24 ms·

Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare

• boastful_inaba 4y ago
  Josh Moon (Null), the owner and administrator of Kiwi Farms, responds to their removal from CloudFlare. Their core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started. Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members. EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?
  • rvz 4y ago
    Yeah, even though or even if the post was removed the outrage mob on Twitter won’t care and it is always one-sided. They got what they wanted even though it won’t solve the problem. It is now the internet’s problem. They will just flag this post and rejoice that they got a billon dollar internet company to bend the knee only for them to scream a false victory, despite KF still being up and running on another domain with Tor and DDoS protection with another provider. Nothing has changed. When it comes to a Twitter mob, there is no “Sorry” or “Please I can explain”, or “It’s not what you think it is” or “But the post was removed”. With the Twitter mob, there is just no redemption. So on to the next villain of the month.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      > Nothing has changed Exactly. Proving that this isn't really a problem at all. Cloudflare has exercised their right to drop this user. And KiwiFarms has moved to someone else.
      • quazar 4y ago
        Two days ago when CloudFlare still publically supported them, a lot of the posters who usually comment on censorship stories with "it's a private company, it's their choice" were not so happy about this private company's choice. Makes you think.
        • Cyberdog 4y ago
          Because they were hypocritical about it. Let's say you're afraid that someone might punch you in the face. So that person gets on a soapbox and gives an eloquent speech to a crowd about how they're not going to punch you in the face, in fact, they're quite against face-punching and regret the times in the past they've punched people, and you're able to relax a little. And then three days later they punch you in the face anyway. Don't you think that punch might hurt a bit more, on an emotional level, than if that person just clocked you when you thought they would?
    • viraptor 4y ago
      > They got what they wanted even though it won’t solve the problem. There's actually quite a bit of follow up action chasing up both the new providers and hosters. The deplatforming has been shown to work before. Just adding the speedbump of requiring the tor access will kill a lot of interest in continuing the abuse. Even if you look at the hashtags and the website, you'll see cf wasn't the only target. It's a pretty well planned action, but it's very clearly against kf and not stopping.
      • towaway15463 4y ago
        If you think this was a win then you don’t know much about this kind of content. I bet you think the banning of r/The_Donald and parler were great too. Mission accomplished right? You haven’t put out those fires, you’ve just scattered the embers and now there are hundreds of little fires cropping up all over. Some of them are starting to get quite big so they’ll probably start popping up in your Twitter feed soon but this time they’re unreachable. It’s just creating more hyper divisiveness, you’ve made your little space nice and blue but in doing so you’ve made other places pure red and a house divided cannot stand.
        • sgarland 4y ago
          > a house divided cannot stand. When Lincoln said that, we went to war, and the side that didn't want to enslave people won. Polite society has no room in it for people who think that calling for the death of LGBT people (AKA people) is acceptable.
          • towaway15463 4y ago
            > the side that didn't want to enslave people won Yes
    • concinds 4y ago
      The primary goal is to increase the left's institutional power. They know that KF will still exist and will move on from Cloudflare. The point isn't to hurt KF, but to hurt Cloudflare for daring to nominally support free speech. That's why they're botting hashtags, putting pressure on the stock price, and encouraging tech decision-makers to move their startups away from Cloudflare. The point is to say: if you do not pander to us, we will come for you. It's an effective way to cement power over institutions from the bottom-up, without actually controlling those institutions. It's a similar kind of social movement to the film censorship movement in early 20th century America, which was largely grassroots and yet ended up controlling the US's entire cultural output for most of a century.
      • sgarland 4y ago
        In the 90s, this was called boycotting, and I don't remember anyone having a problem with it. It's now been rebranded as cancel culture, and is somehow seen as petulant. In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice.
        • concinds 4y ago
          > In the 90s, this was called boycotting, and I don't remember anyone having a problem with it. It's now been rebranded as cancel culture, and is somehow seen as petulant. Every boycott has detractors; if those detractors are too numerous, the boycott fails. Boycotts are marketing campaigns like everything else in the world. > In a capitalist economy, companies are guided by profit (in theory; Cloudflare has yet to actually be profitable IIRC). If people manage to affect that, they will take notice. The point is to observe which direction this pressures companies to lean towards, and what this says about who holds grassroots or institutional power at any given time.
          • sgarland 4y ago
            Personally, I think companies lean whichever way public sentiment directs them. That said, if leftists are better at organizing boycotts, that says more about the relative skill and dedication of their membership than anything else.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cloutchaser 4y ago
    Gab CEO made the same claim when gab was banned everywhere. He said there was a suspicious increase in really bad content a few days before. Obviously it’s completely unverifiable, but in the timeframes we are talking, if 30 minutes is too long to remove bad content, it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet. The precedents set here are terrible.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Gab got business relationships terminated because a mass murderer became radicalized via interactions with Gab users (and people had the receipts). This was after a pattern of buildup of political rhetoric culminating in violence on their site that had repeated for years.
