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Comment by trafficante

4 years ago

>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.

  • You might be right. Posted by a KF user regarding the threat:

    "It's a 2020 account that wasn't active till a month ago with 1 post in the CWC forum and the other 42 in the keffals thread. The post was deletedly nearly instantly, yet within 10 minutes of it being posted Keffals had contacted CF, CF pulled the plug, and articles (which you can find in A&N right now) were being posted. Also it's notable that Keffals removed the quote/reply portion of the post which he accidently revealed before indicating he has an account here. This was so obviously coordinated, it glows more than nuclear blast."

    • Anecdote: in a Discord server I was one of the moderators at, we had a user post porn images from OnlyFans while the moderators were asleep, then report the server to Discord for hosting stolen content. The server got deleted by Discord. The user's account did not.