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The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defe

The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.

worldofmatthew 4y ago
Kiwifarms is a downgrade from the others aka its already a slippery slope. Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are known to protect booters. So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them. The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
- ratg13 4y ago
  A private company having a policy against using their platform to incite violence is not the human rights violation you think it is.
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    These listed companies literally break the law to grow. They create demand by knownly allowing illegal DDOS-for-Hire websites. That is not a free market if the people on top are allowed to break the law to stifle competition and force people to use them or stop existing.
concordDance 4y ago
I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...
- noasaservice 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - concordDance 4y ago
    I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this). When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      I've been on there when some harrassment stuff has came up in the past and have seen some threads. It's probably 0.00x% of it's posts but it's also what it's famous for.
    - manicdee 4y ago
      Right, because they would let someone who created an account in the last month or two and has no presence into their hunting lobby?
      - polygamous_bat 4y ago
        I am sometimes very worried about the apparent naivete of people who think this way, and then I am even more worried thinking that they might just be intentionally obtuse.
pjc50 4y ago
[flagged]
- rep_lodsb 4y ago
  - pjc50 4y ago
armitron 4y ago
It's not hard to feel bad for anyone getting censored/booted off the Internet. I see that "Gossithedog" lives in England, which - I reckon - makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right (a list that doesn't include England). We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  > makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. We understand. And the 2nd amendment. And the rest of the constitution. We just don't think the American ideas are the best.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I often hear this argument, but the US is currently on a much clearer trajectory towards increased authoritarianism than most EU countries/CANZUK despite all of this freedom. The situation is more complicated than just straightforward definitions of what freedom is. What really matters is not edge cases where some forum or other is banned, but whether your society is populated with authoritarian ideologies and to what extent these ideologies are present in the institutions. It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > What really matters is not edge cases… That’s what 100% matters. I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights. Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product. Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.
sp332 4y ago
It's not the speech that people are objecting to, it's the part where they get people killed.
- squabbles 4y ago
  - polio 4y ago
    Doxxing to facilitate swatting is attempted murder. They aren't unearthing this information because they're devoted archivists; they operate within a broader culture of harassment, and when one considers the modern arsenal of digital harassment that's enabled via doxxing, the SWAT team is front and center.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
  - sp332 4y ago
    It's not that members don't take credit for it, it's that the mods lock and delete threads when they do. E.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/achungus1235/status/1561787513819250694 https://mobile.twitter.com/achungus1235/status/1561787513819...
  - Zamaamiro 4y ago
    - squabbles 4y ago
      The only person who has claimed KF lead to their supposed suicide is Near/byuu after he attempted to extort the site into removing his thread. But we know he didn't kill himself as he lives in Japan and the state department releases a report every six months about the deaths of Americans overseas. It's been over a year, there have been two reports, and neither had any suicides in Japan, and the Japanese government is no slouch when it comes to paperwork. The only evidence that was ever given was a picture of an urn with byuu's name on it posted by a friend living in Hong Kong. Nonetheless this has not stopped journalists from reporting it as fact so they can create via citeogenesis a bloody shirt to wave and justify campaigns against the KiwiFarms.
zamalek 4y ago
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech. Spreading this pro-KF propaganda needs to stop.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Speak for yourself. Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. It’s way beyond 1st amendment and the technicalities of Government limits. ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights. The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following. The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. Death threats, fraud, harassment, libel, and other harmful forms of speech have had legal consequences for much longer than that.
    - colpabar 4y ago
      This has been said many times in all of these threads, but the operator of the site has always been very clear that he will comply with all legal subpoenas he is served. He condemns death threats and really anything that isn’t just pointing and laughing. The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?
ohCh6zos 4y ago
It appears that there is no plan for this to stop with Kiwifarms, some twitter searches lead me to believe Ovarit and Mumsnet are the next targets.
- gyuopy 4y ago
  Ovarit has some interesting threads on the Kiwifarms takedown and the possibility of it happening to their site: https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-ovarit-could-be-next https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-o... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-cloudflare https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-c... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-statement-kiwifarms-may-have-been-canceled-over-a-post-on-a-dif https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-state... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rendered-extinct https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rend... Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour. "There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    You presenting that as "interesting" and thinking a choice quote that is absolutely a hateful transphobic interpretation of the state of things ("literal correct information") is extremely telling. Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too. Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
    - gyuopy 4y ago
      I personally find Ovarit interesting reading in general. I don't consider it to be a "hate site", but rather, one of the very few places on the internet where women can be openly critical of the ideology of gender identity, particularly with regards to the legal and social implications, from a feminist perspective.
wesleywt 4y ago
Do you support sites like Kiwifarms that try and attack the freedoms of others?
weare138 4y ago
3 people are dead because of that site. What they were doing was a crime. Criminal activity is not is not protected free speech. That's like arguing carding and SIM swapping sites are just expressing their right to free speech and should be protected.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  So why are they not being prosecuted if it was a crime? DDoS is also a crime, and equates to mob justice at best in this case.
  - breckenedge 4y ago
    What mob is participating in this DDoS attack? Maybe vigilante justice is a more appropriate term.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      Well, seeing as this thread is about a website losing their DDoS protection, it would be whichever criminal mob that the DDoS protection was defending against.
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        This is just the marketplace of ideas in action. If KF wants to succeed, they can just have better ideas.
        stale2002 4y ago
        It's actually illegal to DDoS websites. Generally speaking, the best way to handle situations like that is to get the police to put someone in a cage.
        concordDance 4y ago
        Might (in DDOS power) makes right is pretty far from a free market.
superb-owl 4y ago
Freedom of speech, famously, doesn't give you the right to shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater [1]. It also doesn't give you the right to target, stalk, and harass people. The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Except you do have the right to shout "Fire" at a crowded theater, at least in the US. The original Supreme Court case (about criticism of the draft) was, IMO, a miscarriage of justice. Fortunately it was overturned a few decades later. To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.
mpol 4y ago
If you think you can say anything you want in any way you want, you might not have many friends left. And the "you" is meant as in general, or in this case Kiwi Farms.
tw04 4y ago
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.
- yanderekko 4y ago
  >This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
  - dmatech 4y ago
    What they wish to do is cut the head off the proverbial snake when the snake hasn't committed a crime or directly conspired with people who did commit a crime. It might be an effective strategy, but it's not one our laws allow, because we don't base guilt on "but-for" causation alone. Nor do we base it on that icky feeling we get when we look at the proverbial snake.
- akira2501 4y ago
  What I would prefer is that they have a day in court. Even this twitter thread tries to make the case that these aren't "criminals" effecting the DDoS, but rather they should be viewed as "victims." I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Kiwifarms looks like it is essentially a technical evolution of the tabloid. Tabloid media has been doxxing people and saying really terrible things about them forever. It's hard to feel sympathetic for people like tabloid media, but tabloid media still has a place in society.
- savryn 4y ago
  when 'all the news that's fit to print' stops reporting what goes against their upper crust values, you need to look in the gutters for the truth. There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.
moomin 4y ago
I mean, what are your alternatives? Should the government legislate as to which clients companies should accept and which they shouldn’t? Even if the client is unprofitable? Should the government itself offer these services? Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
atoav 4y ago
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely? While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands. Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  > What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely? How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
  - atoav 4y ago
    As you might have read, I am european. Threats of violence can be illegal here. I did not seek to explain the US flavour of freedom of speech here, I sought to explain a limitation on it I grew up with and why I think it produces a (to me) desirable outcome. Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out. By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights. When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago. Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?
johnklos 4y ago
No. You're absolutely wrong here. The issue isn't that "it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet" - that's a dog whistle to try to say Cloudflare is a victim. Let's be clear about a few things: Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not. Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP. Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS? The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled. They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility. Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action. What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands. So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.
Maursault 4y ago
> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it. But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban. So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
KF is essentially a deniable harassment vector (ie they say 'we don't condone harassment, so please don't harass Random Person* who lives at 123 Name Street and whose phone # is 212-555-1212 and whose email is... (etc)).' Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime. The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc. I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.
dmatech 4y ago
This has all the hallmarks of an overreaction to a moral panic, not a rational response to the actual evidence. People become incredibly sure of their positions and don't even want to look at the evidence, but to be honest, the evidence doesn't matter, because people won't be persuaded by it anyway given the stress level and strong emotions. Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.
- maybelsyrup 4y ago
  > Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows Uh I do
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  I mean, this is a site with a body count. How many people do you think hid themselves from the public, or guarded what they said online or had to be suspicious of mundane interactions for fear of being targeted? Why is their freedom of speech less important than Kiwi Farms’? As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.
danielfoster 4y ago
How else would the website be removed? Should Cloudflare have hosted a vote or something? I think they took it down because millions of people wanted them to, not on a whim.
joe_the_user 4y ago
What is supposedly being suppressed by Cloudflair is kiwifarm's ability to coordinate violent harassment campaigns against vulnerable individuals. I'm pretty sure neither the US nor any nation state includes immediate, credible threats of and facilitation of violence in their concept of Freedom Of Speech. Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Yet the "free speech absolutists" are absolutely nowhere to be found when the speech of groups other than right wing bigots are relevant to the discussion. If we must protect the speech of the most vile and disgusting and hateful and wretched monsters on the planet then surely we should also protect the speech of those who are oppressed and suffering. Where's that?

