it's not fine for the business to lie and say they are something they are not. The question therefore becomes at root, are they lying? Is the company actually impartial infrastructure, or are they dishonest. The past has shown that they are a little unstable in their impartiality. Personally I'd like to see them making much more decisions to clean up the net but I'd need to see them being honest about it.
donohoe 4y ago
Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL hate acts is not ‘free speech’. That was the major point.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL gate acts is not free speech “Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    I think it’s easier than that, hate speech just isn’t speech, it’s an act of violence that happens to use your mouth, pen, or keyboard — 1A as it’s currently interpreted is way too broad, the court seems to find other forms of violence, even those done for political expression, as not protected, but gives exception here for some naive “sticks and stones” argument.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  KF has a very explicit policy to not interact with subjects of a thread. Discussions about harassing them will get you banned.
  - millzlane 4y ago
    Spreading rumors about them and interacting with friends, family, and known associates is fair game. Also posting their public contact information is also fair game.
    - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    - robocat 4y ago
dagmx 4y ago
Is it censoring free speech when the goal of the speech is to actively harm people? I’m not sure of any nation that has no caveats to their idea of free speech
- spacephysics 4y ago
  Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Hate speech is outside of that scope, otherwise we wouldn’t have another term for that (all calls for violence could be hate speech, but not all hate speech is calls for violence) Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    >Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Pretty sure calls for acts of violence is legal in the United States unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action.
    - nixgeek 4y ago
      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373 Not entirely sure you’re correct on this one?
      - Ferrotin 4y ago
        The constitution (and court interpretation) overrides statutory law.
        nixgeek 4y ago
        GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important. Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-) Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”. Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
cowtools 4y ago
I think the internet is just irrecoverably broken in a way such that technical problems like DDoS or NN escalate to social problems. We should not even be having these discussions in the first place: It should be infeasible for attackers to conduct DDoS. It should be infeasible for ISPs to surveil their users. The internet as we know it was designed to facilitate communications between non-antagonistic peers, that design is no longer suitable for use by democratic society at large. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet
hbrundage 4y ago
It’s a fundamental issue though — there’s no “figuring it out” that a government can do that won’t either censor or facilitate. 25 years has been long enough to find tactical policy changes that make it easier, but there aren’t any, which is why nothing has happened. The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred False dichotomy. We have always punished some speech (e.g. fraud) while sanctifying others (political speech).
  - hbrundage 4y ago
    Practical dichotomy — that’s why this thread exists. You either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
    - krapp 4y ago
      The middle ground that already exists - the right of free speech doesn't guarantee an audience, and the right to assembly doesn't guarantee a platform. Censorship is permitted within the marketplace of ideas as an inevitable consequence of the fact that coerced speech cannot be considered free, but the government is far more limited. If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit Or host themselves. ISPs are common carriers. Their freedom of assembly is abridged in a way others' is not.
zaphar 4y ago
On the one hand, I would have supported Cloudflare in continuing to provide service to Kiwifarms as someone not employed there if that was their conviction. On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.
- ksrm 4y ago
  Not just immoral and reprehensible, the campaigns of targeted harassment they undertake limit the victims' speech. If you care about people being able to freely express themselves, today is a good day. I don't know why the free speech defenders miss this (I do know).
  - 0134340 4y ago
    >limit the victims' speech And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
  - StWallSt 4y ago
    Whose speech have they tried to limit? Ironically, there's been a focused attempt to limit the speech of KiwiFarms.
  - 4y ago
colechristensen 4y ago
>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape. When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided. When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with. When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
- notriddle 4y ago
  > When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. But CloudFlare doesn’t. That’s why they position themselves as a common carrier.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Yes, I tried to separate things into three buckets, CloudFlare is in the third bucket.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tenpies 4y ago
> figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech. What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article). Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals. How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > How can anyone be harassed online to the degree that there were not enough settings They were showing up at peoples’ houses and SWATting them. This isn’t a problem technology can solve.
  - fallingupwards 4y ago
  - tenpies 4y ago
    I don't think technology even necessarily has a role to play here. After all, hate speech began the minute we developed language.
  - JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
    Have KF users ever taken credit for SWATing? It's my impression that they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.
bjustin 4y ago
I think Cloudlfare’s choice to block them is fine and CF was probably fine allowing their use of the service before, given the damage to their reputation they apparently considered acceptable. Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.
- graygoose 4y ago
tibbydudeza 4y ago
The problem is who defines what is hate - don't trust a govt to make that - they are the last people I would trust. We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.
- desindol 4y ago
  I am honestly dumbfounded about the government hate on HN. It's elected by you and your peers. You can influence it and you can even be part of it yourself. If you want change do it and stop spreading FUD.
  - tibbydudeza 4y ago
    Our city council recently replaced all the street lights with new LED lights - one of our neighbors is convinced it is 5G - this is the same person who votes as well. Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time. Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
    - desindol 4y ago
      - tibbydudeza 4y ago
        desindol 4y ago
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Right. Centralization of morals and ethics simply causes mass polarization and, eventually and inevitably, war over "which side wins." Those in favor of the rational gray area will be trampled on by both sides.
mjr00 4y ago
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here 100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous. The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488 [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-says-governments-youtube-block-aims-to-censor-him.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-say...
- rnd0 4y ago
  >100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes) Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
- saurik 4y ago
  On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here). https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817 https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cowtools 4y ago
austenallred 4y ago
The notion that government should be in charge of effectively eliminating speech we don't like so that private companies don't have to is _far worse_ than the current state of things.
rejectfinite 4y ago
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point. I can unfortunatley see goverments doing a China style ID required for internet sites....
scythe 4y ago
>Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks. Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks. Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.
- peanut-walrus 4y ago
  I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting. Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with. If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
  - scythe 4y ago
    >If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public. You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law. >However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied. >If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare It's accessible through TOR, IIRC.
IncRnd 4y ago
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape. That's not what happened here. They made an appropriate decision. It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life." People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >Tolerance is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
- cowtools 4y ago
- rtpg 4y ago
