A lot of the replies here have focused on the potential injustices of allowing ISPs to police content. It’s clear that this is an issue that a lot of people take very seriously and that hits close...
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A lot of the replies here have focused on the potential injustices of allowing ISPs to police content. It’s clear that this is an issue that a lot of people take very seriously and that hits close to their moral centers. There’s an almost palpable disgust or anger at the idea that an ISP should take down something like KiwiFarms.
I don’t want to take that feeling away from anyone. It’s real, and I understand where it comes from.
What I want to call attention to is the idea that closing the conversation there requires ignoring other people’s significant, equally supported feelings: the people who are directly targeted by KiwiFarms as well as the chilling effect that has on entire populations online.
KF is a known harm doing active damage to many people. It has been up and at it for a full decade.
If we stop the conversation at “it’s bad to block them” without also considering the bad that they’re doing, we’re essentially laundering their harm for them by making actions against them seem worse than the actions they themselves are taking.
Furthermore, if we only ever propose idealized, non-actionable solutions, then we’ve essentially proposed nothing. That was arguably the most important part of the linked thread in the first place:
Saying "the cops should handle this, not corporations" under circumstances where they clearly don't, is functionally equivalent to saying "this should not be handled at all". It doesn't matter what you think cops should do, what matters is the practical effect, and whether it prevents or perpetuates harm.
The reality is that something needs to be done - immediately, not in some hypothetical future - to protect marginalized folks from Kiwifarms. They are getting harmed now, it's not hypothetical. If the cops don't do that, then the job is unfortunately left to everybody else, whether you like it or not.
And the EFF's stance that "the cops should do something about this" would be a lot more credible if the EFF actually put in some effort to make that happen, rather than just using it as a cheap defense against people not Following The Procedures.
The poster is arguing that, in cases where other mechanisms have failed, then it makes sense to shift the approach and pursue different methods. We can say what we believe the ideal solution is all we want, but if it never happens, then all we’ve done is put a rhetorical bow on the gift of some empty words. KiwiFarms gets to go right on harassing and abusing people as if nothing ever happened (because it didn’t).
Telling people in their line of fire that they need to continue to be relentlessly harassed and fearful because stopping that might make things worse elsewhere is not any sort of help or salve. Saying that only communicates that we care about potential future harms more than their current actual ones, which is its own form of a slap in the face.
I don’t know what the right solution is, and I don’t think it’s easy, but I do know it’s not nearly as cut and dry as many of the people here are making it out to be. It’s only that simple if we ignore the harms that KiwiFarms does. If we’re forced to really weigh those — honestly take them into account — then the whole issue shifts quite uncomfortably.
This isn’t just me blowing smoke, either. KiwiFarms was famously blocked by CloudFlare — a decision that definitely wasn’t made lightly, by a company that’s against policing content. They did so because they weighed the harms:
This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with. However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, 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 unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Endorsing the continued existence of an extremely harmful harassment site as a matter of principle isn’t compelling as an argument to me unless it’s clear that the people advocating for that have properly accounted for the abuses of the site itself. I feel that’s been absent from a lot of the considerations posted here.
I always appreciate your measured and thoughtful responses. There was one post I had awhile back where I was probably poorly explaining my perspective and many of the responses were taking a...
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I always appreciate your measured and thoughtful responses. There was one post I had awhile back where I was probably poorly explaining my perspective and many of the responses were taking a different understanding of them than what I was attempting to convey, and you were able to accurately capture the meaning of it perfectly and explain it way better than I ever came close to.
You're right that it's not simple and there's consequences to not taking action, and certainly halting the conversation to say that it's bad to block them isn't the right way to go. I know the title from EFF certainly gives the impression that the conversation can be ended there, I don't know if it's intended to simply get our attention or what, but it definitely merits debate.
I'm glad you mentioned CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a great example of a company that is well known for being against policing content but having done so in a few instances where it was considered to be well beyond the pale, including KiwiFarms. In order to give the appropriate weight to this example in terms of what it should mean in comparison to the situation EFF is calling out, it is important to consider that CloudFlare is in a different role than an ISP as part of internet infrastructure. CloudFlare acknowledges an element of this in their blog post, by stating that KiwiFarms would likely find other providers that would enable them to come back online as other notorious websites that they blocked before had done.
If we compare this to what the EFF says in their post
For one thing, Tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane are often monopolies or near-monopolies, so users have few alternatives if they are blocked. Censorship is more powerful if you don’t have somewhere else to go. To be clear, at time of writing, there are two mirrored instances of KF online: one on the clear web at a country code top-level domain, and the other an onion service on the Tor network. So right now this isn’t a “lights out” situation for KF, and generally the Tor network will prevent that from happening entirely. The so-called “dark web” has plenty of deserved ill repute, however, so although it is resistant to censorship by Tier 1 ISPs, it is not a meaningful option for many, much less an accessible one.
We know that many believe that KF is uniquely awful, so that it is justifiable to take measures against them that we wouldn’t condone against anyone else. The thing is, that argument doesn’t square with reality, online or offline. Crossing the line to Tier 1 blocking won’t just happen once.
They do really seem to focus on the unique and specific role of Tier 1 ISPs and the overall conditions of the infrastructure in their role, chiefly that they are often monopolies or near-monopolies.
I think this matters when you go back to CloudFlare and realize that CloudFlare doesn't even have this level of responsibility on their shoulders, they weren't a monopoly to internet connectivity for KiwiFarms or the others they cut off in the way that a Tier 1 ISP can be.
If you look at their reasoning for how they approach these matters, you can see they do lay it out by role in infrastructure. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-approach/
They even have a nice graphic that arranges things in terms of how they view responsibility of content moderation and legal processes. Notably, the one furthest down on the list, the transit/IP layer, is the one that as they view it, would be furthest possible role away from handling content moderation. CloudFlare shows in that graph what products and services they offer, and thus gives you an idea of where their roles are.
Core Internet technology services
While we will generally follow legal orders to restrict security and conduit services, we have a higher bar for core Internet technology services like Authoritative DNS, Recursive DNS/1.1.1.1, and WARP. The challenge with these services is that restrictions on them are global in nature. You cannot easily restrict them just in one jurisdiction so the most restrictive law ends up applying globally.
We have generally challenged or appealed legal orders that attempt to restrict access to these core Internet technology services, even when a ruling only applies to our free customers. In doing so, we attempt to suggest to regulators or courts more tailored ways to restrict the content they may be concerned about.
Unfortunately, these cases are becoming more common where largely copyright holders are attempting to get a ruling in one jurisdiction and have it apply worldwide to terminate core Internet technology services and effectively wipe content offline. Again, we believe this is a dangerous precedent to set, placing the control of what content is allowed online in the hands of whatever jurisdiction is willing to be the most restrictive.
So far, we’ve largely been successful in making arguments that this is not the right way to regulate the Internet and getting these cases overturned. Holding this line we believe is fundamental for the healthy operation of the global Internet. But each showing of discretion across our security or core Internet technology services weakens our argument in these important cases.
I can't find an answer on this nor do I know if I necessarily understand actions CloudFlare might take within this role that they serve, but did they block DNS resolution of KiwiFarms? Does KiwiFarms even have a domain? I honestly don't know and I'd rather not attempt to visit to even find out the answer to this question, so I'll just assume that they have a domain and that if someone is using CloudFlare's DNS service, that they are presumably still resolving KiwiFarms rather than blocking it in the absent of information that says otherwise. Since CloudFlare specifically says they ended security services for KiwiFarms but not anything else, that further leads me to believe that.
So to an extent, the CloudFlare example might give more weight to the seriousness of blocking KiwiFarms on a Tier 1 ISP than it is a precedent to justify a Tier 1 ISP from blocking them.
I'll also quote one thing in the linked Mastodon post
However, this isn't about government policy. This is about a first-party decision by a corporation to block using existing means. In other words, something they could've already done for anything anyway - this decision doesn't make anything possible, it doesn't remove any barriers, it's still just as possible to block stuff as it was before.
There is no slippery slope.
I think this drastically underestimates people and how people view things in context. You provided a good summary that I'll quote to show this.
The poster is arguing that, in cases where other mechanisms have failed, then it makes sense to shift the approach and pursue different methods.
This right here is the slippery slope. We shift the problem to someone or something else and hope that they're less resistant to pressure. Once we find that something is less resistant to pressure to the point where they give in, then that becomes the go-to avenue. It no longer matters whether that's the appropriate avenue to address that problem, it only matters that they're the ones that gave in. The context changes once that happens, because now it's known that whenever you can't apply pressure to the appropriate institutions and get what you want, you've got documented alternatives to achieve the same result. This also relieves pressure that would otherwise build up and should go towards reforming the institutions that aren't being responsive, so it makes the problem worse because our institutions get worse rather than better.
To counter my own post, because seemingly I must love nullifying myself but also to show that I'm trying to be considerate of other perspectives, I don't believe there's any legal framework that exists that says Hurricane can't do whatever the fuck they want, which might be what the poster in the link was saying in the part that I quoted. So if Hurricane Electric's owner only wants to facilitate cat posts and nothing else, I don't even know if they would be flouting any laws for them to do that. In that scenario, the people saying that Hurricane Electric shouldn't be able to police content are the ones going outside the institutions to apply pressure to a company. There's some differences, like it's technically customers of a customer of a customer that are being denied service that they're paying for, but ultimately it would still only be able to happen because of their near-monopoly status and could easily be a case where it should be addressed by the institutions. Perhaps another difference might be that it's the internet infrastructure companies that have traditionally taken this stance and ones that break away from it are perhaps not breaking any laws, but are breaking long-held tradition or standards within their roles.
The focus on T1 is so key. Your home ISP is a T3. Most businesses's ISP is a T3 or T2 at most. Including the largest tech giants like Amazon. Let that sink in. Almost all of "The Cloud" operates...
The focus on T1 is so key. Your home ISP is a T3. Most businesses's ISP is a T3 or T2 at most. Including the largest tech giants like Amazon.
Let that sink in. Almost all of "The Cloud" operates from business customers using connections from T2 or T3 providers. Odds of an average person having even been aware of Hurricane Electric's existence was basically 0 before all if this. Having T1 cut people off means stuff like "The criminal is using Azure and AWS, shut down both services for everyone." No less problematic than China's Great Firewall.
Letting (or mandating) T1 ISPs do law enforcement is a dangerous, dangerous precedent. I'd say its no less dangerous than mandating encryption backdoors. And any technically minded person knows that risk exceeds any benefits.
Not necessarily. Mine is CenturyLink, aka the largest T1 provider out there. Verizon, AT&T, Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom, Telia, Orange, Telecom Italia, and Comcast are all T1s as well, and...
Your home ISP is a T3
Not necessarily. Mine is CenturyLink, aka the largest T1 provider out there. Verizon, AT&T, Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom, Telia, Orange, Telecom Italia, and Comcast are all T1s as well, and that covers a large swath of residential ISPs in the US and Europe.
I posted elsewhere in the topic an elaboration of what I was saying here. Comcast isn't really a T1. Their customer cone is about 4.4% of all IP addresses. The ranking chart is super useful to...
I posted elsewhere in the topic an elaboration of what I was saying here. Comcast isn't really a T1. Their customer cone is about 4.4% of all IP addresses.
The ranking chart is super useful to help picture this. By contrast, the top 3 (Level3, Arelion, and Cogent) have a total customer cone of 163% of all IP addresses. It is able to go over 100% because this percentage covers the IPs they own, as well of their customers. So when comcast itself peers with Level3 and Cogent, it falls under their respective cones.
A way to look at this: If Level 3 went dark, 70% of the internet goes down, or is at the very least severely crippled. If Centurylink goes dark, 5% of the internet goes down. Comcast 4%
Hurricane Electric, the topic of the EFF blog, is itself is on the order of 18%, a drop in the bucket compared to the top 3.
CenturyLink is Level3, though, they merged years ago at this point (hence why they rebranded to Lumen, as current Lumen/CL is almost entirely run by former Level3 execs). Last I checked, Tier 1...
CenturyLink is Level3, though, they merged years ago at this point (hence why they rebranded to Lumen, as current Lumen/CL is almost entirely run by former Level3 execs).
Last I checked, Tier 1 status was solely based on having full settlement-free peering, not how large an ISP itself is-- why else are T-Mobile US (from the Sprint acquisition) and PCCW Tier 1, despite having rather small networks of their own, if not because of the nature of their peering arrangements? Hell, Hurricane Electric is not Tier 1 because of their longstanding dispute with peering with Cogent, despite being a decent sized part of the broader backbone routing space.
If we're using Tier 1 status to determine what ISPs have more leeway to deny access, the definition of Tier 1 encompasses many end user providers, in some cases literally both facilities based wireline providers one would have available. Wouldn't using these customer cones as a barometer for whether they can block or not, instead of just plain Tier 1 status?
Even something along the lines of requiring content neutrality on backbone routing operations, but allowing it for end user connections to individual locations would make more sense, IMO.
I think the real question is "why hasn't the authorities taken action against them in a decade" rather than "how can we get around our official channels to solve this problem"? I think it's shame...
If we stop the conversation at “it’s bad to block them” without also considering the bad that they’re doing, we’re essentially laundering their harm for them by making actions against them seem worse than the actions they themselves are taking.
I think the real question is "why hasn't the authorities taken action against them in a decade" rather than "how can we get around our official channels to solve this problem"?