worldofmatthew 4y ago

Kiwifarms is a downgrade from the others aka its already a slippery slope. Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are known to protect booters. So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them. The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.

ratg13 4y ago
A private company having a policy against using their platform to incite violence is not the human rights violation you think it is.
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  These listed companies literally break the law to grow. They create demand by knownly allowing illegal DDOS-for-Hire websites. That is not a free market if the people on top are allowed to break the law to stifle competition and force people to use them or stop existing.

concordDance 4y ago

I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...

noasaservice 4y ago
[flagged]
- concordDance 4y ago
  I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this). When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    I've been on there when some harrassment stuff has came up in the past and have seen some threads. It's probably 0.00x% of it's posts but it's also what it's famous for.
  - manicdee 4y ago
    Right, because they would let someone who created an account in the last month or two and has no presence into their hunting lobby?
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      I am sometimes very worried about the apparent naivete of people who think this way, and then I am even more worried thinking that they might just be intentionally obtuse.

pjc50 4y ago

[flagged]

rep_lodsb 4y ago
- pjc50 4y ago

armitron 4y ago

It's not hard to feel bad for anyone getting censored/booted off the Internet. I see that "Gossithedog" lives in England, which - I reckon - makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. The US is one of few countries on the planet where "freedom of speech" is a protected right (a list that doesn't include England). We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.

deanCommie 4y ago
> makes it impossible for him to understand the value of free speech. We understand. And the 2nd amendment. And the rest of the constitution. We just don't think the American ideas are the best.
Bakary 4y ago
I often hear this argument, but the US is currently on a much clearer trajectory towards increased authoritarianism than most EU countries/CANZUK despite all of this freedom. The situation is more complicated than just straightforward definitions of what freedom is. What really matters is not edge cases where some forum or other is banned, but whether your society is populated with authoritarian ideologies and to what extent these ideologies are present in the institutions. It's not that freedom of speech is not important, just that it's only one facet of everything and tends to be trotted out as the absolute barometer. It's a circular argument where the US is defined as the freest country at the start and thus its particular mixture of authoritarianism and libertarianism is defined as the gold standard despite having the highest prisoner per capita ratio and other such problems.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > What really matters is not edge cases… That’s what 100% matters. I’ve seen multiple civil rights attorneys say this because that’s who they go after to set the precedent to erode everyone’s rights. So they have to defend kiddypornographers and neo-nazis and everyone else common people don’t care if the government tramples all over their rights. Like the iPhone hacking thing the fbi was trying to force apple to do, literally no one cared about some dead terrorist so they chose that case to set the precedent that they could force a company to defeat the security of their product. Nobody gives a shit about Kiwi Farms and everyone has sympathy for Keffals but that’s not what any of this is about.