  To be even clearer, in this case it’s not even really quite clear that this was legal content at all! Coordinated stalking of people! Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy! And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
  - Kalium 4y ago
    Is that a rhetorical question or a sincere one? Legal liability. American law has lots of direct liability for Cloudflare under SESTA/FOSTA for being involved in sex work websites. There's not equivalent liability for hate websites.
    - rtpg 4y ago
notatoad 4y ago
i think this is the sort of thing that exposes a general failure of capitalism. the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce. FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.
gd1 4y ago
[dead]
subsistence234 4y ago
"hate speech" has no coherent definition, it's whatever the people with enough power to impose discourse limits don't like to be said.
simias 4y ago
>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point. I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?
- Icathian 4y ago
  Well this particular example is a US website. The relevant (inadequate) legal framework for handling the situation is US Federal law, which ideally Cloudflare would have had to reference to determine whichever outcome should have happened here. So, while I'm far from an expert on policy, I imagine that'd be the place to start?
  - simias 4y ago
    Is it? I thought that it was hosted outside of the US, and that while the admin was an American citizen he didn't live on US soil. That's from vague memories from years ago though, so maybe not accurate or up to date. Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.
thaumaturgy 4y ago
This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters. The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists. The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so. Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LessimiGoats 4y ago
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Should we ban Signal if people use it to coordinate acts of terrorism?
  - thaumaturgy 4y ago
    Should Signal block users if Signal has the ability to do so and they become aware that those users are using Signal to coordinate acts of terrorism? Can we collectively re-learn how to argue specific situations without comparing them to entirely different situations?
Cupertino95014 4y ago
Let's not obscure things by calling it an issue of "hate speech." That is an impermissible broadening. As they said, "hard cases make bad law." The only way to mitigate the badness is to make the decision as narrow as possible. It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."
- sneak 4y ago
  Then it seems to me the problem here is insufficient law enforcement response. If the illegal threats of violence aren’t being handled properly by law enforcement, that is not CF’s failure. They feel forced to act because the FBI is incompetent.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    Yeah, I'll go with that. The fact that it's "in cyberspace" doesn't mean that normal laws don't apply.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech." the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here? edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it. the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right? KF does not promote terrorism or violence.
  - yomkippur 4y ago
duxup 4y ago
Earlier they posted this image. https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-image-0--2--1.png https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-im... That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation. Hosting content, more moderation. I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.
- paulmd 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the distinction about why providing a CDN is fundamentally and completely different from hosting. Still coming off your servers eierher way. It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too. “It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle. And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I’m not sure either. I do know if I would come up with the exact list they have. I do generally agree with the approach of scaling moderation.
zozbot234 4y ago
Clear and present danger is not protected under free speech, and that's exactly what the OP describes.
- stealthygeek 4y ago
- Banana699 4y ago
etra0 4y ago
> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think. They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement. They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
My government should and cannot ever be trusted to moderate hate speech.
sneak 4y ago
Hate speech is legal by design. There is already illegal speech, not all speech is protected. If they broke the law, charge them with crimes. If they didn’t, ignore them.
threatofrain 4y ago
Why shouldn't we prefer private parties administer the free speech which is most fitting for their platform, as opposed to overly broad legislation at the national level by a government which doesn't appear like they'll catch up on tech within 5 years? Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation. In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people. And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.
jmyeet 4y ago
> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here ... I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention. Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them. This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue. If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
  This evoked Godwin's law real quick. For a purportedly "Nazi" site, KiwiFarms sure does lack swastikas. Moral repugnance is not synonymous with Nazism.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > This evoked Godwin's law real quick. For a purportedly "Nazi" site, KiwiFarms sure does lack swastikas. … you do know the holding company for kiwifarms is literally named “final solutions, LLC”, right? https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/156374856392608973...
    - not_a_shill 4y ago
      So where was that on the website? Honestly you should be applauding that they actually switched from final solutions (obvious edgy joke) to a normal name in what seems to be like a reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
lettergram 4y ago
My main issue was this: > Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post. Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”. It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset. Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).
- BryantD 4y ago
  I think it’s covered in their 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.” Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    > Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked. While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something. It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
    - 4y ago
dabbledash 4y ago
"...pressure their respective governments to figure out what should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet." Should be done by whom? If you mean "done by the government," then in the US at least the answer is clear.
RedReality 4y ago
>what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. Nothing. It's words on the internet.
BryantD 4y ago
I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service. The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent. The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent. It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 4y ago
> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online? My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech: - morally obligated to host without question. - will get you hauled in front of a judge. The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs. But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of. I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA. ---- > Given that they should never be in this position I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company? I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position. More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?" Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it. ---- > Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic. A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site. Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me. It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.
tootie 4y ago
Cloudflare has a really clear and seemingly mandatory option which is to just assert what we all know to be true: They can boot clients whenever they threaten their business. Everybody does this. There are near constant stories of users getting business-critical Google or Apple accounts suspended without warning or explanation. Those companies are ruthless about protecting themselves from liability and will err on the side of losing customers even when the violations aren't proven. Cloudflare wants to be seen as being above the fray and they just absolutely aren't. Anyone who thinks "it's just politics" is delusional. These are real people doing real things with real consequences.
asah 4y ago
There was a better choice - do what they did, AND THEN JUSTIFY IT - show the court of public opinion redacted samples about why they took this action.
hackerlight 4y ago
I'm basically happy right now with private companies being the de facto moderator of speech because your alternative of government censorship is unacceptably risky to people's freedoms, and private companies are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I see a pattern that everything requiring international collaboration is very very slow to fix. From tax havens to climate change. Because you can hide out in another country or blame another country and so on.
Copenjin 4y ago
> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech" Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.
yes_really 4y ago
Let's say Cloudfare had not banned KF because they consider themselves a utility, what liability does Cloudfare really have?

