Comment by eastdakota

>rather than free speech

i encourage anybody who is calls themselves a "free speech advocate" to consider what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech". their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is. if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been harming their free speech. free speech is for everybody, not just the people who have opinions you agree with, and being openly trans is a form of speech.

Freedom of speech isn't about speech. It's about hearing. There are people who want to read or listen to what others have to say, and often for reasons besides agreement with the author's statements. By silencing someone, you are preventing others from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. I certainly don't agree with the posts and comments on kiwifarms, but I want to understand what they believe and why. Also, there is a diamond in that dung heap of a website. Kiwifarms users archive tons of stuff, and those archives are very valuable.

Moreover, I cannot help but notice the double standard you've created. You still provide services to godhatesfags.com. Hell, cloudflare provides DDoS protection for ISIS content. How can you say that kiwifarms is too dangerous when you're ensuring that copies of Inspire and Dabiq are available for extremists to read? If you want to talk about dangerous content, go after the people who claim that they want to murder innocent people and have done so many times in the past.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspire_(magazine)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine)

> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

This is the logic of vigilantes. I'm not saying what you have done is on the same level as vigilante murder or anything, but don't try to justify it as something high-and-mighty. You've once again terminated a customer on a whim. And that's your right, but stop trying to make this out to be anything more than that.

Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

Post the screenshot then. Show us what changed between when CF said "KF is acting within the bounds of the law and will remain online" and today.

Refusing service to customers you find contemptible is completely reasonable. Continuing to service customers out of a sense of fairness even though you find them contemptible is also reasonable. Pretending that you have a sense of fairness that keeps all legal entities online and abandoning it to protect your bottom line is hypocritical and cowardly.

Being a company that protects the vulnerable is every bit as honorable as being a company that stands for freedom of expression. Today Cloudflare proves it is neither.

> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

Does Cloudflare wait for a court order before taking action when it detects a DDoS attack or when it suspects that a client is malicious?

The law is by design reactionary. In this case, I don't mean that in a bad way; what I mean is that the law is designed to respond to criminals, not to preempt them. If all of your moderation decisions, even in cases that go beyond hate speech or bigoted content into straight-up abuse of infrastructure and direct targeting of individuals -- if you need that to be reliant on a court then you are giving up the ability to prevent abuse and you can only respond to that abuse.

Do you worry about due process when someone's site is getting knocked offline by automated requests, or is your primary worry about protecting your customers?

What's even worse is that by abjugating your responsibility to protect your customers even in cases where there are clear threats, and by encouraging the law to become even faster and more trigger-happy to compensate, you encourage the creation of censorship engines that are even more dangerous than the ones that you are in charge of. We should have better laws around doxing and threatening people online, but even once we get better laws, Cloudflare is still going to have a part to play in detecting targeted attacks. No just law is going to be fast enough or nuanced enough to make these decisions for you.

You can't get rid of your responsibility to such a degree that you won't need to make moderation decisions even about non-ideological and purely abusive content like doxing forums. And by refusing to recognize your role in that process, you allow people to be completely driven offline and censored in the exact same ways that your company is dedicated to preventing. It's no different than allowing a DDoS attack on one of your clients to continue because you haven't specifically heard from a judge yet that you should stop it.

It’s nonsense this has anything to do with the law.

This solely happened because of mainstream media pressure and significant clients moving or threatening to move away from Cloudflare and the board deciding they don’t need the bad press and loss of customers and nothing else.

You provide a service and like every service provider you have a TOS/AUP. The issue is the Acceptable Use Paragraph is clear as long as the content isn’t Copyright or CSE then it’s fine as you will absolve yourself of any responsibility.

No other CDN/WAF tolerates nationalists who threaten people, Cloudflare does. No other CDN/WAF makes the reporting process essentially doxing yourself to the threatening website. Cloudflare does. No other CDN/WAF intentionally puts all the most vile sites on dedicated CDN hosts so they get DDoSed while the normal customers don’t.

