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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
by 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 agoSo 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 agoWhat mob is participating in this DDoS attack? Maybe vigilante justice is a more appropriate term.
- stale2002 4y agoWell, 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 agoThis is just the marketplace of ideas in action. If KF wants to succeed, they can just have better ideas.
- stale2002 4y agoIt'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 agoMight (in DDOS power) makes right is pretty far from a free market.
- cauefcr 4y agoSame for the asymmetry of anonymous KF users vs a random LGBT person, so what's the point?
- stale2002 4y agoThe "point" is that anyone engaging in illegal violence, or similar, anywhere, should be punished via the legal system, and not via some other forms of illegal violence. And that goes to anyone involved in any part of this whole fight.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoIt's just packets and packets are speech. Just like the packets used to post this embody free speech
- stale2002 4y agoActually, DDoSing website is a crime, that police will throw you in a cage for doing so.
- concordDance 4y ago"Free speech" is a bit of a misnomer. The valuable thing is the freedom to hear, not the freedom to speak. With a DDOS the goal is to prevent people from reading someone's words. With harassment the goal is to prevent people hearing the targets future words. Both are forms of censorship.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoSounds like we're actually on the same page. I am ddos, hear me roar!
- cowtools 4y agoThis is not a case of "good ideas" vs "better ideas", this is a case of DDoS: "inconvenient ideas and IP Bandwidth" vs "censorship and better IP bandwidth"
- kelseyfrog 4y agoIt's pretty contingent on ideas though. You don't see thecheesecakefactory.com getting blasted for exactly this reason.
- cowtools 4y agoThe cheesecake factory has no meaningful ideological motivations, unless you include the advancement of poor dieting amongst Americans, which I suppose could be considered to be anti-american in a sense. Additionally, it's a retail store. I can't imagine they would lose a lot of business if their website was down. Still, they could just as easily fall victim to a DDoS racketeering scheme I suppose. If somehow someone objected to cheesecake factory's practices (let's say they're a vegan or they disapproved of cheesecake factory's health practices or something), then it would be disproportionately easy for the cheesecake factory to conduct a DDoS attack on the protester's website than vice-versa. So the idea that we should support DDoS as some form of free speech is obviously pro-corporatist in my perspective, because it empowers those with more financial and bureaucratic control over the internet.
- fluoridation 4y agoSo let's see, if I don't like this comment of yours and I find out where you live and go and shoot you in the face so you can't make such comments again, that's also competition in the marketplace of ideas, right? It's my idea to shoot you in the face against your idea of making comments I don't like.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoYou're equating a website going offline to shooting me in the face? No, that's not a competition of ideas. It's murder. Does that really need to be spelled out for you?
- tsimionescu 4y agoWell, by definition almost a Distributed DoS attack implies some kind of mob. Now, it could conceivably be some rich individual illegally paying money to an illegal botnet, but it could also very well be a larger group of people conspiring to illegally pool their money to buy time on an illegal botnet. It could also theoretically be a large group of people illegally conspiring to attack the site directly using their own machines.
- moomin 4y agoYou seem to be under the impression most crimes are prosecuted. Very few are, because, amongst many other things, the police do not exist to protect citizens.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoHarassment, especially online harassment, is a crime that is especially unlikely to lead to prosecution, also.
- tsimionescu 4y agoSo why not try to do something about the police, and instead focusing on Cloud Flare. Surely there are many more important crimes that Cloud Flare can't help with, and that the police could if it were forced by people to act as it is supposed to. Also, have any of the people complaining about this on the internet actually filed complaints with the police/procesutor's office? Have they even attempted to follow the legal channels before deciding to take the law into their own hands? Surely a prosecutor standing for re-election would be much more likely to be swayed than a massive mega corporation. But why go through the bother of actually doing something that could help set legal precedent when you can simply tweet furiously.
- moomin 4y agoI know you’re asking questions rhetorically, but these questions have straightforward answers that contradict your thesis. Read Zoe Quinn sometime.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> why are they not being prosecuted if it was a crime? CloudFlare’s original announcement mentions law enforcement. The bomb threats will almost certainly see investigation; that’s domestic terrorism.
- drexlspivey 4y agoWhat doesn’t make sense to me is why is Cloudflare harassed for providing an utility to some bad actors while other traditional providers aren’t? Is Comcast getting any flak for providing internet to the KKK offices? Or their water provider? Is Netflix getting any complains for providing entertainment to terrorists? Or vodafone for mobile connectivity? Why is it different for cloudflare?
- bastawhiz 4y agoCloudflare caches and rehosts content. Their services actively facilitate the distribution of their customers' website contents.