_2d30 4y ago

“Moderators of free speech” - an interesting idea.

Pxtl 4y ago
Of course. That's what courts are in the USA -- they determine which speech is protected as free speech, and which is not (eg defamation, fraud, perjury, copyright infringement, threats, etc). But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively. Copyright holders already noted the problem and got the DMCA made to make an internet-speed version of copyright enforcement. The remaining laws governing speech have a lot of catching up to do.
- subsistence234 4y ago
  It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself. The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    And yet a fast system was invented for copyright protection online. Was the DMCA wrong? And could the legal system handle it if it was responsible for acting on every case of online copyright infringement through formal due process? What about every case of defamation? Of every threat? The internet has set information free, and allowed every person to contribute to the information superhighway. But that means that torts and crimes that used to be rare and manageable by the courts are now anonymous and decentralized and democratized in such a way that an endless number of people can do them. Leaving it to the courts is asking us to empty a river with a thimble. It was unacceptable for copyright, hence the DMCA. Do only copyright holders deserve that kind of protection?
- stealthygeek 4y ago
- gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
  > But as CF has noted, the wheels of justice are too slow for the speed of internet, so they had to act proactively. Sometimes these things are slow for a reason. They have no idea whether those threats were legitimate or posted by the very group of people that were making a huge fuss about KF the past few weeks. Anyone can post a threat anonymously and then report it themselves. The wheels of justice are slow because they don't just take everything at face value, which CloudFlare just did.

