11 ms·

Tell HN: Sites like Kiwifarms are destroying free speech

78 points by trlima 4y ago

Over the last few days, there's been a lot of discussion about kiwifarms being taken offline by Cloudflare. As is expected from HN, the average response was one appalled by the apparent free speech violation, and a general concern for the precedent being set. While I understand the sentiment, and have thought the same in the past ( with Aaron Swartz or Chelsea Manning); I want to pose an alternative question: What's the precedence set by continuing to do business with kiwifarms? Over the last few days there's been a lot I've wanted to say, but I felt like I couldn't speak. I've been on HN for the better part of a decade, but I can't say anything as myself. Instead I need to use a throwaway account and only connect over a VPN, because I'm a trans woman talking about kiwifarms. I've seen how dangerous it can be for a trans woman to stick her head up. I've watched friends and strangers alike be harassed, attacked, SWAT'd, and doxxed. Not public figures (though they don't deserve death threats either), just regular trans people trying to live their lives and speak their experiences. I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide? Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away.

walt74 4y ago
You are not free to hunt people, period.
3452356346 4y ago
I have no idea who Keffels is, and I've never posted on KF, but I've freely used it for research on more than one occasion, and I honestly appreciated the fact that there was a resource like it where the crimes, lies, and other misdeeds of minor internet personalities were extensively documented. Stuff like a streamer who ran a crowd funding cash-grab scam, or another one who PM'd underage followers inappropriately. This is dirty laundry these people don't want aired, and since reddit has largely killed independent forums, and the official reddits these people maintain are all heavily censored, and since these people aren't quite noteworthy enough for the MSM to hold them to account, KF was, for better or worse, often the only place you could go to get the "dirt" on them. Which calls into question the popular characterization of KF as a "troll site." Trolls will readily lie or fabricate to cause outrage and chaos. Is that an accurate characterization of KF? From my experience lurking there, the non-editorial, purportedly factual content on it (not the opinion or speculation) was completely accurate. They would not post stuff they knew to be false.
neonsunset 4y ago
While it's sad to see such a sorry state of affairs while universities are literally practicing "purification flame ceremony"[0] for burning the books that some <3% people may find offensive (everyone knows this but is afraid to resist because they'd be next on the list), it creates more and more reasons to make strong anonymity strong privacy networks to gain popularity. It's unfortunate that it happens through such rippling damage to society but it is what it is. [0] https://thepostmillennial.com/ontario-schools-book-burning-reconciliation https://thepostmillennial.com/ontario-schools-book-burning-r... p.s.: please emigrate back to reddit
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
>I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide? This is maliciously disingenuous assuming you know Keffals's background (which, unfortunately, 99.9% of people don't). This was not just a trans content creator that randomly got into KF trolls' crosshairs. She's a toxic, manipulative liar tantamount to the KF trolls themselves, just from another angle. That's what fueled the drama to the point she got SWATed. What you saw was a tango which takes two. That doesn't make what happened to her okay (although there's good reason to believe Keffals grossly exaggerated just about every detail), or the KF trolls any less horrible as actors on the Internet. Since no one's familiar with Keffals, though, it's unfortunate how distorted their view is on the situation. One side-effect of that may be that regular people feel as though they're on the chopping block because armies of crazy trolls are going to target them just for being trans or whatever, and so people are more keen to aggressively police online discourse to preclude the formation of imaginary armies of crazy trolls. Which, ironically, is a situation that those regular people were trolled into by a crazy troll.
ranger_danger 4y ago
Twitter has a much larger "body count" than the farms. Where's the outrage and cancellation for them? The real reason Keffals wanted the farms gone is because they exposed just what a truly awful and vile person they really are. Not because some keyboard warriors were making fun of them on one tiny corner of the internet. Also notice how they kept doing stupid stuff like posting pictures of their hotel room to get them re-doxxed as they moved around? It's clearly for attention. And none of the mainstream media has cared to shine any light on what the farms actually dug up and proved everything keffals has done. They still continue to call for others to be doxxed and swatted while crying foul for the same thing happening to them.
version_five 4y ago
- TranquilMarmot 4y ago
  What do you mean by this?
- tomrod 4y ago
  I read the comment a few times and don't see an angle for radicalization. On the flip side, KiwiFarms appears to be a troll group and clearly has radicalized many folks in its forums. What am I missing?
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
  I wouldn’t go that far. People can have opinions and not be called radicalized regardless on your opinion of the CF vs KF thing. I would be curious, and maybe OP is game, is to post their screen time reports. I would wager most individuals just need to step away from the Internet and realize the world isn’t these big fun extreme black and white bandwagons most platforms make things seem.
BlueScreenDeath 4y ago
RavingGoat 4y ago
Harassment should never be included under free speech. Kiwifarms was a site whose purpose was harassment so it's not even an issue for it to be removed.
nostromo 4y ago
Incitement is already illegal. SWATing and making true threats are also illegal. What we need is not nuking entire websites from orbit because they have bad actors, but actually upholding the law via law enforcement. Private corporations should not be the arbiters of online speech. Freedom of speech is also our freedom to read or freedom to hear. When tech giants delete entire websites from the internet, we've all lost our ability to choose for ourselves what we'd like to read or hear.
- nathanlied 4y ago
  This is my opinion, through and through. Regardless of your views on regulating companies (breaking up cloudflare because it's too important vs not doing that), I believe we can mostly agree that companies should not be making moral decisions on what content we should access. Moral decisions are a two-edged sword: we may all agree kiwifarms is bad and should be blocked because we agree trans people have a right to live without harassment; and if Cloudflare agrees with us, they'll block kiwifarms and we'll rejoice. But what if Cloudflare had a different value set from ours? What if they decided to block all pro-abortion-rights websites? They would, after all, be within their right. It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened?