    • soulofmischief 4y ago
      If you read the Cloudflare announcement, they stress that this is not general policy and to not see this decision as precedent.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • ohCh6zos 4y ago
        Once is a mistake, twice is a habit. Cloudflair can't set a precedent and just announce it isn't one.
        • dmix 4y ago
          This is the third time CF banned a site and it won’t be the last. It gets easier to justify every time and Cloudflare just motivated every deplatforming mob on Twitter. They showed pressure tactics work, just help create an ‘extraordinary’ situation. This is the kind of stuff spies are experts at. It can be learned by motivated online communities to target their enemies.
          • 4y ago
• cft 4y ago
  I would like to know what that "something" was: "On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat. The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face."
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    I think we're making an assumption off of partial information that a single post was the cause.
• ignoramous 4y ago
  https://archive.is/damIX https://archive.is/damIX
• sascha_sl 4y ago
  This post should be replaced with an archive link; for one because the availability of KF isn't particularly great and for another because funneling people to a doxing website with Referrer and IP intact is a bit dangerous.
  • _ph_ 4y ago
    Seconded.
  • aaron695 4y ago
    > with Referrer and IP intact is a bit dangerous. What would be the attack vector? They now have my IP and the fact I came from https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ Even if I'm logged in on Kiwifarms so they know who I am they have no idea if I have a login on HN or even what thread I was reading.
  • dotty- 4y ago
    The whole "Refer header and IP intact" thing seems a bit too "boogeyman" to me. You are one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of IPs that are visiting this site. I feel like the audience here generally understands what kind of info an IP address gives up (like broad geo info) and that it can't really be attributed to an identity -- I guess unless you're NSA? or the ISP? Do you think the site operator is monitoring all the IPs visiting the site and picking "targets"? I still support an archive link for availability reasons; I just wouldn't worry about being attacked or something just because you visited the site.
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      KF users love their correlation attacks. I'd just recommend giving them as little information as possible if you have any reason to believe they might be targeting you.
• pseudo0 4y ago
  If this is what Matthew Prince referred to as: > However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before. Seriously? I helped moderate a small community at one point and we would see stuff like this on a weekly basis. Or just look at a YouTube or Facebook comment section on a controversial topic. This looks like an excuse to cave to the Twitter mob.
  • desindol 4y ago
    You are a company if you get death threats against your own workers you have to act. These threats are not anonymous. There are legal implications if you do nothing and something happens.
    • pseudo0 4y ago
      Matthew Prince did not provide any information on the nature of the threats he claimed, but the two that were widely discussed on Twitter are addressed in the submitted post. Neither of them involve Cloudflare employees, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • kelseyfrog 4y ago
        Let's be clear, there is no level of evidence that would be acceptable to KF supporters. Asking for it is pointless because the response would be to discredit it regardless of what it was. So far we see, "it's a joke," "that's a bad apple," "you cant prove there is a connection," "you don't understand look but not touch," ad nauseum. We're just skipping the dialog tree to the part where CF had the power and KF didn't. Kind of a nothingburger if you ask me. KF lost the game - end of story.
        • 4y ago
• intunderflow 4y ago
  > This seems to be based off one of two things He (Moon) doesn't actually know that though, it's very easy to disprove an argument when you set that argument up yourself - I took Matthew's statement to be a more general observation on the state of dozens, if not hundreds of problematic posts on the forum that were overwhelming Cloudflare, but that's just me
  • programmarchy 4y ago
    Isn’t the whole point of Cloudflare to stop DDoS, though? Cloudflare may be able to handle a botnet that can generate 250GBps of traffic, but a few hundred problematic forum posts coupled with some Twitter outrage totally jams them up. (Purposely leaving aside the qualitative details here.) This shows that Cloudflare is completely defenseless against a certain variety of meatspace attacks.
    • dmatech 4y ago
      Correct. If you can get enough of a mob together, you can get any company to drop any client or fire any employee irrespective of the merits. I don't know of any workarounds so long as Twitter exists in its current form.
• keewee7 4y ago
  They are now using DDoS-Guard. The contact information for DDoS-Guard show it's based in Edinburg, Scotland. I think they will have to look for another DDoS protection provider very soon.
  • intunderflow 4y ago
    DDoS-Guard is based in Russia, they just happen to have an entity in Scotland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard
    • bloopernova 4y ago
      Would that business relationship be covered by sanctions against russia? (honest question, I don't know how the sanctions relate to internet businesses)
      • keewee7 4y ago
        There is no government mandated "sanction all of Russia" law. Most Western companies voluntarily left Russia. But there is nothing stopping you from starting a company and trading with Russian entities.