DennisAleynikov 4y ago

Yeah there was no winning move here. The pressure from both sides was too great

fallingupwards 4y ago

phillipcarter 4y ago

> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point. This is a very good takeaway, as it is a complex problem. But I think in the interim, it's perfectly fine for private companies with no legal obligation to keep sites like these operating to just choose not to do business with them.

ryanSrich 4y ago
Yeah regardless of your stance on KF, you have to support cloudflare as an independent business to decide who they want as a customer. KF has many other options to serve their site. It’s really their own fault for using a product like Cloudflare that can be easily coerced into dropping a client through a Twitter mob.
- graygoose 4y ago
thinkingemote 4y ago
It's fine for a business to do anything but it's not fine for the business to lie and say they are something they are not. The question therefore becomes at root, are they lying? Is the company actually impartial infrastructure, or are they dishonest. The past has shown that they are a little unstable in their impartiality. Personally I'd like to see them making much more decisions to clean up the net but I'd need to see them being honest about it.

donohoe 4y ago

Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL hate acts is not ‘free speech’. That was the major point.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Hate speech and organizing to harass and other IRL gate acts is not free speech “Free speech” is a philosophy. It makes no sense to describe a particular expression of speech as free or not. Hate speech is speech. Whether one should be free to make it is another question.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I think it’s easier than that, hate speech just isn’t speech, it’s an act of violence that happens to use your mouth, pen, or keyboard — 1A as it’s currently interpreted is way too broad, the court seems to find other forms of violence, even those done for political expression, as not protected, but gives exception here for some naive “sticks and stones” argument.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
KF has a very explicit policy to not interact with subjects of a thread. Discussions about harassing them will get you banned.
- millzlane 4y ago
  Spreading rumors about them and interacting with friends, family, and known associates is fair game. Also posting their public contact information is also fair game.
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  - robocat 4y ago

dagmx 4y ago

Is it censoring free speech when the goal of the speech is to actively harm people? I’m not sure of any nation that has no caveats to their idea of free speech

spacephysics 4y ago
Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Hate speech is outside of that scope, otherwise we wouldn’t have another term for that (all calls for violence could be hate speech, but not all hate speech is calls for violence) Therefore what is hate speech? Are words violence in and of themselves?
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Calls for acts of violence already hasn’t been legal. Pretty sure calls for acts of violence is legal in the United States unless that call for violence is intended to produce an imminent lawless action.
  - nixgeek 4y ago
    https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373 Not entirely sure you’re correct on this one?
    - Ferrotin 4y ago
      The constitution (and court interpretation) overrides statutory law.
      - nixgeek 4y ago
        GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important. Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-) Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”. Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.

cowtools 4y ago

I think the internet is just irrecoverably broken in a way such that technical problems like DDoS or NN escalate to social problems. We should not even be having these discussions in the first place: It should be infeasible for attackers to conduct DDoS. It should be infeasible for ISPs to surveil their users. The internet as we know it was designed to facilitate communications between non-antagonistic peers, that design is no longer suitable for use by democratic society at large. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet

hbrundage 4y ago

It’s a fundamental issue though — there’s no “figuring it out” that a government can do that won’t either censor or facilitate. 25 years has been long enough to find tactical policy changes that make it easier, but there aren’t any, which is why nothing has happened. The choice we have to make is either de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred, and it’s bogus that we haven’t picked the thing that doesn’t kill people yet.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> de-shrine free speech above all else or entrench hatred False dichotomy. We have always punished some speech (e.g. fraud) while sanctifying others (political speech).
- hbrundage 4y ago
  Practical dichotomy — that’s why this thread exists. You either platform it or you don’t, and you’re either legislated to do so or not. What middle ground do you see that allows this degree of free speech without platforming hate?
  - krapp 4y ago
    The middle ground that already exists - the right of free speech doesn't guarantee an audience, and the right to assembly doesn't guarantee a platform. Censorship is permitted within the marketplace of ideas as an inevitable consequence of the fact that coerced speech cannot be considered free, but the government is far more limited. If Kiwifarms wants to continue "this degree of free speech" it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit, and then to not step over the line, as they apparently just did with Cloudflare.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > it's up to them to find someone willing to tolerate their bullshit Or host themselves. ISPs are common carriers. Their freedom of assembly is abridged in a way others' is not.

zaphar 4y ago

On the one hand, I would have supported Cloudflare in continuing to provide service to Kiwifarms as someone not employed there if that was their conviction. On the other hand, If I were the CEO, Owner, whatever of Cloudflare I would have cut ties with kiwifarms a long time ago on the grounds the site promotes truly immoral and reprehensible content and I wouldn't want any resources I control going toward helping them do so for my own conscience to be at ease.