It’s purely so then when the vile sites get DDoSes then they use those learnings to improve the controls for all customers.

Much like providing security guards for a Proud Boys rally. It’s an intentional business decision to provide those services. You could chose not to. But you don’t.

I disagree somewhat. rule of law' sounds like such a neat, objective solution to social problems, but in practice it centralizes a vast amount of decision-making in organs of state (courts and to a lesser extent, public prosecutors.

This in turn drastically shapes incentives, because of the cost of litigation and highly variable access to legal infrastructure: as we all know, police have no formal duty to protect despite having vast levels of legal immunity from consequences when they make bad decisions.

Hence the pressure campaign on your firm, because exerting leverage through market forces and PR strategies is simply more effective than begging some state authority to intervene. Of course, it hurts you somewhat insofar as it's harder for you to sell a service to anyone and everyone when people see that you're willing to revoke access in some cases. but then you were willing to do that already, eg to pre-empt perceived legal risks from FOSTA/SESTA.

I think sites like Kiwifarms have a right to exist, but on the other hand they don't have any particular right to DDOS protection. If a site is so chronically unpopular that it's constantly getting kicked out of nice infrastructure perhaps the operators need to reconsider their security stance or reflect on the basis of said unpopularity.

Of course, DDOS attacks can be engineered rather than being an expression of organic network sentiment, but then so can mitigation strategies.

Tell me then - why does Cloudflare still offer its services to drug dealers? To sites run by terrorist groups like ISIS? To outright criminal scamming operations?

I have no faith in your principles. From my perspective, the only principle you have is your share price. That's fine, of course. I don't expect you to stick your neck out or risk your business. But don't pretend like this is some principled stand.

Forgive me if my understanding is wrong, but if someone were to host a message board or similar site with UGC and have it backed by Cloudflare, and a troll makes posts and threads threatening disasters on multiple occasions even though the site's administration removes them with haste, would Cloudflare also deny service to them? Basically take the current situation but instead of Kiwi Farms, replace it with "Grandma's Cat Forum".

You're not a law enforcement organization. You don't have the ability to investigate and determine whether or not the threat is genuine or if it's an agent provocateur.

Banning them creates a hazard, since now to get an opponent banned from the service, they can create content that reaches to this level.

It's a Layer 8 DDOS.

Ok, can we know what was this great threat then that suddenly made you change your position in just a few days?

Furthermore, do you believe that someone who is issuing a threat on a public platform is going to not act it out because you took it away? If anything it just sounds like it would make them even more incensed to do it, just makes absolutely no sense to frame it as some immediacy issue.

"the threat"

Ever think the feds have half a brain among them, and know there's no threat?

I know how gullible people are in these culture-warish times, but I still hope you've lost credibility with some significant fraction of us. Maybe those of us old enough to remember when the average techy was libertarian and opposed censorship. The Farms is right back up, by the way. But at least now you can wash your hands of it. Don't think Twitter will stop coming at you though. You need to understand those people want to punish and teach.

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides.

When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.

> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat

If one patron starts beating another to a pulp, the bartender breaking up the fight does not signify a failure of the rule of law or law enforcement. You stepped in to help. It would be nice if you were given official air cover to do so. But I and most Americans prefer a system where the government has extra hoops to jump through to halt even dangerous speech.

Every website gets threats. The Stoneman Douglas shooter wrote a YouTube comment about how he wanted to be a school shooter, just weeks before his attack, which went unmoderated. Kiwifarms immediately deleted the threatening post. Why hold small discussion forums to such a higher standard? They deleted the post in minutes; so you expect them to delete violating posts faster than YouTube?

In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call.

I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?

There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.

The problem is: how do you determine that nobody else was taking this seriously? I don't know anything about Kiwifarms, so I may simply look foolish asking this, but: how do you know there was an imminent emergency? Did you conduct your own independent investigation? Or was this a response to some alarming Twitter outrage? Those are the type of questions on my mind. Essentially, did you do all the things one would reasonably expect of law enforcement who are equip to handle emergencies in a situation like this?

