7 ms·

Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)

43 points by philippejara 4y ago

hresvelgr 4y ago
I agree with the general framework of the argument but as always there's more to it. If a group of criminals are conducting their business out of a motel room, is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them? Most would say the police, right? The thing with KiwiFarms and a lot of these other sites is that law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them because there are thousands of them and when one goes, another appears. So in the face of ineffective policing, the people pressure and protest the next entity who could actually affect change, Cloudflare. The reality is that these sites cannot be effectively and efficiently policed and until someone finds a way to do that in the most minimally harmful way possible, we're still going to see mobs protesting take-downs and companies capitulating to the demands.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  Law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them, because the ones in the spotlight haven't actually broken the law, and the "harassment campaign" is extremely exaggerated. It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.
  - claudiawerner 4y ago
    >but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it This doesn't fill me with hope; I'm not sure why I should trust the website's claim[0] that they enforce these rules with a one strike policy over the people who say that KF users have harassed them after organizing on KF. The law may not have been broken, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a supposed moral imperative to carry those bytes if I'm someone like Cloudflare. [0] A website which, uncontroversially, is more than happy to host (and encourage) users who are known to laugh at people for who they are and revel in scooped information, a fact which decreases the trustworthiness of the operators in my eyes.
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      How do you feel about living in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a moral imperative to provide someone with electricity if you're a power company, or with a telephone number if you're a telephone company?
      - claudiawerner 4y ago
        For telephony I'd make the same argument. For electricity, probably not. If harassment happens over the telephone, then the telephone provider is sufficiently close to the proximal cause in my judgement for service to be cut off in certain circumstances. Electricity is too far removed.
        amadeuspagel 4y ago
        Harassment happening over the telephone of course could mean two things. What do you mean by harassment happening over the telephone? It could mean that someone calls someone else to harass them. Of course the victim could just block the harassers number in this case, but maybe the telephone company is justified in cutting off the harasser anyway. But to stick with the KiwiFarms analogy: What if people talk to each other on the phone, ridicule others, share embarrassing information about others, and then some of them go on (allegedly) to harass the targets?
        claudiawerner 4y ago
        To get closer with the KF situation, the phone company is not typically set up as a moderated venue where administrators, moderators, and janitors are aware of every call and interaction on the service, its content, and who is interacting with who. They might be able to deduce some of this (and some of it they can't even deduce legally), but it's nothing like an online forum in which the administrators and moderators condone the behavior to (what they see as) reasonable limits just shy of breaking laws against harassment. Furthermore, if we likened web services to phone services, you'd find we're using a service which doesn't allow half of what KF allows to be posted in accordance with the HN guidelines. And I'm fine with that sort of moderation. Most phone companies are set up with the implicit assumption that they are content neutral within the bounds of the law, though some do provide further restrictions. KF was not set up as such - this 'ridicule' and 'embarrassing information' is the entire point of the website, and is much closer as a proximal cause to the harassment. It aided that ridicule and connecting people of like minds with bad intentions with the knowledge that this kind of discussion is explicitly banned on Reddit, HN, and to some extent 4chan. If there were a phone company set up with its advertising and moderation similar to KF's, I'd say the phone company is just as culpable as KF.
- humblefarmer 4y ago
  The reason "law enforcement is not effective at dealing with [kiwifarms]" is quite simply because kiwifarms is not doing anything illegal.
- tarakat 4y ago
  > is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers. If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?
milderworkacc 4y ago
This from the EFF seems to create a bit of a circuit split with Electronic Frontiers Australia [0] - though I hasten to add the two are not affiliated. My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in. I recognise the irony. [0] https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cloudflare/ https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cl...
- humblefarmer 4y ago
  It really looks like the only motivation for Cloudflare stopping service to a client is whether it personally angers the CEO. I think we've had three letters already where he's basically saying "gee I really hate doing that, but I'm doing it anyway".
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> It is something that anyone with technical expertise (no platform is guaranteed a right to good programmers) can accomplish. If a DDoS attack overwhelms the network connection, there's no technical expertise that can protect against that. > In the case of KiwiFarms, they’ve transitioned to using a modified fork of a free and open source load balancer to protect against DDoS and other bot-driven attacks. That only shows that no one attacking them has enough resources to overwhelm their network connection.
z9znz 4y ago
The reality is that not all people should be able to vote, and not all people should be able to speak publicly. Of course the challenge is in deciding who is worthy of each. The new problem because of the internet is that critical masses of people who arguably should not be able to speak publicly are now able to. Worse, they can do it anonymously. Threats, slander, and harassment are often illegal and always undesirable. Platform providers enable these things. So ultimately if people want freedom to speak publicly, then they must be personally identifiable (so they can be held accountable for illegal forms of speech)… or the platform providers must attempt to police the content. It has to be one or the other.

