[hackerlight]

So they are lying when they say "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"?

You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?

[fsociety999]

Is there any evidence that it is true other than the word of one person? The Cloudflare post didn’t provide any examples, and it seemed to be news to the Kiwi Farms people as well.

Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:

- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.

- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image

- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action

- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.

I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.

[Arnt]

The Cloudflare posting was by Matthew Prince, who's an officer of a public company. Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.

The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.

Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.

[yanderekko]

>Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.

Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.

[Arnt]

I have it on good legal authority that if lies are to be told, something factual and disprovable like those references to police, then one arranges to have them be told by someone in a suitable department rather than by an accountable officer. Press, marketing, something.

Because in this case, accountable really means it.

[peyton]

I don’t have a horse in this race but I must’ve missed this “no bluffing” law in the Delaware Code…

[evrydayhustling]

IANAL, but the law you are talking about is "no fraud", and it's not Delaware code it's the SEC. When a public company officer lies about issues that could impact the price - and these interactions with law enforcement and regulation def qualify - they could cause people to misvalue the company.

[hackerlight]

There was 2 specific threats. One bomb threat posted to KF proper, and one threat posted to 4chan from outside her apartment that referenced the KF forum on a piece of paper that was photographed.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof

Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.

[fsociety999]

The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes, and the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.

The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?

[hackerlight]

> the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.

It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.

> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes

So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.

[fsociety999]

> It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.

Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?

Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.

> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.

It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.

If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.

[hackerlight]

First, there have been campaigns against the larger companies to improve their moderation. And they've been doing that. Second, I've elsewhere addressed how disanalogous such comparisons are. These other sites actively try to ban the harassment that KF freely allows, and the purpose of their sites and majority of their content isn't hate. Trying to draw analogies between very different examples is terrible thinking and violates the prescription to evaluate each case from first principles.

Also, it is not a small percentage of users. The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages.

  "It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site."

You're confusing proximate reason with main reason. The incitement was the proximate reason, and the harassment formed the backdrop context that gives meaning to that proximate reason. Please don't tell me you expect them to spell out the basic context that is staring you in the face. You don't have the mind of a child. You very well know that if the identical bomb threat was posted on a Justin Bieber fan club forum, Cloudfare would not be disabling anything. And you know this because you implicitly understand that context is an actual thing.

  "If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”."

Because a literal bomb threat was issued after that previous post. I'll repeat again. There is such a thing as a metaphorical dam that breaks after sufficient pressure. You don't go "A-ha! That was just one extra drop of water! I wonder why the dam broke?" No, this is beyond childish.

[salawat]

>This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.

Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.

[hackerlight]

Yet you probably support that defamation and incitement should be illegal. Curious that the exact current set of laws that outlaws some speech and doesn't outlaw other speech is perfectly optimal despite the world having radically changed since those laws were written.

[gcr]

I can demonstrate that KF is acting in bad faith: To this day Kiwifarms still hosts the Christchurch video, the same video discussed in Moon’s rebuttal here.

In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.

You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”

They clearly want to keep this content up.

[pseudo0]

Well it is a US company... In the US, you are allowed to possess or distribute photos from concentration camps, 9/11 footage, and yes, the Christchurch video. You don't need a special journalism license or a law enforcement badge. Many sites understandably choose not to host content like that, but it's important for some places to be willing to host primary source material. Otherwise the event will just fade from our collective consciousness, or will end up getting distorted or twisted into a conspiracy theory (eg. Holocaust denial, 9/11 truthers, crisis actors, etc).

[lovingCranberry]

I believe this content should actually be kept up somewhere. If you burn your records, you will most likely make the same mistake twice.

[yanderekko]

Explain how refusing to censor content or turn over PII on a government's behalf, something which many companies due, relates to "acting in bad faith".

[UncleMeat]

"Extraordinary claims" are things like "God exists", not "some imbeciles on the internet are sending death threats that don't appear to be just bluster."

People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.

[fsociety999]

That is a fair point. Perhaps that was the wrong classification, but “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” is a pretty extreme portrayal of events without any additional evidence/context.

If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.

[res0nat0r]

Yes

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...

[robobro]

I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?

Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).

Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.

[hackerlight]

  > I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?

  > Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).

This is all disanalogous. With Kiwifarms, the incitement to violence was the straw that broke the camel's back. It presumably wasn't just the incitement per se. The incitement didn't happen in a vacuum. Gmail and Yahoo don't have social mechanics that encourage this behavior. Twitter and Facebook actively ban many of the things that Kiwifarms doesn't ban, and presumably your forum does too.