sp332 4y ago

It's not the speech that people are objecting to, it's the part where they get people killed.

squabbles 4y ago
- polio 4y ago
  Doxxing to facilitate swatting is attempted murder. They aren't unearthing this information because they're devoted archivists; they operate within a broader culture of harassment, and when one considers the modern arsenal of digital harassment that's enabled via doxxing, the SWAT team is front and center.
- tchaffee 4y ago
- sp332 4y ago
  It's not that members don't take credit for it, it's that the mods lock and delete threads when they do. E.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/achungus1235/status/1561787513819250694 https://mobile.twitter.com/achungus1235/status/1561787513819...
- Zamaamiro 4y ago
  - squabbles 4y ago
    The only person who has claimed KF lead to their supposed suicide is Near/byuu after he attempted to extort the site into removing his thread. But we know he didn't kill himself as he lives in Japan and the state department releases a report every six months about the deaths of Americans overseas. It's been over a year, there have been two reports, and neither had any suicides in Japan, and the Japanese government is no slouch when it comes to paperwork. The only evidence that was ever given was a picture of an urn with byuu's name on it posted by a friend living in Hong Kong. Nonetheless this has not stopped journalists from reporting it as fact so they can create via citeogenesis a bloody shirt to wave and justify campaigns against the KiwiFarms.

zamalek 4y ago

> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech. Spreading this pro-KF propaganda needs to stop.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Speak for yourself. Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. It’s way beyond 1st amendment and the technicalities of Government limits. ACLU used to defend KKK’s right to march and express. Liberals used to be extremely pro free speech even reaching across the spectrum in the bowels of right-wing extremism to protect their rights. The fact of the matter is that speech and generally liberty is one generation away from being dismantled and eroded. If the newer generation wants to abolish it and institute an authoritarian style censorship, they’ll get an American equivalent of CCP censorship, but through proxy of corporations. All buttons and knobs are in place with Big Tech. It just needs following. The fall of speech rights in the west is a recent phenomenon and America appears to be the last bastion fighting for it. COVID was the last straw that broke camel’s back for places like Canada and New Zealand.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Speech is ingrained in American culture on both aisles of the political spectrum until last 5-10 years. Death threats, fraud, harassment, libel, and other harmful forms of speech have had legal consequences for much longer than that.
  - colpabar 4y ago
    This has been said many times in all of these threads, but the operator of the site has always been very clear that he will comply with all legal subpoenas he is served. He condemns death threats and really anything that isn’t just pointing and laughing. The reason this is a big deal to some is because there was no legal procedure at all. If the site was so obviously guilty as some are claiming, why hasn’t anything been done about it?

ohCh6zos 4y ago

It appears that there is no plan for this to stop with Kiwifarms, some twitter searches lead me to believe Ovarit and Mumsnet are the next targets.

gyuopy 4y ago
Ovarit has some interesting threads on the Kiwifarms takedown and the possibility of it happening to their site: https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-ovarit-could-be-next https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/146818/if-kiwifarms-stays-down-o... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-cloudflare https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/150947/kiwifarms-blocked-by-c... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-statement-kiwifarms-may-have-been-canceled-over-a-post-on-a-dif https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/151211/kiwifarms-latest-state... https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rendered-extinct https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/152066/the-kiwi-has-been-rend... Choice quote: "What I find interesting is of ALL the things on kiwi farms (and there's some vile stuff on there, threads about special needs kids, woman hating, racism etc.) and what took them down is the documenting of literal correct information about these groups of people. Not just nasty behaviour just to be mean and talk shit but documentation of this group of men's behaviour. "There's a level of totalitarianism that’s pretty scary."
- deanCommie 4y ago
  You presenting that as "interesting" and thinking a choice quote that is absolutely a hateful transphobic interpretation of the state of things ("literal correct information") is extremely telling. Ovarit is no hero here. They're a hate site through a "feminist" slant too. Though I have no issues with them staying online. They are exactly the kind of hate speech I can defend because they haven't actively attempted harm to others (yet).
  - gyuopy 4y ago
    I personally find Ovarit interesting reading in general. I don't consider it to be a "hate site", but rather, one of the very few places on the internet where women can be openly critical of the ideology of gender identity, particularly with regards to the legal and social implications, from a feminist perspective.