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    > It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened? I agree ideally, but if you always wait for literal legal orders, any moderation would take _ages_. So you'd always need some sort of value judgement on the provider's part to interpret the law as they see it and act. EDIT: not to mention governments are also putting pressure on providers to act fast.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Definitely a shocking amount of support for what appears to be a cesspool of bigotry. Sorry, you dont feel welcome anymore. This site has had an unfortunate devolution in this regard since around the time Trump got elected, and certainly by the time Jan. 6 happened.
- p1esk 4y ago
  I hope you’re not suggesting to limit my ability to view any internet bigotry I feel like viewing.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    God forbid /s
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  If you're trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, we'd be remiss if we didn't tell you that's not a good thing to do, no matter how bigoted the bathwater is. If you interpret that as "support for ... a cesspool of bigotry", well, sorry but that says more about your blinkered worldview than it does about anyone else.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    > We'd be remiss if we didn't tell you that's not a good thing to do, no matter how bigoted the bathwater is. I understand what freedom of speech is. I've weighed the options and still can't see how you could defend that site. No need to be patronizing. In any case, the post has been flagged. You win.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
      > "...how you could defend that site..." Nobody is defending the site, at least not on this thread.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? They aren’t allowed to do this hence the illegal qualifier. The problem is they can also use the same means that allow you to post this anonymously to harass people anonymously. If you take this away from them you also lose the ability (which would never happen because you’re one of the good ones). Until someone decides you aren’t one of the good ones.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
I don't understand how people can get away with swatting. That seems like one of the biggest issues with situations like these. Shouldn't swatters get hunted down and thrown in prison?
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yeah all of the problematic stuff I have seen has been already illegal actions. I’m not sure why we aren’t talking about going after the individuals posting this stuff.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
- navjack27 4y ago
  Won't someone please think of the children argument. Trafficking is much worse then anyone thinks argument. Two things going around the alt right circles.
  - Ticklee 4y ago
    "Won't someone censor this violent movie it might influence my kids" is a wont someone please think of the children argument Archiving the actions of proven pedophiles in the media and popular culture is not, that is a noble service
    - navjack27 4y ago
      No it's not. It's vigilantism.
tomrod 4y ago
I agree with you. Cloudflare is an independent entity and is within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory (including kiwifarms due to supporting harassment, propagandists, illegal substances, or whatever it chooses). I am surprised radicalized keyboard warriors on the internet feel better about the situation and their lives when they harass, SWAT, and dox others. I am sorry you've experienced this and live in fear of it. It seems out of sync with of principles they tend to mutually adopt from Jordan Peterson and similar. That said, those tend to be a bit of a philosophical mess anyhow. Maybe it's a little thing, but I hope knowing some random other person on the internet agrees with you, and who doesn't run in the same circles, brings some comfort to you. I applaud you for navigating your identity and looking to live your life to be the best you. It shouldn't have to be in fear. Good luck out there.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  > ...within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory... - Labor union organizers and socialists used to be considered unsavory. - The civil rights movement used to be considered unsavory. - LGBTQ people used to be considered really unsavory, pre-1970s. Guess we know what the parent poster and those that agree with them would have said about businesses refusing service to those movements had they been around then.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Your point, even though it is US-centric whataboutism, is quite correct. A private venue that operates as a host has rights to discriminate among whom it hosts. Even more so, "unsavory" here is clearly a placeholder for "legally questionable if not outright banned" rather than "social underdog some people in society feel superior to." Trolls farms are typically anything but social underdogs. But let's step into your oranges-compared-to-apples example set. What your reductionist, presentist whataboutism misses is that the social "unsavoriness" was eventually seen to be unethical by society writ-large. However, KiwiFarms, as a vehicle for harassment against the ideal American underdogs, hasn't a leg to stand on and will remain as socially (and legally) unsavory. Therefore, your conclusion, that the OP and those that agree would have refused service universally to Labor, Civil Rights activists and supporters, and LGBTQ, is flawed. Perhaps ironically, the OP and those that agree with the comments are contained in the union of the latter two categories anyhow.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
godmode2019 4y ago
No one can speak up, your identity is not the reason for backlash, people use identity as the first attack vector or reason to dismiss an opinion that they don't like. Social media is broken - having a fight on the street has real world consequences, having a fight online has none. Many people use fighting online to a proxy to assert their status they can't achieve in the real world. That being said, Free speech and other base rights like privacy, association are activity being reduced in most countries. Take free speech for example once you remove actually hateful people you encounter less of those people, so the extreme things you do see become the new vile, and so on until no one can speak without being labeled some proxy for a reason you should not listen to them. While I have no idea what kiwifarm or whatever is, blocking those already loney people is just going to make them express themselves through violence. Book burning is now commonly practised, the books of today just look different. They are videos hosted online.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
During the Second World War, the Allies raced to create the atomic bomb to defeat the Nazis and the Axis powers that stood by them. After all, who would be against destroying Nazis? After the war, though, the secret of atomic weapons was known and more and more states became able to create them, leaving the world in danger of annihilation. While I agree with what has been said about the vileness of Kiwifarms, you who now celebrate a way to suppress speech you disagree with seem to somehow fail to understand that you are falling into the same trap. Now that it is accepted that "corporations do not have to serve customers they don't want to", the wealthy and the politically powerful will seek to take advantage of the loophole and they have persistence, time horizon, and clout to make it happen. Who is to say that Cloudflare and the other tech companies will be owned by people aligned with your interests fifty or one hundred years from now? And when they get that control, it will be your websites that will go dark, your beliefs declared "inappropriate", your adherents who are denied service. Remember, when you build a muzzle, it fits on anyone, even you who created it. When the muzzle slips over your face, what will you say then in repentance to those of us who tried to warn you?
