Courts and judges seem slow and fuddy-duddy, but they're conducted in public, and you have legal avenues of appeal. Unregulated private businesses can do whatever the fuck they like, and that includes just fucking with you because of personal vendettas. Private businesses that fuck with arbitrary people aren't worthy of being a nation's internet backbone. That behaviour needs reigned in, and common carrier status needs to apply.
That said, Josh is a piece of shit. He's been trying to maintain the PR line that his forum didn't kill Byuu; they didn't, but they double down and claim Byuu isn't even dead. He's had evidence for over a year that Byuu died exactly as claimed, and he didn't bother publishing it and correcting the public record because it made his site look bad. He's normally so eager to publish the truth of awful internet behaviour, but he's silent on his own site's dirty deeds. What else is he hiding?
I personally dislike Josh (moreso the ugly parts of the farms, actually), but strongly agree with him on this particular issue. The open Internet is extremely important to civil liberties.
Exactly. People seem so worried about governments controlling public discourse for their own nefarious ends, that they don't even seem to be aware that private individuals are controlling public discourse for their own nefarious ends.
And if well-connected geeks can massage their online profiles, call in favours from unelected moderators, hide pertinent facts about themselves... what's to stop all manner of awful behaviour from being covered up? What's to stop petty business owners from destroying their rivals?
There's also the issue when private companies just do what the government expects of them, or even pressures them to do. There was a brief controversy (canonized by CBS news) when the current administration ordered social media sites like twitter, youtube, and and facebook to remove posts that they thought were false or painted them in a bad light. What is the point of placing restrictions on government if they can just have a private company do it?
I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want." I don't know why the average person is so enthusiastic about the idea of getting taken for a ride by huge corporations.
> What is the point of placing restrictions on government if they can just have a private company do it?
"Perception is reality".
- Lee Atwater (GOP Consultant)
> I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want."
A lot of people (many of them smart) don't realize that there is a distinction between the first amendment and the general principle of free speech, which precedes the first amendment.
They realize it, they just don't want it to exist, and have a vested interest in muddying the waters of discourse such that most people remain unaware of it, or mistrust it in principle. For a few years they've been actively campaigning to have protections like Section 230 repealed and have all social media platforms (with some arbitrary number of accounts) be taken over and regulated as utilities by the government.
I disagree: I think people genuinely do believe their own opinions, and politicians are also human....thus delusional, and corrupt, necessarily. But they ain't stupid (or at least their PR folks aren't): a well done (mis)representation of reality is well known to be more than adequate to fool most people most of the time, and misrepresenting reality is at the core of "successful" (depending on your perspective, I'm talking electoral and financial success) politics.
When someone says "It's a private company, they can do what they want" in defense of a company doing something, it's probably because in that case they like what the company is doing, and they're probably not being "taken for a ride" by them.
> I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want." I don't know why the average person is so enthusiastic about the idea of getting taken for a ride by huge corporations.
It's especially humorous when you see those same people claiming that talking out the other side of their mouth about the danger of fascists.
Not your average private individuals either, but incredibly wealthy and well-connected private individuals.
Keffals, mentioned in the article, is close associates with and supported by Deviant Ollam and his wife Tarah, who was a senior director at Splunk and Symantec and is a fellow at Council on Foreign Relations.
> Keffals, mentioned in the article, is close associates with and supported by Deviant Ollam and his wife Tarah, who was a senior director at Splunk and Symantec and is a fellow at Council on Foreign Relations.
As someone familiar with all three, this is extremely disappointing to hear about.
I have a lot of respect for Deviant, I can only hope he isn't very close to Keffals, or at the least isn't aware of the sheer number of scummy things they have done.
Folks in the hacker community have a long history of being too forgiving of what should be hard-avoid character flaws.
That's a big part of why these reputation-erasing, behind-closed-door censorship networks exist to begin with.
