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> the future of the internet seems pretty sad... That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous

> the future of the internet seems pretty sad... That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s

vdnkh 4y ago
amatecha 4y ago
Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Get some perspective please.
- cowtools 4y ago
  - DanBC 4y ago
    Post your name and address here.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      - DanBC 4y ago
        cowtools 4y ago
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > since when is "doxxing" a crime? The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party. If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked? The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble. > journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.
        cowtools 4y ago
        [flagged]
  - woeh 4y ago
    The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0]. And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate. [0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebruik-van-persoonsgegevens-met-als-doel-intimidatie-wordt-strafbaar https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...
- TeeMassive 4y ago
  > this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse Source?
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    There have been loads of recent articles and posts on HN about the type of content Kiwifarms hosts and promotes, easily findable from the HN search bar. Even people who disagree with Cloudflare's actions aren't debating the odiousness of Kiwifarms' content.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      That's a different statement though. Twitter hosts some terrible content. Hell, Cloudflare provides CDN-services for some terrible content. But I'm sure you wouldn't say that therefore they exist for the "express purpose" of doing that.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        Let's propose a test. We can scrape all of the tweets submitted in the last month and all of the posts on Kiwi Farms in the last month. Then let's count up the percentage of posts that contain a slur for black people, jewish people, or trans people. If the rate of slurs on KF is no more than 10x that of Twitter then we can consider these sites comparable. Otherwise, we can consider them to be in different categories.
        account42 4y ago
        Why should we only count slurs for these groups?
      - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
        In many of the recent discussions on the topic on HN, you can easily read about the origins of Kiwi Farms, which was originally "CWCki Forums", created for the express purpose of harassing a webcomic creator, Chris Chandler - the name literally grew out of the initials of their first primary target. Furthermore, heck, the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms has tons of references to primary sources that detail some of the directed harassment, e.g. from one well sourced article at https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/... > In the most extreme instance of this, they goaded a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler (and record it, of course). This information is so trivially easy to find (just go down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, or again, read many of the posts on this topic on HN) that I can't believe the requests for "Source?" and false equivalence statements of "lots of companies host objectionable content" are made in good faith. TBH, I haven't seen anyone really try to defend any of Kiwi Farms' content. The only real question is whether Cloudflare should be in the position to make judgement calls on the level of danger inherent to any of the sites that use their DDoS protection services.
_-david-_ 4y ago
What happens if another site that you consider completely legitimate can't be hosted just because others think it is not acceptable? Maybe your views are currently acceptable, but will they be in 5, 10, 20 years?
- amatecha 4y ago
  When was the last time a site got taken down because "others think it is not acceptable"? Please, name a single one. There's a difference between people simply "not liking" a site, and people using extremely well-established principles of ethical concepts and human rights (which have been refined over centuries) to decide what content is violating the "laws", as we call them, which have been generally agreed upon in modern society. Further to that, hosts have what we call "terms of service" or "acceptable use policy" which clearly define what content is acceptable for that host to continue to serve the customer operating the site and administrating its content. Again, not someone "thinking it is not acceptable".
  - paulmd 4y ago
    oh, that's easy: Stormfront, the Daily Stormer... ... hey, Kiwifarm's holding company was named 'Final Solutions, LLC', what a coincidence! ;) https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 take a seat, gamers... we've found the REAL most-oppressed minority here (/s)
  - dmatech 4y ago
    The most recent one was probably Parler. Usually deplatforming is due to a moral panic involving a massively exaggerated risk. All sites probably violate the AUP or TOS if you look closely enough. But during the panic, you can't see that the risk is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  Let’s cross that bridge if it happens.
  - 4y ago
philippejara 4y ago
This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it. Its easy to say those things for someone you dislike, but zoom out and look at the implications, you have a campaign pretty much asking cloudflare to stand aside and allow them to do DDOS attacks on a website which apparently won several lawsuits against them already(ill dig up the sources a bit later on when I get home, sorry). And that's before getting into what this "harassment" that is being reported by every journalist seems to actually be, or rather, the sources thereof. In the previous couple threads I tried to get a bit deeper into what those things actually were and i'm yet to get a straight answer with archives or something. Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are, but I've been part of a regional forum that was vilified for handwavy accusations from people that hated us and had said accusations get a life of their own, and were pretty much all fabrications or things blown out of context to the extreme, of course in an infinitely smaller scale, and of course you'll have to take my word for it. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  > This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it. Like the slippery slope of dropping terrorist harrasser site being "extremely scary" is actually an attempt of discussion, right?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    You could call any politically-adjacent forum a "terrorist harasser" site. Is Wikileaks not a "terrorist harasser site" in the 9/11-era rhetoric?
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
- ajross 4y ago
  > Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are "All people say they are" is a site running coordinated harassment campaigns, including SWATing and bomb threats, though. Those are clear crimes. You can't seriously be arguing that CloudFlare or DDos-Guard or whoever shouldn't be allowed to choose not to do business with that sort of thing, can you? Like so many others here[1], your perception thing seems to be based solely on your personal judgement as to whether the claims are true. But if they're true, it doesn't seem very controversial at all. And even if they're not true, it seems like the only party's judgement that really matters here (absent law enforcement, of course), is CloudFlare's. [1] I admit I've been stunned at the general level of anti-trans sentiment in these threads. So many of these subthreads end in arguments like yours, which sound like they're trying to be arguments of general libertarian principle but end up falling into subjectivity traps.
bnralt 4y ago
The average person is much, much more likely to get fired because of a Twitter mob than a Kiwi Farms mob. Twitter users got David Shor fired because he said riots often cause political blowback; Emmanuel Cafferty because someone saw him make an OK sign and got a Twitter mob riled up. Both stories here[1]. We can argue about the merits of free speech vs. the merits of cutting off all sites that enable harassment. But this isn't where we're at. At the moment, we're in a situation where sites that create some of the largest amounts of harassment are allowed to continue on just fine, while smaller sites are taken down after successful social media campaigns. This isn't a principled stance against harassment that's evenly applied. It's selective enforcement directed by whoever has the largest online mob. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  It has become increasingly clear over the recent years that there is no real rationality that we can apply here. You cannot reason about it. The foundational axioms have fallen off and eroded.