43 points by philippejara 4y ago

I agree with the general framework of the argument but as always there's more to it. If a group of criminals are conducting their business out of a motel room, is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them? Most would say the police, right? The thing with KiwiFarms and a lot of these other sites is that law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them because there are thousands of them and when one goes, another appears. So in the face of ineffective policing, the people pressure and protest the next entity who could actually affect change, Cloudflare. The reality is that these sites cannot be effectively and efficiently policed and until someone finds a way to do that in the most minimally harmful way possible, we're still going to see mobs protesting take-downs and companies capitulating to the demands.

DoItToMe81 4y ago
Law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them, because the ones in the spotlight haven't actually broken the law, and the "harassment campaign" is extremely exaggerated. It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  >but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it This doesn't fill me with hope; I'm not sure why I should trust the website's claim[0] that they enforce these rules with a one strike policy over the people who say that KF users have harassed them after organizing on KF. The law may not have been broken, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a supposed moral imperative to carry those bytes if I'm someone like Cloudflare. [0] A website which, uncontroversially, is more than happy to host (and encourage) users who are known to laugh at people for who they are and revel in scooped information, a fact which decreases the trustworthiness of the operators in my eyes.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    How do you feel about living in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a moral imperative to provide someone with electricity if you're a power company, or with a telephone number if you're a telephone company?
    - claudiawerner 4y ago
      For telephony I'd make the same argument. For electricity, probably not. If harassment happens over the telephone, then the telephone provider is sufficiently close to the proximal cause in my judgement for service to be cut off in certain circumstances. Electricity is too far removed.
      - amadeuspagel 4y ago
        Harassment happening over the telephone of course could mean two things. What do you mean by harassment happening over the telephone? It could mean that someone calls someone else to harass them. Of course the victim could just block the harassers number in this case, but maybe the telephone company is justified in cutting off the harasser anyway. But to stick with the KiwiFarms analogy: What if people talk to each other on the phone, ridicule others, share embarrassing information about others, and then some of them go on (allegedly) to harass the targets?
        claudiawerner 4y ago
        To get closer with the KF situation, the phone company is not typically set up as a moderated venue where administrators, moderators, and janitors are aware of every call and interaction on the service, its content, and who is interacting with who. They might be able to deduce some of this (and some of it they can't even deduce legally), but it's nothing like an online forum in which the administrators and moderators condone the behavior to (what they see as) reasonable limits just shy of breaking laws against harassment. Furthermore, if we likened web services to phone services, you'd find we're using a service which doesn't allow half of what KF allows to be posted in accordance with the HN guidelines. And I'm fine with that sort of moderation. Most phone companies are set up with the implicit assumption that they are content neutral within the bounds of the law, though some do provide further restrictions. KF was not set up as such - this 'ridicule' and 'embarrassing information' is the entire point of the website, and is much closer as a proximal cause to the harassment. It aided that ridicule and connecting people of like minds with bad intentions with the knowledge that this kind of discussion is explicitly banned on Reddit, HN, and to some extent 4chan. If there were a phone company set up with its advertising and moderation similar to KF's, I'd say the phone company is just as culpable as KF.
humblefarmer 4y ago
The reason "law enforcement is not effective at dealing with [kiwifarms]" is quite simply because kiwifarms is not doing anything illegal.
tarakat 4y ago
> is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers. If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?

milderworkacc 4y ago

This from the EFF seems to create a bit of a circuit split with Electronic Frontiers Australia [0] - though I hasten to add the two are not affiliated. My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in. I recognise the irony. [0] https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cloudflare/ https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cl...

humblefarmer 4y ago
It really looks like the only motivation for Cloudflare stopping service to a client is whether it personally angers the CEO. I think we've had three letters already where he's basically saying "gee I really hate doing that, but I'm doing it anyway".

amadeuspagel 4y ago

> It is something that anyone with technical expertise (no platform is guaranteed a right to good programmers) can accomplish. If a DDoS attack overwhelms the network connection, there's no technical expertise that can protect against that. > In the case of KiwiFarms, they’ve transitioned to using a modified fork of a free and open source load balancer to protect against DDoS and other bot-driven attacks. That only shows that no one attacking them has enough resources to overwhelm their network connection.

z9znz 4y ago

The reality is that not all people should be able to vote, and not all people should be able to speak publicly. Of course the challenge is in deciding who is worthy of each. The new problem because of the internet is that critical masses of people who arguably should not be able to speak publicly are now able to. Worse, they can do it anonymously. Threats, slander, and harassment are often illegal and always undesirable. Platform providers enable these things. So ultimately if people want freedom to speak publicly, then they must be personally identifiable (so they can be held accountable for illegal forms of speech)… or the platform providers must attempt to police the content. It has to be one or the other.