I think it's shame that these days we seem to consider "tell our government to do their damn job" an idealized solution. We vote them into power and while the FBI isn't voted, we can certainly petition and pressure them if they are ignoring crime.
Saying that only communicates that we care about potential future harms more than their current actual ones, which is its own form of a slap in the face.
It's certainly not something proper to say with the current overton curtain, but it's certainly a thought to consider. We had much less controversial (at its time) programs with good intentions like No Child Left Behind implemented due to the abandoment of the minority or the physically impaired. We know in reality that instead of raising the education floor it simply lowered the ceiling and it failed to solve the very problems it sought out to achieve. If we don't think long term we end up with more harm than what we saved. Is it worth saving one individual from harassment if that same ISP gets lobbied years later and "protects against harassment" from Black Lives Matters? It's not a fun question to answer and there's no good answer, especially to those being harassed right now.
I completely understand the need for a Big Red Button, because sometimes you need to take swift action and sort out the fine details later. So as a one off I don't necessarily feel threatened. But the big issue here is that there's no way to hold a corporation accountable as a moral figure. They either press that button willy nilly, or they are legislated to the point where the button may as well not even exist.
This isn’t just me blowing smoke, either. KiwiFarms was famously blocked by CloudFlare — a decision that definitely wasn’t made lightly, by a company that’s against policing content. They did so because they weighed the harms:
That may be a better approach. We can talk about censorship, but there are dozens of internet hosts as well as the abliity to self host, and no one is granted a right to have a website. I don't have much issue with CF picking and choosing its clients.
The bigger issue comes from how current ISPs are setup in the US. we can't simply switch to a new ISP or host our own internet. They have a degree of power that makes is more dangerous to do what Cloudflare did. But talking about how to de-monopolize the ISPs feels more overly ideal than petitioning the governmental entities to do something.
I appreciate the thrust of your argument very much, and I think it is needed. However, I don't like that you presume a utilitarian frame—the notion that one harm should be weighed against another...
I appreciate the thrust of your argument very much, and I think it is needed. However, I don't like that you presume a utilitarian frame—the notion that one harm should be weighed against another I find to be a convenient mnemonic in the small, but crass and incoherent in the large; and if I have an objection to the actions of hurricane electric, it is to the principle of robbing somebody of a voice, not to a positive degree of 'net harm'.
The linked content and associated article don't get into the depths very well of why the EFF has such a focus on "protecting the stack". There's a much better site at https://protectthestack.org/...
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The linked content and associated article don't get into the depths very well of why the EFF has such a focus on "protecting the stack". There's a much better site at
This definitely details a very compelling issue, but my question is: what's the actual solution here? There isn't much concrete beyond a list of signatories. Their core examples of DNS abuse,...
This definitely details a very compelling issue, but my question is: what's the actual solution here? There isn't much concrete beyond a list of signatories. Their core examples of DNS abuse, however, are governmental bodies, like that of Tanzania and Kenya. I don't think a petition like this is going to have much bearing on the decisions of governments intent on controlling online speech.
Beyond those offenders, they detail cloudflare receiving requests to shut down human rights groups, though they don't say whether that actually happened, which feels important (if cloudflare can freely say no, this issue feels smaller). Otherwise, a lot of the examples seem to already be focused on the persecution of marginalized communities, like shutting down a sex-worker-focused masto instance in Australia.
Ultimately, the issue the original thread linked above brings up is a difference between theoretical implications and practical effect. Taking a stance of protecting the stack is fantastic and admirable right up until you hit the point of effectively not asking for anything to be done about it. A petition has far less tangible impact than shutting down a site full of harassers that are driving people to suicide. Maybe it's short-sighted, and the slippery slope does eventually happen, but arguing on that possibility is like asking the people actually suffering to just "tough it out" because things could get worse.
Maybe that last part is a little more emotional than rational, maybe that's fine, either way feel free to refute any of what I said. I'm happy to discuss.
Edit: to be clear, I don't like the idea of relying on ISPs and the like to regulate the internet. The implications of that obviously aren't great. I think I'm really just asking what else can we do? What is the best course of action?
This is generally how democracies slip to authoritarianism (though I want to emphasize that political scientists broadly view democratic freedoms as a spectrum and that no nation is perfect.) One...
Maybe it's short-sighted, and the slippery slope does eventually happen, but arguing on that possibility is like asking the people actually suffering to just "tough it out" because things could get worse.
This is generally how democracies slip to authoritarianism (though I want to emphasize that political scientists broadly view democratic freedoms as a spectrum and that no nation is perfect.) One of my favorite parts of the cute Secret Hitler board game is how once fascist policies have been enacted, both the Liberals and the Fascists can use them to their advantage.
Imagine a world where a very wealthy person, let's call them Belon Busk, decides that they do not want teens to have access to information about being LGBT. Busk buys a Tier-0 ISP and decides to stop routing traffic to datacenters that offer information to teens about being LGBT. Now any teen who wants to access this information but uses an ISP that peers with the ISP that Busk bought cannot access this information without using things like Tor or the Yggdrassil network. In a world where we have politicians in parts of the country who would hunger for this power and are already trying to ban books that discuss LGBT issues, this would be a huge win. The nature of a Tier-0 ISP is such that you've probably blocked off access to lots and lots of people, making the content pretty much unavailable on the net.
Edit: to be clear, I don't like the idea of relying on ISPs and the like to regulate the internet. The implications of that obviously aren't great. I think I'm really just asking what else can we do? What is the best course of action?
Harassment and incitement to violence laws and precedent exist. While I'm not a lawyer, the case for harassment seems quite obvious for KF and the case for incitement to violence doesn't seem that hard to prove either.
This is kind of the most important part. They can also freely say yes -- but they don't, because organizations like the EFF and their supporters freak out when they do. Normalizing infrastructure...
if cloudflare can freely say no, this issue feels smaller
This is kind of the most important part. They can also freely say yes -- but they don't, because organizations like the EFF and their supporters freak out when they do. Normalizing infrastructure level content takedowns at the discretion of corporations is something we should avoid at all cost.
As to what should be done, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but it sure sounds like there's some case to be made here for criminal harassment. If there's no current law being broken, maybe there is a legislative remedy.
Maybe it's short-sighted, and the slippery slope does eventually happen, but arguing on that possibility is like asking the people actually suffering to just "tough it out" because things could get worse.
I do think it's short-sighted, and I am deeply concerned about the slippery slope. I actually favour net neutrality legislation to absolutely and unambiguously put an end to this entire line of attack on infrastructure.
My point of view is that we shouldn't rely only on government, e.g. justice system/police. Also, ISP should not be able to regulate the Internet, government should be. What we can do ourselves...
This definitely details a very compelling issue, but my question is: what's the actual solution here?
My point of view is that we shouldn't rely only on government, e.g. justice system/police. Also, ISP should not be able to regulate the Internet, government should be.
What we can do ourselves (somebody mentioned it somewhere around here) is, if we know somebody in our circle is using such websites, talking and doing everything to convince that person that it's not worth taking part in kiwifarms and similar things. We should care about our friends, relatives, not to let them be drawn into such evil places.
It's not something genius I've written here, the problem is very difficult, but there are some means to be used to stop spreading such places.
... and it's the most privileged, liberal shit I've seen in a while. Let's go into why.
As a refresher: KF is a community of harassers; people whose main goal is harassing particularly marginalized people, frequently to the point of actual death. They have a number of murders on their name, and they are only legally not murders because they were driven to suicide through harassment.
It's hard to get across how relentless this community can be. There have been attempts to get them cut off from internet service providers for quite a while, because "just ignoring them" clearly doesn't work, and they will go out of their way to harass people wherever they go, using their site as an organizing platform.
So: actual, real people are being deliberately and constantly harmed by them, to the point of trauma and death. The only defense against this that has had some effect so far, has been to get their service cut off.
It's under these circumstances that the EFF made a couple of arguments:
This blocking might cause collateral damage for other things hosted under the same organizations.
This creates a slippery slope; they might also start blocking other things, like marginalized people.
Prosecuting KF members is the job of the cops and the courts, not of an ISP.
The first one is an easy one; if organizations don't want to be caught in the crossfire, they shouldn't knowingly associate with a community of bigoted murderers. 11 nazis at the table, etc., you know how this goes.
The second one is deceptive, however; it sounds like a credible issue, and it's consistent with what the EFF has campaigned for before.
Slippery slopes can be a real thing where legislation and court mandates are concerned. If an ISP is compelled to start blocking one thing, and all the legal legwork is done to make that happen, then it is indeed very likely that this will experience scope creep, and blocks of other things start being demanded.
However, this isn't about government policy. This is about a first-party decision by a corporation to block using existing means. In other words, something they could've already done for anything anyway - this decision doesn't make anything possible, it doesn't remove any barriers, it's still just as possible to block stuff as it was before.
There is no slippery slope.
The third point, however, is where the privilege really shines through. It's the job of the cops, right? Sounds very principled and reasonable. But what if the cops just... don't?
KF has been around for a long time now. Authorities know about its existence. And yet, it's still untouched - clearly the cops and courts cannot be relied upon here.
A recurring problem with liberals is that they assume that the systems are there to serve them, and by extension, to serve everybody - even when there's clear evidence that they don't, like is the case here. Those legal systems aren't serving the many marginalized targets getting harassed and murdered by Kiwifarms.
Saying "the cops should handle this, not corporations" under circumstances where they clearly don't, is functionally equivalent to saying "this should not be handled at all". It doesn't matter what you think cops should do, what matters is the practical effect, and whether it prevents or perpetuates harm.
The reality is that something needs to be done - immediately, not in some hypothetical future - to protect marginalized folks from Kiwifarms. They are getting harmed now, it's not hypothetical. If the cops don't do that, then the job is unfortunately left to everybody else, whether you like it or not.
And the EFF's stance that "the cops should do something about this" would be a lot more credible if the EFF actually put in some effort to make that happen, rather than just using it as a cheap defense against people not Following The Procedures.
This is just 'the ends justify the means' thinking, which is not the greatest idea when it comes to corporations, as they will just as soon turn those means against you when it benefits them. Not...
Saying "the cops should handle this, not corporations" under circumstances where they clearly don't, is functionally equivalent to saying "this should not be handled at all". It doesn't matter what you think cops should do, what matters is the practical effect, and whether it prevents or perpetuates harm.
The reality is that something needs to be done - immediately, not in some hypothetical future - to protect marginalized folks from Kiwifarms. They are getting harmed now, it's not hypothetical. If the cops don't do that, then the job is unfortunately left to everybody else, whether you like it or not.
This is just 'the ends justify the means' thinking, which is not the greatest idea when it comes to corporations, as they will just as soon turn those means against you when it benefits them. Not that I necessarily think this was the wrong action to take in this instance, but we as a society should be very careful when we slowly allow corporations power over stuff that was previously legislated.
As an example, many businesses that payment processors deem 'risky' are basically impossible to run, despite the fact that they are technically 'legal', they are in-practice illegal because payment corporations have decided that you can't run them.
To be clear, the quote you called out is, to me, the most dangerous thought process out there because it can easily be used to burn everything to the ground and I hate it. Applying that logic to...
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To be clear, the quote you called out is, to me, the most dangerous thought process out there because it can easily be used to burn everything to the ground and I hate it.
Applying that logic to ANYTHING you stand against is terrifying, and it should always be questioned. Bluntly while what kiwifarms is doing is horrific, i'd much rather see pressure put on the correct entities for their inaction, rather than suddenly throwing out the book to try and solve it. This is exactly how you erode liberties in the long run and is extremely self sabotaging.
People have no idea what pandora's box they're trying to open with suggestions like these, and just how dangerous it's all going to be, and it's so so frustrating when we are literally living in an example of the exact kind of consequences you face when too many things are just run on good faith. The recent US political elections are just a subsection of a larger trend of really testing the boundaries of what you can get away, with and the rampant consolidation of power for short term goals over the years is finally showing it's ugly head and why such things are dangerous.
Telling ISP's, of all entities, they have not just the right, but the responsibility, to curate content is one of the dumbest modern stances I can think. There is all sorts of horrible shit on the internet, but we've already seen how miserable this can be with things like suspected pirating and content moderation on sites like youtube, and now you want to ramp that up, and give oligopolies mandate to handle this? Even if they mean well the consequences are going to be obscene.
Thank you. I’ve been following internet policy for years and that “there is no slippery slope” freaked me out. That’s patently untrue. It’s called establishing precedent. The right direction is to...
Thank you. I’ve been following internet policy for years and that “there is no slippery slope” freaked me out. That’s patently untrue. It’s called establishing precedent.
The right direction is to consider internet access a utility and a fundamental right- like water, electricity, and housing.
Channels and systems matter. This technique- and I do believe it’s a technique - of using marginalized groups’ disenfranchisement and victimization as a means of stripping away civil rights is I think in some instances and corners deliberate. I think someone is seeing an opportunity here and letting these kiwi dicks escalate so that ISPs get a “silent the dissenters” button.
There's a reason 'child porn' is trotted out as the first and foremost example for building the police state. It's utterly repugnant, so taking a stand against techniques preporting to stop is...
There's a reason 'child porn' is trotted out as the first and foremost example for building the police state.
It's utterly repugnant, so taking a stand against techniques preporting to stop is tricky, at best.
Remember, all the anti-encryption laws all rest their foundations on anti-child porn and anti-terrorism justifications.
Are we now going to support encryption backdoors because Kiwifarms uses SSL? No, that would be preposterous.