    • keewee7 4y ago
      Weird, why are they so shy about mentioning they're Russian on their website? Anyways that Scottish entity will soon have some bad things happening to it. The UK authorities will come down hard on anyone who supports the shitty "Bully LGBT people into suicide" forum.
      • ajb 4y ago
        > Weird, why are they so shy about mentioning they're Russian on their website? There are currently sanctions against Russia. They're not comprehensive, but many companies won't want to use a Russian company just because they don't want the risk that more stuff will be banned later (never mind the hassle of figuring out whether what you need to do is banned already)
• schleck8 4y ago
  > Our website makes no money. All of our moderators are volunteers. It took Facebook (with a 24/7 staff of paid moderators) 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch shooting from Facebook Live. You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here. 'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
  • worldofmatthew 4y ago
    That's false equivalence on your part. Downgrading a violent threat to compare it to shit-posting is logically incorrect. The website points out that it took Facebook 29 minutes to ban a live-stream of an active terrorist attack, a social media platform who has enough money to do better. A forum with volunteers monitoring taking down a threat in around 1 hour is incredibly quick.
    • schleck8 4y ago
      > There is also a false equivalent on your part. The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users. Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions. Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
      • towaway15463 4y ago
        In most of the world it is not illegal to use nazi symbolism.
        • 4y ago
• deepcyanide 4y ago
  I am no fan of kiwifarms, I have my own reasons to hate that site but I also strongly support free speech so I simply don't visit. That's changed for the past month because keffals decided to open another pandora's box. Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after. Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.
  • almost 4y ago
  • stillbourne 4y ago
    Moderation is not Censorship. Moderation is Free Speech. Hate Speech is not Free Speech. Criticizing the termination of services against kiwifarms isn't an endorsement of free speech its an endorsement of universal toleration. Universal toleration is the idea that I'm not allowed to determine who I provide goods and services to despite the message of the those to whom I am providing services too, if I host a website that is a forum for lego builds, am I not allowed to kick Nazis spreading hate from my forum? My platform, my rules, entitles me to determine what messages I want to convey because the message that is provided on my platform is my right to free speech therefore moderation is free speech. Remember the Colorado Wedding Cake? So which is it? Do you support Free Speech or don't you? mic drop
  • danielmalmer 4y ago
    "At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets." https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudflare-drops-kiwifarms/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudfl...
• ddevault 4y ago
  Organizing harassment campaigns and planning acts of violence, the bread and butter of Kiwi Farms, is not free speech. This website is accountable for the deaths of at least three people. They should have been de-platformed sooner. We cannot simply accept "free speech" as a value without question: it has to serve an underlying purpose as a tool with which our values are enacted. The purpose of free speech is to serve the best interests of society against bad actors, i.e. governments, who would use censorship to centralize power. Defending hate speech and organized violence contradicts the underlying purpose of free speech as a value in the first place. Free speech absolutists fail to see through the tool to the values beneath, to the detriment of society.
  • heartbeats 4y ago
    The entire point here, though, is that the Farms vigorously dispute having done any such thing. How are you to determine who's right? To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.
    • ddevault 4y ago
      There are a lot of questions lurking beneath the surface of your argument, many of which invoke difficult questions like the allocation of power and responsibility between the public and private sectors. I definitely think that we need stronger laws about hate speech and organized violence, and most definitely better enforcement. It's telling that the government will spare no cost to shut down a dark net drug market, but won't lift a finger to save trans lives from websites like this. So, we might find a solution to this problem in law, but we could probably write several books worth of material fully expanding on the implementation and implications. In any case, we cannot expect this solution to be implemented by breakfast tomorrow. What we might find tomorrow morning is that Kiwi Farms is responsible for another murder. Naturally, they will vigorously reject claims that it's a hate site: it's in their interests to portray themselves as such, and hate groups are not known for placing a high value on the truth. It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence. We do not need a court's opinion to make this judgement, though I would welcome such an opinion nevertheless -- these people should be held accountable in a court of law. As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values. In terms of values, I expect them (1) to have values compatible with peaceful society, and (2) to act in accordance with those values. Should they fail to do so, it reflects poorly on the people responsible for making those decisions.
• tibbydudeza 4y ago
  • keewee7 4y ago
    Can you expand on this? Does that region and city have some special significance?
    • tibbydudeza 4y ago
      • tgv 4y ago
        Anything to sow discord.
        • tibbydudeza 4y ago
          • tgv 4y ago
            That comment wasn't about you, but about Russia/the Russian Federation. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
      • Cyberdog 4y ago
        Up until yesterday, the site used a .net TLD and an American company provided DDOS mitigation. The actions of a Twitter mob which largely has Ukrainian flags in their profiles drove them further into business entanglements with Russian companies.
