[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.