ksrm 4y ago
Not just immoral and reprehensible, the campaigns of targeted harassment they undertake limit the victims' speech. If you care about people being able to freely express themselves, today is a good day. I don't know why the free speech defenders miss this (I do know).
- 0134340 4y ago
  >limit the victims' speech And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
- StWallSt 4y ago
  Whose speech have they tried to limit? Ironically, there's been a focused attempt to limit the speech of KiwiFarms.
- 4y ago

colechristensen 4y ago

>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape. When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided. When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with. When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.

notriddle 4y ago
> When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. But CloudFlare doesn’t. That’s why they position themselves as a common carrier.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Yes, I tried to separate things into three buckets, CloudFlare is in the third bucket.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tenpies 4y ago

> figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. I honestly wish there were some organization focused on the causes of hate speech rather than censoring hate speech. What caused this? Why are Kiwifarm users so hateful? One does not just hate out of the blue, especially not to the degree of the actions they've taken (judging from their Wikipedia article). Then there's the other end of this: To walk a thorny world, don't pave the world, wear sandals. How can anyone be harassed online to end their life? Were there not enough settings, blocklists, and such to keep the harassment away? Were they unable to access the services that would have helped them better handle the harassment that did get through?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> How can anyone be harassed online to the degree that there were not enough settings They were showing up at peoples’ houses and SWATting them. This isn’t a problem technology can solve.
- fallingupwards 4y ago
- tenpies 4y ago
  I don't think technology even necessarily has a role to play here. After all, hate speech began the minute we developed language.
- JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
  Have KF users ever taken credit for SWATing? It's my impression that they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > they were - or at least Moon - always careful about not crossing the legal line No clue. We likely won't know until law enforcement's investigations are over. In the meantime, everyone is free to come to their own threshold. That's essentially what's going on here. If it turns out Cloudflare erred, they'd have to show the evidence that pushed them to take such an extraordinary step to regain trust.

bjustin 4y ago

I think Cloudlfare’s choice to block them is fine and CF was probably fine allowing their use of the service before, given the damage to their reputation they apparently considered acceptable. Historically, you needed money or influence or both to make a “bad” (or in this case, actually bad) message widely available. What we’re seeing with Cloudflare and other companies choosing not to do business with some people is like a correction a bit back toward the past, after an hard swing toward unchecked, potentially widespread reach of speakers who wouldn’t have been heard much before.

graygoose 4y ago

tibbydudeza 4y ago

The problem is who defines what is hate - don't trust a govt to make that - they are the last people I would trust. We have no solution in this age - it was easy in the older days when consensus was reached within a village on what was bad for the community and you got either got tarred and feathered or thrown out.

desindol 4y ago
I am honestly dumbfounded about the government hate on HN. It's elected by you and your peers. You can influence it and you can even be part of it yourself. If you want change do it and stop spreading FUD.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Our city council recently replaced all the street lights with new LED lights - one of our neighbors is convinced it is 5G - this is the same person who votes as well. Govt is generally a low quality effort until it comes around to election time and then carefully crafted slogans and media and the majority of voters fall for it every time. Democracy is best system we have but sometimes the outcomes is less than desirable.
  - desindol 4y ago
    - tibbydudeza 4y ago
      - desindol 4y ago
nathanaldensr 4y ago
Right. Centralization of morals and ethics simply causes mass polarization and, eventually and inevitably, war over "which side wins." Those in favor of the rational gray area will be trampled on by both sides.

mjr00 4y ago

> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here 100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes), this is a matter of, "When does internet infrastructure end and content moderation begin?" As I mentioned in a previous discussion[0], Cloudflare finds itself right at the blurred edge of this line, made more complicated by CF providing both hosting, which is generally seen as content, and DDOS mitigation, which is more ambiguous. The same people who cheer this decision wouldn't be happy if, say, DNS servers refused to resolve mega.io because it hosts illegal pornography. Or if their ISP started blocking PTP or nyaa.si for copyright infringement. This is to say nothing, of course, of any suspect political interference in internet infrastructure, which we already see around the world[1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32664488 [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-says-governments-youtube-block-aims-to-censor-him.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/22/pakistans-former-pm-khan-say...

rnd0 4y ago
>100%. To me this isn't really about KF (which clearly sucks and should be offline, but through actual legal processes) Agreed! The problem is that I am not seeing a way to get there. I also don't see any incentive for the legal system to change. In fact I think there are far-right elements who probably see the situation as a Good Thing.
saurik 4y ago
On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here). https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817 https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cowtools 4y ago

austenallred 4y ago

The notion that government should be in charge of effectively eliminating speech we don't like so that private companies don't have to is _far worse_ than the current state of things.

rejectfinite 4y ago

scythe 4y ago

>Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". Unless they provide hosting services, this seems a little distorted. Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, not a platform. For nearly as long as there have been laws, there has been a general understanding that even the worst of us are entitled to the protection of the laws. Even Bill Cosby was entitled to his Fifth Amendment rights when he was given immunity for his infamous testimony. I don't see why Cloudflare's role should be seen differently; they have become the online anti-DDoS police, in the face of an Internet woefully under-equipped to manage such attacks. Only in the case of the Daily Stormer, who deliberately turned Cloudflare's neutral role against them by saying "Cloudflare supports us", does there seem to be an exception, because they can't pretend to be truly bound by the law. But calling this "platforming" is basically playing into the hands of people running DDoS attacks. Kiwifarms's hosts platform them. Cloudflare protected them. The difference is important. I don't know what happened exactly, so I can't comment on it, but I'm interested to find out what happened over the last two days.

peanut-walrus 4y ago
I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting. Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with. If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
- scythe 4y ago
  >If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public. You're contradicting yourself here. Those services you described in the second sentence are what is necessary for DDoS protection. Likewise, when cops arrest me for throwing a paint ballon at Richard Spencer, it's not because they're acting as his personal security detail. It's because I broke the law. >However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. Again, this is simply harassment prevention. If the hosting provider wants to know what is on their service, they can just look. It's not like Cloudflare is providing an encrypted service to keep hosts from knowing what is on their servers. It's just preventing people from harassing the host about it. Law enforcement can walk right through Cloudflare if they want, it's vigilantes who are stymied. >If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare It's accessible through TOR, IIRC.

IncRnd 4y ago

> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape. That's not what happened here. They made an appropriate decision. It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life." People and their companies aren't computers who have to allow everything to meet some absurd MVP product definition of false fairness.

pixl97 4y ago
>Tolerance is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
cowtools 4y ago
rtpg 4y ago
To be even clearer, in this case it’s not even really quite clear that this was legal content at all! Coordinated stalking of people! Of course you could say “the legal system should handle it”. But what serious company says “let’s wait for a court to maximize our legal exposure”. The guy cited hard cases. This seems pretty easy! And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?
- Kalium 4y ago
  Is that a rhetorical question or a sincere one? Legal liability. American law has lots of direct liability for Cloudflare under SESTA/FOSTA for being involved in sex work websites. There's not equivalent liability for hate websites.
  - rtpg 4y ago

notatoad 4y ago

i think this is the sort of thing that exposes a general failure of capitalism. the underlying assumption of capitalism is that competition works, and one company doesn't have the power to do something like censor a website, because competition will solve that. instances like this prove that to be wrong. cloudflare (and google, amazon, and most other big companies) get put in this position because regulators insist on pretending our economic system is pure capitalism. but in most cases, the big players are much more of a monopoly than anybody would like to think, and the forces of competition are a farce. FWIW i think kiwifarms should be censored. but it sucks for cloudflare that they have to be the one to make that decision.

gd1 4y ago

[dead]

subsistence234 4y ago

"hate speech" has no coherent definition, it's whatever the people with enough power to impose discourse limits don't like to be said.

simias 4y ago

>I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point. I see what you mean and that sounds nice but how would that work? With the internet being international I can't imagine what could be done really. What KiwiFarm is hosting is already illegal in many jurisdictions I'm sure, but as long as the servers are hosted in some country with lax regulation (or a poorly implemented one) then what can be done at the state level?

Icathian 4y ago
Well this particular example is a US website. The relevant (inadequate) legal framework for handling the situation is US Federal law, which ideally Cloudflare would have had to reference to determine whichever outcome should have happened here. So, while I'm far from an expert on policy, I imagine that'd be the place to start?
- simias 4y ago
  Is it? I thought that it was hosted outside of the US, and that while the admin was an American citizen he didn't live on US soil. That's from vague memories from years ago though, so maybe not accurate or up to date. Although I guess as a European I don't know if I really trust the USA to do a good job fighting hate speech. We have a pretty different take on that over here.

thaumaturgy 4y ago

This was not a free speech issue and I suspect that some of the attempts to reframe it that way are deliberately muddying the waters. The issue at hand is that Cloudflare was providing material support to terrorists. The site at the center of all this wasn't merely being critical of a group of people, it was being used to gather and disseminate personal information and coordinate acts of terrorism. Cloudflare meanwhile is not a public utility and had absolutely no obligation to provide services to terrorists; that was a smokescreen meant to deflect criticism of their decision to do so. Free speech absolutists should really consider whether their argument is being strengthened or weakened by this specific case before hitching their ideological wagon to it.

deleted 4y ago
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LessimiGoats 4y ago
josephcsible 4y ago
Should we ban Signal if people use it to coordinate acts of terrorism?
- thaumaturgy 4y ago
  Should Signal block users if Signal has the ability to do so and they become aware that those users are using Signal to coordinate acts of terrorism? Can we collectively re-learn how to argue specific situations without comparing them to entirely different situations?

Cupertino95014 4y ago

Let's not obscure things by calling it an issue of "hate speech." That is an impermissible broadening. As they said, "hard cases make bad law." The only way to mitigate the badness is to make the decision as narrow as possible. It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech."

sneak 4y ago
Then it seems to me the problem here is insufficient law enforcement response. If the illegal threats of violence aren’t being handled properly by law enforcement, that is not CF’s failure. They feel forced to act because the FBI is incompetent.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  Yeah, I'll go with that. The fact that it's "in cyberspace" doesn't mean that normal laws don't apply.
_dain_ 4y ago
>It's about illegal threats of violence. Those were against the law long before anyone ever used the term "hate speech." the illegal threats of violence are always removed as soon as possible from KF, just as they are on every other site. what exactly is the difference here? edit: I'm rate limited; there is (or now, was) a point-by-point rebuttal to the "KF bullied people to suicide" claims on the front-page. tldr it's a false narrative, there's no evidence anyone killselfed because of their KF thread. would you like to know more? too bad, you can't, because the site is down so you can't read it. the "counter" / "KF kill count" / etc is a running site joke; it's not a joke about actually bullying people to suicide, it's a joke about the unfounded reputation of the site itself; part of the punchline is that everyone in the in-group knows that the number is zero but the out-group thinks it's in the dozens. get it? well I guess it's not that funny when I explain the joke, but then no joke is, right? KF does not promote terrorism or violence.
- yomkippur 4y ago

duxup 4y ago

Earlier they posted this image. https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-image-0--2--1.png https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2022/08/pasted-im... That made sense to me. Basic services, transit, blocking ddos… little, if any moderation. Hosting content, more moderation. I might strongly disagree with someone and I sure as hell won’t host their BS, but I still think some basic level of rights/ services should be provided.

paulmd 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand the distinction about why providing a CDN is fundamentally and completely different from hosting. Still coming off your servers eierher way. It feels like they’re trying to construct a distinction here that allows them to continue providing web services to illegal/immoral content. And this isn’t the first time, they’ve told patreon to pound save over pirates using their cdn too. “It’s not actually hosted just a CDN” is the weakest of these though. Like wow that’s splitting a fine fine hair, for what I can’t really see as any particularly great underlying reason or principle. And if the principle is free speech… why not host it too? I just don’t see the logic here.
- duxup 4y ago
  I’m not sure either. I do know if I would come up with the exact list they have. I do generally agree with the approach of scaling moderation.

zozbot234 4y ago

Clear and present danger is not protected under free speech, and that's exactly what the OP describes.

stealthygeek 4y ago
Banana699 4y ago

etra0 4y ago

> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think. They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement. They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

My government should and cannot ever be trusted to moderate hate speech.

sneak 4y ago

Hate speech is legal by design. There is already illegal speech, not all speech is protected. If they broke the law, charge them with crimes. If they didn’t, ignore them.

threatofrain 4y ago

Why shouldn't we prefer private parties administer the free speech which is most fitting for their platform, as opposed to overly broad legislation at the national level by a government which doesn't appear like they'll catch up on tech within 5 years? Pressuring government does not mean that the government will suddenly develop technical expertise. Even if the "right people" are voted into government at every level possible in a simultaneous magical moment, it would still take years for the government to develop its own internal consensus as to the state of problems and solutions & to slowly develop a workforce to administer technical policy. But one must question as to whether this is even in the cards for your respective nation. In the meantime, if we prefer companies deal with the matter, people who don't like how things are done at least have the mere theoretical possibility of going it another way, assuming your market isn't so unhealthy as to only permit one entity (in which case you have a problem which a non-technical government may be able to deal with). The government issues monolithic force-backed policy, whereas the free market can create a diverse product ecosystem for different kinds of people. And isn't the authority which is exercised by companies one which is ultimately quite fundamental — the freedom of association? The freedom to not have relations with those you don't want to talk to? Everyone should be free to yell their message on public property, but people should also be free to withdraw from each other if they no longer wish to be related. It is questionable to say that free speech must hinge on whether one party wishes to be related to another, especially when that other party has to maintain their services via expensive engineers.