- Mauraudaaa 4y ago
  It's already over, your words fall on deaf ears. If this keeps up, the best option would be to secede from the mainstream as an individual. In fact, I urge all those with a modicum of intelligence to start planning ahead along this direction, since the cancellation of kiwifarms is simply part of a larger emerging tapestry in the west. Stay together, sink together.
navjack27 4y ago
I completely agree with you on this. It's wild how many posts go grey on here that call kiwifarms exactly what they are, a site whose purpose is harassment. Coordinated harassment. Off site harassment. They have people who aren't completely stupid who coordinate things less directly on the site but off the site just for situations like this where they could be like look nothing bad's happening on our website why are you mad at our website... But the freaking nerds here in hacker News are like oh no free speech! What the! I don't know who to trust here anymore I don't know who to take seriously and I don't know who is acting in bad faith or who actually can't read in between the lines... It's wild. You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media... They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- aordano 4y ago
  Most comments here seem to lean a lot into the lawfulness aspect and that the individuals should be prosecuted, but the platform should be left to its own devices. But the fat is that organizing criminal activities is a criminal activity! Having a whole platform where there is rampant, blessed-by-the-mods organized crime is not something acceptable. Even if you give credence to the idea that this activity is not representative of the platform as a whole, it is responsibility of the platform to prevent crime being harbored there, just like in any other business. Morals and ethics are a complex thing, impossible to "solve" in a perfect way, and both restriction and freedom have their costs and benefits for everyone. Maybe instead of understanding this events as the demise of freedom, we could understand them better as a way to learn --as a society-- how to manage this balance properly.
chikadee 4y ago
[dead]
kodyo 4y ago
If a crime has been committed, arrest the perpetrators.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> What's the precedence set by continuing to do business with kiwifarms? Continuing to do business with Kiwifarms is an acknowledgement that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and any illegal activity such as swatting is the fault of the individual. Are Mark Zuckerberg and Meta responsible when people livestream murders or plan terrorist attacks using Facebook? Obviously no. Now I will acknowledge that there's some dispute over Kiwifarm's actual role in any illegal activity here. Did they encourage or organize criminal activity? As somebody who hasn't followed this drama from the beginning and who doesn't know what actually happened on Kiwifarms, I'd be a bit interested to try and read the source to try and somewhat figure out the truth of what happened for myself free of bias about who did what to who. Unfortunately, after shutting the site down, it's now impossible to get an objective answer after the fact and piece together the truth about this drama for myself. And trusting corporate claims or biased actors on any side of this story is just about impossible in today's hyper-politicized world.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Well, it affirms that idea, but you're kind of begging the question here - it's a point of view rather than a fact. I do think Zuckerberg (especially as CEO with an unassailable majority stake of voting shares) does bear some responsibility for what happens on his platform.
- benwad 4y ago
  But the issue here isn't just the actions of individuals - without a community like Kiwifarms to coordinate and plan these attacks then these individuals might not have the motivation or organisation to do them. While I don't think Cloudflare has full responsibility over everyone they do business with, I also think they have a moral imperative to intervene when one of their customers is using their service to coordinate attacks on someone. And remember, that person is being attacked for their perfectly reasonable free speech. As far as being able to read the posts and piece it together yourself, you can probably find something on the Wayback machine if you want to. Cloudflare's action was about preventing activity on those threads (i.e. planning/instigating further attacks), not to completely censor the contents.
creakingstairs 4y ago
Free speech is a right that is balanced against other rights and things like inciting violence can limit free speech. I don't think many people on this forum believes in unlimited free speech. I think the issue is whether Cloudflare("CF"), as an internet infrastructure, should be involved in balancing free speech with other rights and if so, what kind of bar should they have before deciding to act. Looking at the issue in this way, your argument that: > Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away. may be right and most people would agree. But some people may be more concerned about how CF has reached that decision and the future implication of this action. After all, there is a possibility that CF may have gotten this one right even with inconsistent reasoning/ shaky evidence. In that case, there may be future cases where CF jumps the gun too fast. Some are also scared about how much (perceived) power CF has over current internet infrastructure. This is understandable as CF is a company and their decision making process isn't as transparent as public system. But if there wasn't such dominance by CF and it was merely one of many competitors, this wouldn't be a big contention. TL;DR People are arguing about different things: short term result and long term implication. You can agree with the banning of Kiwifarm but still be concerned about how CF reached that conclusion.
JEDI-HACKER 4y ago
qirte 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
_ywzy 4y ago
Cloudflare is 100% in the wrong. It's like owning a restaurant where a robbery is discussed; should the restaurant have its license revoked? Should the people who provide milk, fruit, meat to the restaurant permanently stop doing business with them because of that? No they shouldn't. Individuals are responsible both for their behaviour and their reactions to the behaviour of others. This is yet another precedent set where people who hold views, however acerbic, that are contrary to the "mainstream" are simply cancelled. It's an environment akin to the catholic church of the middle ages, or to some insane dictatorship where everything the ruling party says and does is right and everyone else is wrong. From removing the dislike button on youtube, mass censorship of comments, paypal and other payment providers refusing to do business with people they deem "problematic" and now this, it seems like the liberal west is only nominally liberal (don't even get me started on inane "ESG Scores"). It used to be the puritanical conservatives that were against everything and now it seems the pendulum has swung the other way. While I personally find kiwifarms and such sites to be utterly disgusting and revolting, their cancellation is yet another precedent set in what seems to be a nascent global hegemony that will eventually turn feudalistic.