One of infosec's biggest twitter cancel-brigade queens was also the most prolific troll in GNAA and had a long, public history of grooming underage males but everyone looks the other way and celebrates her accomplishments. She literally got a job on Biden's campaign and yet barely anyone talks about it.
> Folks in the hacker community have a long history of being too forgiving of what should be hard-avoid character flaws.
Maybe, and while most are definitely quite progressive, I would hope most of them (including Deviant) do what they truly believe is the right thing. He has since deleted all his posts relating him to Keffals, so it's possible he just didn't realize how deep the rabbit hole went and has since chosen to cut off ties.
> She literally got a job on Biden's campaign and yet barely anyone talks about it.
Also, I can only rely on memory here, but I believe that Ollam only deleted his tweets with Keffals in the previous few months since Mutahar announced publicly that he was investigating Keffals for a video.
Not in the wake of other less visible creators voicing literally the exact same concerns. Not the doxxing campaigns, not the Catboy Ranch stuff and not the DIY hormone website stuff.
I get it. He's a very busy guy...but if you're going to engage in activism you need to be extra guarded about who your associations are with.
> how kiwifarms relates to the open internet that Null allows a lot of questionable things
In other words, an open internet. Doxxing is not illegal if your intent is not considered harassment or threatening (if it's just for "public shame" or ridicule, that's allowed). If the website or Josh's conduct WAS so illegal, it would have been dealt with already. You're whining at the wrong person, or perhaps, pissing into the wrong wind.
He continues to be sued every couple of months at least, by lots of angry people who were upset at things that were posted, whether by him or others, and he has won against them every single time. I think Melinda alone has sued him like six times, and always lost.
Also your archive links are crimeflared and the opposite of open.
>In other words, an open internet. Doxxing is not illegal if your intent is not considered harassment or threatening (if it's just for "public shame" or ridicule, that's allowed). If the website or Josh's conduct WAS so illegal, it would have been dealt with already. You're whining at the wrong person, or perhaps, pissing into the wrong wind.
He also allows revenge porn (wich is illegal to distribute in most of the usa), as I have mentioned elsewhere.
He's also refused to ban hackers before, and instead chose to punish someone criticizing them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40396348
>He continues to be sued every couple of months at least, by lots of angry people who were upset at things that were posted, whether by him or others, and he has won against them every single time. I think Melinda alone has sued him like six times, and always lost.
He's only been sued by 3 people in total. 2 of them have ongoing lawsuits against him. All of them are pro-se litigants and are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Melinda is the only person he's won against so far. He didn't win because of the merits of his case, he won because the other side wasn't capable of arguing theirs.
These are all from 8-10+ years ago and your first example doesn't say what you think it does. Everyone's said questionable things online. That was a catalyst of the deplatforming campaign if you read TFA.
I read the farms (mostly CWC's thread, some absolutely phenomenal original research), I'm aware of what generally happens there. The only real rule is that porn can't be posted for its own sake. It exists and has a right to do so.
The farms exists to shame degeneracy. It started as CWC farms to track the behavior of Chris-chan, of course it's going to be a crazy place. This does not mean they don't deserve access to the backbone of the Internet. You're making moral judgements about who gets to practice legal speech.
There are things on the website aren't legal speech or are at least legally questionable. Harassment is illegal for one.
The owner is fine with revenge porn being posted, and this has gotten him blocked by some hosts. He's also said he won't ban users who commit illegal acts.
I think this is more of a legal issue regarding selective enforcement and Section 230. He has a good lawyer and always wins his cases, maybe don't be so quick to claim he is being wreckless or breaking laws.
Revenge porn isn't generally illegal to post. Posting pornography as revenge is the illegal bit, generally speaking. Also, harassment is illegal in some cases, but talking on a public forum generally doesn't qualify. If the parties talked about it publicly and then committed it, that's their problem.
I'm anti-harassment and not in favor of revenge porn. Not really relevant to this discussion, where my position is simply that the law is the law, the government's job is to enforce the law, and companies should be out to make money, not make pretend laws and enforce them via silent agreements.