wesleywt 4y ago

Do you support sites like Kiwifarms that try and attack the freedoms of others?

weare138 4y ago

3 people are dead because of that site. What they were doing was a crime. Criminal activity is not is not protected free speech. That's like arguing carding and SIM swapping sites are just expressing their right to free speech and should be protected.

tsimionescu 4y ago
So why are they not being prosecuted if it was a crime? DDoS is also a crime, and equates to mob justice at best in this case.
- breckenedge 4y ago
  What mob is participating in this DDoS attack? Maybe vigilante justice is a more appropriate term.
  - stale2002 4y ago
    Well, seeing as this thread is about a website losing their DDoS protection, it would be whichever criminal mob that the DDoS protection was defending against.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      This is just the marketplace of ideas in action. If KF wants to succeed, they can just have better ideas.
      - stale2002 4y ago
        It's actually illegal to DDoS websites. Generally speaking, the best way to handle situations like that is to get the police to put someone in a cage.
      - concordDance 4y ago
        Might (in DDOS power) makes right is pretty far from a free market.

superb-owl 4y ago

Freedom of speech, famously, doesn't give you the right to shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater [1]. It also doesn't give you the right to target, stalk, and harass people. The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Rebelgecko 4y ago
Except you do have the right to shout "Fire" at a crowded theater, at least in the US. The original Supreme Court case (about criticism of the draft) was, IMO, a miscarriage of justice. Fortunately it was overturned a few decades later. To stretch the metaphor (which was a throwaway comment in a brief, not a formal supreme court opinion about fire safety), you can shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What you can't do is lead a mob to a theater and tell them to set it on fire.

mpol 4y ago

If you think you can say anything you want in any way you want, you might not have many friends left. And the "you" is meant as in general, or in this case Kiwi Farms.

tw04 4y ago

> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.

yanderekko 4y ago
>This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. It's about not shutting down speech via a pretextual appeal to its causal nexus to violence. Censorship based on "stochastic terrorism" claims are almost always demanded in an extremely ideological fashion.
- dmatech 4y ago
  What they wish to do is cut the head off the proverbial snake when the snake hasn't committed a crime or directly conspired with people who did commit a crime. It might be an effective strategy, but it's not one our laws allow, because we don't base guilt on "but-for" causation alone. Nor do we base it on that icky feeling we get when we look at the proverbial snake.
akira2501 4y ago
What I would prefer is that they have a day in court. Even this twitter thread tries to make the case that these aren't "criminals" effecting the DDoS, but rather they should be viewed as "victims." I'm entirely uncomfortable with the lack of due process and the easy justifications of vigilantism simply because some people perceive the site in a particular way.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Kiwifarms looks like it is essentially a technical evolution of the tabloid. Tabloid media has been doxxing people and saying really terrible things about them forever. It's hard to feel sympathetic for people like tabloid media, but tabloid media still has a place in society.

savryn 4y ago
when 'all the news that's fit to print' stops reporting what goes against their upper crust values, you need to look in the gutters for the truth. There are several times where the goddamn Daily Mail was the fastest quick and dirty way to get the facts, while the fancy papers avoided, deflected, or put on their three pairs of "systemic" eyeglasses before telling the reader the where, when, whys of what's happened.

moomin 4y ago

I mean, what are your alternatives? Should the government legislate as to which clients companies should accept and which they shouldn’t? Even if the client is unprofitable? Should the government itself offer these services? Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.