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  If a school with a massive bullying problem flat-out refuses to address the issue in spite of continued issues time after time, would parents be unjustified in getting upset at the school for not taking action? Should they be placated if the school just said "we are utterly disgusted and revolted by the bully's actions against your kids! But we also take a strong stance against punishing the bullies, because detention or expulsion would set a dangerous precedence that will eventually be abused"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
collier_stan 4y ago
I wish you would just be honest and say you want everything that offends you banned. I feel like the 90’s Christians at least came closer for that. They’d say it’s offensive to my religion/God. There wasn’t word salad and mental gymnastics to explain how censoring every dissenting thought is actually promoting free speech.
- sinclairX86 4y ago
  I wanted to comment and say that you cannot just disregard the fear of harassment because there might be those two motives. But I realised, I myself am afraid of being harassed if I don’t post from a throwaway account. Maybe that fear is not justified — I never heard of KiwiFarms before Cloudflare booted them. I don’t mind people writing crazy stuff intended to offend. Harassment is a pretty solid breach of the golden rule.
  - diogenesjunior 4y ago
    yeah but they have no reason to doxx you. you're just a regular person. if it turned out you supplied life changing drugs to minors behind their parents backs that were brewed in your bathtub, maybe then you'd have a problem. they dont just see a trans person and then decide to harass them
    - navjack27 4y ago
      That literally isn't what was happening.
      - snoided 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - diogenesjunior 4y ago
        thats what is currently happening with keffals. not that kf is equivalent to HN or the like in terms of being nice, but this keffals isnt just a random trans person they latched on to and decided to harass. they (keffals) have done some seriously immoral stuff
tonfreed 4y ago
This isn't a new phenomenon. You raise literally anyone's hackles on twitter and you can potentially get swatted and harassed off the internet. Dong Nguyen was run off the internet for a fun little mobile game that some people on Twitter got frustrated by. Scott Cawthorne was unpersoned when he gave money to the GOP. Lindsay Ellis made a single wrong step and was bullied and harassed by the type of people upset about Kiwifarms now. Hell, there's a fresh 2 minutes hate every day on Twitter that leads to someone completely irrelevant having their life ruined because they didn't like something popular. This wouldn't be a problem if people removed their identity from the internet and just started doing everything anonymously, but apparently ego is a monetisable commodity now.
yanderekko 4y ago
As someone who pseudonymously defends the right of KiwiFarms to exist, I am pretty much guaranteed to lose my job if I am doxxed and targeted by the usual activist crowd. A trans woman who opposes KiwiFarms faces no comparable intrinsic threat, which is why I can't take these crybully attacks on speech seriously.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Why are you guaranteed to lose your job for the opinion? Transwomen face very real danger of death and harm[0], for the record, both generally and as a result of targeted doxxing and harassment in online forums. Since KiwiFarms does this, why do you not consider this an intrinsic threat? [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1627420 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1...
- thunderfork 4y ago
  I think you make a very good point here - if someone made a website with the exact format of KiwiFarms, but for "collecting info" on programmers who "love nazis" (in the same way that every KF thread's subject "deserves it" because of some disproportionately aggrandized sleight), all the HN users who are currently sobbing about the death of free speech would unite to say that the website should be deplatformed immediately. >A trans woman who opposes KiwiFarms faces no comparable intrinsic threat Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened.
  - yanderekko 4y ago
    >I think you make a very good point here - if someone made a website with the exact format of KiwiFarms, but for "collecting info" on programmers who "love nazis" (in the same way that every KF thread's subject "deserves it" because of some disproportionately aggrandized sleight), all the HN users who are currently sobbing about the death of free speech would unite to say that the website should be deplatformed immediately. No, I'd defend that website's existence. >Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened. Keffels getting attacked by KF is obviously not strong evidence that any random trans woman who criticizes KF in any capacity will be attacked.
bArray 4y ago
> I've seen how dangerous it can be for a trans woman to stick her head up. I've watched friends and strangers alike be harassed, attacked, SWAT'd, and doxxed. Not public figures (though they don't deserve death threats either), just regular trans people trying to live their lives and speak their experiences. These problems are all being collated together, but they are not of equal strength. Things that cause physical harm, such as SWAT'ing, are obviously illegal and I doubt you would get any kind of support from anybody here for these actions. Problems such as doxxing are more ethical, and they can result in physical harm in extreme cases. But their main goal is mental distress. Then you have harassment, which is where I think free speech comes in. You have the right to speak, and others by extension have the right to reply. If you are speaking in public places on hotly contended topics, you will likely find opposition. The market place of ideas can only work if this is possible. Bare in mind also that the internet public space is not the same as the public space down the road. On the internet, not only are you battling with local ideological differences, you're also battling with people from fundamentally conflicting cultures. If you want a meaningful discussion about local ideology (i.e. trans people living in Western Countries), I would suggest to go somewhere that includes only local people. > I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide? You shouldn't and this is of course a problem with KiwiFarms, one I think even the owner agrees with. Again, though, whilst dealing with an international community, your idea of 'illegal' doesn't carry. In some Countries, for being trans, the punishment is death. Some of the people you will interact with in these international communities believe this entirely and want to see this globally adopted. Thanks to the invention of the internet and many years of global immigration, some of these people now even live next door. When we lost social uniformity, we also lost safety and increased social tensions. > Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away. I would like to see KiwiFarms do better to clean up their act. At the very least, threats of violence or actions that encourage violence (doxxing, SWAT'ing, etc) seems like a good place to start. I don't think wiping them off the internet is to the way to go. For example, big tech worked together to remove Parler (for apparently organizing Jan 6, although it later transpired that it was actually organized on Facebook and Twitter), and all these people migrated to other platforms, which are now even more resilient. (On a different note, I remember all Parler accounts got doxxed, and this was widely celebrated. Where was their right to speak and safety? I created an account there years ago just to see what it was about, and it was just as boring as Twitter.)
draw_down 4y ago