Does kiwifarms need ended? Yes. IMO a good start would be: If you find anyone in your social circle is using it, turn them the fuck in.
This is what I find most interesting about our societies and human behavior, and how we view things. When we have institutions that are specifically there to act on certain things and they don't,...
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Applying that logic to ANYTHING you stand against is terrifying, and it should always be questioned. Bluntly while what kiwifarms is doing is horrific, i'd much rather see pressure put on the correct entities for their inaction, rather than suddenly throwing out the book to try and solve it. This is exactly how you erode liberties in the long run and is extremely self sabotaging.
This is what I find most interesting about our societies and human behavior, and how we view things.
When we have institutions that are specifically there to act on certain things and they don't, and the public feels they have lost control over those institutions, we don't necessarily direct our anger or despair at those institutions, we might start looking elsewhere. When someone or something else then has some technical way of limiting what the institutions were supposed to and didn't, and we feel we have a better chance of influencing them, even if it's not their responsibility, we direct our anger and despair at them instead.
On the one hand, it's quite understandable, if you can do something that works, even if it's not fair to one person or organization and there's potentially unknown future consequences to bear for it, as opposed to doing something that doesn't work and there's known consequences for this now, a lot of people are going to choose the option that works and the unknown future consequences.
On the other hand, we're creating perverse incentives where it's better for institutions to find ways to insulate themselves from public influence and resistant to public influence, to make it more difficult etc. because the public will just forget about it and try an easier target. And they'll publicly pressure and blame those people or organizations if they don't bend and lose sight of the fact that there are dedicated institutions that are meant to resolve these problems but they've already given up on them.
Shows even moreso why it's important to get out and vote. these institutions can insulate themselves because the population that understands this stuff represents less than the Baby Boomer...
Shows even moreso why it's important to get out and vote. these institutions can insulate themselves because the population that understands this stuff represents less than the Baby Boomer voterbase who doesn't even know what cyberbullying is. It should be made loud and clear that the younger demographic matters and that ignoring your role gets you kicked.
Of course, I unfortunately don't have much of a solution to this except time. I no longer occupy that 18-25 demographic and millenials as a whole are simply aging to the next 35-44 bracket. It's unfortunate because this isn't a new trend and I don't want to dismiss this as simply "the young people don't like to vote". there should be some way to let new citizens understand their power.
Can you help me to understand what book is being thrown out? @Hazel accurately pointed out that this is not new behavior of ISPs by any stretch, and is in fact something that Hurricane Electric...
i'd much rather see pressure put on the correct entities for their inaction, rather than suddenly throwing out the book to try and solve it.
Can you help me to understand what book is being thrown out? @Hazel accurately pointed out that this is not new behavior of ISPs by any stretch, and is in fact something that Hurricane Electric has already done in the past. We already have plenty of laws which violate the concept of net neutrality and carrier neutrality (see SOPA, PIPA, SESTA-FOSTA). Nothing new is happening here, this is entirely 'business as usual'.
Telling ISP's, of all entities, they have not just the right, but the responsibility, to curate content
I don't get where this is coming from? No one is arguing for that. A large portion of the link in this post is discussion of this very topic and how nearly everyone is in agreement that oligopolies shouldn't be in control of this... but right now they are. They have the right, and they do feel some kind of responsibility as ISP providers have adopted guidelines such as the DNS abuse framework to decide what kind of content they serve. Hurricane Electric even has a TOS which pretty apparently has been violated by KF.
The means have already existed and been in use for a very, very long time. All kinds of "possibly illegal" stuff like botnet C&C servers, ransomware payment portals, phishing sites, spam...
The means have already existed and been in use for a very, very long time. All kinds of "possibly illegal" stuff like botnet C&C servers, ransomware payment portals, phishing sites, spam operations and the like get shut down rather fast without any type of law enforcement coming into play. Even if you're merely hosting a server that gets compromised, a common scenario is that you get an email telling you all of your stuff was null-routed and you better come up with a good reason they should keep you as a customer within some rather pressing time-frame. Verisign will just casually erase you from the .com zone if any of the organizations they're affiliated with ask them to, sometimes as part of the multi-ISP "DNS Abuse Framework" and sometimes other stuff not related to that. There are similar policies for pretty much every service provider providing every type of service.
There is, of course, an understanding that service providers can't directly control what their clients do. Nearly every service provider relies on others in some fashion, so the standard operating procedure is to start as late in the chain as possible and slowly send things up the chain until the complaint is reasonably solved and unlikely to reoccur. If your site shows any real signs of legitimacy and is responsive to abuse complaints, you'll be included in that chain and provided with that reasonable doubt. It should be fairly obvious at this point that KF does not fit that bill, and neither do the providers that continue to host it. Normally, the providers later in the chain rarely have to enforce their terms. This doesn't mean it never happened; for example, HE was also involved in the 2008 McColo shutdown.
Any argument that these types of shutdowns should only ever be left to slow-to-respond legal channels would be challenging all those types of shutdowns as well. It would indeed be nice and optimal if the legal channels were responsive, but they aren't, and until they are, the processes already in place give power to the corporations providing the services.
In the world of domestic violence enforcement, the courts will issue temporary and permanent restraining orders. Such a mechanism is possible but I am not sure how it fits the industry.
In the world of domestic violence enforcement, the courts will issue temporary and permanent restraining orders. Such a mechanism is possible but I am not sure how it fits the industry.
I think the distinction is "taken down quickly". Unfortunately, the site in question has run for over a decade and for whatever reason has been deemed to be "not spam" (to put it in the loosest...
Any argument that these types of shutdowns should only ever be left to slow-to-respond legal channels would be challenging all those types of shutdowns as well.
I think the distinction is "taken down quickly". Unfortunately, the site in question has run for over a decade and for whatever reason has been deemed to be "not spam" (to put it in the loosest terms possible). I think we should as a general principe take more time on these kinds of takedowns compared to [newspamsite] dot com created 3 hours ago.
the processes already in place give power to the corporations providing the services.
yes, and I hate that as is even in casual everyday usage of the internet. I'd rather not give them more power if I can help it.
Being slow at times is a good thing, because we shouldn't make laws based on gut reactions. I also agree we need swifter channels, but those channels should have checks on them. private corportations don't and we have seen the results of that for the past decade with the major social media networks just now being questions over misinformation.
An apt observation, given that the author has made posts explicitly encouraging that kind of thinking: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91 (can't figure how to link the specific post, but it's not...
This is just 'the ends justify the means' thinking,
An apt observation, given that the author has made posts explicitly encouraging that kind of thinking:
Actually yes, the ends can justify the means, and if you really believe that the justifiability of the means is completely separate from the ends, you should probably ask yourself who that belief benefits
My personal biases, of course. that's the exact issue that leads to that adage. Maybe I'm a benevolent dictator and my biases focus on serving the people and the environment they live on. Maybe...
you should probably ask yourself who that belief benefits
My personal biases, of course. that's the exact issue that leads to that adage. Maybe I'm a benevolent dictator and my biases focus on serving the people and the environment they live on. Maybe I'm a greed driven billionaire and my biases focus on making a billion more dollars.
Do we really want to take that gamble with every individual who feels their end is just? Sadly, I haven't run into enough benevolent dictators to be optimistic here.
I despise how much it seems culture and communication are increasingly under the control of corporate interests, so my gut instinct is to agree with the EFF on this, that granting an ISP...
I despise how much it seems culture and communication are increasingly under the control of corporate interests, so my gut instinct is to agree with the EFF on this, that granting an ISP (especially one operating at Tier 1) the right/mandate to police speech will just end up being yet another way our civil liberties are literally sold off. Perusing legal recourse against KF seems to me the better way of combating its existence and behavior, but the way joepie91 dismisses the idea tells me there's some history there I'm not aware of.
So, my question is what is the legal history with KF/Joshua Moon?
As far as I know, KF has never actually broken US law. Which is why nothing has happened until tech companies started shutting them down. It does bring up an interesting discussion about if tech...
As far as I know, KF has never actually broken US law. Which is why nothing has happened until tech companies started shutting them down.
It does bring up an interesting discussion about if tech companies should have this much control rather than letting the public vote for the system they want.
I think it might be helpful to distinguish between outcome and procedure. Should KF be able to stay online? Who should have the power to take them offline? (So to be clear, I have no personal...
Exemplary
I think it might be helpful to distinguish between outcome and procedure. Should KF be able to stay online? Who should have the power to take them offline?
(So to be clear, I have no personal knowledge and prefer not to find out, but based on reputation, I think my preferred outcome is that they go offline.)
EFF is being a little vague about this when they say that they aren’t defending KF, but they don’t take a position about whether, ideally, they should be allowed to remain online. They also equivocate a bit between whether a Tier 1 ISP should do anything about it and whether any ISP should do anything about it. Based on their headline, it seems like they’re saying that no ISP should do anything?
It seems like a setup for a hide-the-ball argument where it turns out that nobody is in a position to make a decision about taking them offline. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it goes, for policy reasons.
I’m skeptical of this. It reminds me of cryptocurrency where they try to build complicated distributed machines where nobody is at the wheel, as if that were a good idea. I think the opposite is more sensible: avoid building things that nobody can change or shut down. If you give this power away, try to arrange so that there are responsible people who could change it or shut it down. (It may be a good idea to decentralize power by distributing it, though.)
Procedurally, I think there’s a reasonable case for Tier-1 ISP’s rarely taking action because they indirectly provide service to many millions of people who are mostly strangers that they know little or nothing about. Also, cutting off service will affect other unrelated people. As a result, their actions are likely to be badly-targeted and unjust.
The case for not taking action seems weaker, though, if the ISP’s closer to the site refuse to do anything?
More generally, there’s a question of how society should work. Who gets to make decisions about something like this? Should it ultimately be decided by the courts, backed by police? Should there be some other people, like maybe policy-makers at ISP’s, who can do it?
I suspect most ISP’s don’t want to make policy decisions like this, but sometimes they’re the ones with the power.
This is a great comment. The internet is a public service but it shouldn't tolerate intolerance. You can't go to a public library and find books and start harassing people; you'll be kicked out....
This is a great comment.
The internet is a public service but it shouldn't tolerate intolerance. You can't go to a public library and find books and start harassing people; you'll be kicked out. Someone needs to have the authority to remove these kinds of people from the generally well behaving crowd, and if the library starts getting a bit too overzealous with who they ban, there are plenty of others around.
This thread has comments that strike me as very similar to the free speech arguments thrown around by the alt right, and I don't particularly like it.
Everyone should really read up on the ISPs being discussed. Here's some rankings of the top 200 ISPs in the world. These are the 200 most important ISPs, in terms of importance for routing data to...
In terms of importance, we're not talking local libraries. We're talking international alliances like NATO or the EU. The cops aren't showing up at your door...your whole town is getting drone strikes launched at it, bystanders be damned.
I agree intolerance can't be tolerated. But the thing is...T1 ISPs can and should be as involved with censorship as the asphalt on the highway. A facilitator for people whose jobs it actually is.
They don't operate servers that Kiwifarms runs on. They don't provide the DNS entries. They see a request from one IP to another and route it.
They have the power to capture data from every packet on the internet. That power should not be taken lightly. And we've seen how destructive it is when a power that was granted for "the greater good" ends up going bad...just look at Trump's presidency.
This is a rather unique case study for this topic. If nothing else, it's a great demonstration on how strict rules can be a poor way to maintain society. Hurricane has done society a huge favor by...
This is a rather unique case study for this topic. If nothing else, it's a great demonstration on how strict rules can be a poor way to maintain society. Hurricane has done society a huge favor by cutting off Kiwi Farms. Just slowing the amount of harassment that comes from there is probably going to save a few people from doing something very drastic that could end a life.
With that being said I think it's easy to see why both the poster and the article they are reacting to are "right". Personally, I agree more with the poster than the article. EFF would have probably been better off not posting that article, IMHO, but that's a perspective that could only be gained with aftersight.
I don't think it can only be gained with after-sight; we should always have caution when talking about groups which cause real and tangible harm and violence to the world. We should naturally stop...
Exemplary
I don't think it can only be gained with after-sight; we should always have caution when talking about groups which cause real and tangible harm and violence to the world. We should naturally stop to consider precisely what we are saying and why. It does not take a genius to see the many holes in the EFFs argument or how this could read as tone deaf to anyone who's been harmed by KF.
The EFF have always viewed the internet as a public utility and this post in no way runs contrary to any of their beliefs. However, there's a lot to be said about the circumstances in which they find themselves making this post, the words they choose to use in the post, and the existing reality that the internet is not currently a public utility and is not legislated in that fashion. The way they frame this argument and the content of the argument itself brings to mind free speech absolutists or organizations which have come to the legal aid to protect free speech, even when the people on trial have committed horrible crimes against humanity. The ACLU, for example, has been involved in virtually every high profile free speech case in the last century. They have defended the right to free speech for some truly horrific people and violent speech. However, there's a distinct difference between protecting an existing law because you believe it provides more protection in its existing state and what's happening here. There is no law declaring internet providers as public utilities. There is no history of precedent of this being upheld to protect people- in fact, there's plenty of history where this ideal of public utility is already being violated.