• _ph_ 4y ago
  As I didn't really follow the controversy around Kiwi Farms: there have been made quite plausible accusations that the Kiwi Farms are a forum of people for quite some time organizing online hate and harrassment which has lead to swattings, and at least one death. Can anyone dispute those accusations?
  • DuskStar 4y ago
    > a forum of people for quite some time organizing online hate and harrassment which has lead to swattings, and at least one death. Can anyone dispute those accusations? Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
    • threeseed 4y ago
      > Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more? No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
      • yaddaor 4y ago
        Plus they are more like a general mirror of society where obviously there are bad actors and dark corners but not pretty much exclusively.
      • yanderekko 4y ago
        >Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content. This is goalpost-shifting. Kiwifarms does moderate threats and such. It does not moderate mere "hateful and harassing content" (whatever that means, I assume a lot of "harassing" content does overlap with illegality), but if the clear no-no actions are swatting and such then clearly KF actively tries to prevent that. I fear that the implicit argument here is that in order for these efforts to be treated as "good faith", then forum owners need to not only remove clear legal threats but all sorts of speech (particularly "hate speech") that can be stochastically linked with the generation of those threats. That having sufficient moderation entails that moderators address not only actual threats but in removing a wide range of speech.
• Claude_Shannon 4y ago
  I find it strange how they weren't banned before. They already caused a few people to suicide.
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    Why is this downvoted? It's true. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-keffals-anti-trans-rcna44834 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-... Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome. This false dichotomy allows them to cling to their ideology.
    • protomyth 4y ago
      Because if we banned sites for causing suicides then Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok would be off the internet.
      • hackerlight 4y ago
        Well I happen to think they should be off the internet, so you're preaching to the choir. But supposing I wasn't someone who thought that, what you're saying is disanalogous, given the ratio of healthy use cases to unhealthy ones is drastically different, and given that these larger platforms actually ban (albeit imperfectly enforced) a lot of the suicide-causing behavior that Kiwifarms allows.
      • sweetheart 4y ago
        I think you’re making a stronger case for your opponents point than you think.
        • capitalsigma 4y ago
          Kids have been bullied into suicide at school. Do you think we should ban schools? Or forbid cafeterias? Some kids feel trauma over being picked last for sports teams -- should we ban sports?
• stefantalpalaru 4y ago
  Onion URL: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/ http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...
• high_derivative 4y ago
  Let's just be honest about CloudFlare. They write these hand-wringing posts occasionally to try to justify their 'policies', but their policy is quite literally 'block someone if enough people demand it on twitter'.
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    So they are lying when they say "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"? You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
    • nailer 4y ago
      > "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life" The post directly addressed this matter.
    • cft 4y ago
      I am not a Kiwifarms user, but since it's now available at the new domain (and according to CF, KF is not cooperating) the threats should still be there. I cannot find them. Can you please link those threats? Otherwise this lends me to believe that the basis of Matthew Prince's sudden reversal on his "free speech" ideals was something else, not the KF content.
      • calahad 4y ago
        The kiwi response states emphatically that they were deleted
        • cft 4y ago
          Then if the site promptly deleted allegedly unlawful content, why was it deplatformed by CF?
• almost 4y ago
• keewee7 4y ago
  Kiwi Farms and several other Western far-right websites consider Russia to be a safe haven. They're correct in this assumption if they limit themselves to hate speech against LGBT people and non-white minorities. However these websites are also blatantly anti-semitic and there is a lot of Holocaust denial going on. Russia has laws against both anti-Jewish hate speech and Holocaust denial. It will be interesting to witness what happens when the Western far-right collides with their Russian buddy's laws against anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
  • byyll 4y ago
    DDoS Protection is not hosting.
    • prvit 4y ago
      Even if true, Cloudflare does much more than just DDoS protection.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • quazar 4y ago
    Why would kiwifarms be far-right? It had hundreds of threats making fun of right wing people like Ethan Ralph, Nick Fuentes, Jack Murphy...
    • prvit 4y ago
      https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qK_xU8RldkYJ:https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/page-14&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qK_xU8... The site literally displays taglines like “obviously Hitler had a problem with Jewish people.”
      • quazar 4y ago
        Norm Macdonald once made a very similar joke on video. Is Norm far-right?
• Kiro 4y ago
  The replies to that thread give you an idea what KF is about.
  • convery 4y ago
    Want to provide any examples? Seems like the comments are mostly about CF going back on their policies, laughing at Twitter celebrating them being down for 30 minutes, and calling the account that posted the 'threat' an idiot.
    • notsound 4y ago
      This is incredibly dishonest. It took me less than 1 minute to find anti-semetism+transphobia (the t slur cries out as they strike you), and the n word (hard r) was one of the first comments. I get why this site is so infamous.