> the future of the internet seems pretty sad... That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s

vdnkh 4y ago

amatecha 4y ago

Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Get some perspective please.

cowtools 4y ago
- DanBC 4y ago
  Post your name and address here.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    - DanBC 4y ago
      - cowtools 4y ago
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > since when is "doxxing" a crime? The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party. If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked? The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble. > journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        [flagged]
- woeh 4y ago
  The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0]. And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate. [0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebruik-van-persoonsgegevens-met-als-doel-intimidatie-wordt-strafbaar https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...
TeeMassive 4y ago
> this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse Source?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  There have been loads of recent articles and posts on HN about the type of content Kiwifarms hosts and promotes, easily findable from the HN search bar. Even people who disagree with Cloudflare's actions aren't debating the odiousness of Kiwifarms' content.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    That's a different statement though. Twitter hosts some terrible content. Hell, Cloudflare provides CDN-services for some terrible content. But I'm sure you wouldn't say that therefore they exist for the "express purpose" of doing that.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Let's propose a test. We can scrape all of the tweets submitted in the last month and all of the posts on Kiwi Farms in the last month. Then let's count up the percentage of posts that contain a slur for black people, jewish people, or trans people. If the rate of slurs on KF is no more than 10x that of Twitter then we can consider these sites comparable. Otherwise, we can consider them to be in different categories.
      - account42 4y ago
        Why should we only count slurs for these groups?
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      In many of the recent discussions on the topic on HN, you can easily read about the origins of Kiwi Farms, which was originally "CWCki Forums", created for the express purpose of harassing a webcomic creator, Chris Chandler - the name literally grew out of the initials of their first primary target. Furthermore, heck, the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms has tons of references to primary sources that detail some of the directed harassment, e.g. from one well sourced article at https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/... > In the most extreme instance of this, they goaded a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler (and record it, of course). This information is so trivially easy to find (just go down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, or again, read many of the posts on this topic on HN) that I can't believe the requests for "Source?" and false equivalence statements of "lots of companies host objectionable content" are made in good faith. TBH, I haven't seen anyone really try to defend any of Kiwi Farms' content. The only real question is whether Cloudflare should be in the position to make judgement calls on the level of danger inherent to any of the sites that use their DDoS protection services.

_-david-_ 4y ago

What happens if another site that you consider completely legitimate can't be hosted just because others think it is not acceptable? Maybe your views are currently acceptable, but will they be in 5, 10, 20 years?

amatecha 4y ago
When was the last time a site got taken down because "others think it is not acceptable"? Please, name a single one. There's a difference between people simply "not liking" a site, and people using extremely well-established principles of ethical concepts and human rights (which have been refined over centuries) to decide what content is violating the "laws", as we call them, which have been generally agreed upon in modern society. Further to that, hosts have what we call "terms of service" or "acceptable use policy" which clearly define what content is acceptable for that host to continue to serve the customer operating the site and administrating its content. Again, not someone "thinking it is not acceptable".
- paulmd 4y ago
  oh, that's easy: Stormfront, the Daily Stormer... ... hey, Kiwifarm's holding company was named 'Final Solutions, LLC', what a coincidence! ;) https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1563748563926089730 take a seat, gamers... we've found the REAL most-oppressed minority here (/s)
- dmatech 4y ago
  The most recent one was probably Parler. Usually deplatforming is due to a moral panic involving a massively exaggerated risk. All sites probably violate the AUP or TOS if you look closely enough. But during the panic, you can't see that the risk is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
Let’s cross that bridge if it happens.
- 4y ago

philippejara 4y ago

This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it. Its easy to say those things for someone you dislike, but zoom out and look at the implications, you have a campaign pretty much asking cloudflare to stand aside and allow them to do DDOS attacks on a website which apparently won several lawsuits against them already(ill dig up the sources a bit later on when I get home, sorry). And that's before getting into what this "harassment" that is being reported by every journalist seems to actually be, or rather, the sources thereof. In the previous couple threads I tried to get a bit deeper into what those things actually were and i'm yet to get a straight answer with archives or something. Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are, but I've been part of a regional forum that was vilified for handwavy accusations from people that hated us and had said accusations get a life of their own, and were pretty much all fabrications or things blown out of context to the extreme, of course in an infinitely smaller scale, and of course you'll have to take my word for it. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
> This is not reddit, calm down on the snark and try to actually have a discussion if you're gonna go for it. Like the slippery slope of dropping terrorist harrasser site being "extremely scary" is actually an attempt of discussion, right?
- cowtools 4y ago
  You could call any politically-adjacent forum a "terrorist harasser" site. Is Wikileaks not a "terrorist harasser site" in the 9/11-era rhetoric?
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
ajross 4y ago
> Maybe kiwifarms is all people say they are "All people say they are" is a site running coordinated harassment campaigns, including SWATing and bomb threats, though. Those are clear crimes. You can't seriously be arguing that CloudFlare or DDos-Guard or whoever shouldn't be allowed to choose not to do business with that sort of thing, can you? Like so many others here[1], your perception thing seems to be based solely on your personal judgement as to whether the claims are true. But if they're true, it doesn't seem very controversial at all. And even if they're not true, it seems like the only party's judgement that really matters here (absent law enforcement, of course), is CloudFlare's. [1] I admit I've been stunned at the general level of anti-trans sentiment in these threads. So many of these subthreads end in arguments like yours, which sound like they're trying to be arguments of general libertarian principle but end up falling into subjectivity traps.

bnralt 4y ago

The average person is much, much more likely to get fired because of a Twitter mob than a Kiwi Farms mob. Twitter users got David Shor fired because he said riots often cause political blowback; Emmanuel Cafferty because someone saw him make an OK sign and got a Twitter mob riled up. Both stories here[1]. We can argue about the merits of free speech vs. the merits of cutting off all sites that enable harassment. But this isn't where we're at. At the moment, we're in a situation where sites that create some of the largest amounts of harassment are allowed to continue on just fine, while smaller sites are taken down after successful social media campaigns. This isn't a principled stance against harassment that's evenly applied. It's selective enforcement directed by whoever has the largest online mob. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

systemvoltage 4y ago
It has become increasingly clear over the recent years that there is no real rationality that we can apply here. You cannot reason about it. The foundational axioms have fallen off and eroded.