> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).
>Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.
You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.
The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.
Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.
How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.
There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?
Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.
Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:
You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”
Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.
After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.
You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.
If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.
But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.
>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus
You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
You should, as a general rule, never take a charitable view of the actions of businesses. If you start with the most machiavellian interpretation possible you will be more right than wrong. Not that you will be always right, but absent special information it is the presumptive default.
I was actually monitoring the Keffals threads to laugh at the salt on display. It was hilarious at times, then you'd run into stuff like people determining what restaurants she was likely to be at so they could detonate a bomb and kill her. It's such a brazen display that, even if it was a joke, I don't think the first amendment would be an acceptable defense if your door got busted down over it.
CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.
While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.
Isn't "swatting" just the practice of calling 911 and saying e.g. "I'm at [streamer's neighbour's address] and there were gunshots fired at my neighbour's house! Please send armed police!"?
I don't think there's a simple way to stop swatting, though if a streamer/someone else who is a likely swatting target phones ahead of time and asks to be put on a "likely to get swatted, please disregard suspicious calls" list then the police should honour that list (AFAIK there is something like this but it often doesn't help).
To be clear, nothing I say is any sort of endorsement of Kiwifarms. Cloudflare is a business so it’s Machiavellian. Kiwifarms is… I don’t even know what Kiwifarms is. Something worse.
But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.
I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.
> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.
Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.
I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).
At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.
There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.
Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.
That's exactly a problem with theses sites; they are horrible and yet can slowly recruit people because companies still provide them with services that allow them to stay public.
Such groups can splinter endlessly into unidentifiable new subgroups. How do you stop those? What is your imagined end-game here — making freedom of association default-deny?
> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,
Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.
What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?
I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760
> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit
You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...
Maybe link some of her tweets? I see this point being made repeatedly as essentially an argument of faith, but in fact Keffals simply does not engage in the kind of targetted harrassment that KiwiFarms does. There is, I think, exactly one tweet someone found where she said "I hope they get doxxed" or whatever.
And... OK, that's intemperate! She absolutely shouldn't have said it. She should probably take it down (maybe she has?). Twitter would have been very justified in issuing a warning over it (maybe they did?).
But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes. It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat, or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses, or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
But because so many people here have "picked a side"[1], you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side". And the only way that works morally if is "the other side" is just as bad. But... it's not. It's just not.
[1] On trans rights, which is the crazy thing. Everyone on that site was seriously willing to go to jail just... to prevent having to let people be who they want to be? That's the mind-bending thing to me, personally. You can't just... let them be?
> But... sorry, that's as far as that kind of thing goes.
Not really. Among others you can find tweets saying shit like "no bad tactics, just bad targets". Keffals also rejoiced in taking away people's sources of income in the past, amongst others that of a streamer named Destiny. I also recall her being giddy about trying to get someone's nursing license removed, but I can't find an archived version of that.
> It's not remotely the same thing as calling in a bomb threat,
One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes. It was from an account that never posted otherwise. That's suspect.
> or providing a forum for volunteers to post home addresses,
Sleuthing and finding someone's address isn't in itself illegal.
> or SWATing people, or even doing a pizza flood. It's not, and you know that.
These are, and they explicitly say to not do any of that shit. When people do this or say they'll do it they get banned.
> you all find yourselves in this insane position of having to defend places like KiwiFarms because they're "on your side".
I defend them because while I think they're on or over the borderline of what is morally acceptable, that I find how they use their free speech to be objectionable doesn't mean I think it should be taken away from them. These people find joy, for whatever perverse reason, in finding out details about the weirdest e-celebs and sharing those details. I think it's not a good thing generally, but doing that is very much within the limits of free speech.
I do not agree with them from an ideological perspective, nore do I understand why they like doing what they do. However, I will defend their right to do so, because free speech is free speech, even when I disagree with it.
> You can't just... let them be?
It's very quickly becoming obvious that you haven't looked into the history of these terminally online mad-people. Some keywords would be 'DIY bathtub HRT' and 'Catboy ranch', in this particular case, though on the other hand, for your sanity I would suggest not to.
> One person on a forum did. The post was removed as soon as it was seen by a mod, which was within 30 minutes.