You are right, the simple idea of vigilante corporations makes my skin crawl. The double standards, of sort, are pretty logically inconsistent and frustrating. You’re saying, “Cloudflare acknowledges that policing the internet is not an appropriate responsibility for a platform provider, but we’re gonna do it anyway because the rest of society doesn't have its act together.” I guess I am to some extent expecting a citation on that last part so I can verify your claims are serious and not just corporate knee jerk.

Finally, let’s assuming there is indeed an emergency and the you are 100% spot on with your mitigation strategy. Crisis averted. Then what happens? Is this permanent? Once the immediate emergency is over, would you be comfortable reinstating Kiwifarms as a customer? There are some “don’t be Google” vibes here that make me uncomfortable too.

In a fair environment, once an emergency is dealt with and justice served, we go back to normal. I find it hard to believe you’d be amenable to that type of resolution because I’m used to corporate decisions being final and essentially unable to be appealed. Or, at least they’re final until Twitter starts griping about the new injustice such a final outcome has caused.

You may not want the mantle but, by choosing to act, you are, at least for now, picking it up. Yes, this is way more nuanced than “free speech”. I hope you’re ready…

Imagine I own a bunch of billboards around town. A customer comes to me with cash and wants to display someone's personal details and a message encouraging harassment on my billboards.

Do I have to wait for law enforcement to stop me from displaying their content? Or can I, as a private company, make a judgement call and decline their business?

I think the answer here is pretty obvious and your attempt at passing the buck is pathetically weak.

How do you intend to generalize this case to other websites with user-generated content? Because the precedent set today is that a single threatening user-generated comment is enough to pull Cloudflare security services for the entire site, regardless of how quickly the website performs their own moderation, as long as it stays up long enough to be screenshotted and passed around on Twitter. That's basically carte blanche to deny service to any website with user generated content whenever you want.

Cloudflare's post the other day seemed like a very reasonable framework for making decisions on issues like this, but Cloudflare's actions today just severely undercut your credibility on this issue.

Did blocking the content save anybody's life? If so, how? If you don't know, can you even articulate a theory in which blocking content could save a life imminently threatened?

I don't dispute that a life was threatened and murder may have been imminent, I'm taking that for granted. I just don't understand how this action could have any effect upon that course of events. Murder is a physical-world thing, not an online content thing.

Further explanation would be appreciated.

Unelected technocrats taking the law into their own hands and using arbitrary judgment calls to manipulate infrastructure is not an improvement on the current legal system. Especially when they are making promises they don't keep and when they then try to gaslight people into thinking this has nothing to do with external political pressure.

There was one threat which was immediately removed by the moderators. Why is it your business to take down an entire site because one user on it broke the rules and was stopped by the site moderators?

Actually it's about the fact that you don't want to spend the money to enforce an AUP, like just about every other ISP does. Instead you want someone else to make the that system for you. Every printer gets to decide if they want to print Mein Kampf, and most decide that they won't. Movie theaters get to decide if they want to show dirty movies. Liberal society recognizes human interactions beyond the merely legal.

What you're saying is you're fine hosting harassment until it gets bad enough for a court to finally intervene and order it offline. But Kiwifarms was already banned in New Zealand for hosting a snuff film showing innocent people getting slaughtered for their religion. I'm not sure what exactly you wanted: a US court issuing an order that would almost certainly be unconsitutional prior restraint? An obscenity prosecution?

Society has decided that it's your choice what kinds of speech the company you control enables, and you've decide to tell us that you're going to pretend it isn't. Well, it is. Those sites are up on Cloudflare, because you want them to be, and nothing you say is going to change that reality.

So then why did you become the liability decision maker on behalf of your customer, if you were not required by the law?

After many sales emails that we ignored, your sales guy found and called me on my personal cell when I was on vacations in Mexico City, trying to push a 5000/mo DDoS mitigation contract, and i explained to him that we are happier paying 100k/year to a net neutral company VeriSign (now down to 27k), than offloading the legal liability decisions on our behalf to your Majesty Matthew Prince.

