Comment by notatoad
4 years ago
>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.
There seems to be a double standard with who can partake in intimidation campaigns.
Before any mention of keffals in Kiwifarms she was running a harassment campaign against Destiny, making false accusations that he was a rapist and rallying their followers to get him de-platformed on all platforms.
The worst situation is having one sided intimidation campaigns where trans activists can de-platform users like Destiny but they cannot defend themselves due to either losing remaining platforms or fear of losing their remaining platforms.
Making accusations against someone and trying to get them deplatformed is not the same as threatening someone with violence. I know very few details but the moral equivalence you’re drawing in this comment is false.
Is it? Attacking someone's livelihood is a very real and impactful form of aggression. Compared threats of violence there's more cases where it's warranted, yes, but I think I would personally rather be on the receiving end of threats of violence than of someone attempting to make me lose my job and become much harder to employ.
Of course actual violence is a different case altogether.
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Publicly calling someone a rapist can very well get someone injured or killed. Unless you’re a victim whose pleas are being completely ignored by the legal system, it’s not justifiable and not something that should be taken as anything but a threat to someone’s life.
I have no clue who these people are or what the situation is, but I’ve seen more than enough angry mobs appear out of nowhere after an accusation of a crime.
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If I'm not mistaken, the threat of violence came from someone USING the KF platform, not KF itself. If you want to make equivalences, deplatforming Destiny means removing him FROM a platform, and thus the person making threats should have been banned from KF to result an an equivalence. Yet the action taken was to actually remove the entire platform.
Am I wrong here?
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This is the post the got the site shut down: https://i.imgur.com/S1z3Po2.jpg
And btw, kiwifarms had to get their own ip block because no one would host them any more that was like 5+ years ago or something. So cloudflare never really provided any service to the site as their IPs were public knowledge and could be ddos'd (hence why it is always going down)
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As far as I know both the people who doxxed kavanagh and jk Rowling are still happily posting on twitter.
Oh and the journalist who threatened those schoolboys with violence.
Of course those aren’t real threats of violence apparently. Only the right threatens actual violence. The left only does rhetoric. /s
Those people should also be banned from twitter. Just because some folks aren't banned when they should be doesn't mean we should stop banning everyone.
This isn't a left vs right thing. It's a "we shouldn't let people bring harm to other people online" thing. It seems you're the one making it left vs right.
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Last I checked both Kavanaugh and Rowling have shit loads of security. I can't say the same for a random trans person, can you???
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>making false accusations that he was a rapist
This is a lie. What happened is Destiny had a tirade about how to him stealthing isn’t rape, and Keffals pointed it out. Then KF went wild, as seen above.
For people who don't like to hide an essay's worth of scum behind a two-syllable word, "stealthing" is used above to describe putting on a condom to obtain consent and then discreetly removing the condom after consent is obtained.
No Keffals said that destiny is a rapist
https://streamable.com/ti9rgx
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You left the part out where Keffals once again went out of their way to then get Destiny (and by Keffals own words, livelihood) de-platformed first and how Keffals is the one in fact who started the fight with KF. (who only looked further into the person's pretty unsavory history because of their freak out)
To this day Kiwifarms still hosts the Christchurch video.
They posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with their response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove it.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
They clearly want to keep this content up.
Yes and thank god they do. I watched it several times so I could better understand what happened in this scenario and what an evil person may do if I find myself unarmed with a pile of people in a confined space like this. I learned that hiding in the corner resulted in piles of people simply ending up getting shot, and that immediately exiting out through windows and other less expected exit points greatly aided survivors. This is counter to idiotic advice my teachers gave me, like hiding under chairs and desks, which the shooter in Uvalde took advantage of to massacre virtually all the children in their room.
After watching the videos I came up with a plan as to what to do if an evil person ever enters close quarters building and I have no way to fight back. Only by watching such a gruesome video with such explicit results did it really drive home what the stakes are. I truly believe Kiwifarms may save lives by keeping up this video.
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Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.
This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference between saying hateful things and doxing and harassing people with threats of violence.
