Comment by danShumway
4 years ago
> 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.
Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA.
Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that.
In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
> Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices.
Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
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>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
My issue is that the Kiwi post in question - which (to my reading) was a very VERY stupid bomb “joke” obliquely referencing the Belfast Troubles - appears to have been quickly moderated and the user banned. Which is, I thought, how this was all supposed to work.
The screenshot going around Twitter of the idiotic post was tweeted out within literal minutes of said post being made. I have no idea how long it took the KF moderators to delete the post and ban the user but, from a perusal of the following pages in that thread, it doesn’t seem like it was up very long.
So is moderation an issue? It doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps that post was the final straw, but CloudFlare is framing their action as having to step in and “moderate” specifically because of THAT post - and yet the post in question had already been (correctly) nuked from orbit by the KF mods.
Edit: here’s where I do the obligatory “I didn’t vote for Trump, however” mea culpa: I do not have a KiwiFarms account and honestly I find it to be fairly distasteful in a 2004 FYAD sort of way.
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> You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online.
No, we want the government to clandestinely meet every week with representatives of major internet companies and instruct them who to ban and what information to suppress, while pretending it's independent action of the same companies driven by their love of free speech. Or maybe we don't want that, but who cares - it's what we've got.
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Do we still call it “speech” if it’s a threat for physical violence? This seems even more clear when an established past of threats being actualized exists.
Edit-Maybe I’ll make this personal. I’ve been a victim of both verbal and physical bullying. At some point words cross a boundary from speech to violence. You could even see this with the audio simulations used to simulate schizophrenia. I’d say speech crosses the boundary into violence when it hurts another person and cannot be “muted” by the other. Ie doxxing someone-once it’s on the internet it’s out there for all time. Etc.
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>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.
Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Now we're somehow discussing "multiple layers of moderation". This was fast. No limiting principles in sight either.
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“ You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online”
That’s exactly what I think should be the case. The US government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and having a representative democracy is a way to achieve that decentralization. If the power structures that arise from this model threaten this process then the first goal should be fixing it rather than introducing a new process where a smaller ideological group gets to harass those within companies into acquiescing to their moral guidelines.
“promptly and firmly by a justice system”
The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail.
So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?
> They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail.
If this is true, explain police protection. Or restraining order.
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Every CEO implicitly decides what is morally acceptable or not when they act. Additionally individual people and society as a whole judge those actions within their own frame of reference.
Laws aren't about what's moral or not.
> 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.
This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.
> This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals.
Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals?
If someone else is going to decide what ideas I'm allowed to hear I want to have a vote in who that person is. When CEOs make those choices for you voting with your wallet isn't going to cut it. At least with the state we have the ability to collectively decide what the limits of their power will be and hold them accountable when they overstep.
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> We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not.
Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
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Let's not be coy here - the ultimate goal is to exactly make them cease to exist. And indeed, in any other case such action would be pointless - if they're dangerous hateful bigots that endanger lives, then what changes if they move to another provider? What has been achieved by that? It's like the police would say "we caught this terrible murderer and we forced him to change the store where he shops for groceries and to wear different brand of clothes. Yay us!" What's the point then? The only case where it makes any sense if when the ultimate goal - maybe not immediate, but eventual - is to drive it out of existence.
CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
Everyone here has defended the CEO right to make those decision. The disagreement is his argument and justfication. He should just come out and say "I did it because i can and want to" not those long winded excuses
They have been broken, by anonymous or nearly anonymous people, constantly, distributed throughout the world behind multiple proxies.
Sorry dude, we're not gonna wait 3 to 50 months for law enforcement to sort gradually through the trail of bodies.
Like oh I'm just doing crimes using your delivery service, I'm just doing crimes in your restaurant, I'm just doing crimes in your day care, and if you believe in free speech you have to let me keep doing the crimes it until you petition the US government to compose a task force
No. The argument is that there is very little evidence here that crimes were actually committed, rather they were allegedly just discussed. Cloudflare hasn’t brought any evidence to bear.
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?
If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline.
But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else.
The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
Their cover up of Stalins holocaust in Ukraine probably killed more people than there are transpeople in the US. Their support of the Iraq war caused an unknowable amount of damage.
From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
Is this referring to the "slate star codex" incident a couple years back?
That and likely how Taylor Lorenz handled the Libs of Tik Tok unmasking.
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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.
> nobody has proven their actions to be illegal
It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably.
I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government.
I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack.
Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
> It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably.
Yes it should be.
Society is based on rule of the law and corporations that are controlling our most critical communication infrastructure should solely concern themselves with what is legal. Not what is moral, not what they think is just or "offensive" or "hurtful".
I feel for the trans people who are targeted and wish them well but I absolutely don't want the Cloudflare's CEO making _any kind_ of judgment regarding the content I am allowed to read and share.
> My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence.
Your position here is that the matter was so grave that people could be in absolute danger. Well, guess what? We already have laws protecting people from bodily harm and Cloudflare should have waited for the courts to decide, however you don't get to make a moral judgment here and deny ME, a citizen of the world, access to information unless our democratic society votes otherwise.
If you think this isn't how society should function, great, you can attempt to vote and change the laws.
By restricting speech and information, you are restricting and controlling human thought.
I will not allow it.
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Most of the posters on the site might do nothing illegal, but one or two did make actual threats that crossed the line into criminal conduct. Even if the posts were immediately deleted by moderators, people still took screenshots.
So if I threatened you right here in this post, and someone screencapped it before a moderator deleted it, then HN has no right to exist? Or does there need to be another person or two also threatening you? Just the fact that it happened, regardless of it being against the site's TOS and taken down by site admins, means that the site is now complicit and loses any right or privilege to protection?
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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Is bullshit.. That's why it's a paradox. Intolerance of "intolerance" is intolerance!
And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
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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.
the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical