Comment by chomp
3 years ago
The same Epik that turned down 8chan? https://www.epik.com/blog/epik-draws-line-on-acceptable-use....
At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.
>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network
I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.
> The same Epik that turned down 8chan?
Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.
> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.
I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.
How did it achieve nothing? Deplatforming has shown to be effective. The Nazi site that CF shut down is very difficult to access.
It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site). If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate. The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
7 replies →