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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

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.
- dmatech 4y ago
  Boycotting and cancel culture are quite different. At its core, cancel culture involves the isolation of a person or company by forcing their immediate network of friends or other connections. The cancellers force these connections to choose (under duress) between the cancelee and everyone else. If this doesn't work, they attack a connection's connections the same way. For instance, if they don't like you, they report you to your employer. If your employer defends you, they attack your employer's relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees. Basically, cancel culture exploits social networks to force the submission of an opponent.
  - sgarland 4y ago
    If you're espousing shitty views, you get what you deserve. shrug I think there's a line that most reasonable people can determine between "I disagree with $CURRENT_VIEW" and "I am against $PERSON_OF_CATEGORY existing." For example, frequently someone on Twitter will say things like, "calling for more bike lanes is ableist." I think - and am not afraid to have my name attached to this sentiment - that this is an absurd take. Every aspect of society cannot possibly serve everyone, but that doesn't mean we should fail to do something because a minority of that society can't participate. If the action actively harms that minority, then yes, close examination of it is warranted. However, if your publicly stated opinion is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be teachers, you deserve to be pilloried, because that opinion is harmful and without merit.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      > If you're espousing shitty views, you get what you deserve. And who gets to decide what views are sufficiently shitty to deserve life ruination? Please remember this post if someone ever decides that something you said now means that you qualify for it.
      - sgarland 4y ago
        Again, see "reasonable people." If someone disagrees with me on, say, whether or not the USG should subsidize EV manufacturers, I wouldn't expect a 3rd party to call either side of that debate deserving of, well, anything. However, when someone holds an opinion that $GROUP is less deserving of x _due solely to their existence, not their choices,_ I expect that opinion to be questioned. Also, it's very possible to be wrong on the internet, be corrected, and become a better person without having your life ruined. I used to be somewhat of a troll. Not 4chan level, but I was definitely a crueler person than I was in real life. Someone once had the patience to engage me in questions, I realized what I was doing was harmful or at least not helpful, and I stopped the behavior.
- boastful_inaba 4y ago
  In several places there's a differentiation between a "primary boycott" and a "secondary boycott". Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either. Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business. I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Secondary boycott idn't a thing. You're thinking secondary strike, and no legally recognized Union can orchestrate one as a consequence of the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States. This is, if I recall, the same legislation that normally outlawed "unfair" practices in Capital/Labor relations, which included making illegal blacklisting, wildcat strikes, secondary striking, retaliation, etc...
kalleboo 4y ago
> The primary goal is to increase the left's institutional power Is it that hard to believe that the primary goal of a group of people who were being harassed, at times to the point of suicide, is to try to shut down the forum that is harassing them?
- philistine 4y ago
  So far to the right that shaming corporations for helping harrassers is seen as an evil political value.
  - concinds 4y ago
    Did I say it was evil? I am merely coldly analysing the implications for US political dynamics.
- languageserver 4y ago
  > at times to the point of suicide proof?
  - klyrs 4y ago
    See references 4 through 8: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
    - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Mmm. I never heard of KiwiForums before and can well believe it's full of nasty stuff, so took a look at reference 4, the first one. At first it seems cut and dried. Some emulator developer has a thread on KF making fun of him and he and doesn't like it, tells the owner he'll do anything to get it taken down, that his friends are being harassed because of KF and he will kill himself if the thread isn't deleted. Which it appears he then did. But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut. The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies. The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven). So: - The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF. - The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets. - The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum. It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know. More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do you draw the line? It has to be drawn somewhere or else half the internet would be deleted.