      • convery 4y ago
        > This is incredibly dishonest. It took me less than 1 minute to find anti-semetism Eh, a few users using naughty words on the internet doesn't really say much about what a site "is all about". Unless you're equating "naughty words" with "horrible person" and extrapolate a narrative about what such a person could possibly post. Which is a pretty Twitter-level view of the world..
        • krainboltgreene 4y ago
          > using naughty words I love how easy it is to spot you guys. You can't help yourselves. You wish you were normal.
          • convery 4y ago
        • UncleMeat 4y ago
          Using these slurs is actually extremely tightly correlated with being a horrible person.
• aaron695 4y ago
• vilaca 4y ago
  Why is Hacker News giving a platform for Kiwi Farms?
  • dmatech 4y ago
    Because the story covers a dispute about precisely what should be allowed on the internet and what the proper process is for removing something. A lot of people have decided that KF is morally bad and used that to justify any tactic to remove them. But an ordered society requires stable and well-drafted rules.
  • drewbug01 4y ago
    Because there is a significant overlap between the user base of both sites.
    • yukinon 4y ago
      This thread and the last one have been an eye opening experience for me, for the worse.
      • sashahrzg 4y ago
        Yeah. I'm frustrated seeing all the support for KF and their behavior.
  • twirlock 4y ago
• viraptor 4y ago
  This is very non-content to be honest. The main claim here is: > This seems to be based off one of two things (lists two cases) But it's just guesswork, we don't know if and what cf saw and what was reported to any law enforcement. Random possible alternative: Cloudflare got a considerable increase in their "kf complaints" pile and because of the outside pressure legal actually looked at them for the first time and said "we can't take this risk". There's just so many ways this could've played out, null's "it wasn't even us, promise" is just meaningless. Neither kf nor cf is great at being truthful and open at the moment. We can wait for the arrests or court documents if any will happen.
  • glenstein 4y ago
    Exactly, this is the weak link in the chain that's inviting all manner of speculative comments, inviting all manner of preemptive conclusions about who has or hasn't lied, whether the threats were real, etc.
• pjc50 4y ago
  Background (1) : https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885 https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885 (2) : https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566303971911909376 https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566303971911909376 (3) : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/599a356e-2bc1-11ed-a4d5-afa440292fae?shareToken=d1dfabf3c112b17c2a41d4f1544def0f https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/599a356e-2bc1-11ed-a4d5-a... Keffals did something extremely brave in using herself as a live-fire target. She knew she was being doxxed, so she went to Northern Ireland and mentioned looking for a particular kind of restaurant. This inevitably resulted in bomb threats and fake calls to the police. Bomb threats are taken seriously in Northern Ireland. It seems that this time the threat was given enough credibility for Cloudflare to take it seriously and cut them off. (As a Brit, there's a deep irony in the idea of someone fleeing to Northern Ireland for their personal safety!)
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    What is the possibility of someone wanting to have the site taken down posting these threats? The post was apparently deleted by mods within 14 minutes.
    • convery 4y ago
      Actually, a mod checked the logs to find that the post was deleted by the poster 2-3 minutes after Keffals screenshot and Tweeted it. So it was up just long enough to serve its purpose.
  • _vvaw 4y ago
    • convery 4y ago
      > to sue Canadian police for unspecified reasons The reason originally given was that they "misgendered" them. The chief released a statement saying that he had personally reviewed all recordings and found no evidence of this. Also made a statement that they knocked on Keffals door, and took them into custody without any issues, in direct contradiction to Keffals statement about waking up with an assault rifle in their face from the 'SWATing'. Worth noting that as part of the police detaining them, they also confiscated their phone and hard-drives. Which might explain why they are 'fleeing' all over the world except to Canada..
• soulofmischief 4y ago
  Don't forget about near/byuu. Killed themselves after DM'ing Josh Moon and warning that their KF thread was bringing them to suicide. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/near-byuu-suicide https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/near-byuu-suicide
  • dotty- 4y ago
    When reading the KYM page, don't forget to read the KF response. It's always important to read both sides to every story.
    • soulofmischief 4y ago
      Absolutely. And at the end of the page, you will see the exact DM's I am referencing between null and near. What exactly do you think I'm leaving out? How null insensitively and defensively perpetuated the idea that the suicide was faked? Furthermore the KYM page is convenient for other uninformed readers, but it is obviously incomplete and not a primary source of information for me because I watched this entire episode unfold in real time. This situation is highly nuanced. However, the KYM page gives fair treatment to the issue.