It leaves a sour taste in the mouth that they are willing to grandstand here about this issue. No one is suing the ISP. There is no law being violated. This isn't the first time an ISP has chosen to (or even been ordered to) not allow traffic for specific content. They don't have to comment on what's happening because it is already the status quo. The EFF does not have unlimited resources, so why are they focusing their limited resources to talk about something that happened on the internet? They could have just as easily not commented on it. But if they decided that they must comment on it, why do they spend so little time talking about the violence that this website has wrought on the world? Why do they spend so few words talking about the countless other times that this conceptual idea has been violated and that harm was caused to people who are already marginalized by society or who are trying to do good? The article could have just as easily lightly highlighted the issue by using KF as an issue but then pivoted to other examples where the same concept was used to harm people who deserve protection. They even imply, themselves, that KF does not deserve protection, but rather that the policing should be done by other entities, not the ISPs. Why not spend a few minutes highlighting that these other entities, such as police, often fail to do their job and that we need strong protections written into law in addition to net neutrality or the designation of ISPs as a public utility?
For such a large company and a non-profit with the reach that they have, they need to be better than this. A post like this has greatly eroded my trust in their institution.
You're right, too. And I agree with you about 99% of the way. The only difference between you and me is our expectations of the EFF. I'm operating with the context that the EFF has kind of always...
You're right, too. And I agree with you about 99% of the way. The only difference between you and me is our expectations of the EFF.
I'm operating with the context that the EFF has kind of always been this way. They are free speech absolutists, just on the left instead of the right. They're a bit like the ACLU in that way.
I don’t really follow your argument here with respect to the ACLU. It sounds like the only difference here is the ACLU is defending an existing law and the EFF is advocating for a new law, but it...
I don’t really follow your argument here with respect to the ACLU. It sounds like the only difference here is the ACLU is defending an existing law and the EFF is advocating for a new law, but it sounds like you support the ACLU and condemn the EFF for fairly similar positions?
Free speech is in our constitution. The law is exercised to protect the rights of minorities and individuals which nearly everyone would agree have the right to speech. It is also exercised by...
Free speech is in our constitution. The law is exercised to protect the rights of minorities and individuals which nearly everyone would agree have the right to speech. It is also exercised by some individuals to cause harm. The ACLU has come to the conclusion that the law provides more protection in its existing state and thus they fight to uphold that state in spite of its use by malicious actors. There is no law declaring ISPs a public utility. There are no protections or guarantee that any website should or must be served. No one is being protected by the current status quo.
I pointed this out as a juxtaposition because while they are both absolutionist in their ideals, and they both argue in favor of widely held ideas (speech should be free, the internet should be a utility), but they are not analogous. In one case a law is actively defending the rights of people which society deemed should have these rights. There are real world ramifications to modifying the status quo, in that people who are currently protected could lose that protection. In the other case, however, there is no law, there is no protection, and no one is being defended. Whether the net should be neutral or ISPs should be public utilities is purely ideological right now. Choosing to defend KF does not jeopardize anyone because no one is currently protected or defended by existing law and the status quo.
Absolutely agree, there's no law governing this. I don't know if this is true. Infrastructure providers tend to stay out of these kinds of issues specifically because of pressure from groups like...
There is no law declaring ISPs a public utility. There are no protections or guarantee that any website should or must be served.
Absolutely agree, there's no law governing this.
No one is being protected by the current status quo.
I don't know if this is true. Infrastructure providers tend to stay out of these kinds of issues specifically because of pressure from groups like the EFF. If they find that they don't get any pushback in this case, I won't be surprised to find them emboldened to be either more aggressive in proactively censoring their systems or more willing to acquiesce to demands from regimes with more restrictive social norms (eg. Iran, Saudi, UAE, etc). There's a much better and detailed argument made by the EFF at https://protectthestack.org/ that you might find interesting.
Thank you for this. There are several other claims made in this long thread that are sounding like they’re trying to normalize this ISP’s decision to censor these horrible people- it doesn’t...
Thank you for this. There are several other claims made in this long thread that are sounding like they’re trying to normalize this ISP’s decision to censor these horrible people- it doesn’t already happen regularly - that’s WHY the EFF got involved- and trying to triangulate between the issue of what these kiwi people do and what the EFF is saying is a terrible kind of bad faith way of muddying the issues. It’s threads like these that make me suspect some are not acting in great faith. Keep the issues separate. ISPs shouldn’t have the power to silence online discourse. That was decided a long ways back. Changing that is trying to take a legal shortcut just because the system is broken. The right answer is to fix the system, not give carte blanc control over communications to corporations.
But corporations do have that power! You're not changing anything! The system doesn't have a hole punched in the wall, it has a neon lit door labelled "ISPs can do what they want"! There's no...
ISPs shouldn’t have the power to silence online discourse. That was decided a long ways back. Changing that is trying to take a legal shortcut just because the system is broken.
But corporations do have that power! You're not changing anything! The system doesn't have a hole punched in the wall, it has a neon lit door labelled "ISPs can do what they want"! There's no legal shortcut, that's just what the law's set up to allow!
Sure, ISPs shouldn't have the power to silence online discourse. I'd agree with that. But they do. Conforming to fictitious laws fictitiously decided a long ways back while Kiwi Farms avoids prosecution by anti-harassment laws that, also, should exist being fictional is a double standard. The right answer is to fix the system: but that's useless. The system ain't getting fixed any time soon, if ever. And the EFF is putting far more effort in trying to convince private companies to play by their fake rules than making any concrete legislation.
I think there’s a vast ocean between technically having the power, and exercising that power on the regular. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that some groups have the power and...
I think there’s a vast ocean between technically having the power, and exercising that power on the regular.
I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that some groups have the power and mandate to police these malicious websites, but simply don’t, and then on the other hand say that the best way forward is to break precedent and ask ISPs to open the floodgates, suggesting that precedent doesn’t pave the way for more precedent.
I saw another comment here that I strongly agree with: if we’re comfortable putting pressure on the organisations that will cave, instead of the institutions who are supposed to be dealing with these situations, what we’re actually doing is choosing the path of least resistance to get what we want.
And today you want KF shut down, maybe tomorrow someone you disagree with wants suicide helplines shut down. So now everyone chooses to put pressure on the ISP that caved in, because they know that’s the easiest way to get what they want.
How does this work when we know there are situations where precedence must be set though? Where if corporations are encouraged to fill a societal gap before government does, the government is...
In one case a law is actively defending the rights of people which society deemed should have these rights. There are real world ramifications to modifying the status quo, in that people who are currently protected could lose that protection. In the other case, however, there is no law, there is no protection, and no one is being defended.
How does this work when we know there are situations where precedence must be set though? Where if corporations are encouraged to fill a societal gap before government does, the government is never able to reclaim that power no matter how unjust the corporations are being?
We already live in that world for so many other situations where corporations have set a status quo and then gradually started to abuse their influence once they became entrenched deeply enough. The majority of the public lose interest, traditionalists start to defend it as the norm (as some are already starting to do in this thread), and the government lacks the political capital to ever change it.
What other recourse do we have in these situations but to push for new laws and try to slow down those who hope to usurp those powers before the injustices happen.
No, the issue of online discourse and responsibility and rights and recourse and recompense is incredibly well trod legal ground. It’s what made the EFF! Trust them on this
No, the issue of online discourse and responsibility and rights and recourse and recompense is incredibly well trod legal ground. It’s what made the EFF! Trust them on this
They'll probably keep popping up until they exhaust all other options, a la 8chan. But the further they get kicked out of society the better society gets. Even if they are still online as an onion...
They'll probably keep popping up until they exhaust all other options, a la 8chan. But the further they get kicked out of society the better society gets. Even if they are still online as an onion service, that presents a hurdle that discourages people from interacting with it.
I wonder if there is an unintended consequence here. By making it harder to access, its retaining only the most extreme and dedicated members, resulting in a more extreme environment and thus,...
I wonder if there is an unintended consequence here. By making it harder to access, its retaining only the most extreme and dedicated members, resulting in a more extreme environment and thus, willing to act further outside of social norms? It strikes me that that could be a consequence of these sorts of measures.
I'm roughly one degree removed from tragic events driven by KF and feel nothing but sadness and sorrow. I'd rather feel angry. As a human rights org, the EFF might try having a little humanity,...
I'm roughly one degree removed from tragic events driven by KF and feel nothing but sadness and sorrow. I'd rather feel angry.
As a human rights org, the EFF might try having a little humanity, and put this effort into something more constructive.
I think KF should be on the clearnet* and I'll explain why. I don't intent to upset people, just writing this comment if anyone is curious of the reasoning. *Specifically in terms of the linked...
I think KF should be on the clearnet* and I'll explain why. I don't intent to upset people, just writing this comment if anyone is curious of the reasoning.
*Specifically in terms of the linked article, with ISPs carrying traffic and net neutrality. I strongly believe in net neutrality and think Hurricane Electric violated it.
It does not actually have illegal content. Doxxing is not illegal, nor is celebrating someone's death. When ISPs or other services drop them and cite illegal content, they are doing this based on heresay. The owner of KF is just one single crazy guy, so he makes no reasonable effort to correct the whole "illegal content" thing and it keeps getting repeated
It does not actually organize off-site harassment. Kiwifarmers are stalkers who carry out this stalking entirely online. The vast majority of the posts there and the users there are reposting and discussing publically available information, with no efforts to contact the subject they are stalking. It's a lot like the stalking and surveillance of a celebrity done by paparazzi. This is of course creepy, invasive, and even harmful. But they are not en masse organizing people to hop into someone's DMs to send hateful messages.
It is not unique in its role as a gossip forum, nor is it unique as a repository of doxxing, and it is especially not unique in being a website where someone who the site stalked/criticized later killed themselves. KF is a very obscure forum that is basically unreadable to the average person. Compare with twitter, so famous for turning obscure figures into celebrities of hatred overnight that there are academics studying it. Every time someone is harassed on twitter and then takes their life or self harms, people who might have been tangentially involved in this try to deflect blame and say someone who would do such a thing was already unstable and might have done it even without the harassment. Basically, gossip and online witchhunts are extremely common and partaken in by the masses who later justify to themselves why it was okay when they did it.
The disease isn't KF, it's online witchhunting in general, and the cure is more kindness. (And also google no longer indexing hateful gossip sites, which they finally fixed with KF). The cure is thinking twice before participating in a pile-on, no matter where it is occurring. And sending messages of support, material help, and checking in on people who are being witchunted.
This is an extremely naiive view to take with regard to KF specifically. KF are not overzealous advocates on Twitter, thoughtlessly causing harm to whoever happens to be the main character of the...
The disease isn't KF, it's online witchhunting in general, and the cure is more kindness.
This is an extremely naiive view to take with regard to KF specifically. KF are not overzealous advocates on Twitter, thoughtlessly causing harm to whoever happens to be the main character of the day. They are deliberate and malicious. They do everything they can to make life difficult for their targets, often to the point of suicide. You cannot reason with them or make them stop by chiding them to Remember The Human. Only force will stop them. You should accept this if you're going to advocate that they remain online.
Someone I deeply admired and respected committed suicide after an extended KF harassment campaign not long ago. If the actual campaign had not convinced me of the evil of that place, the vile bad-faith defenses, questions, and smears that came out afterwards would have. They are absolute scum, the lowest of the low.
My apologies for being unclear. I do not think the users there are capable of reform or kindness. More like, KF is essentially a black hole of information because it is so obscure and so reviled....
You cannot reason with them or make them stop by chiding them to Remember The Human. Only force will stop them. You should accept this if you're going to advocate that they remain online.
My apologies for being unclear. I do not think the users there are capable of reform or kindness. More like, KF is essentially a black hole of information because it is so obscure and so reviled. I will use Lindsay Ellis as my example. For years, KF had a thread about her that got thousands of replies of people posting her personal info and being mad she was a successful youtuber. Because only a small number of people use that site, it never really escaped the KF event horizon. Until the Raya thing, where an enormous pool of social media users (mostly on twitter) decided they hated Lindsay and needed to bring her down. This was when some of the KF dox and lines of attack could cross the event horizon. As another user mentioned, KF is where people know they can go when they have already decided they hate someone and want more ammunition.
Without a well of hatred on mainstream social media against some sort of figure, KF has very little power. It is ordinary people who get overwhelmed with hatred for some internet stranger and choose to pursue digital or even real world harm, using information that occasionally originated with KF and very often did not.
I'm glad Cloudflare dropped them, that AWS will never service them, and all those mainstream SaaS companies refuse to do business with them. The crazy founder guy can't even have a channel on youtube or twitch.
in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Spain, it is. "it's not illegal" is a meaningless statement on the internet. there are countries where possession of child porn is technically legal. someone could...
but of course that server would get shut down immediately, and no one would care about its physical location or the relevant laws, because it's something everyone agrees is unequivocally morally wrong.
The vast majority of the posts there and the users there are reposting and discussing publically available information, with no efforts to contact the subject they are stalking.
"vast majority" is doing some heavy lifting there. what percentage, exactly? is it closer to 90%, 99%, or 99.9%?
and what methodology did you use to come up with that estimate? are you a frequent lurker on KiwiFarms and taking notes on how many posts have what sort of content in them? or are you repeating someone else's estimate of what posts on KiwiFarms are like? if so, whose?
It is not unique in its role as a gossip forum, nor is it unique as a repository of doxxing, and it is especially not unique in being a website where someone who the site stalked/criticized later killed themselves.
OK, it's not unique. and?
how many similar sites are there? what are their names?
are they as bad as KiwiFarms is? maybe they should be taken offline as well.