We don't even need to dip into the endless debate about tolerating hate -- there's no level of ideological indirection here, Kiwi Farms was just very straightforwardly driving people offline with threats of physical harm and real-world harassment.
No that's why this issue should have been dealt with promptly and firmly by a justice system not by a corporate choice.
We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not.
If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
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So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
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Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal.
Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit.
That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
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Kiwifarms also serves a weird specific role. Many of the people people discussed there do propagate harmful things. Like normalizing cutting, starving, violence and much more.
There is no control instance for things like this. Normalizing harmful things ok YouTube in front of children is not cool, we all know YouTube barely cares either.
For a concrete example look into Chris Chan and how Kiwifarms was literally the only instance out there protecting Chris from way more evil groups.
My point is even if Kiwifarms is a hateful environment, I think they serve a purpose in our society.
Where are these so-called threats of physical harm and real-world harassment? People keep saying this but never even attempt to back it up with anything more than the allegation.
Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News.
The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online.
We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong.
The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
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> doxing
Doxxing isn't illegal.
> harassing people with threats of violence
How do you know that A: the person whose name I won't say isn't lying, because that person's a professional victim. And B: if that person isn't lying, that those threats came from Kiwi Farms users.
The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc.
The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
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Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.
The 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech aren't the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a philosophical concept and is, in fact, "freedom from consequences."
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but "giving the individual the choice to listen to whatever influence they wish" means that when somebody uses the threat of physical violence to silence one of those influences, anybody who stands up for free speech must push back against that. everybody deserves to have their say, except those who would seek to silence others.
defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
Free speech is not completely unfettered. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech that incites imminent lawless action - and that would likely cause such action - can be punished under the law.
In all likelihood this appears to be what is happening with kiwi farms. Of course, the issue is that Cloudflare can’t undertake legal enforcement, but they have a terms of use and so contractually are duly within their rights to end service to kiwifarms.
Don't forget the ending: Brandenburg's incitements to non-imminent violence were upheld as legal. And the person recording/distributing the incitements (the cincinnati reporters [ i.e. Kiwifarms in this case]) was not charged at all.
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Free speech doesn't mean not being held reponsible for what is said.
This ideological purism doesn't grapple with real world corner cases where one person's freedoms infringe on another person's freedoms.
But it doesn’t extend to advocating for violence. We can rightly enact limits on inciting violence.
> Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting.
Yes, but it is not only that. It is also being part of an relgious, cultural or otherwise marginalized group and not having to fear for your life because you have been a little too vocal.
The truth is that freedom of speech (like most other freedoms) must comstantly be balanced between the different actors. E.g. in 1930s Germany the members of the nationalist socialist party of Germany have been quite free to utter their disgusting voices while as a jewish citizen you would have had a hard time if you did so. And the reason for this was that the speech of the Nazis ended up being more than just opinions, but threats. And those threats turned into violence and genocide.
Today, we are again at a point where speech turns into threats turns into violence. Karl Popper's paradoxon of intolerance and all that. Any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, otherwise you cease to be a free society at one point or another. Because the intolarent will not fight for free speech once they are in power, they will abolish it for everybody but themselves. The actual Nazis back then were quite happy painting themselves as victims only to later remove the very rights they claimed.
Once people get beaten, lynched and killed by fascist mobs and loose their rights to bodily autonomy discussing freedom of speech seems naive. People who have to fear violence and incarceration cannot speak freely. And if you look at the statistics for right wing violence the point I raise here is anything but academic.
Update, as I read more on the topic: In the case of KiwiFarms this is not even close to being about free speech. On that platform coordinated attacks on specific people have been planned, driving a few into suicide.
To all those downvoting: How would you think if the target of these attack was your mother, sister, daughter? Should there be a legal way to make them stop? Or should it just be legal to coordinate harassing and threaten people whose appearance, opinion, political opinion, sexual preferences, etc you don't like?