- kelnos 4y agoI think because some of us look at Internet access or phone service as akin to water or electricity service. You just don't deprive someone of those things. Regarding your Netflix example, I doubt Netflix knows if any particular customer is a terrorist. Having access to a CDN provider isn't in the same "basic rights" league.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI look at having a home and a place to sleep at night as categorically more important than KF having CDN access, but maybe I'm just being weird about stuff.
- yanderekko 4y ago
- ALittleLight 4y agoEven if that were true, and I think it's pretty doubtful to just attribute a suicide to some people who made fun of or harassed the deceased, it's a criminal or civil matter. If people on that forum committed a crime, let them face the legal penalties. Why should the website be made persona non grata by Internet companies? How many more are dead from activities on Facebook, Instagram, etc? Why is it that big businesses see no punishment for vastly larger crimes and small communities are harshly dealt with?
- therouwboat 4y agoSo how many more are dead from Facebook etc?
- Deathcrow 4y agoFacebook has probably killed more people with face detection and name tagging in photos alone.
- wizofaus 4y agoIf even only half the material presented in "The social dilemma" was credible, Meta have absolutely been knowingly responsible for more harm than KF. I don't know what the right solution is.
- ALittleLight 4y agoIt's not countable, but vastly more than three. There are civil wars and ethnic cleansing that get organized and supported on Facebook (e.g. Ethiopia and Myanmar). Gang violence and mass murder also get spread on Facebook. Nevermind the harassment and bullying that happens on Facebook, which is, of course, orders of magnitude more than what goes on on KF. It's just not very sensible to think that big companies care about a few people dying because of a small forum when they demonstrably do not care about many, many, more people dying because of a big forum. It seems way more plausible to me that big tech companies work together to kill small social media than that they have some secret ethic which compels them to care about small harms over big harms.
- aaa_aaa 4y agoThis information is hard to believe. How is a forum is responsible? Seriously, has someone hired a hitman or what?
- Natsu 4y agoI happened to see someone else post KF's response while it was protected by DDoS guard and read it. Their story, which doesn't seem to appear in the responses in that Twitter thread, was that a 2 year old account that only posted once previously in its history suddenly activated, posted a picture of someone holding a threatening letter of some type outside of someone's home, then this was screencapped on Twitter a short time later (~15 minutes). The post was removed 2 minutes after it hit Twitter by the submitter (they originally thought their mods did it, but corrected this, saying it was removed with the note "retarded"). I don't ever read that site other than to look at stuff like this when it hits the news, so I don't claim to know anything more than that, but you were for a time able to look at the forum threads and see the posts they mentioned, etc.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI don't know of any SIM swapping sites that have been taken down - I would be happy to be corrected here but there doesn't seem to be a populist fervor demanding it. Aren't there ISIS members on Twitter? There are also people advocating for the industrial scale genital mutilation of babies. I just checked and Purdue Pharma is still online and their cynical campaign of mass murder puts 3 people dead in a very stark perspective. This whack-a-mole approach to de-platforming seems reactionary and very fashion based and not based on coherent set of morals. There seems to be no proportionality. This extrajudicial punishment sounds like a neat solution to a lot of problems but I'm worried about setting precedents that will almost definitely be used against things I care about. Anti-war movements always start out as fringe minority (now casually defined as extremists paroting Russian talking points) and are very undermining to a state that has decided to mobilize its population for war - which leaves me counting down the days until I'm deplatformed.
- echelon 4y agoI'm a free speech advocate but 100% agree with you. Our legislators needs to make laws against targeted, anonymous, non-journalistic doxxing. It needs to include clauses that escalate the severity when revenge porn or racial, sexual, or other discrimination is being incited. If this bullying results in suicide, that should also increase the severity of the crime. Until these laws exist, prosecutors need to use this angle and try these cases anyway.
- ALittleLight 4y agoNon-journalistic doxxing? What makes doxxing someone journalistic and why is it okay when a journalist does it?
- cauefcr 4y agoDocumenting any of: - leader of a mafia - any government leader - billionaires in general - anyone in a position of power Investigating their crimes and doxxing them is very different from "lmao look at this piece of shit loser, let's bully it to death".
- philippejara 4y agoIf someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news. What does "government leader" means? what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means? Especially in the era of twitter and immense followings from people that are just regulars and not some ultra-rich celebrities. Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today. [0]https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-user-trump-tweet/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
- cauefcr 4y ago>If someone is the leader of a mafia and it is known without a doubt and you know their location you should call the police not put it in the news. Fair enough. >What does "government leader" means? >what does "anyone in a position of power" actually means? I'm not a lawmaker, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things. >Man it really didn't take long for people to forget things like the CNN reddit kid dox or even more recent the twitter account from tiktok dox by journalists active still today. That's exactly why I put the above caveat.