>Also, harassment is illegal in some cases, but talking on a public forum generally doesn't qualify. If the parties talked about it publicly and then committed it, that's their problem.
If the example of Null asking his users to harass someone doesn't count, then at what point can something be considered organized harassment?
Another example is the user "Not Based and Redpilled" hacking the game developer of Yandere Simulator. Other users were egging him on and giving suggestions on how to misuse the hacked account. Null was aware of it and described it as a violation of federal law, but didn't punish the hacker. In fact the only user who was punished was someone who criticized the hack: https://archive.is/dr0MR#10%
That page I linked lists all of the laws in the usa about revenge porn. Kiwifarms isn't based in nevada as far as I am aware, I believe it's west virginia or florida.
It is West Virginia. West Virginia's statute protects against illicit recordings in places with a reasonable expectation of privacy. It does not penalize someone who runs the platform where it is shared.
>(b) No person may knowingly and intentionally disclose, cause to be disclosed or threaten to disclose, with the intent to harass, intimidate, threaten, humiliate, embarrass, or coerce, an image of another which shows the intimate parts of the depicted person or shows the depicted person engaged in sexually explicit conduct which was captured under circumstances where the person depicted had a reasonable expectation that the image would not be publicly disclosed.
From "W. Va. Code §61-8-28a: Nonconsensual disclosure of private intimate images; definitions; and penalties."
There is nothing in the law that says it only bans illicit recordings (like creepshot videos). If you share a video that someone took of themself, you can be be prosecuted under it.
But yes, there is this clause in the law:
>(e) Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose liability on the provider of an interactive computer service as defined by 47 U.S.C. §230(f)(2), an information service as defined by 47 U.S.C. §153(24), or telecommunications service as defined by 47 U.S.C. §153(53), for content provided by another person.
I remember the FCC well enough to be very, very wary of a government-regulated internet. I'd personally rather see the internet become ungovernable - if everybody ran Freenet, Tor and I2P, there'd be nothing to censor, but too many people prefer the illusion of selective censorability for me to believe that will ever happen. What the government _can_ do without nationalizing the internet infrastructure is provide legal support for entities that want to do so in an open way by indemnifying them from "harm". I'd like to see section 230 not repealed, but made more explicit - "no forum can be held legally liable in any way for any content hosted, only the original poster".
idk, this is all appealing in an abstract way, but I don't think it results in a world most people want to live in.
we all draw the line in different places, but I think most would agree that some subset of user-submitted content is purely abusive. if the only recourse available to the victim requires identifying every individual poster, it's effectively impossible to stop.
imo some sort of safe harbor mechanism is a reasonable compromise. we can't expect the host to prevent every single instance of abusive content, but we should require them to make some kind of reasonable effort.
>imo some sort of safe harbor mechanism is a reasonable compromise. we can't expect the host to prevent every single instance of abusive content, but we should require them to make some kind of reasonable effort.
I'd say Kiwifarms has failed to make that kind of reasonable effort.
There is a good faith moderation clause in part of section 230, but I'm not sure how it has been enforced in the past or if it is similar to what you are thinking of.
The issue is, well, let me count the weasel words .. "most would agree", "some subset", "some sort of safe harbor", "some kind of reasonable effort".
You just hand wave all the difficult things away with the weasel words, but the majority of the population, in reality, in no way agree on the actual definition of any of the things you're referring to. Not what constitutes abusive content, nor what should be done with it, or whether anything even should be done with it.
I'm not writing a public policy proposal here. if you want a rough estimate of "most", you can take the percentage of libertarian- and anarchist-aligned people and subtract that from 100%.
yes, I'm being intentionally vague about "abusive content", because that's not really what I want to debate here. revenge porn might be a good example though. what fraction of people do you think would be okay with having their privately-shared nudes posted over and over with no practical recourse or mechanism for slowing it down? no one I know in real life would accept that.
I don't know the veracity of the claim, but Josh basically claims the EFF has been useless on this topic.