  >  Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue.

Don't look at it as an asbtracted issue. Study the details, otherwise you will confuse yourself by trying to draw analogies between a hate forum with targeted harassment on the one hand, and an email provider on the other, which share nothing in common aside from them both being websites.

[salawat]

Fine then. Here we go. I now suggest a medium by which others may pseudonymously incite each other to violence by creating accounts on various services, and hosting credentials in a regular manner such that one can compose a system using arbitrary providers to host the same type of speech.

By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.

I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.

If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.

[hackerlight]

  "By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""

That's not my logic. You're assuming I'm an ideologue like the free speech purists. But I am a pragmatist that draws lines based on best guesses and cost benefit trade offs whenever one person's freedom infringes on another person's freedom.

I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.

[dmatech]

As a society, the USA has decided that mere pragmatism is insufficient for restricting speech or the closing down of platforms. It would be much simpler if we could make case-by-case decisions based on cost-benefit or risk-reward, but we don't.

I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.

[hackerlight]

Well, I don't live in the USA. Free speech purism is a US-specific sociocultural product that most people don't subscribe to.

Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.

[cmsj]

If communities are formed with the sole purpose of being a haven for horrible people to further radicalise each other, it's perfectly reasonable for society's antibodies to destroy those communities.

[salawat]

Tech companies are not society's immune system, and if that's how you see yourself, please stop. Nor is it the case we should aspire to put ourselves into the capacity of being the instrumentality over and above what the jurisdictions we operate in demand, and even then, there's a mandate to push back some in the interests of the public.

Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P

[fmajid]

> Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook

Yes please! Pretty please with a kiwi on top?

[ajross]

Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation. Isn't it valid, for the same reasons, to argue that their "moderation" in that particular case was insincere and driven by external outrage?

Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.

In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.

[turkeysandwich]

> Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation.

Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.

Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.

Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.

The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).

Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.

[ajross]

So KiwiFarms was just a site dispassionately interested in the "natural behavior" of "people on social media", and the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harrassment campaigns based almost exclusively on content and information collected on that site by the dispassionate observers is... what, just a crazy coincidence?

I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.

You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.

[turkeysandwich]

> the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harassment campaigns

Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.

Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.

That's about it.

Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.

I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.

Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.

Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.

[danielmalmer]

OP wrote: "Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here"

Whether or not you're trying to, you are.

[yanderekko]

>So they are lying when they say "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"?

In a word, yes.

In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.

Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?

[shadowgovt]

> discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack

There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.

He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.

With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.

Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.

[cft]

I am not a Kiwifarms user, but since it's now available at the new domain (and according to CF, KF is not cooperating) the threats should still be there. I cannot find them. Can you please link those threats? Otherwise this lends me to believe that the basis of Matthew Prince's sudden reversal on his "free speech" ideals was something else, not the KF content.

[calahad]

The kiwi response states emphatically that they were deleted

[cft]

Then if the site promptly deleted allegedly unlawful content, why was it deplatformed by CF?

[bobzimuta]

the twitter pressure campaign

[cft]

It could be the threats from their more important clients https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1565026728241614849

[dalmo3]

Interestingly, that thread gives no indication (other than the date it was written) whether the user is mad at CloudFlare for enacting censorship or for the lack of censorship.

[shadowgovt]

For the same reason thieves go to prison after returning stolen goods.

[josephcsible]

Unlawful content gets posted to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. all the time. We don't deplatform all of them just because there was a window of time in which it was posted but not yet removed.

[shadowgovt]

Their value proposition outweighs the harm.

[danielmalmer]

Google exists.

[zppln]

Out of curiosity, what caused targeted threats to escalate over the last 48 hours? I'm not familiar with the site, but from what I understand they've been around for over a decade doing basically the same thing, so what caused this escalation?

[pjc50]

Keffals posted that she was going to Belfast, which caused the escalation of targeted threats, this time reported through a different more effective police service. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712196

[criley2]

Now that the community is being used to target US politicians, I'm surprised the government hasn't stepped in.

[nailer]

> "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"

The post directly addressed this matter.

[gsich]

They lied before, so yes it's possible.

[hackerlight]

How did they lie before?

[JohnHaugeland]

We've been on the internet for more than six weeks, rather

Don't be an apologist for these guys