The cure is thinking twice before participating in a pile-on, no matter where it is occurring.
if there was a pile-on of targeted harassment on a site like Tildes, the admin would remove it. participating or not wouldn't be a question people faced. most social media sites are the same, to various degrees.
this isn't an "oh, targeted harassment is bad, no matter where it occurs" problem. this is a problem of a site that has become notorious for "if you want to do targeted harassment, this is the place to hang out".
I'm pointing to legalities because the issue here is kiwifarms being able to be on the clearnet under net neutrality specifically. These ISPs claim to not refuse to carry a site's traffic just for...
because it's something everyone agrees is unequivocally morally wrong.
I'm pointing to legalities because the issue here is kiwifarms being able to be on the clearnet under net neutrality specifically. These ISPs claim to not refuse to carry a site's traffic just for being morally wrong. Every time an ISP or a service provider alludes to "illegal content", they are specifically thinking US-illegal, and they say KF violates because otherwise they have to acknowledge they made an exception in net neutrality for one site.
"vast majority" is doing some heavy lifting there
I could ask the same of you, who has done quantitative analysis of the posts and their content? No one. I am not a user or lurker there, but there have sadly been many times I had to visit in my time as a mod on reddit when some sort of harassment campaign was happening. (During such times, I need to know the doxxing info so I can add it to automod, and then it's auto removed on reddit before ever seeing the light of day.) So typically what you will see in these threads, is one person digs up some personal info and posts it, and the next 50 replies are a bunch the users crying and whining about the woke mind virus or some such. Not coordinated or planned campaigns of how to spread such information. It actually makes it way harder to find the dox.
It was very rare you'd see someone openly advocating for some sort of "action" against the subject. It's against the rules there to plan trolls, although I would guess the users there only have that rule because such things are considered "cringe", not because they care about morals.
I actually really wish someone could do a quantitative analysis of the site and especially the users.
In regards to uniqueness, other social media sites cause MORE harassment and MORE harm, on an astronomical scale, simply by being more mainstream. Find out who the "main character" of the day is, search their name on tiktok, reddit, twitter, etc, and you will find a lot of very angry people openly coordinating to ruin their life, and succeeding at it.
this is a problem of a site that has become notorious for "if you want to do targeted harassment, this is the place to hang out"
I completely agree with this. That's why all reputable businesses can and should refuse to provide services such as DDOS protection. In terms of "do we break net neutrality for this one site" I do not agree.
I agree, there are echos of KF all over the mainstream internet, not to mention amplifications of it, as you are saying. TikTok has huge issues with mass harassment campaigns, you can simply be in...
In regards to uniqueness, other social media sites cause MORE harassment and MORE harm, on an astronomical scale, simply by being more mainstream. Find out who the "main character" of the day is, search their name on tiktok, reddit, twitter, etc, and you will find a lot of very angry people openly coordinating to ruin their life, and succeeding at it.
I agree, there are echos of KF all over the mainstream internet, not to mention amplifications of it, as you are saying. TikTok has huge issues with mass harassment campaigns, you can simply be in the background of a video and get doxxed/harassed by much larger groups of people than KF has. Twitter has had similar issues for a long time. The Chris Chan subreddit has been very active recently (and I would be incredibly surprised if that wasn't partially due to KF being taken off the clearnet while Christine was in jail.) Many so called "lolcows" have subreddits/facebook group equivalents and hate content being spread on various sites. If anything, the place to "hang out and participate in targeted harassment" is TikTok, not KF. Most people wouldn't touch KF with a ten foot pole or even know what it is, yet are happy to engage in harassment campaigns on other sites.
People on reddit also give instructions to others on how to access KF these days, and accessing it is really not that hard, especially for the terminally online types that must frequent that site. So to me, all of this seems like an ineffective band-aid that 1) doesn't fix the problem, and 2) sets a concerning precedent. I wouldn't care so much about the precedent, if this action would actually fix the problem, or if this problem wasn't already happening everywhere.
I won't pretend to know what should be done with KF or any of these sites, but because the problem is obviously much larger than KF itself, being at least wary of "slippery slopes" seems justified to me. This type of online content/behavior is very far from being niche or relegated to obscure corners of the internet.
This is a complex issue, but the opinion I feel most confident about is that laws need to be made so that the behavior of online harassers and KF is actually illegal in the first place.
Right, digital stalking needs to be targeted IMO. There are so many companies that having selling personal info as their primary business. You can get a picture of someone's face and then pay a...
Right, digital stalking needs to be targeted IMO. There are so many companies that having selling personal info as their primary business. You can get a picture of someone's face and then pay a company to find out their name, address, phone number, all their accounts. People have essentially no recourse to removing their personal information online except hoping that a social media company enforces their own non-legally-required policy
The TL;DR is: the EFF put out a post stating their stance against ISPs interfering with network traffic. Specifically, Hurricane Electric cutting off Kiwi Farms. (for those not in the know: kiwi...
The TL;DR is: the EFF put out a post stating their stance against ISPs interfering with network traffic. Specifically, Hurricane Electric cutting off Kiwi Farms. (for those not in the know: kiwi farms is a messageboard dedicated to finding vulnerable people, and driving them to suicide via persistent harassment. truly the worst place on the internet. they have killed multiple people, including (recently) near/byuu, famous in the emulation scene.)
The EFF argues that Tier 1 ISPs are a backbone of the internet and should not discriminate against traffic because it's a slippery slope. Instead, they say, persecution of Kiwi Farms should go through proper legal channels, and that while Tier 1 ISPs blocking Kiwi Farms is effective, it sets a precedent for further blocking of less wretched sites, or blocking of whatever sites suits the government's whims (the example given is websites with abortion information)
The Mastodon post essentially argues that 1. there is no slippery slope: this is an action taken by a private corporation at its own whim, not a capitulation of some regulatable agency to government pressure. And 2. law enforcement is not doing their job (which the EFF does not dispute) and not only that, they will continue to not do their job in the future. They also note that the EFF (liberals, actually, but in context the EFF) does like to recommend using idealized legal channels that aren't perfect or even functional in practice while making little effort to improve them: and this is one of those times.
When I stumbled across this Mastodon post earlier, I dismissed it outright, taking a guess that it'd be arguing for Kiwi Farms as an exception among exceptions, thinking the EFF was probably...
When I stumbled across this Mastodon post earlier, I dismissed it outright, taking a guess that it'd be arguing for Kiwi Farms as an exception among exceptions, thinking the EFF was probably right, but the Mastodon post probably also not wrong: you can have reasonable exceptions without having a slippery slope.
Then I read it all the way through and changed my mind. I think the EFF is being disingenuous.
This has nothing to do with the government. This is a privately owned company making a private decision to refuse service to customers. They can do that. If you look at this and say "well they shouldn't do that, that's bad for the health of the internet", too bad? They're private companies. Companies don't have morals.[1] If you look at this and say "well they shouldn't be allowed to do that, they should be forced to behave as utilities", great. Onto point 2.
US internet law is sordidly bad and is not going to get better. The EFF wants things to go through what they deem "proper" channels: ignoring that comprehensive anti-harassment laws do not exist and are not going to exist. Private ISPs aren't utilities and the EFF can say they should be utilities all they want: but realistically, I can't see such legislation being focused on much less passing any time in the next decade. And in the mean time, do we just let Kiwi Farms run about? The EFF is placing so much emphasis on laws around harassment improving and Kiwi Farms being prosecuted Correctly, yet so little emphasis on laws around ISPs as utilities.
I should also note that despite agreeing with most of the post, I very much do not agree with the "the ends justify the means" talk.
1: on a similar topic, this reminds me of people seeing surveillance laws being passed in ex. the UK and saying "oh! how awful! please save us, Apple, with your market share and ridiculous corporate power!". it bothers me.
Perhaps safe harbor should be adjusted so that a platform that, on its own, is neutral but willfully hosts exclusively hostile users and content is to blame and needs to be taken town. Kiwifarms...
Perhaps safe harbor should be adjusted so that a platform that, on its own, is neutral but willfully hosts exclusively hostile users and content is to blame and needs to be taken town. Kiwifarms is just a forum. But the admins know what they're doing and like it.
Meta: This post's title shouldn't have been changed this way. This post is a link to a Mastodon discussion about criticizing an article, not the article itself. It's kind of gross that the title...
Meta: This post's title shouldn't have been changed this way. This post is a link to a Mastodon discussion about criticizing an article, not the article itself. It's kind of gross that the title here now is opposite of what the post is about.
I mistakenly thought this was merely a post that linked to another article. I had requested someone with link-editing powers to change the link to the primary article. They've pointed out my...
I mistakenly thought this was merely a post that linked to another article. I had requested someone with link-editing powers to change the link to the primary article. They've pointed out my oversight.
Granted, the original title was not a title: just a list of topics from the content warning. I think the poster misinterpreted as such when this was submitted.
Granted, the original title was not a title: just a list of topics from the content warning. I think the poster misinterpreted as such when this was submitted.
The new title definitely does relate closer to the bigger discussion at play, but I do agree that the title should not directly contradict the opinion of the linked post as that is what was chosen...
The new title definitely does relate closer to the bigger discussion at play, but I do agree that the title should not directly contradict the opinion of the linked post as that is what was chosen to be shared.
A lot of the replies here have focused on the potential injustices of allowing ISPs to police content. It’s clear that this is an issue that a lot of people take very seriously and that hits close to their moral centers. There’s an almost palpable disgust or anger at the idea that an ISP should take down something like KiwiFarms.
I don’t want to take that feeling away from anyone. It’s real, and I understand where it comes from.
What I want to call attention to is the idea that closing the conversation there requires ignoring other people’s significant, equally supported feelings: the people who are directly targeted by KiwiFarms as well as the chilling effect that has on entire populations online.
KF is a known harm doing active damage to many people. It has been up and at it for a full decade.
If we stop the conversation at “it’s bad to block them” without also considering the bad that they’re doing, we’re essentially laundering their harm for them by making actions against them seem worse than the actions they themselves are taking.
Furthermore, if we only ever propose idealized, non-actionable solutions, then we’ve essentially proposed nothing. That was arguably the most important part of the linked thread in the first place:
The poster is arguing that, in cases where other mechanisms have failed, then it makes sense to shift the approach and pursue different methods. We can say what we believe the ideal solution is all we want, but if it never happens, then all we’ve done is put a rhetorical bow on the gift of some empty words. KiwiFarms gets to go right on harassing and abusing people as if nothing ever happened (because it didn’t).
Telling people in their line of fire that they need to continue to be relentlessly harassed and fearful because stopping that might make things worse elsewhere is not any sort of help or salve. Saying that only communicates that we care about potential future harms more than their current actual ones, which is its own form of a slap in the face.
I don’t know what the right solution is, and I don’t think it’s easy, but I do know it’s not nearly as cut and dry as many of the people here are making it out to be. It’s only that simple if we ignore the harms that KiwiFarms does. If we’re forced to really weigh those — honestly take them into account — then the whole issue shifts quite uncomfortably.
This isn’t just me blowing smoke, either. KiwiFarms was famously blocked by CloudFlare — a decision that definitely wasn’t made lightly, by a company that’s against policing content. They did so because they weighed the harms:
Endorsing the continued existence of an extremely harmful harassment site as a matter of principle isn’t compelling as an argument to me unless it’s clear that the people advocating for that have properly accounted for the abuses of the site itself. I feel that’s been absent from a lot of the considerations posted here.
I always appreciate your measured and thoughtful responses. There was one post I had awhile back where I was probably poorly explaining my perspective and many of the responses were taking a different understanding of them than what I was attempting to convey, and you were able to accurately capture the meaning of it perfectly and explain it way better than I ever came close to.
You're right that it's not simple and there's consequences to not taking action, and certainly halting the conversation to say that it's bad to block them isn't the right way to go. I know the title from EFF certainly gives the impression that the conversation can be ended there, I don't know if it's intended to simply get our attention or what, but it definitely merits debate.
I'm glad you mentioned CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a great example of a company that is well known for being against policing content but having done so in a few instances where it was considered to be well beyond the pale, including KiwiFarms. In order to give the appropriate weight to this example in terms of what it should mean in comparison to the situation EFF is calling out, it is important to consider that CloudFlare is in a different role than an ISP as part of internet infrastructure. CloudFlare acknowledges an element of this in their blog post, by stating that KiwiFarms would likely find other providers that would enable them to come back online as other notorious websites that they blocked before had done.
If we compare this to what the EFF says in their post
They do really seem to focus on the unique and specific role of Tier 1 ISPs and the overall conditions of the infrastructure in their role, chiefly that they are often monopolies or near-monopolies.
I think this matters when you go back to CloudFlare and realize that CloudFlare doesn't even have this level of responsibility on their shoulders, they weren't a monopoly to internet connectivity for KiwiFarms or the others they cut off in the way that a Tier 1 ISP can be.
If you look at their reasoning for how they approach these matters, you can see they do lay it out by role in infrastructure.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-approach/
They even have a nice graphic that arranges things in terms of how they view responsibility of content moderation and legal processes. Notably, the one furthest down on the list, the transit/IP layer, is the one that as they view it, would be furthest possible role away from handling content moderation. CloudFlare shows in that graph what products and services they offer, and thus gives you an idea of where their roles are.
I can't find an answer on this nor do I know if I necessarily understand actions CloudFlare might take within this role that they serve, but did they block DNS resolution of KiwiFarms? Does KiwiFarms even have a domain? I honestly don't know and I'd rather not attempt to visit to even find out the answer to this question, so I'll just assume that they have a domain and that if someone is using CloudFlare's DNS service, that they are presumably still resolving KiwiFarms rather than blocking it in the absent of information that says otherwise. Since CloudFlare specifically says they ended security services for KiwiFarms but not anything else, that further leads me to believe that.
So to an extent, the CloudFlare example might give more weight to the seriousness of blocking KiwiFarms on a Tier 1 ISP than it is a precedent to justify a Tier 1 ISP from blocking them.
I'll also quote one thing in the linked Mastodon post
I think this drastically underestimates people and how people view things in context. You provided a good summary that I'll quote to show this.
This right here is the slippery slope. We shift the problem to someone or something else and hope that they're less resistant to pressure. Once we find that something is less resistant to pressure to the point where they give in, then that becomes the go-to avenue. It no longer matters whether that's the appropriate avenue to address that problem, it only matters that they're the ones that gave in. The context changes once that happens, because now it's known that whenever you can't apply pressure to the appropriate institutions and get what you want, you've got documented alternatives to achieve the same result. This also relieves pressure that would otherwise build up and should go towards reforming the institutions that aren't being responsive, so it makes the problem worse because our institutions get worse rather than better.
To counter my own post, because seemingly I must love nullifying myself but also to show that I'm trying to be considerate of other perspectives, I don't believe there's any legal framework that exists that says Hurricane can't do whatever the fuck they want, which might be what the poster in the link was saying in the part that I quoted. So if Hurricane Electric's owner only wants to facilitate cat posts and nothing else, I don't even know if they would be flouting any laws for them to do that. In that scenario, the people saying that Hurricane Electric shouldn't be able to police content are the ones going outside the institutions to apply pressure to a company. There's some differences, like it's technically customers of a customer of a customer that are being denied service that they're paying for, but ultimately it would still only be able to happen because of their near-monopoly status and could easily be a case where it should be addressed by the institutions. Perhaps another difference might be that it's the internet infrastructure companies that have traditionally taken this stance and ones that break away from it are perhaps not breaking any laws, but are breaking long-held tradition or standards within their roles.
The focus on T1 is so key. Your home ISP is a T3. Most businesses's ISP is a T3 or T2 at most. Including the largest tech giants like Amazon.
Let that sink in. Almost all of "The Cloud" operates from business customers using connections from T2 or T3 providers. Odds of an average person having even been aware of Hurricane Electric's existence was basically 0 before all if this. Having T1 cut people off means stuff like "The criminal is using Azure and AWS, shut down both services for everyone." No less problematic than China's Great Firewall.
Letting (or mandating) T1 ISPs do law enforcement is a dangerous, dangerous precedent. I'd say its no less dangerous than mandating encryption backdoors. And any technically minded person knows that risk exceeds any benefits.
Not necessarily. Mine is CenturyLink, aka the largest T1 provider out there. Verizon, AT&T, Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom, Telia, Orange, Telecom Italia, and Comcast are all T1s as well, and that covers a large swath of residential ISPs in the US and Europe.
I posted elsewhere in the topic an elaboration of what I was saying here. Comcast isn't really a T1. Their customer cone is about 4.4% of all IP addresses.
The ranking chart is super useful to help picture this. By contrast, the top 3 (Level3, Arelion, and Cogent) have a total customer cone of 163% of all IP addresses. It is able to go over 100% because this percentage covers the IPs they own, as well of their customers. So when comcast itself peers with Level3 and Cogent, it falls under their respective cones.
A way to look at this: If Level 3 went dark, 70% of the internet goes down, or is at the very least severely crippled. If Centurylink goes dark, 5% of the internet goes down. Comcast 4%
Hurricane Electric, the topic of the EFF blog, is itself is on the order of 18%, a drop in the bucket compared to the top 3.
CenturyLink is Level3, though, they merged years ago at this point (hence why they rebranded to Lumen, as current Lumen/CL is almost entirely run by former Level3 execs).
Last I checked, Tier 1 status was solely based on having full settlement-free peering, not how large an ISP itself is-- why else are T-Mobile US (from the Sprint acquisition) and PCCW Tier 1, despite having rather small networks of their own, if not because of the nature of their peering arrangements? Hell, Hurricane Electric is not Tier 1 because of their longstanding dispute with peering with Cogent, despite being a decent sized part of the broader backbone routing space.
If we're using Tier 1 status to determine what ISPs have more leeway to deny access, the definition of Tier 1 encompasses many end user providers, in some cases literally both facilities based wireline providers one would have available. Wouldn't using these customer cones as a barometer for whether they can block or not, instead of just plain Tier 1 status?
Even something along the lines of requiring content neutrality on backbone routing operations, but allowing it for end user connections to individual locations would make more sense, IMO.
What a great reply. Just wanted to say thank you, and to anyone reading- the above is long, but really worth it.
I think the real question is "why hasn't the authorities taken action against them in a decade" rather than "how can we get around our official channels to solve this problem"?
I think it's shame that these days we seem to consider "tell our government to do their damn job" an idealized solution. We vote them into power and while the FBI isn't voted, we can certainly petition and pressure them if they are ignoring crime.
It's certainly not something proper to say with the current overton curtain, but it's certainly a thought to consider. We had much less controversial (at its time) programs with good intentions like No Child Left Behind implemented due to the abandoment of the minority or the physically impaired. We know in reality that instead of raising the education floor it simply lowered the ceiling and it failed to solve the very problems it sought out to achieve. If we don't think long term we end up with more harm than what we saved. Is it worth saving one individual from harassment if that same ISP gets lobbied years later and "protects against harassment" from Black Lives Matters? It's not a fun question to answer and there's no good answer, especially to those being harassed right now.
I completely understand the need for a Big Red Button, because sometimes you need to take swift action and sort out the fine details later. So as a one off I don't necessarily feel threatened. But the big issue here is that there's no way to hold a corporation accountable as a moral figure. They either press that button willy nilly, or they are legislated to the point where the button may as well not even exist.
That may be a better approach. We can talk about censorship, but there are dozens of internet hosts as well as the abliity to self host, and no one is granted a right to have a website. I don't have much issue with CF picking and choosing its clients.
The bigger issue comes from how current ISPs are setup in the US. we can't simply switch to a new ISP or host our own internet. They have a degree of power that makes is more dangerous to do what Cloudflare did. But talking about how to de-monopolize the ISPs feels more overly ideal than petitioning the governmental entities to do something.
I appreciate the thrust of your argument very much, and I think it is needed. However, I don't like that you presume a utilitarian frame—the notion that one harm should be weighed against another I find to be a convenient mnemonic in the small, but crass and incoherent in the large; and if I have an objection to the actions of hurricane electric, it is to the principle of robbing somebody of a voice, not to a positive degree of 'net harm'.
The linked content and associated article don't get into the depths very well of why the EFF has such a focus on "protecting the stack". There's a much better site at
https://protectthestack.org/
that gets into how the slippery slope is actually quite a real thing, and what the stakes are.
This definitely details a very compelling issue, but my question is: what's the actual solution here? There isn't much concrete beyond a list of signatories. Their core examples of DNS abuse, however, are governmental bodies, like that of Tanzania and Kenya. I don't think a petition like this is going to have much bearing on the decisions of governments intent on controlling online speech.
Beyond those offenders, they detail cloudflare receiving requests to shut down human rights groups, though they don't say whether that actually happened, which feels important (if cloudflare can freely say no, this issue feels smaller). Otherwise, a lot of the examples seem to already be focused on the persecution of marginalized communities, like shutting down a sex-worker-focused masto instance in Australia.
Ultimately, the issue the original thread linked above brings up is a difference between theoretical implications and practical effect. Taking a stance of protecting the stack is fantastic and admirable right up until you hit the point of effectively not asking for anything to be done about it. A petition has far less tangible impact than shutting down a site full of harassers that are driving people to suicide. Maybe it's short-sighted, and the slippery slope does eventually happen, but arguing on that possibility is like asking the people actually suffering to just "tough it out" because things could get worse.
Maybe that last part is a little more emotional than rational, maybe that's fine, either way feel free to refute any of what I said. I'm happy to discuss.
Edit: to be clear, I don't like the idea of relying on ISPs and the like to regulate the internet. The implications of that obviously aren't great. I think I'm really just asking what else can we do? What is the best course of action?
This is generally how democracies slip to authoritarianism (though I want to emphasize that political scientists broadly view democratic freedoms as a spectrum and that no nation is perfect.) One of my favorite parts of the cute Secret Hitler board game is how once fascist policies have been enacted, both the Liberals and the Fascists can use them to their advantage.
Imagine a world where a very wealthy person, let's call them Belon Busk, decides that they do not want teens to have access to information about being LGBT. Busk buys a Tier-0 ISP and decides to stop routing traffic to datacenters that offer information to teens about being LGBT. Now any teen who wants to access this information but uses an ISP that peers with the ISP that Busk bought cannot access this information without using things like Tor or the Yggdrassil network. In a world where we have politicians in parts of the country who would hunger for this power and are already trying to ban books that discuss LGBT issues, this would be a huge win. The nature of a Tier-0 ISP is such that you've probably blocked off access to lots and lots of people, making the content pretty much unavailable on the net.
Harassment and incitement to violence laws and precedent exist. While I'm not a lawyer, the case for harassment seems quite obvious for KF and the case for incitement to violence doesn't seem that hard to prove either.
This is kind of the most important part. They can also freely say yes -- but they don't, because organizations like the EFF and their supporters freak out when they do. Normalizing infrastructure level content takedowns at the discretion of corporations is something we should avoid at all cost.
As to what should be done, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but it sure sounds like there's some case to be made here for criminal harassment. If there's no current law being broken, maybe there is a legislative remedy.
I do think it's short-sighted, and I am deeply concerned about the slippery slope. I actually favour net neutrality legislation to absolutely and unambiguously put an end to this entire line of attack on infrastructure.
My point of view is that we shouldn't rely only on government, e.g. justice system/police. Also, ISP should not be able to regulate the Internet, government should be.
What we can do ourselves (somebody mentioned it somewhere around here) is, if we know somebody in our circle is using such websites, talking and doing everything to convince that person that it's not worth taking part in kiwifarms and similar things. We should care about our friends, relatives, not to let them be drawn into such evil places.
It's not something genius I've written here, the problem is very difficult, but there are some means to be used to stop spreading such places.
Thank you for this
This is just 'the ends justify the means' thinking, which is not the greatest idea when it comes to corporations, as they will just as soon turn those means against you when it benefits them. Not that I necessarily think this was the wrong action to take in this instance, but we as a society should be very careful when we slowly allow corporations power over stuff that was previously legislated.
As an example, many businesses that payment processors deem 'risky' are basically impossible to run, despite the fact that they are technically 'legal', they are in-practice illegal because payment corporations have decided that you can't run them.
To be clear, the quote you called out is, to me, the most dangerous thought process out there because it can easily be used to burn everything to the ground and I hate it.
Applying that logic to ANYTHING you stand against is terrifying, and it should always be questioned. Bluntly while what kiwifarms is doing is horrific, i'd much rather see pressure put on the correct entities for their inaction, rather than suddenly throwing out the book to try and solve it. This is exactly how you erode liberties in the long run and is extremely self sabotaging.
People have no idea what pandora's box they're trying to open with suggestions like these, and just how dangerous it's all going to be, and it's so so frustrating when we are literally living in an example of the exact kind of consequences you face when too many things are just run on good faith. The recent US political elections are just a subsection of a larger trend of really testing the boundaries of what you can get away, with and the rampant consolidation of power for short term goals over the years is finally showing it's ugly head and why such things are dangerous.
Telling ISP's, of all entities, they have not just the right, but the responsibility, to curate content is one of the dumbest modern stances I can think. There is all sorts of horrible shit on the internet, but we've already seen how miserable this can be with things like suspected pirating and content moderation on sites like youtube, and now you want to ramp that up, and give oligopolies mandate to handle this? Even if they mean well the consequences are going to be obscene.
Thank you. I’ve been following internet policy for years and that “there is no slippery slope” freaked me out. That’s patently untrue. It’s called establishing precedent.
The right direction is to consider internet access a utility and a fundamental right- like water, electricity, and housing.
Channels and systems matter. This technique- and I do believe it’s a technique - of using marginalized groups’ disenfranchisement and victimization as a means of stripping away civil rights is I think in some instances and corners deliberate. I think someone is seeing an opportunity here and letting these kiwi dicks escalate so that ISPs get a “silent the dissenters” button.
There's a reason 'child porn' is trotted out as the first and foremost example for building the police state.
It's utterly repugnant, so taking a stand against techniques preporting to stop is tricky, at best.
Remember, all the anti-encryption laws all rest their foundations on anti-child porn and anti-terrorism justifications.
Are we now going to support encryption backdoors because Kiwifarms uses SSL? No, that would be preposterous.
Does kiwifarms need ended? Yes. IMO a good start would be: If you find anyone in your social circle is using it, turn them the fuck in.
This is what I find most interesting about our societies and human behavior, and how we view things.
When we have institutions that are specifically there to act on certain things and they don't, and the public feels they have lost control over those institutions, we don't necessarily direct our anger or despair at those institutions, we might start looking elsewhere. When someone or something else then has some technical way of limiting what the institutions were supposed to and didn't, and we feel we have a better chance of influencing them, even if it's not their responsibility, we direct our anger and despair at them instead.
On the one hand, it's quite understandable, if you can do something that works, even if it's not fair to one person or organization and there's potentially unknown future consequences to bear for it, as opposed to doing something that doesn't work and there's known consequences for this now, a lot of people are going to choose the option that works and the unknown future consequences.