This seems revisionist to me. There was a whole thread dedicated to identifying every Belfast restaurant that serves Poutine because Keffals said something to that effect. People were talking about or implying bomb threats everywhere in that thread. I definitely saw it, but obviously I can't link it because CloudFlare.
It's just not true that KF engaged in serious moderation. If they had, they wouldn't be a community engaged in targetted harrassment, and they are very clearly a community engaged in targetted harrassment.
And to repeat: you seem really engaged in finding a way to make them not, or make their enemies just as bad. When... maybe you could just not defend them? If you want to make a 100% principled argument for Free Speech, go right ahead. But don't nod to the idea of moderation like you are here and then pretend that it works when it doesn't.
You know... I was typing up a reply to this, but I don't think we're gonna agree.
I don't buy the narrative of "they do targetted harrassment as a community" because I haven't seen evidence of it except for the alleged victims saying so. There is no evidence either way, so I am gonna say that Kiwifarms isn't guilty of that. That's not to say I don't think people weren't swatted using info gathered there, but that's not the same thing as harrassment, because there is no proof that members of that community did so by urging of the community.
I mean, you're obviously free to believe what you want to, but it's not like there's a general lack of evidence here. You just don't want it to be true, which was sort of my point upthread: KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
The sources for that section are news articles about the alleged victims saying so. To me that's not credible evidence.
> KiwiFarms is, in a real sense, "on your side", so you're not willing to condemnn their clearly bad acts. And that's upsetting.
Well, I did also say that I do not find their use of free speech palatable, but that I do think it should be allowed. I don't get the general dislike that they have for people like DSP, which you could handily ignore without any real consequences. In those famous words: "the internet's not real, just close your eyes lmao".
Now, if they do indeed do targetted harrassment then it's different. However, from the look-see I gave a few of the threads, which I wouldn't recommend if you value your soul, it's all discussion and information gathering. None of it was calls for harrassment or threats, veiled or otherwise.
I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.
Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.
(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)
In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.
I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.
> And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome
But... you brought it up. We're here discussing KiwiFarms, a site with a long and documented history of violent behavior and extremist rhetoric. And you invoked the idea of "extremism on both sides" as part of an argument for something about censorship. And the clear truth is that there is simply not a similar kind of discourse going on on the left. There isn't.
It's a bunch of hippies being mad about social justice, and occasionally pining for someone to seize the means of production. That's not SWATing, it's not doxxing, it's not harrassment. It's just not.
>> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better
> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?
>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it
...
> But... you brought it up
Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.
I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).
Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.
Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)
Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.
Proving the negative is impossible. The internet is too vast. Proving that it exists is effectively impossible, because there's always bar-moving on
But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).
Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.
Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.
> Proving that it exists is effectively impossible
An existence proof is a thing, I'm not following your point. It seems like it's pretty easy to prove that KiwiFarms, in this particular case, engaged in targetted harrassment and has for quite some time. QED, right?
The point upthread is just asking for where your equivalent existence proof is for these left wing groups engaging in similar hateful activity. And you're not finding it. And I for one think that might be a good opportunity to revisit your priors about the kind of "extremism" that exists on the left, vs what you believe must be the case.
r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.
cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.
edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.
>I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.
Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?
Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.
I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.
Having never read Kiwifarms I don't know whether the threats are real or not.
But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret
CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.
Why would this be true?
Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.
It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.
I don’t know where posts are coming from when I see them online. We can only guess at the specifics (which will hopefully be released when there’s time for an after-action report) but presumably cloudflare may be able to see ip addresses and have some idea of location. If someone posts “I’m coming to kill you” a dozen times but the ip is in Europe and doesn’t appear to be a VPN then that’s less cause for concern than the same posts made by someone with a residential ISP ip that’s half an hour away from the target.
Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.
When the topic under discussion are the contents of a publicly available website, unless you think that Cloudflare has some kind of tooling scanning for specific terms on the CDN origin (why?), no, I am pretty confident in saying they do not have any additional information. This is not some arcane matter of network management, this is the public contents of a public website that anyone can verify.
>Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.
I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.
I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.
They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.
Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.