While it makes sense to use CF for a booter DDoS-for-hire outfit accepting Monero, any legitimate company that has real money and jobs at stake should not use CF.

> could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. > Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context

To get this straight: your position is that this is not about free speech because something clearly illegal happened and you acted purely to expedite matters since law enforcement was too slow to react and there was material danger.

So you are then tying your reputation to there being eventual legal consequences for what happened in recent days on Kiwi Farms?

I always appreciate your stance (as you have tried to maintain for many years) on the importance of trying to be neutral.

It is kind of funny that your latest argument / blog was your best and just a week ago…

So thank you. Anyone capable of reading between the lines here doesn’t fault you or believe the “new threats story”.

But that’s okay. Media pressure, bad PR, ESG scores, losing customers, and the bigger HR problem of employees/ engineers becoming deranged and unfocused is not worth the trade off. It casts a pretty shadow over the real and good company stuff.

Thanks for being reasonable and understanding this is just not the way things should be.

Hopefully you can quietly lobby for clearer legal guidance or a better measured shift in the public conversation.

Until then… here’s to the next one! See you back here in 6-12 months all over again, haha.

Did Cloudflare give KF notice that it intended to take this action and enable them to avoid service disruption? Or did Cloudflare intend that KF should experience service disruption?

I remember many years ago with lulzsec, where cloudflare refused to shutdown their services. Whether what they did was moral or not, it was a still a crime and I imagine it was because they agreed with the message.

> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

By making that call regardless, I don’t think you’ve increased the likelihood of law enforcement (or other appropriate parties) stepping up to deal with such cases in a timely manner in the future. Maybe rather the opposite, which would be unfortunate.

What was the actual threat? Was it posted on Kiwi Farms, or transmitted via another channel?

I'd like to honestly better understand why, if there is a threat of violence, law enforcement cannot act.

What threat exactly? How do we know it wasn't a false flag by someone wanting to take the site offline?

Matthew, you don't give a damn about free speech. You've proven it numerous times. Quit pretending that you do.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but what does banning them from Cloudflare achieve?

Is it just that the company feels unconfortable providing them any kind of service given the nature of the currently posted content?

Because banning them should have no effect on their ability to generate/serve that content, maybe make it a bit more expensive (though I see that their site is still blocked, so maybe immediately disabling Cloudflare isn’t an option for them either)

I'd like to have seen some transparency, e.g. post redacted examples of the content that caused this conclusion.

We do not call "rule of law" "due process" in US. Due process is the tempering of the application of law ("Rule of Law") by the state. You start off clouding matters (npi).

> traditional rule of law systems.

As opposed to what, "modern and innovative corporate rule of law systems"?

INAL but I am pretty sure there are all sort of legal actions that can be taken before the entire "due process" is completed.

You are aware, Mr. Prince, that people can be arrested and put in jail ("Rule of Law") and have a court date at a much later date ("Due Process")?

[p.s. for hn]: It's not that I give a fig about wikifarms (which was TIL for me). But this posturing by Cloudflare and framing this as a responsible action in context of 'a broken legal system' (aka "traditional") is too much.

Yes, let's have CEOs of SV companies apply the "Rule of Law" for us. While you are at it, why don't you 'edit' the content that you are 'fronting'? "Traditional editorial systems" are also desperately in need of the wise guidance of CEOs and corporations! /s

>Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not.

Indeed it’s not - you have no problems with censoring your critics. It’s about you being bad actors (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32705613) but now pretending not to, because share prices started to tank.

Josh has received no contact from federal law enforcement. He has never not complied with their requests and is open about every request he does receive. He does this by creating a post notifying the community of the post and how he responded.

He’s also pro-active in both deleting and reporting any posts that advocate violence, whether that’s a bombing, shooting or stalking.