jmyeet 4y ago

> There were no good choices for Cloudflare here ... I couldn't disagree more. Just cut off sites for organized harassment and nazis immediately. If you're able to, hand over any archives you have to law enforcement. Don't even talk about it. Just let such sites disappear one day. Don't give them any more attention. Could you be breaching a contract? Maybe. But who cares? You think the KF owners are going to reveal themselves and sue? Let them. This is what I find infuriating about the US media and many people in general: there's way too much effort spent on trying to appear neutral by bothsidesing every issue. If CNN existed in 1938 Germany, after Kristallnacht [1], CNN talking heads would've gone on the air and said "sure a lot of Jews were killed, their homes and businesses ransacked and the authorities looked on without intervening but the perpetrators say they asked for it. Let's hear what this spokesman has to say." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

deleted 4y ago
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JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
This evoked Godwin's law real quick. For a purportedly "Nazi" site, KiwiFarms sure does lack swastikas. Moral repugnance is not synonymous with Nazism.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > This evoked Godwin's law real quick. For a purportedly "Nazi" site, KiwiFarms sure does lack swastikas. … you do know the holding company for kiwifarms is literally named “final solutions, LLC”, right? https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 https://mobile.twitter.com/keffals/status/156374856392608973...
  - not_a_shill 4y ago
    So where was that on the website? Honestly you should be applauding that they actually switched from final solutions (obvious edgy joke) to a normal name in what seems to be like a reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

lettergram 4y ago

My main issue was this: > Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post. Cloudflare was providing security from DDoS attacks. Then all the sudden they arbitrarily decided to hijack their domain. It would be one thing to stop providing protection. It’s another to say “no you see our content now”. It would be like security at an event deciding to put in a band no one paid for. But still taking the money from the people hosting the event. The attendees are upset, the venue is upset, the original bands are upset. Pretty sure that is a breach of contract. Feel free to drop them, but redirecting is wtf. Particularly, when they may be interfering with an investigation (as they said, cloudflare already took it upon themselves to involve law enforcement- who didn’t feel it necessary to shut it down).

BryantD 4y ago
I think it’s covered in their 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.” Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked.
- lettergram 4y ago
  > Kiwifarms controls their DNS; they can change NS records as needed, so I wouldn’t say the domain is hijacked. While I agree in part, the DDoS protection isn’t meant to serve alternative pages per-se. It’s meant to mitigate hostile actors by making them check a box or something. It would be one thing to take it down (terms clearly make that okay); but directing to alternative content I see as a possible breach.
  - 4y ago

dabbledash 4y ago

"...pressure their respective governments to figure out what should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet." Should be done by whom? If you mean "done by the government," then in the US at least the answer is clear.

RedReality 4y ago

>what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. Nothing. It's words on the internet.

BryantD 4y ago

I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service. The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent. The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent. It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danShumway 4y ago

> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online? My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech: - morally obligated to host without question. - will get you hauled in front of a judge. The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs. But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of. I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA. ---- > Given that they should never be in this position I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company? I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position. More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?" Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it. ---- > Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic. A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site. Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me. It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.

tootie 4y ago

Cloudflare has a really clear and seemingly mandatory option which is to just assert what we all know to be true: They can boot clients whenever they threaten their business. Everybody does this. There are near constant stories of users getting business-critical Google or Apple accounts suspended without warning or explanation. Those companies are ruthless about protecting themselves from liability and will err on the side of losing customers even when the violations aren't proven. Cloudflare wants to be seen as being above the fray and they just absolutely aren't. Anyone who thinks "it's just politics" is delusional. These are real people doing real things with real consequences.

asah 4y ago

There was a better choice - do what they did, AND THEN JUSTIFY IT - show the court of public opinion redacted samples about why they took this action.

hackerlight 4y ago

I'm basically happy right now with private companies being the de facto moderator of speech because your alternative of government censorship is unacceptably risky to people's freedoms, and private companies are doing a decent enough job at it as is.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I see a pattern that everything requiring international collaboration is very very slow to fix. From tax havens to climate change. Because you can hide out in another country or blame another country and so on.

Copenjin 4y ago

> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech" Talking about free speech and censoring in this cases is what people that are ok with the harassment do. Don't. They should just have a normal TOS like everyone else and apply it. The freedom of speech should not be invoked in this case.

yes_really 4y ago

Let's say Cloudfare had not banned KF because they consider themselves a utility, what liability does Cloudfare really have?