78 points by trlima 4y ago

walt74 4y ago

You are not free to hunt people, period.

3452356346 4y ago

I have no idea who Keffels is, and I've never posted on KF, but I've freely used it for research on more than one occasion, and I honestly appreciated the fact that there was a resource like it where the crimes, lies, and other misdeeds of minor internet personalities were extensively documented. Stuff like a streamer who ran a crowd funding cash-grab scam, or another one who PM'd underage followers inappropriately. This is dirty laundry these people don't want aired, and since reddit has largely killed independent forums, and the official reddits these people maintain are all heavily censored, and since these people aren't quite noteworthy enough for the MSM to hold them to account, KF was, for better or worse, often the only place you could go to get the "dirt" on them. Which calls into question the popular characterization of KF as a "troll site." Trolls will readily lie or fabricate to cause outrage and chaos. Is that an accurate characterization of KF? From my experience lurking there, the non-editorial, purportedly factual content on it (not the opinion or speculation) was completely accurate. They would not post stuff they knew to be false.

neonsunset 4y ago

While it's sad to see such a sorry state of affairs while universities are literally practicing "purification flame ceremony"[0] for burning the books that some <3% people may find offensive (everyone knows this but is afraid to resist because they'd be next on the list), it creates more and more reasons to make strong anonymity strong privacy networks to gain popularity. It's unfortunate that it happens through such rippling damage to society but it is what it is. [0] https://thepostmillennial.com/ontario-schools-book-burning-reconciliation https://thepostmillennial.com/ontario-schools-book-burning-r... p.s.: please emigrate back to reddit

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

>I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide? This is maliciously disingenuous assuming you know Keffals's background (which, unfortunately, 99.9% of people don't). This was not just a trans content creator that randomly got into KF trolls' crosshairs. She's a toxic, manipulative liar tantamount to the KF trolls themselves, just from another angle. That's what fueled the drama to the point she got SWATed. What you saw was a tango which takes two. That doesn't make what happened to her okay (although there's good reason to believe Keffals grossly exaggerated just about every detail), or the KF trolls any less horrible as actors on the Internet. Since no one's familiar with Keffals, though, it's unfortunate how distorted their view is on the situation. One side-effect of that may be that regular people feel as though they're on the chopping block because armies of crazy trolls are going to target them just for being trans or whatever, and so people are more keen to aggressively police online discourse to preclude the formation of imaginary armies of crazy trolls. Which, ironically, is a situation that those regular people were trolled into by a crazy troll.

ranger_danger 4y ago

Twitter has a much larger "body count" than the farms. Where's the outrage and cancellation for them? The real reason Keffals wanted the farms gone is because they exposed just what a truly awful and vile person they really are. Not because some keyboard warriors were making fun of them on one tiny corner of the internet. Also notice how they kept doing stupid stuff like posting pictures of their hotel room to get them re-doxxed as they moved around? It's clearly for attention. And none of the mainstream media has cared to shine any light on what the farms actually dug up and proved everything keffals has done. They still continue to call for others to be doxxed and swatted while crying foul for the same thing happening to them.

version_five 4y ago

TranquilMarmot 4y ago
What do you mean by this?
tomrod 4y ago
I read the comment a few times and don't see an angle for radicalization. On the flip side, KiwiFarms appears to be a troll group and clearly has radicalized many folks in its forums. What am I missing?
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
I wouldn’t go that far. People can have opinions and not be called radicalized regardless on your opinion of the CF vs KF thing. I would be curious, and maybe OP is game, is to post their screen time reports. I would wager most individuals just need to step away from the Internet and realize the world isn’t these big fun extreme black and white bandwagons most platforms make things seem.

BlueScreenDeath 4y ago

RavingGoat 4y ago

Harassment should never be included under free speech. Kiwifarms was a site whose purpose was harassment so it's not even an issue for it to be removed.

nostromo 4y ago

Incitement is already illegal. SWATing and making true threats are also illegal. What we need is not nuking entire websites from orbit because they have bad actors, but actually upholding the law via law enforcement. Private corporations should not be the arbiters of online speech. Freedom of speech is also our freedom to read or freedom to hear. When tech giants delete entire websites from the internet, we've all lost our ability to choose for ourselves what we'd like to read or hear.

nathanlied 4y ago
This is my opinion, through and through. Regardless of your views on regulating companies (breaking up cloudflare because it's too important vs not doing that), I believe we can mostly agree that companies should not be making moral decisions on what content we should access. Moral decisions are a two-edged sword: we may all agree kiwifarms is bad and should be blocked because we agree trans people have a right to live without harassment; and if Cloudflare agrees with us, they'll block kiwifarms and we'll rejoice. But what if Cloudflare had a different value set from ours? What if they decided to block all pro-abortion-rights websites? They would, after all, be within their right. It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened?
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  > It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened? I agree ideally, but if you always wait for literal legal orders, any moderation would take _ages_. So you'd always need some sort of value judgement on the provider's part to interpret the law as they see it and act. EDIT: not to mention governments are also putting pressure on providers to act fast.