      • dotty- 4y ago
        Truly, I don't think you left anything out. It seems like every controversy involving KF is incredibly complicated and nuanced. I was not there in real time, and from the KYM page, it looks like Null lacked pretty much any compassion during this saga and was more concerned about his user's ability to have "free speech". The KF response, including the link to the entire e-mail exchange, really highlights that lack of compassion. I can see now how the "both sides to every story" implied KF had a moral leg to stand on. Not my intention. I think people almost intentionally avoid visiting the KF site out of some sort of fear, but people shouldn't be afraid to see what's going on over there.
        • soulofmischief 4y ago
          You're right, and everyone should definitely go right to the primary source when evaluating null and this situation. I know some will say that is too much work for some internet drama, and while that's a valid opinion, any further opinion on the issue itself by those people would be entirely invalid due to lack of proper research.
• moltar 4y ago
  CloudFlare is definitely not acting in good faith. Given that a friend of mine had to jump thru many hoops to report to CF a website that was very clearly and obviously abusive with hard evidence for it. It was a blackmail type website that was preying on women in the cam industry.
  • _-david-_ 4y ago
    You literally just go https://abuse.cloudflare.com/ https://abuse.cloudflare.com/ and submit the request. Is filling out a form jumping through many hoops?
• hanifbbz 4y ago
  So this has been going on: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_lizthegrey-twitch-activity-6968791661896220672-vJTp https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_lizthegrey-twitch-activ... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_timesupcloudflare-pt-3-alternatives-to-activity-6969150201253048320-nHxA https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_timesupcloudflare-pt-3-... And finally: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_blocking-kiwifarms-activity-6971981567141322752-X5UQ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_blocking-kiwifarms-acti...
• andrewinardeer 4y ago
  CloudFlare can terminate any account for any, or no reason as per their ToS. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/website-terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/website-terms/ Hackernews can do the same to your account on their site. https://www.ycombinator.com/legal#tou https://www.ycombinator.com/legal#tou It is what you agree to when you use someone's service. Pretty much every online service has this clause buried away in their ToS. Twitter deplatformed an ex-POTUS and he went and built his own platform. CloudFlare is well within their rights to do so. It might not be "right" to you, but it is their right to do so and they pulled the trigger on KF.
  • dotty- 4y ago
    No one is arguing about the legal merits, so these kinds of comments are just noise. Like the room is having a discussion and you are not engaging in the actual discussion and just telling everyone "It doesn't matter because Cloudflare can do whatever they want anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" Yeah sure -- you're right, but you're avoiding the real topic.
    • tsukikage 4y ago
      > No one is arguing about the legal merits Demonstrably untrue. There are literally dozens of posts here in this very ycombinator discussion explaining loudly and often that none of the kiwifarms content was illegal, never mind discussions in other places.
    • andrewinardeer 4y ago
      What do you perceive as the "real" topic here? That CF is trigger happy? That KF has put forth their argument and CF is being dishonest? That free speech is being curtailed? I also, from my perspective, see a lot of "noise" in this discussion. Just as you see noise in my previous comment and that's okay. Whether you are Team CF, Team KF or a neutral the fact is CF has pulled the trigger for their own reasons and that's that. We use a world wide network that started with high hopes for openess and freedom, it got monetized, coalesced into a number of large players who proprierized their forks of FOSS standards (IRC == Discord, XMPP == WhatsApp, etc) and we all know governments around the world has allowed this to happen.
• rosmax_1337 4y ago
  Let it be known that I tried to think of something thoughtful to write in response to this but that I have at this point grown tired enough of companies like CF that I just don't care anymore.
• afrcnc 4y ago
• ryukoposting 4y ago
  Scrolling through the KF comments section, I found multiple accounts complaining about "muh freedom of speech" with a signature boasting about their involvement in threads that resulted in people killing themselves. Horrifying
  • convery 4y ago
    Do screenshot some please. It should be easy since there's so many, right?
    • tgv 4y ago
      I opened the linked thread. It has replies from apparently regular users. Their profiles are ununderstandable to me; looks as if it's mainly in-jokes. But quite a few reply with "doxx", "n*gga/er", and "jew". That should say enough. They either mean it, or they're there to agitate. Cloudflare may be hypocritical, but it's good they pulled the plug.
      • convery 4y ago
        > with a signature boasting about their involvement in threads that resulted in people killing themselves > quite a few reply with "doxx", "nigga/er", and "jew". That should say enough. Pretty sure claiming that they are celebrating their killcount and using naughty words are different things.
• ThrustVectoring 4y ago
  This is an organized campaign to shut down a website by targeting their third-party infrastructure website. Kiwi Farms is a terrible place by pretty much any objective measure, sure, but do you think the people responsible for this campaign won't move on to the next-worst content that they can find? Are you sure that their view of objectionable material is going to align with yours? How worried are you that their political opponents are going to draw inspiration from these successes and undergo copycat campaigns against the websites they hate?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • becquerel 4y ago
    You think the right-wing hasn't been doing this shit for decades?