And before someone comes with the slippery slope argument: I live in Germany, we have certain Nazi symbols banned for decades here and it hasn't harmed the discourse one bit. You just can't walk around and go like "Heil Hitler" in public without having to fear some sort of retaliation. You can still talk about Nazis, you can learn about them, you can still be a Nazi. But if there was a slippery slope, why didn't it slip – for decades?
Btw.: Most Europeans would regard the censorship of female nipples, swear words and anything remotely sexual like it is so commonplace in the US as an impediment on free speech. But if it is ingrained in the prude traditionalism, it is suddenly okay censorship, right?
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Why should I take this argument on good faith when literally this same argument has been repeatedly used in attempts to deplatform comedians, popular politicians, writers, journalists and tons of ordinary people?
Were said comedians, popular politicians, writers, and journalist calling for immediate violent acts and intimidation of others.
If yes, then I believe they should be censored.
If no, , then they should not.
Authoritarians will use both arguments at the same time, they have no problem with hypocrisy. They will threaten you with violence, and demand their violence be published, while with the slights of those they do not like demand censorship.
Calls for violence must not be tolerated, for if they are civil society cannot exist.
You mean practicing and protecting it?
What harassment campaigns? Talking about someone and pointing out what publicly say is not harassment.
"free speech is certain types of people not having anything they don't like spoken anywhere"
> what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech"
What? Testing it? To make sure we can actually exercise it in practice? Because "be careful how you use it or you might ruin it for everyone" wasn't ever how the 1st amendment was meant to work. Like, what would be the point. Let's let the 1st amendment say you have to check in with anyone sensitive and if they don't like it, you can't say it, because "we live in a society" Let's have a new Mandatory Courtesy and Respect amendment.
I am so utterly ashamed of the tech industry at this point. I'm glad I retired and don't have to pretend to your faces.
"The Internet interpretes censorship as damage and routes around it." Oh how naive and libertarian us techies were in the reactionary nineteen hundred and nineties.
private companies have no obligation under the 1st amendment. violence and hatred have no place in this world or on the internet.
i'm ashamed of all the people who stand up and defend nazis, fascists, and cyber-bullying and doxxing. this isn't about sensitivity it's about vile human actions, and viewpoints like yours are what allowed for fascism to spread in europe, asia, and america.
Tell it to somebody who's already subscribed to that whole delusional ideology. Such as every other user in this thread.
Free speech is free speech, and it includes speech that you and others will find hateful, cruel, and disgusting. Doesn't stop it from being protected by free speech laws. Would you say trans people have been hurting the free speech of people on Twitter by reporting them and harassing them en masse for speaking against them and refusing to follow their demands of tolerance?
yeah a "my speech is better than yours" situation
I am not aware of what Kiwifarms have done, but I am aware of what is often said when people claim harrasment of trans people. And that would not be considered harrasment in any other context.
So maybe this is the case that has finally gotten too far, but when you have been crying wolf as many times as the trans movement has, well I am not going to care.
It’s like the US military explaining their actions during the Vietnam War - “we needed to destroy the city in order to save it”
most recently, they executed a targeted intimidation campaign to the point where somebody felt the need to flee Canada. and then continued it when kiwifarms users discovered that person's new home in ireland.
(edit: corrected US to canada. most of the coverage of this was coming from NBC, assumed that meant the victim was american)
It might help the "victim" if they weren't constantly posting online and leaking their whereabouts. But hey, how else would they be able to solicit donations?
When I grew up, people used to say that you should never post your personal details online. I think we should normalize that attitude again.
It really makes me wonder why they decided to go with a DDoS attack as opposed to counter-doxxing the operator of KiwiFarm, who also seems to be a donation-soliciting public nuisance and "internet celebrity".
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Coordinating real world afk harassment and physical attacks.
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/2022-alleged-kiwi-...
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Yes, the devil is in the details like always.
Well it seems to me like the kiwifarm posts demeaning information about this person who is co-ordinating the DDoS, like that they were a pornstar or something. So this campaign seems like a tactic to shut down the discussion of facts that are inconvenient for their reputation, like a SLAPP suit.
I knew someone that kiwifarms had a big hand in driving to commit suicide.
