[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!

[shadowgovt]

> 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

It's not. The speaker also must (in general) have a history of tolerance of / implicit support of / explicit support of / creation of vile content, and (history suggests) the corporation making the call to pull the plug has to be feeling the pressure to either act or to be seen as also implicitly supporting such vile content, which will have financial ramifications down the road as they're seen as "Those KiwiFarms guys" and people of their own free will choose to do business with Instart instead.

The laws that force association in a corporate setting are extremely narrowly-tailored (at least in the US), and "harassers" isn't a protected class. For everything else, there's the First Amendment... The one that guarantees freedom of association. And the Internet is, at the end of the day, actually made of corporations and institutions that voluntarily associate with each other... Or don't.

[yanderekko]

Sure, I was mostly speaking hypothetically. The reality right now is that for this sort of false flag attack to work the speaker must be deeply unpopular, especially with media figures. This is why due process is important to prevent inequitable treatment, but woke ideology is ironically demanding that companies abandon due process if this would be harmful to shareholder value. The idea that left-wing activists would be flirting with Friedmanite shareholder primary would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. So much for corporate social responsibility!

[hackerlight]

So you would support laws that make fascist content and cyberbullying illegal, in order to take the burden of enforcement away from private corporations and into the hands of the government? Or are you advancing this rule of law angle in bad faith because your real motivation is to keep a nexus of cyberbullying and hate like KF up and running?

[yanderekko]

You're actually excluding a priori that I could actually defend KiwiFarms here in good faith? That's just sad.

This is reminiscent of dealing with someone who thought we needed to close mosques after 9/11.

[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.

[hackerlight]

This is splitting hairs too much. If I'm negatively gossiping about someone and they're within earshot, that can be considered bullying which is considered a type of verbal abuse. Let's call it cyberbullying rather than harassment, just to be precise.

[turkeysandwich]

In the world at large (not just a schoolroom or workplace situation), everyone is subject to being criticized for their public behavior. That's not bullying. That's holding them to task.

Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.

Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.

Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.

[hackerlight]

It is not conflating it. One of the people who committed suicide wrote in their suicide note that it was because of the cyberbullying on KF. And there's multi thousand thread pages with bodyshaming and Photoshopped images and so on. This is not just criticism. Open your eyes.

[turkeysandwich]

Who, Elizabeth Waite? She never had a Kiwi Farms thread. She was briefly mentioned in a megathread about silly public trans behavior.

Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.

But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.

Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.

The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.

Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.

Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.

Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.

You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.

The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.

Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.