> At the time the Kiwi Farms deplatforming was starting to show cracks in the Internet backbones, the EFF even launched a petititon website called “Protect the Stack”, dedicated to trying to preserve the neutrality of the Internet. They have never contacted the Kiwi Farms directly to learn about where the stack is in danger, and as a result they have accomplished nothing! Despite the size, prestige, and financial support of the EFF, Protect the Stack has accomplished nothing!
One of his forum users posted the official death report (from 2021) in April 2024. He came out of nowhere to announce that, yes, he already had that report, he obtained it last year, and words words words about how right he was to not even mention it until his hand was forced.
No "I'm sorry for leading everyone on this whole time" or "RIP Byuu" because the guy's a sociopath concerned mainly about the reputation of himself and his site. But even raging sociopaths don't deserve null-routing.
Why don't you ask him about it instead of assuming an ulterior motive? I believe he did state that he could not verify if the records were real/accurate or not and questioned it himself, and only published it after that other user obtained one of the same documents via FOIA request (maybe this was enough "proof" that Josh's documents were likely genuine). I may not be 100% accurate on that but that's what I recall happening.
Service providers have already been policing websites. It didn't start with kiwifarms.
If you go on twitter and look at the profiles of registrars like namecheap, you'll often see them stating they will drop service to websites which are accused of being scams, spam or otherwise malicious.
The article talks about Hacker News comments "quoted in this article, that I am having trouble finding now on the live version of the site." As far as I can tell, the comment they're referring to is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053930, which appears to have been edited years after it was posted (judging by Wayback Machine snapshots), along with one of the replies, to redact the name of the person involved.
Edit: And now this post is marked as a "dupe", even though it doesn't appear to have been posted on Hacker News before. Weird.
Software incorrectly marked the post as a dupe - I've fixed that now.
We redact PII on HN pretty regularly. The basic principles are that we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted on HN, and we don't want HN commenters to use other people's personal details as ammunition.
It also got flagged four times in a row. Probably due to the subject matter and the person named therein. A friend sent me this and it blew my mind. Infra being this vulnerable to a single angry person is... Bad.
I'm glad this covers the "canonization cycle" that's popular among news sites right now. The path to getting something declared as truth on wikipedia is to convince an unqualified journalist to uncritically repeat your claims, and now you can point to that as an official source. Often it goes even deeper if you try to track down a source on wikipedia and it's a reputable news site citing another, citing another, citing another, all the way down to the original source being some cooking blog. This means that unqualified bloggers and the tech company who host the infrastructure are the final arbiters of truth.
What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system? In my mind there sadly isn't much of a choice. It means that Wikipedia is not so useful for charged political articles, and the number of articles achieving that status has continued to increase, but it also means it is generally good for technical and scientific articles as well as the more niche history articles that are more often written by subject experts than political wariors.
Wikipedia should admit that "verifiability" matters because truth matters, and that they can't get away from making judgments on what's true. in particular, making judgments about which sources are truthy, as they do, is a judgment on what's true.
If something true and important can't be written on Wikipedia, that is actually a problem. If something false can be written on Wikipedia because a truthy source has said it, that's a huge problem.
Wikipedia should also acknowledge that a source can be trustworthy in some areas and not in others, and that e.g. someone posting evidence of their own statements is more trustworthy than a third party saying what they said.
In short, it's not hard imagining better policies. It's maybe hard to imagine getting them implemented in the most socially gamed institution on the internet.
> What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system?
I propose journalists should do their own research like the old days, and directly talk to the people in question, then form their own conclusions and report that, instead of just regurgitating third-hand blogspam.
Perhaps I misread GP. I thought he took issue with the accepted sources system although he didn't say that explictly. I agree with you and GP that the so called trusted sources should be better.
Some news articles about kiwifarms might get a few minor details wrong. I've seen one mix up the timeline of the site's founding. But they describe the site's content accurately. The wikipedia article for kiwifarms seems fair to me.