There is no credible evidence of any physical violence or deaths resulting from KiwiFarms.

Chloe Sagal stated in her farewell messages that her pain came from negative comments made about, and to, her by fellow members of the broader LBGTQIA+ community.

Byuu/Near faked his death, as he did not appear on any Japanese or US death lists. He also has been seen by other developer expats in the time that has passed since his purported suicide.

There is no evidence for the claims being made in the drive to cancel this website. I say this as someone who has never posted there and personally find much of it reprehensible to my ethics and politics.

> the risk created by the content

What risk? Can you please share details? From my perspective, it seems like this is a thin excuse, and there was not actually a credible risk that you were mitigating.

> That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

sure, but I presume CF makes the decision of whether or not to facilitate access to/sell services to other undesirable bits of the internet all the time without requiring law enforcement intervention.

  * Does CF wait for LE or a court case to block or drop malware distribution or command&control channels from their cache/NS/1.1.1.{2+} resolvers?
  * Would CF wait until LE intervenes to drop a known, demonstrated CP host? 
  * Would CF continue to cache pirated material until a court stepped in even if approached by an alleged copyright holder? 
  * Would any of the above actors have a right of appeal with CF?

“The law doesn’t work so I’m gonna be the law.”

- every evil person ever

Another often (purposely?) forgotten freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association

> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call

So you believe that your company shouldn’t be constrained by morality? This is why I look skeptically at hiring any engineering and product leaders from Cloudflare at any company in which I work

>I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not.

Says the people blocking access.

>the risk created by the content

What risk? Fearmongering is always the first defense of those who wish to limit free speech. "Something will happen if we don't." Can I get a crystal ball like yours from amazon?

>no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

What threat?

>Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech,

Free speech should trump the rule of law. When it doesn't you end up with tyranny.

Twitter mob wants more

I have no idea why and this piecemeal information leak looks bad

You’re just going to wind up like Facebook where their content moderation completely missed the fanning of genocide in Myanmar and that actual outcome, all the “immediate threats” not just one person getting doxxed

Rule of law? I have no clue what distinction you’re making, as it is neither a legal free speech or rule of law issue. Leave the communication to the lawyers?

Will you also ban violent threats from the left to Andy Ngo? He has been thoroughly documenting it. And published a NYT bestseller “Unmasked”, a written account of how violence from the extreme left is being ignored.

I’d like to see equal treatment, that’s the least worst option.

I want extreme objectivity at the highest level.

Edit: I’m questioning OBJECTIVITY and Andy Ngo is just a fucking example. Find some hypothetical antifa forum, the point is about standards.

> we shouldn’t be the ones making that call

Well, who should? Is anything with the authority going to or even inclined to in the slightest?

Cloudflare has maintained a lobbying/policy department since quite early on, but I'd argue that the post from the 31st wasn't so much that there _should_ be policy against this than that there simply isn't. Given the coming EU DSA or, hell, the comical farce that is/was Texas HB20, it seems clear that further government regulation of online speech is coming in some capacity. How is Cloudflare discussing these issues with lawmakers? Are they taking the approach that existing law and enforcement mechanisms are fully sufficient, or are they arguing that there is a common strain between KiwiFarms, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer that has demonstrated a known pathway between speech and violence that needs some sort of updated legal framework?

> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

Given kiwifarms most definitely remains up[1] (all your action did was let them be DDOSed for an hour or two) and this imminent dealy threat has not materialized, will you invite them back to your infrastructure? Or was this just an excuse and you were unhappy about the bad PR?

[1] https://kiwifarms.ru/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/

The issue is about "free speech" AND "due process" AND the "rule of law". In the US, the law is emphatic that the government shall not infringe upon the free speech of the individual except under very limited circumstances. People on HN insisting that these are private corporations doing private things are painfully naive "useful idiots" or shills for the government. Zuckerberg just admitted that the FBI and intelligence services applied pressure on Facebook to suppress information that would harm the campaign of the candidate who ended up winning the last presidential election. That is fact. The "requests" from government are ALWAYS going to be couched in the language of risk and helping law enforcement. And what would the consequences of a media company's refusal to comply be? What corporate executive wants to find out?

