7 ms·

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 (

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

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