On the other hand, we're creating perverse incentives where it's better for institutions to find ways to insulate themselves from public influence and resistant to public influence, to make it more difficult etc. because the public will just forget about it and try an easier target. And they'll publicly pressure and blame those people or organizations if they don't bend and lose sight of the fact that there are dedicated institutions that are meant to resolve these problems but they've already given up on them.
Shows even moreso why it's important to get out and vote. these institutions can insulate themselves because the population that understands this stuff represents less than the Baby Boomer voterbase who doesn't even know what cyberbullying is. It should be made loud and clear that the younger demographic matters and that ignoring your role gets you kicked.
Of course, I unfortunately don't have much of a solution to this except time. I no longer occupy that 18-25 demographic and millenials as a whole are simply aging to the next 35-44 bracket. It's unfortunate because this isn't a new trend and I don't want to dismiss this as simply "the young people don't like to vote". there should be some way to let new citizens understand their power.
Can you help me to understand what book is being thrown out? @Hazel accurately pointed out that this is not new behavior of ISPs by any stretch, and is in fact something that Hurricane Electric has already done in the past. We already have plenty of laws which violate the concept of net neutrality and carrier neutrality (see SOPA, PIPA, SESTA-FOSTA). Nothing new is happening here, this is entirely 'business as usual'.
I don't get where this is coming from? No one is arguing for that. A large portion of the link in this post is discussion of this very topic and how nearly everyone is in agreement that oligopolies shouldn't be in control of this... but right now they are. They have the right, and they do feel some kind of responsibility as ISP providers have adopted guidelines such as the DNS abuse framework to decide what kind of content they serve. Hurricane Electric even has a TOS which pretty apparently has been violated by KF.
The means have already existed and been in use for a very, very long time. All kinds of "possibly illegal" stuff like botnet C&C servers, ransomware payment portals, phishing sites, spam operations and the like get shut down rather fast without any type of law enforcement coming into play. Even if you're merely hosting a server that gets compromised, a common scenario is that you get an email telling you all of your stuff was null-routed and you better come up with a good reason they should keep you as a customer within some rather pressing time-frame. Verisign will just casually erase you from the .com zone if any of the organizations they're affiliated with ask them to, sometimes as part of the multi-ISP "DNS Abuse Framework" and sometimes other stuff not related to that. There are similar policies for pretty much every service provider providing every type of service.
There is, of course, an understanding that service providers can't directly control what their clients do. Nearly every service provider relies on others in some fashion, so the standard operating procedure is to start as late in the chain as possible and slowly send things up the chain until the complaint is reasonably solved and unlikely to reoccur. If your site shows any real signs of legitimacy and is responsive to abuse complaints, you'll be included in that chain and provided with that reasonable doubt. It should be fairly obvious at this point that KF does not fit that bill, and neither do the providers that continue to host it. Normally, the providers later in the chain rarely have to enforce their terms. This doesn't mean it never happened; for example, HE was also involved in the 2008 McColo shutdown.
Any argument that these types of shutdowns should only ever be left to slow-to-respond legal channels would be challenging all those types of shutdowns as well. It would indeed be nice and optimal if the legal channels were responsive, but they aren't, and until they are, the processes already in place give power to the corporations providing the services.
In the world of domestic violence enforcement, the courts will issue temporary and permanent restraining orders. Such a mechanism is possible but I am not sure how it fits the industry.
I think the distinction is "taken down quickly". Unfortunately, the site in question has run for over a decade and for whatever reason has been deemed to be "not spam" (to put it in the loosest terms possible). I think we should as a general principe take more time on these kinds of takedowns compared to [newspamsite] dot com created 3 hours ago.
yes, and I hate that as is even in casual everyday usage of the internet. I'd rather not give them more power if I can help it.
Being slow at times is a good thing, because we shouldn't make laws based on gut reactions. I also agree we need swifter channels, but those channels should have checks on them. private corportations don't and we have seen the results of that for the past decade with the major social media networks just now being questions over misinformation.
An apt observation, given that the author has made posts explicitly encouraging that kind of thinking:
https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91 (can't figure how to link the specific post, but it's not far down)
To be clear, I do not agree with the author. Just thought it was interesting how incisive @tesseractcat's comments were.
My personal biases, of course. that's the exact issue that leads to that adage. Maybe I'm a benevolent dictator and my biases focus on serving the people and the environment they live on. Maybe I'm a greed driven billionaire and my biases focus on making a billion more dollars.
Do we really want to take that gamble with every individual who feels their end is just? Sadly, I haven't run into enough benevolent dictators to be optimistic here.
Just to clarify, this is a quote from the article.
I despise how much it seems culture and communication are increasingly under the control of corporate interests, so my gut instinct is to agree with the EFF on this, that granting an ISP (especially one operating at Tier 1) the right/mandate to police speech will just end up being yet another way our civil liberties are literally sold off. Perusing legal recourse against KF seems to me the better way of combating its existence and behavior, but the way joepie91 dismisses the idea tells me there's some history there I'm not aware of.
So, my question is what is the legal history with KF/Joshua Moon?
As far as I know, KF has never actually broken US law. Which is why nothing has happened until tech companies started shutting them down.
It does bring up an interesting discussion about if tech companies should have this much control rather than letting the public vote for the system they want.
I think it might be helpful to distinguish between outcome and procedure. Should KF be able to stay online? Who should have the power to take them offline?
(So to be clear, I have no personal knowledge and prefer not to find out, but based on reputation, I think my preferred outcome is that they go offline.)
EFF is being a little vague about this when they say that they aren’t defending KF, but they don’t take a position about whether, ideally, they should be allowed to remain online. They also equivocate a bit between whether a Tier 1 ISP should do anything about it and whether any ISP should do anything about it. Based on their headline, it seems like they’re saying that no ISP should do anything?
It seems like a setup for a hide-the-ball argument where it turns out that nobody is in a position to make a decision about taking them offline. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it goes, for policy reasons.
I’m skeptical of this. It reminds me of cryptocurrency where they try to build complicated distributed machines where nobody is at the wheel, as if that were a good idea. I think the opposite is more sensible: avoid building things that nobody can change or shut down. If you give this power away, try to arrange so that there are responsible people who could change it or shut it down. (It may be a good idea to decentralize power by distributing it, though.)
Procedurally, I think there’s a reasonable case for Tier-1 ISP’s rarely taking action because they indirectly provide service to many millions of people who are mostly strangers that they know little or nothing about. Also, cutting off service will affect other unrelated people. As a result, their actions are likely to be badly-targeted and unjust.
The case for not taking action seems weaker, though, if the ISP’s closer to the site refuse to do anything?
More generally, there’s a question of how society should work. Who gets to make decisions about something like this? Should it ultimately be decided by the courts, backed by police? Should there be some other people, like maybe policy-makers at ISP’s, who can do it?
I suspect most ISP’s don’t want to make policy decisions like this, but sometimes they’re the ones with the power.
This is a great comment.
The internet is a public service but it shouldn't tolerate intolerance. You can't go to a public library and find books and start harassing people; you'll be kicked out. Someone needs to have the authority to remove these kinds of people from the generally well behaving crowd, and if the library starts getting a bit too overzealous with who they ban, there are plenty of others around.
This thread has comments that strike me as very similar to the free speech arguments thrown around by the alt right, and I don't particularly like it.
Everyone should really read up on the ISPs being discussed. Here's some rankings of the top 200 ISPs in the world. These are the 200 most important ISPs, in terms of importance for routing data to the rest of the internet. Level 3 accounts for about 70% of all IP addresses directly or indirectly.
In terms of importance, we're not talking local libraries. We're talking international alliances like NATO or the EU. The cops aren't showing up at your door...your whole town is getting drone strikes launched at it, bystanders be damned.
I agree intolerance can't be tolerated. But the thing is...T1 ISPs can and should be as involved with censorship as the asphalt on the highway. A facilitator for people whose jobs it actually is.
They don't operate servers that Kiwifarms runs on. They don't provide the DNS entries. They see a request from one IP to another and route it.
They have the power to capture data from every packet on the internet. That power should not be taken lightly. And we've seen how destructive it is when a power that was granted for "the greater good" ends up going bad...just look at Trump's presidency.
This is a rather unique case study for this topic. If nothing else, it's a great demonstration on how strict rules can be a poor way to maintain society. Hurricane has done society a huge favor by cutting off Kiwi Farms. Just slowing the amount of harassment that comes from there is probably going to save a few people from doing something very drastic that could end a life.
With that being said I think it's easy to see why both the poster and the article they are reacting to are "right". Personally, I agree more with the poster than the article. EFF would have probably been better off not posting that article, IMHO, but that's a perspective that could only be gained with aftersight.
I don't think it can only be gained with after-sight; we should always have caution when talking about groups which cause real and tangible harm and violence to the world. We should naturally stop to consider precisely what we are saying and why. It does not take a genius to see the many holes in the EFFs argument or how this could read as tone deaf to anyone who's been harmed by KF.
The EFF have always viewed the internet as a public utility and this post in no way runs contrary to any of their beliefs. However, there's a lot to be said about the circumstances in which they find themselves making this post, the words they choose to use in the post, and the existing reality that the internet is not currently a public utility and is not legislated in that fashion. The way they frame this argument and the content of the argument itself brings to mind free speech absolutists or organizations which have come to the legal aid to protect free speech, even when the people on trial have committed horrible crimes against humanity. The ACLU, for example, has been involved in virtually every high profile free speech case in the last century. They have defended the right to free speech for some truly horrific people and violent speech. However, there's a distinct difference between protecting an existing law because you believe it provides more protection in its existing state and what's happening here. There is no law declaring internet providers as public utilities. There is no history of precedent of this being upheld to protect people- in fact, there's plenty of history where this ideal of public utility is already being violated.
It leaves a sour taste in the mouth that they are willing to grandstand here about this issue. No one is suing the ISP. There is no law being violated. This isn't the first time an ISP has chosen to (or even been ordered to) not allow traffic for specific content. They don't have to comment on what's happening because it is already the status quo. The EFF does not have unlimited resources, so why are they focusing their limited resources to talk about something that happened on the internet? They could have just as easily not commented on it. But if they decided that they must comment on it, why do they spend so little time talking about the violence that this website has wrought on the world? Why do they spend so few words talking about the countless other times that this conceptual idea has been violated and that harm was caused to people who are already marginalized by society or who are trying to do good? The article could have just as easily lightly highlighted the issue by using KF as an issue but then pivoted to other examples where the same concept was used to harm people who deserve protection. They even imply, themselves, that KF does not deserve protection, but rather that the policing should be done by other entities, not the ISPs. Why not spend a few minutes highlighting that these other entities, such as police, often fail to do their job and that we need strong protections written into law in addition to net neutrality or the designation of ISPs as a public utility?
For such a large company and a non-profit with the reach that they have, they need to be better than this. A post like this has greatly eroded my trust in their institution.
You're right, too. And I agree with you about 99% of the way. The only difference between you and me is our expectations of the EFF.
I'm operating with the context that the EFF has kind of always been this way. They are free speech absolutists, just on the left instead of the right. They're a bit like the ACLU in that way.
I don’t really follow your argument here with respect to the ACLU. It sounds like the only difference here is the ACLU is defending an existing law and the EFF is advocating for a new law, but it sounds like you support the ACLU and condemn the EFF for fairly similar positions?
Free speech is in our constitution. The law is exercised to protect the rights of minorities and individuals which nearly everyone would agree have the right to speech. It is also exercised by some individuals to cause harm. The ACLU has come to the conclusion that the law provides more protection in its existing state and thus they fight to uphold that state in spite of its use by malicious actors. There is no law declaring ISPs a public utility. There are no protections or guarantee that any website should or must be served. No one is being protected by the current status quo.
I pointed this out as a juxtaposition because while they are both absolutionist in their ideals, and they both argue in favor of widely held ideas (speech should be free, the internet should be a utility), but they are not analogous. In one case a law is actively defending the rights of people which society deemed should have these rights. There are real world ramifications to modifying the status quo, in that people who are currently protected could lose that protection. In the other case, however, there is no law, there is no protection, and no one is being defended. Whether the net should be neutral or ISPs should be public utilities is purely ideological right now. Choosing to defend KF does not jeopardize anyone because no one is currently protected or defended by existing law and the status quo.
Absolutely agree, there's no law governing this.
I don't know if this is true. Infrastructure providers tend to stay out of these kinds of issues specifically because of pressure from groups like the EFF. If they find that they don't get any pushback in this case, I won't be surprised to find them emboldened to be either more aggressive in proactively censoring their systems or more willing to acquiesce to demands from regimes with more restrictive social norms (eg. Iran, Saudi, UAE, etc). There's a much better and detailed argument made by the EFF at https://protectthestack.org/ that you might find interesting.
Thank you for this. There are several other claims made in this long thread that are sounding like they’re trying to normalize this ISP’s decision to censor these horrible people- it doesn’t already happen regularly - that’s WHY the EFF got involved- and trying to triangulate between the issue of what these kiwi people do and what the EFF is saying is a terrible kind of bad faith way of muddying the issues. It’s threads like these that make me suspect some are not acting in great faith. Keep the issues separate. ISPs shouldn’t have the power to silence online discourse. That was decided a long ways back. Changing that is trying to take a legal shortcut just because the system is broken. The right answer is to fix the system, not give carte blanc control over communications to corporations.
