[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.

[yanderekko]

Incitement is a term with legal weight. If my legitimate criticism of someone online leads a third party to engage in a bomb threat against that person, then these mere facts will not lead to me being found guilty of incitement of violence or terroristic threats or whatever.

Furthermore, if all someone has to do to get a speaker they dislike to shut up is to manufacture a threat on that speaker's behalf everywhere on the internet, then mass censorship is not only possible but inevitable. Anyone can throw away a burner account making a terroristic threat on any number of websites. The fact that these threats will only be taken seriously when they confirm the narratives of those in power is a major problem. Cloudflare was right to point to due process being the mechanism to prevent this sort of biased treatment, but then immediately opened up a giant loophole that allows for people to avoid it!

[turkeysandwich]

> The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages. By definition, you cannot harass someone by talking about them.

[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...