    • inawarminister 4y ago
      I thought bothsides is a terrible argument?
• sdze 4y ago
  Why the hell do people need cloudflare. Read a book about iptables. And be done with 3rd parties between you and your visitors.
  • lbotos 4y ago
    I guess you've never been DDoS'd before? IPTables won't cut it when the traffic is big enough to saturate the network: https://www.linode.com/blog/cloud-computing/christmas-ddos-retrospective/ https://www.linode.com/blog/cloud-computing/christmas-ddos-r... (I do agree about 3rd parties though, which is what makes this problem hard.)
• jakejarvis 4y ago
• olsonjeffery 4y ago
  To all the HN users bent out of shape about this outcome (not even mentioning the numerous, actual KF users that are active in this discussion): this is the system you built. One where government largely stays out of the way of private businesses, leaving those businesses to fend for themselves when faced with entirely normal, popular, and historically recurrent calls for some, or any, kind of justice. This is the world you wanted. This is the reaping you have sowed. Enjoy it!
• hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Oh no, not a "community with 16,000 users being punished for the actions of a single user". Who honestly gives a flying fuck? If you lie with dogs, you get fleas. If you can't successfully moderate your community and it becomes a breeding ground for dangerous behaviour then this only serves to highlight the difference between the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Kiwi Farms, not that Twitter or Facebook do it very well either, but they at least have teams of salaried people dedicated to dealing with it.
  • convery 4y ago
    > If you can't successfully moderate your community > but they at least have teams of salaried people dedicated to dealing with it. As pointed out in the post, their volunteer moderators didn't notice the offending post for 14 minutes. Facebooks paid moderators and advanced AI let a terrorist stream for 29 minutes before noticing.
    • hammyhavoc 4y ago
      16,000 daily users on Kiwi Farms versus 1.968 billion on Facebook. Of course Facebook will take longer because of the volume of UGC. Some perspective: I run Facebook Pages and Groups with many times more users than that. Whole Facebook Pages and Groups consisting of many more users have been terminated over far less from a single user. Stay hydrated and keep cool. I've made silly statements before on HN when I'm dehydrated or flustered, and I'm not one to chastise or mock over it, but really, look after yourself if you aren't already, mate.
      • convery 4y ago
        > Stay hydrated and keep cool. I've made silly statements before on HN when I'm dehydrated or flustered You may want to consider your own advice mate.
        • hammyhavoc 4y ago
          Oh, I do. Go on then, what's wrong with what I said? Are you not genuinely impressed by the logistics of handling that much UGC? Scaling up to that level means that response times increase.
• splitrocket 4y ago
  Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ The number of folks that confuse government censorship with people deciding that their private company shouldn't support abhorrent content is astonishing, especially for a forum with this level of sophistication.
  • junofan 4y ago
    To clear up any confusion, it’s possibly a violation of the social contract. That is what’s under discussion. The xkcd you linked does not apply.
  • matrix_overload 4y ago
    I would draw a line differently. If Alice wants to pass a message to Bob and Bob is refusing to hear it, it's Bob's personal decision. If Alice wants to pass a message to Bob, and Carol decides that Bob shouldn't be able to hear it, it's a form of censorship. De-facto, the identity politics activists are provided free tools to reach the attention of the public, any any opposing movements that get popular enough get quickly shut down by equating the entire movement or platform with the worst action of their worst members. There is a valid opinion that this is a coordinated policy aimed at turning the middle class vs. corporations conflict into a race/sexuality conflict that keeps the corporate interests unaffected [0]. [0] https://i.ibb.co/PCCyTyP/1661897568772175.png https://i.ibb.co/PCCyTyP/1661897568772175.png
    • rep_lodsb 4y ago
      > [0] https://i.ibb.co/PCCyTyP/1661897568772175.png https://i.ibb.co/PCCyTyP/1661897568772175.png With the bottom right graph removed, this would be believable as something other than an antisemitic /pol/ meme.
    • jameslars 4y ago
      So in this analogy, Alice should not relay the message through Carol and instead ask Dave. Or maybe talk to Bob directly? Carol isn't the only messenger in town, and Carol is not obligated to participate in communication they do not agree with. It's a weird position to insist otherwise.
• twirlock 4y ago
  Why am I not surprised that hn supports a forum for low level spooks to gossip about "cringe" people and harass them to the point of suicide? Meanwhile, no one will ever see this comment because I'm shadowbanned.
  • tennisflyi 4y ago
    > I'm shadowbanned. You sure?