ShamelessC 4y ago

Definitely a shocking amount of support for what appears to be a cesspool of bigotry. Sorry, you dont feel welcome anymore. This site has had an unfortunate devolution in this regard since around the time Trump got elected, and certainly by the time Jan. 6 happened.

p1esk 4y ago
I hope you’re not suggesting to limit my ability to view any internet bigotry I feel like viewing.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  God forbid /s
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
If you're trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, we'd be remiss if we didn't tell you that's not a good thing to do, no matter how bigoted the bathwater is. If you interpret that as "support for ... a cesspool of bigotry", well, sorry but that says more about your blinkered worldview than it does about anyone else.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  > We'd be remiss if we didn't tell you that's not a good thing to do, no matter how bigoted the bathwater is. I understand what freedom of speech is. I've weighed the options and still can't see how you could defend that site. No need to be patronizing. In any case, the post has been flagged. You win.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    > "...how you could defend that site..." Nobody is defending the site, at least not on this thread.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? They aren’t allowed to do this hence the illegal qualifier. The problem is they can also use the same means that allow you to post this anonymously to harass people anonymously. If you take this away from them you also lose the ability (which would never happen because you’re one of the good ones). Until someone decides you aren’t one of the good ones.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

I don't understand how people can get away with swatting. That seems like one of the biggest issues with situations like these. Shouldn't swatters get hunted down and thrown in prison?

sieabahlpark 4y ago
Gigachad 4y ago
Yeah all of the problematic stuff I have seen has been already illegal actions. I’m not sure why we aren’t talking about going after the individuals posting this stuff.

GauntletWizard 4y ago

navjack27 4y ago
Won't someone please think of the children argument. Trafficking is much worse then anyone thinks argument. Two things going around the alt right circles.
- Ticklee 4y ago
  "Won't someone censor this violent movie it might influence my kids" is a wont someone please think of the children argument Archiving the actions of proven pedophiles in the media and popular culture is not, that is a noble service
  - navjack27 4y ago
    No it's not. It's vigilantism.

tomrod 4y ago

I agree with you. Cloudflare is an independent entity and is within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory (including kiwifarms due to supporting harassment, propagandists, illegal substances, or whatever it chooses). I am surprised radicalized keyboard warriors on the internet feel better about the situation and their lives when they harass, SWAT, and dox others. I am sorry you've experienced this and live in fear of it. It seems out of sync with of principles they tend to mutually adopt from Jordan Peterson and similar. That said, those tend to be a bit of a philosophical mess anyhow. Maybe it's a little thing, but I hope knowing some random other person on the internet agrees with you, and who doesn't run in the same circles, brings some comfort to you. I applaud you for navigating your identity and looking to live your life to be the best you. It shouldn't have to be in fear. Good luck out there.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> ...within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory... - Labor union organizers and socialists used to be considered unsavory. - The civil rights movement used to be considered unsavory. - LGBTQ people used to be considered really unsavory, pre-1970s. Guess we know what the parent poster and those that agree with them would have said about businesses refusing service to those movements had they been around then.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Your point, even though it is US-centric whataboutism, is quite correct. A private venue that operates as a host has rights to discriminate among whom it hosts. Even more so, "unsavory" here is clearly a placeholder for "legally questionable if not outright banned" rather than "social underdog some people in society feel superior to." Trolls farms are typically anything but social underdogs. But let's step into your oranges-compared-to-apples example set. What your reductionist, presentist whataboutism misses is that the social "unsavoriness" was eventually seen to be unethical by society writ-large. However, KiwiFarms, as a vehicle for harassment against the ideal American underdogs, hasn't a leg to stand on and will remain as socially (and legally) unsavory. Therefore, your conclusion, that the OP and those that agree would have refused service universally to Labor, Civil Rights activists and supporters, and LGBTQ, is flawed. Perhaps ironically, the OP and those that agree with the comments are contained in the union of the latter two categories anyhow.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

godmode2019 4y ago

No one can speak up, your identity is not the reason for backlash, people use identity as the first attack vector or reason to dismiss an opinion that they don't like. Social media is broken - having a fight on the street has real world consequences, having a fight online has none. Many people use fighting online to a proxy to assert their status they can't achieve in the real world. That being said, Free speech and other base rights like privacy, association are activity being reduced in most countries. Take free speech for example once you remove actually hateful people you encounter less of those people, so the extreme things you do see become the new vile, and so on until no one can speak without being labeled some proxy for a reason you should not listen to them. While I have no idea what kiwifarm or whatever is, blocking those already loney people is just going to make them express themselves through violence. Book burning is now commonly practised, the books of today just look different. They are videos hosted online.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

During the Second World War, the Allies raced to create the atomic bomb to defeat the Nazis and the Axis powers that stood by them. After all, who would be against destroying Nazis? After the war, though, the secret of atomic weapons was known and more and more states became able to create them, leaving the world in danger of annihilation. While I agree with what has been said about the vileness of Kiwifarms, you who now celebrate a way to suppress speech you disagree with seem to somehow fail to understand that you are falling into the same trap. Now that it is accepted that "corporations do not have to serve customers they don't want to", the wealthy and the politically powerful will seek to take advantage of the loophole and they have persistence, time horizon, and clout to make it happen. Who is to say that Cloudflare and the other tech companies will be owned by people aligned with your interests fifty or one hundred years from now? And when they get that control, it will be your websites that will go dark, your beliefs declared "inappropriate", your adherents who are denied service. Remember, when you build a muzzle, it fits on anyone, even you who created it. When the muzzle slips over your face, what will you say then in repentance to those of us who tried to warn you?

