Comment by TomSwirly
4 years ago
Kiwi Farms was literally and deliberately driving people to suicide.
Your argument appears to be this: "Private companies should be forced by the government to host any content, no matter how horrifying and evil it is."
Your argument is morally horrifying, and legally indefensible.
The argument is that companies aren't police. Companies, especially infrastructure companies, should not have a personal view of things like these.
What Kiwifarms is doing is either illegal already or should be made illegal. Law enforcement should be the one deplatforming them and taking action against the human drivel that drives people to suicide, it shouldn't be an ISP deciding what is or isn't acceptable.
ISPs should not be filtering out LGBT+ content even if that content is considered undesirable by the general population and that argument goes both ways. With the way things are turning in large areas of the USA, I expect state-wide LGBT+ content bans to be up for debate in less than five or ten years, despite the USA's extremely liberal free speech laws. I think most of us here agree that such bans should not happen and ISPs should be dumb pipes in terms of content selection.
However, if this holds for your Verizons and Amazons, it should probably also hold for DDoS-protection platforms like Cloudflare. Cloudflare is setting out to be in a similar position to your ISP, a piece of infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks rather than a hosting company where you put your content. I think there's a perfectly fair argument to be made that net neutrality should also apply to companies like Cloudflare, especially in a position of this much power. A company should be able to host anything that's not illegal if it chooses to be infrastructure rather than a hosting provider.
In practice, law enforcement doesn't really give a damn about sites like these unless a big story hits the news. The lack of regulation and enforcement is the problem and the burden of combating these societal problems is shifting from the police to companies. Rather than forcing companies to decide what is or isn't right, concrete steps should be taken by the people that are supposed to protect and serve our communities.
What is happening to Kiwifarms will soon be happen to content other people get mad about; be it reproductive rights, gay marriage, or any other civil liberty at risk because of conservative outrage.
The benefits of Kiwifarms existence outweigh its cons, and I say this as someone who greatly dislikes the site after having used it for an extended amount of time. The site has and still discovers, documents, and reports criminal and disgusting activity, from bestiality to the grooming of children online by extremely predatory, mentally ill individuals, and it provides a platform for uncensored speech as well as the dissemination of media that had and continues to be censored on mainstream websites.