• softcactus 4y ago
  Lots of people in here are saying things like: "Kiwifarms was taken down by the Twitter mob" or "Kiwifarms was just freedom of speech" Those people either have clearly never visited the site, or are operating in bad faith. I would visit Kiwifarms occasionally to catch up on obscure drama, get updates on Chris Chan, or just look at the deranged posts from users on the site. Kiwifarms had always been instrumental in coordinating attacks on people, not just "mean words" but swatting, doxxing, getting people fired, mass well-poisonings (aka "cancel culture"). It was not only a cesspool, but a source of what would probably be called "active measures" in the 20th century. As for Joshua Moon, he has never been the voice of reason beyond damage control for the site. When eyes are on the site you best believe he's trying his best to control optics. But even then, he's such a deranged psycho that his letter to the press on why Keffal's was "targeting him" used the "Jewish parentheses" and multiple slurs. Taking his arguments in good faith isn't playing centrist, it's extending an olive branch to a holocaust-denying antisemite, whose hobby is running a site that bullies trans people into suicide. I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms. If you haven't visited the site before, I implore you to listen to the people who have for years. What KF engaged in was not protected speech.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • salawat 4y ago
    >I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms. As you sit here trying to convince people that no, really, that's not free speech. Pragmatists ruin everything, and I've been around long enough to understand "boiling the frog", "not one inch", and that love of liberty creates at times very strange bedfellows. If you want to make progress dealing with horrible people, stop trying to turn me/everyone else against them, and deal with them. Like an adult. Either avoid, or work with authorities, within the rails of due process, to resolve the issue. If there is no unsavoryness to the non-KF side, there should be no reluctance with regards to letting the authorities deal with it. If there is, then that suggests someone is seeking to leverage the justice system who wants to avoid the inevitable consequences of doing so when one doesn't have clean hands, which I see no reason to offer myself as a conduit to deliver. Investigation and truth cuts both ways. I will not tell you that taking the easy way out is okay. I will not let you convince me through equivocation to give up a value I cherish deeply, that everyone is entitled to be heard, and to be free to pursue the ends of what they believe in short of actually engaging in violence. In time, it may be my own undoing, but I accept that. Too much has been sacrificed on the altar of the hypothetical in my life Clean hands and evidence, or it's just more "tit-for-tat" playing out at large.
• TechBro8615 4y ago
  Here’s what I don’t get. Cloudflare wasn’t providing hosting services to KiwiFarms. They were just proxying to their origin. So now they’ve terminated service, now what? The origin is still there, Kiwifarms is still available one way or another. All that’s been accomplished is Cloudflare is no longer proxying traffic to kiwifarms, and it’s easier to find their origin IP to continue harassment campaigns. This rubs me the wrong way because it doesn’t feel like any sort of justice. It feels like you paid the security guard to step aside so you could read the address on the door, call your friends and mob the store. You didn’t call the cops to shutdown the store. You just cleared a path for more vigilante action. It’s for this reason I see this as a failing of the legal system. If a website is so abhorrent as to be illegal, then you should be able to open an investigation, and investigators should be able to get warrants to seize the site hosting structure and take it down. If that doesn’t happen, why should it fall to vigilantes to harass and dox the site owners? That’s not justice, and Cloudflare is certainly not facilitating it by abdicating their position. In fact it’s the classic definition of cowardice.
  • convery 4y ago
    > It’s for this reason I see this as a failing of the legal system. If a website is so abhorrent as to be illegal, then you should be able to open an investigation, and investigators should be able to get warrants to seize the site hosting structure and take it down. They have been investigated a lot over the years, the operator works with law-enforcement to provide the information they request, and the moderators are pretty quick at removing any illegal content. One can argue that the police concluding that there's nothing illegal going on is because of their incompetence, but it's more likely that the US holds the 1A sacred and has no legal reason to take it down.
    • oivey 4y ago
      Whether the content was strictly illegal or quickly taken down is irrelevant. It isn’t a good sign that supporters of Kiwi Farms repeatedly conflate the law with ethics. Regardless of the law, Kiwi Farms is a place where a significant portion of the content, even when not veering into illegality, is based on harassment. There’s a history. Given the history and recent threats on people’s physical well being, Cloudflare decided they had enough. The same concept of freedom of speech that allows Kiwi Farms to exist is also what allows Cloudflare to decide to not do business with them.
• navjack27 4y ago
  It is absolutely wild how many existing users of HN or hijacked accounts or gullible people just keep defending this website on here. Or you have bad faith actors coordinating "I don't know the website but..." Posts. You even can see coordinated down voted comments that get grayed out that have reasonable opinions. What is even happening here? Why doesn't anyone else see it? People died. People have been driven to death. The people of this place know what they did. They know not to keep things centralized. To do harassment in a multi pronged off site method. That isn't evidence of innocence when you can't find posts on there anymore.