More damning @dang why have allegations of inappropriate behaviour of Fong-Jones been silently redacted on hacker news but unfounded allegations against kiwifarms is allowed?
Well for starters that Kiwifarms killed Byuu. There is no evidence that it was bullying or harassment from kiwi farms that caused his him to commit suicide.
I mean, there is no evidence of claims against Fong-jones apart from the allegations recorded in the hacker news thread (and the admission of a "consent-accident"), and I've never seen actual evidence of kiwifarms being the actual cause of Buy's death, yet it is repeatedly claimed as such.
> Well for starters that Kiwifarms killed Byuu. There is no evidence that it was bullying or harassment from kiwi farms that caused his him to commit suicide.
Byuu/Near is the one who blames kiwifarms in their suicide note on twitter.
>But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible
>[...]
>It's too late for me, but I pray that someone, at some point, will do something about that website. There's too many people suffering, and no one seems to care because we are relative nobodies online, and they know that. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
>[...]
>I would have kept going if Joshua Moon had shown me just the tiniest bit of compassion. But he chose not to. That's not on me, that's on him. That's on every last person who pushed me to this point and didn't let up. I never deserved any of this.
Misgendering someone (Liz Fong-Jones pronouns, as documented on her own sites, are she/her) does tend to undermine the credibility that this is a legitimate grievance. Surely given the length at which the author writes on her, they would be aware of this, so it can only be assumed to be a deliberate transphobic act.
The defamation case mentioned in Australia appears not to have been responded to (see https://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2023...), but the judge in the case was satisfied that she was actually defamed and doxxed on the site, that she had been harassed as a result of that doxxing, and that the plaintiff had been informed in advance and had done nothing.
It seems legitimate that courts in that case should be able to take such things down.
Hello - I am the author of this article. Yes, my choice of pronoun was deliberate. I will allow you to determine why.
In regards to the litigation, your interpretation is wrong. The main reason why the default was granted is that LFJ lied in the affidavits to the court. It was stated under penalty of perjury that the IPs were absolutely necessary for the site to be able to stay up.
The site is still up and you may access it on the normal Internet with a normal browser. No IPs from Flow Chemical are in use. Therefore, LFJ's claims that the IPs were necessary are a lie.
The other claim significant to the litigation is that I am unserviceable. That the need to sue Vincent was that there is no way to sue me. I am currently involved in two, soon three, separate ongoing civil litigations in the United States. My attorney's address can be found by a link present on every single page of the Kiwi Farms. Simply put, LFJ lied that there is no way to service me.
Perhaps, if my website was Australian, it would be within the Court's jurisdiction to object to its contents and order it removed. Fortunately, it is American.
In your article you state that kiwifarms has rules against harassment:
>If I ask Google Gemini to describe the Kiwi Farms in a sentence, it tells me “a controversial web forum known for its users' online harassment and stalking campaigns against various individuals and communities”, despite the Kiwi Farms having explicit and enforced rules against contacting people off-site (i.e. harassment).
Why weren't these rules enforced against users such as "Not Based and Redpilled" when he hacked the game developer of Yandere Simulator? You were aware of it and described it as a violation of federal law. In fact, the only user who was punished was someone who criticized the hack: https://archive.is/dr0MR#10%
Well of course they do. The whole point of the argument is that LFJ is so hellbent on trying to take Josh's site down in any and all ways possible, every single day, continually for years, and people are letting them get away with it. They both have axes to grind with each other.
If you had swarms of people that wished you dead and did everything they could to mess with you for years and years, you'd get angry at people too. You may not agree with his conduct but I think he is still fighting a good fight nonetheless. It's not like he has fled the country for no good reason.
If he just wanted kiwifarms to be a gossip forum he could have banned doxxing.
He doesn't allow doxxing out of a commitment to free speech. The forum doesn't actually have that much free speech. If you criticize him you will get banned pretty fast.
There isn't much transparency either. Banned users aren't marked as being banned. And bans are often done without public notification. So unlike most forums, you can't tell if someone has been banned.