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atoav 4y ago

> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely? While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands. Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.

Georgelemental 4y ago
> What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely? How is the impediment happening? If through the threat of violent or illegal action, then that should be illegal. If it's libel (false statement, made while knowing and believing that it is false, with intent to harm), then maybe it should be illegal too. Otherwise, it's protected speech.
- atoav 4y ago
  As you might have read, I am european. Threats of violence can be illegal here. I did not seek to explain the US flavour of freedom of speech here, I sought to explain a limitation on it I grew up with and why I think it produces a (to me) desirable outcome. Whether a thing is legal or not doesn't mean everything that stays within the legal bounds is desirable as a society or morally, ethically just. Many of the most atrocious deeds of humanity have been legal at the time they were carried out. By saying all of this I am not doing myself a service here. Such opinions get downvoted on an US dominated platform like this one. I still think it is important to note that any freedom we are gurantueed comes with a duty to protect these freedoms for others. Those who enjoy a freedom and at the same time try to take that very freedom away from others can not complain if a free society tries to defend itself and limits their rights. When thinking about how societies can stop aliding into fascism after the genocides of the second world war Austrian philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "paradoxon of intolerance" for this. Any free society that wants to survive, cannot be universally tolerant — otherwise the intolerant will abuse that "hospitality" and abolish that free society. That means any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, after a certain degree. I would argue this degree has been reached in the US a while ago. Protected speech is a strong word in a nation which killed civilians on foreigns soil based on what they have been communicating via SMS without a trial. Here, suddenly, it is okay to go after people based on what they say somehow?

johnklos 4y ago

No. You're absolutely wrong here. The issue isn't that "it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet" - that's a dog whistle to try to say Cloudflare is a victim. Let's be clear about a few things: Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not. Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP. Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS? The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled. They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility. Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action. What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands. So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.

Maursault 4y ago

> But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it. But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban. So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations

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anigbrowl 4y ago

KF is essentially a deniable harassment vector (ie they say 'we don't condone harassment, so please don't harass Random Person* who lives at 123 Name Street and whose phone # is 212-555-1212 and whose email is... (etc)).' Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime. The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc. I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.

dmatech 4y ago

This has all the hallmarks of an overreaction to a moral panic, not a rational response to the actual evidence. People become incredibly sure of their positions and don't even want to look at the evidence, but to be honest, the evidence doesn't matter, because people won't be persuaded by it anyway given the stress level and strong emotions. Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.

maybelsyrup 4y ago
> Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows Uh I do
jakelazaroff 4y ago
I mean, this is a site with a body count. How many people do you think hid themselves from the public, or guarded what they said online or had to be suspicious of mundane interactions for fear of being targeted? Why is their freedom of speech less important than Kiwi Farms’? As for looking at the evidence: all I can say is that I’ve glanced through Kiwi Farms a couple of times over the years when people spoke up about being targeted by them, and it is abundantly clear to even a casual observer that this was a community built with the intention of stalking and intimidating people.

danielfoster 4y ago

How else would the website be removed? Should Cloudflare have hosted a vote or something? I think they took it down because millions of people wanted them to, not on a whim.

joe_the_user 4y ago

What is supposedly being suppressed by Cloudflair is kiwifarm's ability to coordinate violent harassment campaigns against vulnerable individuals. I'm pretty sure neither the US nor any nation state includes immediate, credible threats of and facilitation of violence in their concept of Freedom Of Speech. Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.

UncleMeat 4y ago

Yet the "free speech absolutists" are absolutely nowhere to be found when the speech of groups other than right wing bigots are relevant to the discussion. If we must protect the speech of the most vile and disgusting and hateful and wretched monsters on the planet then surely we should also protect the speech of those who are oppressed and suffering. Where's that?