Comment by xupybd
4 years ago
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).
> I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc.
Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).
Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal.
Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options.
Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world.
ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone.
The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack.
The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.
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> 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).
CloudFlare acts against speech all the time. They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.
CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well, in many conditions that don't come anywhere approaching "organizing an international manhunt to intimidate a minority": https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#email-routing
They should stop talking about this like it's "pure speech" because it's not that at all, and even to the extent that it is, they already limit actual "pure speech" in many other scenarios not nearly as threatening as this.
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If you don't like what Cloudflare or Facebook are doing, feel free to start your own alternative.
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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.
One thing I don't understand: if Kiwifarms is subject to very big, very expensive DDoS attacks - and I've seen no one denying that it is, that's the whole thing Cloudflare is needed for, after all - why would we even think an illegal threat on Kiwifarms originated with a regular Kiwifarms user? It seems a lot cheaper to make an account and post the illegal comment than to run a DDoS operation.
No Kiwifarms account here either, but I have read it and I do appreciate that some of the people wanting them shut down are... not very nice people themselves.
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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.
This is kind of exactly what I mean when I say that people haven't really though this through.
You intend this to be a gotcha, but yes, unironically getting pressured by a political representative has fewer free speech implications than the government openly threatening to throw people in prison. It does have implications; it's not ideal. But are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?
I've brought up SESTA/FOSTA a few times already, but they're kind of an ever-green example. The government has been pressuring companies to deplatform sex workers for ages, but SESTA/FOSTA were still a worse outcome. I don't want the government trying to do run-arounds to the First Amendment in the first place, but if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.
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As far as I’m aware, the government has little to no power to force a company to suppress information.
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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.
Ok but where were the threat for physical violence here and why did they need to take away protections against illegal attacks in order to stop it?
>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.
> Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company.
Very obviously Cloudflare is operating at a higher level of infrastructure than ISPs or the government.
If they actually believe that they are infrastructure that people have a human right to access and that is so fundamental to the Internet that they should be treated as level 0 infrastructure, then they should consider dissolving the company and forming a public org instead.
Otherwise, yes, of course Cloudflare should have stricter standards. Even under Net Neutrality (which I support) ISPs have more moderation power than the government does. Banks arguably have far too much moderation power (I do think people should have a right to banking access), but I don't know anyone who would argue that banks should have no moderation powers at all, it would make it impossible for them to prevent fraud or abuse if that was the case.
Cloudflare obviously should not have as strict moderation as a web forum, but this isn't a binary choice. The limiting principle here is having multiple layers of infrastructure. It's choosing not to have a single company in charge of DDOS protection for 20% of the web.
“ 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.
In the US, a restraining order issued by a court is merely a suggestion; police can simply ignore it without consequence, even if there is a law on the books that requires police to enforce it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/04-278
You should look into the enforcement of restraining orders.
Because it is unacceptably lax to say the least. And way too many people have died because of it.
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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.
> Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals?
They can't, because we have laws against monopolies.
> 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.