Mauraudaaa 4y ago
It's already over, your words fall on deaf ears. If this keeps up, the best option would be to secede from the mainstream as an individual. In fact, I urge all those with a modicum of intelligence to start planning ahead along this direction, since the cancellation of kiwifarms is simply part of a larger emerging tapestry in the west. Stay together, sink together.

navjack27 4y ago

I completely agree with you on this. It's wild how many posts go grey on here that call kiwifarms exactly what they are, a site whose purpose is harassment. Coordinated harassment. Off site harassment. They have people who aren't completely stupid who coordinate things less directly on the site but off the site just for situations like this where they could be like look nothing bad's happening on our website why are you mad at our website... But the freaking nerds here in hacker News are like oh no free speech! What the! I don't know who to trust here anymore I don't know who to take seriously and I don't know who is acting in bad faith or who actually can't read in between the lines... It's wild. You could see it in the posts from some people on here they repeat the same things. They either say they don't know the website at all but then they say that they're not actually defending it but then they go on to defend it and then they go on to also say things about corporations... Like why not Twitter why not social media... They are expert manipulators gaslighters and just overall horrible bad people. There is no gray area here with this.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
aordano 4y ago
Most comments here seem to lean a lot into the lawfulness aspect and that the individuals should be prosecuted, but the platform should be left to its own devices. But the fat is that organizing criminal activities is a criminal activity! Having a whole platform where there is rampant, blessed-by-the-mods organized crime is not something acceptable. Even if you give credence to the idea that this activity is not representative of the platform as a whole, it is responsibility of the platform to prevent crime being harbored there, just like in any other business. Morals and ethics are a complex thing, impossible to "solve" in a perfect way, and both restriction and freedom have their costs and benefits for everyone. Maybe instead of understanding this events as the demise of freedom, we could understand them better as a way to learn --as a society-- how to manage this balance properly.

chikadee 4y ago

[dead]

kodyo 4y ago

If a crime has been committed, arrest the perpetrators.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> What's the precedence set by continuing to do business with kiwifarms? Continuing to do business with Kiwifarms is an acknowledgement that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and any illegal activity such as swatting is the fault of the individual. Are Mark Zuckerberg and Meta responsible when people livestream murders or plan terrorist attacks using Facebook? Obviously no. Now I will acknowledge that there's some dispute over Kiwifarm's actual role in any illegal activity here. Did they encourage or organize criminal activity? As somebody who hasn't followed this drama from the beginning and who doesn't know what actually happened on Kiwifarms, I'd be a bit interested to try and read the source to try and somewhat figure out the truth of what happened for myself free of bias about who did what to who. Unfortunately, after shutting the site down, it's now impossible to get an objective answer after the fact and piece together the truth about this drama for myself. And trusting corporate claims or biased actors on any side of this story is just about impossible in today's hyper-politicized world.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Well, it affirms that idea, but you're kind of begging the question here - it's a point of view rather than a fact. I do think Zuckerberg (especially as CEO with an unassailable majority stake of voting shares) does bear some responsibility for what happens on his platform.
benwad 4y ago
But the issue here isn't just the actions of individuals - without a community like Kiwifarms to coordinate and plan these attacks then these individuals might not have the motivation or organisation to do them. While I don't think Cloudflare has full responsibility over everyone they do business with, I also think they have a moral imperative to intervene when one of their customers is using their service to coordinate attacks on someone. And remember, that person is being attacked for their perfectly reasonable free speech. As far as being able to read the posts and piece it together yourself, you can probably find something on the Wayback machine if you want to. Cloudflare's action was about preventing activity on those threads (i.e. planning/instigating further attacks), not to completely censor the contents.

creakingstairs 4y ago

Free speech is a right that is balanced against other rights and things like inciting violence can limit free speech. I don't think many people on this forum believes in unlimited free speech. I think the issue is whether Cloudflare("CF"), as an internet infrastructure, should be involved in balancing free speech with other rights and if so, what kind of bar should they have before deciding to act. Looking at the issue in this way, your argument that: > Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away. may be right and most people would agree. But some people may be more concerned about how CF has reached that decision and the future implication of this action. After all, there is a possibility that CF may have gotten this one right even with inconsistent reasoning/ shaky evidence. In that case, there may be future cases where CF jumps the gun too fast. Some are also scared about how much (perceived) power CF has over current internet infrastructure. This is understandable as CF is a company and their decision making process isn't as transparent as public system. But if there wasn't such dominance by CF and it was merely one of many competitors, this wouldn't be a big contention. TL;DR People are arguing about different things: short term result and long term implication. You can agree with the banning of Kiwifarm but still be concerned about how CF reached that conclusion.

JEDI-HACKER 4y ago

qirte 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

_ywzy 4y ago

Cloudflare is 100% in the wrong. It's like owning a restaurant where a robbery is discussed; should the restaurant have its license revoked? Should the people who provide milk, fruit, meat to the restaurant permanently stop doing business with them because of that? No they shouldn't. Individuals are responsible both for their behaviour and their reactions to the behaviour of others. This is yet another precedent set where people who hold views, however acerbic, that are contrary to the "mainstream" are simply cancelled. It's an environment akin to the catholic church of the middle ages, or to some insane dictatorship where everything the ruling party says and does is right and everyone else is wrong. From removing the dislike button on youtube, mass censorship of comments, paypal and other payment providers refusing to do business with people they deem "problematic" and now this, it seems like the liberal west is only nominally liberal (don't even get me started on inane "ESG Scores"). It used to be the puritanical conservatives that were against everything and now it seems the pendulum has swung the other way. While I personally find kiwifarms and such sites to be utterly disgusting and revolting, their cancellation is yet another precedent set in what seems to be a nascent global hegemony that will eventually turn feudalistic.

thedorkknight 4y ago
If a school with a massive bullying problem flat-out refuses to address the issue in spite of continued issues time after time, would parents be unjustified in getting upset at the school for not taking action? Should they be placated if the school just said "we are utterly disgusted and revolted by the bully's actions against your kids! But we also take a strong stance against punishing the bullies, because detention or expulsion would set a dangerous precedence that will eventually be abused"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

collier_stan 4y ago

I wish you would just be honest and say you want everything that offends you banned. I feel like the 90’s Christians at least came closer for that. They’d say it’s offensive to my religion/God. There wasn’t word salad and mental gymnastics to explain how censoring every dissenting thought is actually promoting free speech.