There is already US case law prohibiting this. At scale, governments prefer to act through "private" enterprise. Such enterprises are "state actors" suppressing speech. That is why government prefers monopoly capitalism. Who wouldn't rather have just one or a few partners to manage?

Of course this is a free speech issue, but it's much more. Cloudflare's volte face is super sus. Even if it's the case that no direct government agents were involved this time, the astroturfed pressure campaigns run by state sponsored NGO money are just the privatized surveillance and secret police state hard at work.

The deep issue is that US politicians and citizens are abandoning "rule of law" expectations in domestic politics. These free speech issues are the visible manifestation of a shift in the structure of power in US politics to an unapologetic administrative uni-party, accelerating in real time. Arguing the ludicrous details of this Kiwifarms blocking is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

So you are fine to bypass the laws on your own? How practical.

Kiwifarmers can call each other on the phone, stand on a soapbox in a park, print pamphlets and distribute them. They are still free to say whatever they want to whomever they want without fear of a Government throwing them in jail unless they break the law. Anonymous posts simply allow Kiwifarmers to say things they would likely never say to your face. Cloudflare simply chose to not allow their paid for service to support this behavior. Big deal.

> Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

Do you not see how concerning (not to mention arrogant) it is when a corporation decides to act because it believes the law is inadequate. When individuals do this, we call it vigilantism.

It does set a dangerous precedent and will have a chilling effect. You could have done this silently. Blogging about this is disgusting.

It is not your job to be the police. You should let the authorities do their job.

I think this better encapsulates what I was going for with my comment. For whatever it's worth, I strongly agree.

"Our decision..." who are you?

For context, @eastdakota on HN is Matthew Prince, the CEO/founder of Cloudflare.

Turns out there's no such thing as neutrality. Connecting content to the world is a choice your team approves or declines. You can complain about scalability of that decision all you want. Cloudflare is not neutral, and will never be. You're an active participant and you have to deal with your responsibility.

>Our decision today

Your decision today. You took ownership before for the arbitrary decisions to remove DS and 8Chan, take ownership now and do not try to backpedal. You are Cloudflare's leader.

>That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

You failed to take ownership of this issue either way. Your response suggests you can't understand the responsibility that you continue to have and are trying to shirk it. My suggestion is, find someone who is willing to be compensated to have this responsibility if it burdens you so. That's part of a leader's job.

Watching company employees consistently pop up on critical threads (not fingering CF here, many including at least Stripe come to mind as frequently occurring too) feels a lot like gaming the forum. Vetted messages like this from a recognizable source will often end up pinned to the top of the thread, but I don't really think they overly contribute to the conversation in most cases, and I find myself wishing there was some rule against it.

Not to say there shouldn't be a place for official responses, just that it's kinda tiring to see crowdpleasing justifications during times of stress displacing the thoughts of other potentially less biased folk on the Internet discussing the problem at hand.

(The counterargument would be that the status quo provides unparalleled public access to top-level staff, I'll leave that angle for someone else to explore ;)

how do you know it wasn't just trolls trying to get KF taken down?

"hi I'm a liar and we only did something because the bad press started to go mainstream. fuck trans people"

[dead]

[flagged]

While I agree with you that the content on kiwifarms is not covered by free speech, you should not play law enforcement and wait for a court order instead.

> Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech

That's a clever way of spinning the issue. But no amount of spinning can change the fact that you are clearly using doublespeak. Contrary to what you say in the post, this clearly isn't in the spirit of the policy you had promised [1], or even had advertised just a few days ago. [2]

You are mostly just giving in to pressure. I can't blame you for that, given that I have to use a pseudonym here myself.

Otherwise, if this was just a matter of different principles, you would also kick out media websites who regularly dox people, or publish dumps of hacked websites, etc.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...

[2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...