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Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. U

by Borgz 4y ago

Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. Until then, it doesn't seem likely.

flumpcakes 4y ago
I've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone. It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people. Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media. Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care Was this information omitted because it was false or libelous, perhaps? How did you verify it was actually true?
  - flumpcakes 4y ago
    I don't believe so. I think it was omitted because if it was published in the press (TV and newspapers) there would have been a public outcry of indecency. Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people. I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings. Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments. > How did you verify it was actually true? The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group. Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
  - flumpcakes 4y ago
    Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"? If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact. There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?). If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      > I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms. Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first. > If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt > Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.
concordDance 4y ago
Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.
- Borgz 4y ago
  Yes, I've looked at the site quite a few times over the past few years. Even if you can't find people explicitly organizing there, you do see their effects across the internet in the form of off-site harrassment campaigns, generally of internet personalities, that seemingly come out of nowhere.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pjc50 4y ago
  > Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment. That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet. Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Stochastic terrorism style? Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    > Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand. They'd do that anyway. Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
I don't think that's coherent. Twitter for example has been the host of many many harassment campaigns which are propped up by its algorithms, it also hosts videos of murder, decapitations and other gruesome crimes. There are also regular death threats, doxxings and hate speech on twitter which are tolerated. Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations. By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?
- Borgz 4y ago
  Do you believe that KiwiFarms is making a good faith effort to remove objectionable content to the same extent that mainstream social media platforms are? I think it's pretty clear that they're not, simply based on the prevalence of that content on KiwiFarms, and the relative lack of it elsewhere.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I don't think Twitter makes much of an effort; some of my reports on clear-cut cases like "shame if his face would be smashed in with a brick wink-emoji wink-emoji" have been rejected as they are, apparently, not promoting violence. I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.
Consultant32452 4y ago
Reminder: a 13 year old minor survivor begged Twitter to remove a video sexually exploiting him. Twitter reviewed the content and said NO. They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time. The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.
- pjc50 4y ago
  This was also wrong of them.
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    Sure, the point is that this was not an isolated case and Twitter was not nuked off the internet.
tomohawk 4y ago
I've never been to kiwifarms, but I'll take your word that you find them morally reprehensible. Isn't it more morally reprehensible (and just counterproductive) to take away people's rights? It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights. If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  No one has a right to use Cloudflare DDOS protection services. No one has a right to a twitter account. No one has a right to force companies to host their bigotry. This isn't how rights work.

by Borgz 4y ago

Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. Until then, it doesn't seem likely.

flumpcakes 4y ago

I've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone. It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people. Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media. Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.

pjc50 4y ago
> It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care Was this information omitted because it was false or libelous, perhaps? How did you verify it was actually true?
- flumpcakes 4y ago
  I don't believe so. I think it was omitted because if it was published in the press (TV and newspapers) there would have been a public outcry of indecency. Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people. I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings. Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments. > How did you verify it was actually true? The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group. Does it make a difference to you whether it's happened on Kiwifarms or Jan 6th?
- flumpcakes 4y ago
  Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"? If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrible opinions and are grossly offensive. Again, I've only only read probably 0.01% of the content on that site so this isn't an objective fact. There was another comment about SSN/Credit score and PII. I think that is a legitimate line of criticism against Kiwifarms and I would expect them to get shutdown for breaking GDPR and other PII laws. I expect this is actually illegal (or should be?). If people think it is acceptable for them to go down due to their nasty comments then please let's get rid of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and only allow comments that have been approved by human monitoring system like in China. I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    > I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms. Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first. > If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt > Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.

concordDance 4y ago

Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.

Borgz 4y ago
Yes, I've looked at the site quite a few times over the past few years. Even if you can't find people explicitly organizing there, you do see their effects across the internet in the form of off-site harrassment campaigns, generally of internet personalities, that seemingly come out of nowhere.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pjc50 4y ago
> Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment. That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet. Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Stochastic terrorism style? Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?
- Mezzie 4y ago
  > Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand. They'd do that anyway. Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

I don't think that's coherent. Twitter for example has been the host of many many harassment campaigns which are propped up by its algorithms, it also hosts videos of murder, decapitations and other gruesome crimes. There are also regular death threats, doxxings and hate speech on twitter which are tolerated. Conversely, KiwiFarms has been actively prohibiting and removing threats and posts that are considered illegal in its jurisdiction, including going to the extent of blocking all new registrations. By what objective standards do you distinguish these sites when choosing to ban one and to keep another?

Borgz 4y ago
Do you believe that KiwiFarms is making a good faith effort to remove objectionable content to the same extent that mainstream social media platforms are? I think it's pretty clear that they're not, simply based on the prevalence of that content on KiwiFarms, and the relative lack of it elsewhere.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I don't think Twitter makes much of an effort; some of my reports on clear-cut cases like "shame if his face would be smashed in with a brick wink-emoji wink-emoji" have been rejected as they are, apparently, not promoting violence. I really appreciate the challenges Twitter is facing with a bazillion tweets a minute and who-knows-how-many reports a minute and I'm not attaching all that many conclusions to this, but let's not pretend there isn't a huge amount of pretty dubious content on Twitter.

Consultant32452 4y ago

Reminder: a 13 year old minor survivor begged Twitter to remove a video sexually exploiting him. Twitter reviewed the content and said NO. They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time. The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.

pjc50 4y ago
This was also wrong of them.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  Sure, the point is that this was not an isolated case and Twitter was not nuked off the internet.

tomohawk 4y ago

I've never been to kiwifarms, but I'll take your word that you find them morally reprehensible. Isn't it more morally reprehensible (and just counterproductive) to take away people's rights? It seems that the bigger threat by far is from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google working hand-in-glove with politicians to take away peoples rights. If removing these companies from the internet seems impossible, maybe that is a sign that they are more powerful than the US federal government, and that their power needs to be curtailed.

tstrimple 4y ago
No one has a right to use Cloudflare DDOS protection services. No one has a right to a twitter account. No one has a right to force companies to host their bigotry. This isn't how rights work.