sinclairX86 4y ago
I wanted to comment and say that you cannot just disregard the fear of harassment because there might be those two motives. But I realised, I myself am afraid of being harassed if I don’t post from a throwaway account. Maybe that fear is not justified — I never heard of KiwiFarms before Cloudflare booted them. I don’t mind people writing crazy stuff intended to offend. Harassment is a pretty solid breach of the golden rule.
- diogenesjunior 4y ago
  yeah but they have no reason to doxx you. you're just a regular person. if it turned out you supplied life changing drugs to minors behind their parents backs that were brewed in your bathtub, maybe then you'd have a problem. they dont just see a trans person and then decide to harass them
  - navjack27 4y ago
    That literally isn't what was happening.
    - snoided 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - diogenesjunior 4y ago
      thats what is currently happening with keffals. not that kf is equivalent to HN or the like in terms of being nice, but this keffals isnt just a random trans person they latched on to and decided to harass. they (keffals) have done some seriously immoral stuff

tonfreed 4y ago

This isn't a new phenomenon. You raise literally anyone's hackles on twitter and you can potentially get swatted and harassed off the internet. Dong Nguyen was run off the internet for a fun little mobile game that some people on Twitter got frustrated by. Scott Cawthorne was unpersoned when he gave money to the GOP. Lindsay Ellis made a single wrong step and was bullied and harassed by the type of people upset about Kiwifarms now. Hell, there's a fresh 2 minutes hate every day on Twitter that leads to someone completely irrelevant having their life ruined because they didn't like something popular. This wouldn't be a problem if people removed their identity from the internet and just started doing everything anonymously, but apparently ego is a monetisable commodity now.

yanderekko 4y ago

As someone who pseudonymously defends the right of KiwiFarms to exist, I am pretty much guaranteed to lose my job if I am doxxed and targeted by the usual activist crowd. A trans woman who opposes KiwiFarms faces no comparable intrinsic threat, which is why I can't take these crybully attacks on speech seriously.

tomrod 4y ago
Why are you guaranteed to lose your job for the opinion? Transwomen face very real danger of death and harm[0], for the record, both generally and as a result of targeted doxxing and harassment in online forums. Since KiwiFarms does this, why do you not consider this an intrinsic threat? [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1627420 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1...
thunderfork 4y ago
I think you make a very good point here - if someone made a website with the exact format of KiwiFarms, but for "collecting info" on programmers who "love nazis" (in the same way that every KF thread's subject "deserves it" because of some disproportionately aggrandized sleight), all the HN users who are currently sobbing about the death of free speech would unite to say that the website should be deplatformed immediately. >A trans woman who opposes KiwiFarms faces no comparable intrinsic threat Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened.
- yanderekko 4y ago
  >I think you make a very good point here - if someone made a website with the exact format of KiwiFarms, but for "collecting info" on programmers who "love nazis" (in the same way that every KF thread's subject "deserves it" because of some disproportionately aggrandized sleight), all the HN users who are currently sobbing about the death of free speech would unite to say that the website should be deplatformed immediately. No, I'd defend that website's existence. >Yeah, man, a real swatting and bomb threat don't compare in the slightest to the scenario you've presented where someone defending KF gets fired, something that's definitely happened. Keffels getting attacked by KF is obviously not strong evidence that any random trans woman who criticizes KF in any capacity will be attacked.

bArray 4y ago

> I've seen how dangerous it can be for a trans woman to stick her head up. I've watched friends and strangers alike be harassed, attacked, SWAT'd, and doxxed. Not public figures (though they don't deserve death threats either), just regular trans people trying to live their lives and speak their experiences. These problems are all being collated together, but they are not of equal strength. Things that cause physical harm, such as SWAT'ing, are obviously illegal and I doubt you would get any kind of support from anybody here for these actions. Problems such as doxxing are more ethical, and they can result in physical harm in extreme cases. But their main goal is mental distress. Then you have harassment, which is where I think free speech comes in. You have the right to speak, and others by extension have the right to reply. If you are speaking in public places on hotly contended topics, you will likely find opposition. The market place of ideas can only work if this is possible. Bare in mind also that the internet public space is not the same as the public space down the road. On the internet, not only are you battling with local ideological differences, you're also battling with people from fundamentally conflicting cultures. If you want a meaningful discussion about local ideology (i.e. trans people living in Western Countries), I would suggest to go somewhere that includes only local people. > I no longer feel like I can speak up, for fear of illegal reprisals. Why should they be allowed to infringe on my rights? Why should I have to hide? You shouldn't and this is of course a problem with KiwiFarms, one I think even the owner agrees with. Again, though, whilst dealing with an international community, your idea of 'illegal' doesn't carry. In some Countries, for being trans, the punishment is death. Some of the people you will interact with in these international communities believe this entirely and want to see this globally adopted. Thanks to the invention of the internet and many years of global immigration, some of these people now even live next door. When we lost social uniformity, we also lost safety and increased social tensions. > Cloudflair's decision to stop doing business with kiwifarms is a step towards free speech, not away. I would like to see KiwiFarms do better to clean up their act. At the very least, threats of violence or actions that encourage violence (doxxing, SWAT'ing, etc) seems like a good place to start. I don't think wiping them off the internet is to the way to go. For example, big tech worked together to remove Parler (for apparently organizing Jan 6, although it later transpired that it was actually organized on Facebook and Twitter), and all these people migrated to other platforms, which are now even more resilient. (On a different note, I remember all Parler accounts got doxxed, and this was widely celebrated. Where was their right to speak and safety? I created an account there years ago just to see what it was about, and it was just as boring as Twitter.)

draw_down 4y ago