I don't want to really get into the details, but we should push places like kiwifarms to the corners of the internet, and then keep pushing.
Don't forget informing jurors of their actual rights and responsibilities.
Well, you can yell "nullification" in a crowded courtroom, everybody knows that.
Nobody is arguing that any one group should have blanket free speech protections. There are definitely trans people who turn to harassment and threats to try to protect their community, which isn't okay.
But at least three trans/gnc people have died through suicide, directly attributable to Kiwi Farms. Near, a brilliant and widely respected open source contributor, specified in their suicide note that it was because Kiwi Farms had made their life hell for years (https://www.ign.com/articles/near-bsnes-remembrance). Just because there are some bad apples in the trans community doesn't make this okay, and they don't get carte blanche to make threats online - they get banned from social media like most other people. There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
> There is no trans equivalent of kiwi farms where they cheer driving people to suicide.
Huh? Of course there is. It's called Twitter. I've seen posts from all kinds of people calling for the deaths of all men, for example. Literally: "kill all men", verbatim. I've seen them get called out on it, only to laugh in the face of the "reddit virgins" who had the audacity to talk back to them. It's a mistake to think they are not hateful.
How many people commit suicide because of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? I have absolutely no doubt it's a far greater number than some trolling website in the darker corners of the internet. Why isn't cloudflare condemning them?
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The fact that no US Citizens in Japan had been reported dead by the government in the time period that Near supposedly killed himself pretty much tells me it’s probably a hoax.
However, I do hope it was not a hoax, and not because I want him dead, but because I am not looking forward to the era where people commit fake “suicides” as the ultimate way to bring attention to a cause or argument, or just as a way to “win” and get the last word. It’s the climax of clout chasing IMO. But it takes away from people who actually do commit suicide and minimizes their tragedies, as our first instinct will eventually be to assume all suicides are fake.
We have not crossed that line yet as a society, but I fear someday we will. Already I doubt anyone has actually killed themselves because of KF.
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>It's very hard for me to take this seriously when the same rules are never applied to trans people and their advocates.
I know that I'm going to regret stepping in this pile of community dog poo, but ...
The simple idea behind "the rule of law" and the concept of "justice" is that it applies equally to all. Regardless of what someone claims to "support" or "oppose" online, death threats are illegal (and sometimes deadly) and should be dealt with accordingly.
I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling". As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; in the absence of such evidence, which your post is, your claims are inflammatory, at best. Were there an option to report your comment (or were I intelligent enough to know how that option worked), I would have done so.
I know that I should not have to spell this out, but it is not OK to threaten people's lives. This, regardless of whether (i) you are trans, (ii) you support trans people, (iii) you hate trans people, or (iv) none of the above.
>>>I am personally unaware of "trans people and their advocates" having "free reign everywhere on the internet to harass, doxx, send death threats, call for the murder of JK Rowling".
DataRacer on Twitter is really good at cataloging this sort of stuff, as early as 2020: https://nitter.net/dataracer117/status/1272737061703790592
Looks like there's finally some actions being taken in the case of JK Rowling:
https://www.thewrap.com/jk-rowling-death-threat-music-video-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10976955/Police-inv... https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-j-k-rowling-r...
Keep in mind that this is a billionaire who seems to get mediocre support from social media platforms against threats of violence. What chance do the mere plebs have?
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It is as mussel IQ level thinking as drivers who raise the "but cyclists don't respect the traffic lights" flags whenever something is discussed about road safety.
> 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,
As far as I know you have many pro-trans channels to communicate online, and it's very natural that you find the opposite as well on the internet. I love the fact that you guys never complain about anticlerical content that's rampant in the most popular platforms. It's almost like you only dislike one type of discrimination.
TDLR: "Free Speech only for the Speech I like"
Please point me to co-ordinated mass harassment campaigns with the objective of leading clerics to suicide, and you might change my mind. Otherwise your comparison is absurd.
If you believe that words are violence then it cuts both ways whether you are trans or just another group that is discriminated against online. Since when is suicide the only endpoint to look at? Shifting goalposts much?
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