But corporations do have that power! You're not changing anything! The system doesn't have a hole punched in the wall, it has a neon lit door labelled "ISPs can do what they want"! There's no legal shortcut, that's just what the law's set up to allow!
Sure, ISPs shouldn't have the power to silence online discourse. I'd agree with that. But they do. Conforming to fictitious laws fictitiously decided a long ways back while Kiwi Farms avoids prosecution by anti-harassment laws that, also, should exist being fictional is a double standard. The right answer is to fix the system: but that's useless. The system ain't getting fixed any time soon, if ever. And the EFF is putting far more effort in trying to convince private companies to play by their fake rules than making any concrete legislation.
I think there’s a vast ocean between technically having the power, and exercising that power on the regular.
I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that some groups have the power and mandate to police these malicious websites, but simply don’t, and then on the other hand say that the best way forward is to break precedent and ask ISPs to open the floodgates, suggesting that precedent doesn’t pave the way for more precedent.
I saw another comment here that I strongly agree with: if we’re comfortable putting pressure on the organisations that will cave, instead of the institutions who are supposed to be dealing with these situations, what we’re actually doing is choosing the path of least resistance to get what we want.
And today you want KF shut down, maybe tomorrow someone you disagree with wants suicide helplines shut down. So now everyone chooses to put pressure on the ISP that caved in, because they know that’s the easiest way to get what they want.
Policy and precedent are not fiction
How does this work when we know there are situations where precedence must be set though? Where if corporations are encouraged to fill a societal gap before government does, the government is never able to reclaim that power no matter how unjust the corporations are being?
We already live in that world for so many other situations where corporations have set a status quo and then gradually started to abuse their influence once they became entrenched deeply enough. The majority of the public lose interest, traditionalists start to defend it as the norm (as some are already starting to do in this thread), and the government lacks the political capital to ever change it.
What other recourse do we have in these situations but to push for new laws and try to slow down those who hope to usurp those powers before the injustices happen.
No, the issue of online discourse and responsibility and rights and recourse and recompense is incredibly well trod legal ground. It’s what made the EFF! Trust them on this
But Hurricane Electric didn't actually take Kiwi Farms offline, it's still kicking as an onion service...
They'll probably keep popping up until they exhaust all other options, a la 8chan. But the further they get kicked out of society the better society gets. Even if they are still online as an onion service, that presents a hurdle that discourages people from interacting with it.
I wonder if there is an unintended consequence here. By making it harder to access, its retaining only the most extreme and dedicated members, resulting in a more extreme environment and thus, willing to act further outside of social norms? It strikes me that that could be a consequence of these sorts of measures.
I'm roughly one degree removed from tragic events driven by KF and feel nothing but sadness and sorrow. I'd rather feel angry.
As a human rights org, the EFF might try having a little humanity, and put this effort into something more constructive.
I think KF should be on the clearnet* and I'll explain why. I don't intent to upset people, just writing this comment if anyone is curious of the reasoning.
*Specifically in terms of the linked article, with ISPs carrying traffic and net neutrality. I strongly believe in net neutrality and think Hurricane Electric violated it.
It does not actually have illegal content. Doxxing is not illegal, nor is celebrating someone's death. When ISPs or other services drop them and cite illegal content, they are doing this based on heresay. The owner of KF is just one single crazy guy, so he makes no reasonable effort to correct the whole "illegal content" thing and it keeps getting repeated
It does not actually organize off-site harassment. Kiwifarmers are stalkers who carry out this stalking entirely online. The vast majority of the posts there and the users there are reposting and discussing publically available information, with no efforts to contact the subject they are stalking. It's a lot like the stalking and surveillance of a celebrity done by paparazzi. This is of course creepy, invasive, and even harmful. But they are not en masse organizing people to hop into someone's DMs to send hateful messages.
It is not unique in its role as a gossip forum, nor is it unique as a repository of doxxing, and it is especially not unique in being a website where someone who the site stalked/criticized later killed themselves. KF is a very obscure forum that is basically unreadable to the average person. Compare with twitter, so famous for turning obscure figures into celebrities of hatred overnight that there are academics studying it. Every time someone is harassed on twitter and then takes their life or self harms, people who might have been tangentially involved in this try to deflect blame and say someone who would do such a thing was already unstable and might have done it even without the harassment. Basically, gossip and online witchhunts are extremely common and partaken in by the masses who later justify to themselves why it was okay when they did it.
The disease isn't KF, it's online witchhunting in general, and the cure is more kindness. (And also google no longer indexing hateful gossip sites, which they finally fixed with KF). The cure is thinking twice before participating in a pile-on, no matter where it is occurring. And sending messages of support, material help, and checking in on people who are being witchunted.
This is an extremely naiive view to take with regard to KF specifically. KF are not overzealous advocates on Twitter, thoughtlessly causing harm to whoever happens to be the main character of the day. They are deliberate and malicious. They do everything they can to make life difficult for their targets, often to the point of suicide. You cannot reason with them or make them stop by chiding them to Remember The Human. Only force will stop them. You should accept this if you're going to advocate that they remain online.
Someone I deeply admired and respected committed suicide after an extended KF harassment campaign not long ago. If the actual campaign had not convinced me of the evil of that place, the vile bad-faith defenses, questions, and smears that came out afterwards would have. They are absolute scum, the lowest of the low.
My apologies for being unclear. I do not think the users there are capable of reform or kindness. More like, KF is essentially a black hole of information because it is so obscure and so reviled. I will use Lindsay Ellis as my example. For years, KF had a thread about her that got thousands of replies of people posting her personal info and being mad she was a successful youtuber. Because only a small number of people use that site, it never really escaped the KF event horizon. Until the Raya thing, where an enormous pool of social media users (mostly on twitter) decided they hated Lindsay and needed to bring her down. This was when some of the KF dox and lines of attack could cross the event horizon. As another user mentioned, KF is where people know they can go when they have already decided they hate someone and want more ammunition.
Without a well of hatred on mainstream social media against some sort of figure, KF has very little power. It is ordinary people who get overwhelmed with hatred for some internet stranger and choose to pursue digital or even real world harm, using information that occasionally originated with KF and very often did not.
I'm glad Cloudflare dropped them, that AWS will never service them, and all those mainstream SaaS companies refuse to do business with them. The crazy founder guy can't even have a channel on youtube or twitch.
in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Spain, it is.
"it's not illegal" is a meaningless statement on the internet.
there are countries where possession of child porn is technically legal. someone could conceivably set up a server in one of those countries and the "it's not illegal" defense would apply just as much to KiwiFarms as it does to them.
but of course that server would get shut down immediately, and no one would care about its physical location or the relevant laws, because it's something everyone agrees is unequivocally morally wrong.
"vast majority" is doing some heavy lifting there. what percentage, exactly? is it closer to 90%, 99%, or 99.9%?
and what methodology did you use to come up with that estimate? are you a frequent lurker on KiwiFarms and taking notes on how many posts have what sort of content in them? or are you repeating someone else's estimate of what posts on KiwiFarms are like? if so, whose?
OK, it's not unique. and?
how many similar sites are there? what are their names?
are they as bad as KiwiFarms is? maybe they should be taken offline as well.
if there was a pile-on of targeted harassment on a site like Tildes, the admin would remove it. participating or not wouldn't be a question people faced. most social media sites are the same, to various degrees.
this isn't an "oh, targeted harassment is bad, no matter where it occurs" problem. this is a problem of a site that has become notorious for "if you want to do targeted harassment, this is the place to hang out".
I'm pointing to legalities because the issue here is kiwifarms being able to be on the clearnet under net neutrality specifically. These ISPs claim to not refuse to carry a site's traffic just for being morally wrong. Every time an ISP or a service provider alludes to "illegal content", they are specifically thinking US-illegal, and they say KF violates because otherwise they have to acknowledge they made an exception in net neutrality for one site.
I could ask the same of you, who has done quantitative analysis of the posts and their content? No one. I am not a user or lurker there, but there have sadly been many times I had to visit in my time as a mod on reddit when some sort of harassment campaign was happening. (During such times, I need to know the doxxing info so I can add it to automod, and then it's auto removed on reddit before ever seeing the light of day.) So typically what you will see in these threads, is one person digs up some personal info and posts it, and the next 50 replies are a bunch the users crying and whining about the woke mind virus or some such. Not coordinated or planned campaigns of how to spread such information. It actually makes it way harder to find the dox.
It was very rare you'd see someone openly advocating for some sort of "action" against the subject. It's against the rules there to plan trolls, although I would guess the users there only have that rule because such things are considered "cringe", not because they care about morals.
I actually really wish someone could do a quantitative analysis of the site and especially the users.
In regards to uniqueness, other social media sites cause MORE harassment and MORE harm, on an astronomical scale, simply by being more mainstream. Find out who the "main character" of the day is, search their name on tiktok, reddit, twitter, etc, and you will find a lot of very angry people openly coordinating to ruin their life, and succeeding at it.
I completely agree with this. That's why all reputable businesses can and should refuse to provide services such as DDOS protection. In terms of "do we break net neutrality for this one site" I do not agree.
I agree, there are echos of KF all over the mainstream internet, not to mention amplifications of it, as you are saying. TikTok has huge issues with mass harassment campaigns, you can simply be in the background of a video and get doxxed/harassed by much larger groups of people than KF has. Twitter has had similar issues for a long time. The Chris Chan subreddit has been very active recently (and I would be incredibly surprised if that wasn't partially due to KF being taken off the clearnet while Christine was in jail.) Many so called "lolcows" have subreddits/facebook group equivalents and hate content being spread on various sites. If anything, the place to "hang out and participate in targeted harassment" is TikTok, not KF. Most people wouldn't touch KF with a ten foot pole or even know what it is, yet are happy to engage in harassment campaigns on other sites.
People on reddit also give instructions to others on how to access KF these days, and accessing it is really not that hard, especially for the terminally online types that must frequent that site. So to me, all of this seems like an ineffective band-aid that 1) doesn't fix the problem, and 2) sets a concerning precedent. I wouldn't care so much about the precedent, if this action would actually fix the problem, or if this problem wasn't already happening everywhere.
I won't pretend to know what should be done with KF or any of these sites, but because the problem is obviously much larger than KF itself, being at least wary of "slippery slopes" seems justified to me. This type of online content/behavior is very far from being niche or relegated to obscure corners of the internet.
This is a complex issue, but the opinion I feel most confident about is that laws need to be made so that the behavior of online harassers and KF is actually illegal in the first place.
Right, digital stalking needs to be targeted IMO. There are so many companies that having selling personal info as their primary business. You can get a picture of someone's face and then pay a company to find out their name, address, phone number, all their accounts. People have essentially no recourse to removing their personal information online except hoping that a social media company enforces their own non-legally-required policy
The TL;DR is: the EFF put out a post stating their stance against ISPs interfering with network traffic. Specifically, Hurricane Electric cutting off Kiwi Farms. (for those not in the know: kiwi farms is a messageboard dedicated to finding vulnerable people, and driving them to suicide via persistent harassment. truly the worst place on the internet. they have killed multiple people, including (recently) near/byuu, famous in the emulation scene.)
The EFF argues that Tier 1 ISPs are a backbone of the internet and should not discriminate against traffic because it's a slippery slope. Instead, they say, persecution of Kiwi Farms should go through proper legal channels, and that while Tier 1 ISPs blocking Kiwi Farms is effective, it sets a precedent for further blocking of less wretched sites, or blocking of whatever sites suits the government's whims (the example given is websites with abortion information)
The Mastodon post essentially argues that 1. there is no slippery slope: this is an action taken by a private corporation at its own whim, not a capitulation of some regulatable agency to government pressure. And 2. law enforcement is not doing their job (which the EFF does not dispute) and not only that, they will continue to not do their job in the future. They also note that the EFF (liberals, actually, but in context the EFF) does like to recommend using idealized legal channels that aren't perfect or even functional in practice while making little effort to improve them: and this is one of those times.
When I stumbled across this Mastodon post earlier, I dismissed it outright, taking a guess that it'd be arguing for Kiwi Farms as an exception among exceptions, thinking the EFF was probably right, but the Mastodon post probably also not wrong: you can have reasonable exceptions without having a slippery slope.
Then I read it all the way through and changed my mind. I think the EFF is being disingenuous.
I should also note that despite agreeing with most of the post, I very much do not agree with the "the ends justify the means" talk.
1: on a similar topic, this reminds me of people seeing surveillance laws being passed in ex. the UK and saying "oh! how awful! please save us, Apple, with your market share and ridiculous corporate power!". it bothers me.
Perhaps safe harbor should be adjusted so that a platform that, on its own, is neutral but willfully hosts exclusively hostile users and content is to blame and needs to be taken town. Kiwifarms is just a forum. But the admins know what they're doing and like it.
Relevant: The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website
Meta: This post's title shouldn't have been changed this way. This post is a link to a Mastodon discussion about criticizing an article, not the article itself. It's kind of gross that the title here now is opposite of what the post is about.
I have reverted it to its original title.
@Algernon_Asimov - care to enlighten us about your reasoning instead of edit-warring?
I mistakenly thought this was merely a post that linked to another article. I had requested someone with link-editing powers to change the link to the primary article. They've pointed out my oversight.
@Macil
Granted, the original title was not a title: just a list of topics from the content warning. I think the poster misinterpreted as such when this was submitted.
The new title definitely does relate closer to the bigger discussion at play, but I do agree that the title should not directly contradict the opinion of the linked post as that is what was chosen to be shared.