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.
dmatech 4y ago
Boycotting and cancel culture are quite different. At its core, cancel culture involves the isolation of a person or company by forcing their immediate network of friends or other connections. The cancellers force these connections to choose (under duress) between the cancelee and everyone else. If this doesn't work, they attack a connection's connections the same way. For instance, if they don't like you, they report you to your employer. If your employer defends you, they attack your employer's relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees. Basically, cancel culture exploits social networks to force the submission of an opponent.
- sgarland 4y ago
  If you're espousing shitty views, you get what you deserve. shrug I think there's a line that most reasonable people can determine between "I disagree with $CURRENT_VIEW" and "I am against $PERSON_OF_CATEGORY existing." For example, frequently someone on Twitter will say things like, "calling for more bike lanes is ableist." I think - and am not afraid to have my name attached to this sentiment - that this is an absurd take. Every aspect of society cannot possibly serve everyone, but that doesn't mean we should fail to do something because a minority of that society can't participate. If the action actively harms that minority, then yes, close examination of it is warranted. However, if your publicly stated opinion is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be teachers, you deserve to be pilloried, because that opinion is harmful and without merit.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    > If you're espousing shitty views, you get what you deserve. And who gets to decide what views are sufficiently shitty to deserve life ruination? Please remember this post if someone ever decides that something you said now means that you qualify for it.
    - sgarland 4y ago
      Again, see "reasonable people." If someone disagrees with me on, say, whether or not the USG should subsidize EV manufacturers, I wouldn't expect a 3rd party to call either side of that debate deserving of, well, anything. However, when someone holds an opinion that $GROUP is less deserving of x _due solely to their existence, not their choices,_ I expect that opinion to be questioned. Also, it's very possible to be wrong on the internet, be corrected, and become a better person without having your life ruined. I used to be somewhat of a troll. Not 4chan level, but I was definitely a crueler person than I was in real life. Someone once had the patience to engage me in questions, I realized what I was doing was harmful or at least not helpful, and I stopped the behavior.
boastful_inaba 4y ago
In several places there's a differentiation between a "primary boycott" and a "secondary boycott". Primary boycott: I buy from you now, but you did something bad and now I don't like you and refuse to purchase your goods/services anymore. I'm going to campaign for my friends to not buy from you either. Secondary boycott: I don't buy from you directly, but I don't like who you work with or sell to, don't associate with them. If you don't stop my friends and I will hurt you In some jurisdictions, secondary boycotts are illegal, usually as a measure to prevent unions applying muscle to people tangentially related to a core business. I'm not sure of the legal status of these things in the mess of jurisdictions involved in this controversy, though.
- salawat 4y ago
  Secondary boycott idn't a thing. You're thinking secondary strike, and no legally recognized Union can orchestrate one as a consequence of the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States. This is, if I recall, the same legislation that normally outlawed "unfair" practices in Capital/Labor relations, which included making illegal blacklisting, wildcat strikes, secondary striking, retaliation, etc...

kalleboo 4y ago

> The primary goal is to increase the left's institutional power Is it that hard to believe that the primary goal of a group of people who were being harassed, at times to the point of suicide, is to try to shut down the forum that is harassing them?

philistine 4y ago
So far to the right that shaming corporations for helping harrassers is seen as an evil political value.
- concinds 4y ago
  Did I say it was evil? I am merely coldly analysing the implications for US political dynamics.
languageserver 4y ago
> at times to the point of suicide proof?
- klyrs 4y ago
  See references 4 through 8: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Mmm. I never heard of KiwiForums before and can well believe it's full of nasty stuff, so took a look at reference 4, the first one. At first it seems cut and dried. Some emulator developer has a thread on KF making fun of him and he and doesn't like it, tells the owner he'll do anything to get it taken down, that his friends are being harassed because of KF and he will kill himself if the thread isn't deleted. Which it appears he then did. But then you read the email exchange, the KF response and follow a few links and it gets less clear cut. The summary seems to be that someone with self-admitted serious long term mental health issues that pre-dated KF (and especially depression) had (in their own words) lived their whole life online, shared every thought that popped into their head including some rather 'edgy' thoughts related to child porn, generally created a lot of drama and become a target of some relatively minor amount of ridicule as a consequence in which his various public statements were documented. However they actually posted in their KF forum thread and then agreed with a lot of that ridicule, stating that much of their past behavior had been a mistake. This person was doing things like taking hormone replacement drugs despite explicit instructions from their doctor not to do so (due to mental health preconditions!), claimed to have no real life friends whatsoever, to believe that their life was mostly wasted and a failure etc. So all the classic risk factors for suicidal tendencies. The email thread is where it gets really weird. The emulator developer says he has panic attacks worrying what users of KF are "going to do next to me or my friends" and offers the KF guy lots of money to take the thread down, stating he'll kill himself if it doesn't happen and describing in graphic detail how he'll do it. The site operator asks where the harassment is because he isn't aware of it and that this sounds a bit like extortion, but gets a reply that the harassment is doxing on other sites, and that the "friends" in question are all random anonymous Twitter users/furries he's never met and didn't even know their names, who supposedly blamed/blocked him for other people doxing them, even though it wasn't his fault (i.e. not really his friends?). The operator points out that he can't control what people do on other websites, and that even if he took down the thread someone might just put a copy of it back up somewhere else anyway. The emulator dev then acknowledges that this is true, but says he just hopes that won't happen. He then kills himself (or appears to, the KF guy claims it's not proven). So: - The harassment in question wasn't being done on KF. - The thread that the guy wanted taken down consisted mostly of records of his own tweets. - The guy in question had been saying for many years things that made plain he was a major suicide risk, regardless of what happened on any particular forum. It feels risky to assign the blame here exclusively to a single internet forum. With hindsight you can say, wow, this is a terrible story and KF should have pulled the thread, or should never have allowed it in the first place. But as the KF guy points out, if he does that then he will have to delete anything and everything the moment someone claims they'll kill themselves if he doesn't - even if the threat is fake, simply because he has no way to know. More generally, threatening to kill yourself if someone else doesn't do what you want is pretty widely recognized as anti-social and problematic behavior. "Stop harassing me because you're making me want to kill myself" is one thing and a something everyone would be sympathetic towards. "Pointlessly delete this record of my own statements because some anonymous users of your site are doxing other anonymous users I know nothing about on a different site" feels like a different category. Where do you draw the line? It has to be drawn somewhere or else half the internet would be deleted.