It is an article about censorship. If someone in the USSR were writing an article about censorship, it would be in line with the articles themes to criticize the government. To make explicit the things being censored. It's the same here.
How is it anti-censorship to deliberately refer to someone incorrectly?
If you call a pelican a seagull, I'm not censoring you if I tell you that it's actually a pelican. And if you continue to call it a pelican because you have a problem with seagulls and think they suck, I'm also not censoring you if I point out you're being a jerk. Free speech goes both ways!
This is more like a seagull that wants everyone to call it a pelican on the dubious basis that it claims to have a 'pelican identity', despite not actually being a pelican.
There's nothing wrong with rejecting that demand and continuing to refer to it as a seagull, is there?
Im impressed by your psychic ability to read a person’s chromosomes just by looking at their face, cause if I saw them out of context I’d assume they were female.
>It seems legitimate that courts in that case should be able to take such things down.
The Kiwi Farms posts that supposedly defamed Fong-Jones were made by American users and the man sued in Australia had absolutely no connection to them other than leasing IPs to Joshua Moon's company. It's absolutely not legitimate. The only reason the man in Australia was sued is because Fong-Jones would not win a lawsuit against Joshua or the users of the site.
Joshua specifically talks about the legitimacy of the lawsuit in the article:
"In affidavits supplied to Australian court, Liz Fong-Jones has promised under penalty of perjury that these IP addresses are critical to the Kiwi Farms’s operations, uptime, and (most importantly) ability to deliver mean posts about him to the world-wide Internet.
We have not used these IP addresses in a year, and only used them publicly for less than a year. How critical these IP addresses are can be easily determined by the fact that the Kiwi Farms remains available to the world-wide Internet, and that we do not use any Flow Chemical IP addresses in doing
You've posted that link at least six times here and I'm guessing it's you spamming it over on Substack. People have pointed out the problems they have with that source, repeatedly. I would reiterate that most of your examples of alleged malfeasance are from a decade ago and that none of what's been said is illegal in the United States. You can dislike Josh all you want but it does not make him deserving of tortious interference in his affairs.
Some of the examples are rather recent, and there's no evidence of the site's behavior changing. The point is that the site has allowed harassment, contrary to what the owner claims.
How have the complaints against him been tortious interference? As far as I am aware, they have been factual.
Revenge porn has gotten the forum dropped by some providers.
One of the complaints Liz fong jones had about the forum was that her social security number was being shared on there: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/03/kiwifar...
I think that has gotten kiwifarms dropped by other providers, since it apparently this came up in her leaked emails complaining about the forum.
A transphobe is assmad that a transgender person attempted to get his harassment forum taken off the internet for doing shit that violates ISPs' terms of service and, in some cases, the law; and, since transgender people run the internet now, was almost successful.
Hackernews is totally at sixes and sevens about whom to believe or support.
I assume part of the confusion that people have is that kiwifarms harassment is not (always) blatantly obvious. Most of the time, they don't outright say "go harass this person" (unlike other sites).
The users claim they have rules against harassment and that they don't engage in it. But as demonstrated by the links I've posted elsewhere in this thread, that is not entirely true. The owner of the site has admitted to allowing harassment, and has even directed it on some occasions
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police...
Courts and judges seem slow and fuddy-duddy, but they're conducted in public, and you have legal avenues of appeal. Unregulated private businesses can do whatever the fuck they like, and that includes just fucking with you because of personal vendettas. Private businesses that fuck with arbitrary people aren't worthy of being a nation's internet backbone. That behaviour needs reigned in, and common carrier status needs to apply.
That said, Josh is a piece of shit. He's been trying to maintain the PR line that his forum didn't kill Byuu; they didn't, but they double down and claim Byuu isn't even dead. He's had evidence for over a year that Byuu died exactly as claimed, and he didn't bother publishing it and correcting the public record because it made his site look bad. He's normally so eager to publish the truth of awful internet behaviour, but he's silent on his own site's dirty deeds. What else is he hiding?