- hecatoncheires 4y agoWhoop tee doo. I've seen dozens of livestreamed murders on Instagram Live and Facebook Live. Reddit has /r/chiraqology where there are hundreds of videos of gang bangers and drill rappers beefing with each other and shooting at each other, and commenters celebrate the lifestyle and keep detailed ontologies of it all. Nobody is talking about nuking any of these platforms from existence just because of some isolated illegal incidents.
- spoonjim 4y agoThe Chiraqology stuff is wild. People threaten each other on YouTube and then follow through with murder! The only reason it’s not banned is because nobody with power cares what happens to impoverished black kids in Chicago unless they can make money from it.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI think it's worse than that. They aren't banned precisely because people are making money from it.
- hecatoncheires 4y agoIf Reddit were materialists to that degree then they wouldn't have banned popular gore subs. It's more likely the sub taps into a vein of black culture that happens to be interwoven with some violence, and Reddit tolerates it because they don't want to be seen as trampling out anything to do with black culture. Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy
- tsol 4y agoThere are still plenty of subs for hating fat people, Muslims, Indians, etc. Reddit just doesn't care about most of its issues, unless a journalist writes about them and puts on the heat. >Now if there were a sub dedicated to a popular genre of exclusively white musicians who occasionally livestream themselves murdering their white "opps," Reddit would ban it in a heartbeat under their "glorifying violence" ToS policy Not the same, but combat footage is a popular sub that's basically just watching brown people get bombed.
- 4bpp 4y agoWhether the operators of the site are guilty of a crime is surely for the courts to determine, not for Cloudflare or Twitter's userbase.
- terminatornet 4y ago
- TOMDM 4y agoHow are three people dead because of KF? Not concern trolling, a google search only turned up a kiwifarms thread that _could_ have been relevant, but is now obviously inaccessable.
- yanderekko 4y agoPeople who have threads on KiwiFarms have (allegedly) committed suicide. That's about all that's required to attribute each death causally to KiwiFarms. It's an incredibly weak standard.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoKiwiFarms members often don't just take notes of those they laugh at. They actively get involved in harassing them, online, through the phone and in person.
- yanderekko 4y agoSo was this the case for any of the people who actually committed suicide in a way that establishes a reasonable causal nexus? My impression is that the answer is "no".
- terminatornet 4y ago
- UncleMeat 4y agoYes. KF has been explicitly mentioned in a suicide note.
- yanderekko 4y agoYes, but iirc the suicide note doesn't claim that the KF thread was leading to ongoing direct harassment that motivated the (alleged) suicide. Just that the mere existence of the thread played a role. So we're back to "if someone has a KiwiFarms thread and kills themselves, then KiwiFarms is to blame".
- tomjen3 4y agoIf they have killed them, they shouldn't be kicked of the internet. They should be charged with the appropriate charge and go to prison if found guilty.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mhuffman 4y ago>3 people are dead because of that site How many people are dead because of twitter/facebook/tiktok stalking, arguments, etc?
- cauefcr 4y agoWere any of them made _for_ stalking/doxxing/harassing? It's a totally different ballpark.
- ranger_danger 4y agoit's not made for illegal activities, it's made for discussion and making fun of people. rhetorical hyperbole (e.g. "Bob is a big fat idiot") is protected speech and the site owner routinely fights this in court and wins every single time.
- tomcam 4y agoDo you think any teens have committed suicide due to body dysmorphia from watching TikToks or Instagram?
- _vvaw 4y agoWhat they were doing was not a crime, as evidenced by every lawsuit against the site getting thrown out and the owner's extensive cooperation with law enforcement. The line with "Kiwi Farms is responsible for 3 suicides" seems to be repeating that lie until it sticks. The truth is more complicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712037
- ranger_danger 4y agoif you think the fault lies with the website and the posters won't just use some other website (plenty of death threats on twitter are still up)... you are sorely uninformed.
- Silverback_VII 4y agowith a very high suicide rate among transgender individuals I'm not sure if the deaths can solely be attributed to the site. Moreover some of the people, who pushed to shut down the forum, openly support the transition of teens (even without the knowledge of their parents). Yet trans teens face an even higher risk of attempting suicide. Therefore one must ask if those who wanted to remove KF are not responsible for more suicides by promoting and facilitating transition among teens in identity crisis i.e. by making their problems even worse.
- noslenwerdna 4y agoIf they committed a crime, let the authorities deal with it. Committing another crime (DDoSing a website) is hardly the answer. Vigilantism is also a crime.