I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...
They also provide a good counter to propaganda. You don't have to believe you get Covid chipped or in evil lizard people to see serious and concerning displays of media propaganda. And yes, it is US corporations in cooperation with government far more than the Russians on the English speaking net. There is just as much propaganda in Russia in Russian of course.
It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even more effectively as it did in the past.
I think there are much better ways to counter propaganda than running a site that doxxes people you don't like and harasses them to the point they commit suicide. We should not enable folks like this.
If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.
It isn't about this site in particular. These are people that make fun of others, there is no deeper "service" the platform provides, no particular insights to be gained. It is morally questionable endeavor to stay diplomatic and I hope users can learn to moderate themselves.
The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.
Note that "the site" doesn't do this. Some of their users may do so and may or may not (I couldn't dig very deep before it went down) organise via the site.
the counter to propaganda is thoughtful, deep investigation of the matter at hand, getting at least some minimal subject matter expertise and getting the opinion of experts, etc. (nowadays this has the fancy name of epistemological rationalism)
KF is at best more/different propaganda against the mainstream propaganda
That's more of a measure of how inadequate your laws currently are. I view GP's measure to be far more accurate and reasonable, and one that I use myself.
Harassment (e.g. attempting to communicate with someone with the intent to upset them) is indeed bad for discourse and should be stopped. However, talking to other likeminded people about how much X sucks and you hate them would not be harassment.
By this logic, there is no way you can deny someone their freedom of speech. What is the difference between someone putting you on death row for speaking out against the government versus publishing your information so that angry randos can do the same? Is the only problem with government censorship that their violence is somehow "special" and worse than other forms of violence?
I'm not an expert in KiwiFarms, but I think the difference between the goverment putting you to death and what KiwiFarms does is they don't put you to death. My understanding is they basically talk shit about people and talk to each other about how to let the person they dislike know how much they dislike them. It's a nasty and horrible version of protesting.
Say you dislike Donald Trump and you want to talk shit about Donald Trump and you want to organise a protest againist Donald Trump, you want to hurt his interests by organising a boycott of his companies, or say random things like you wish he was blown up, etc. This would be roughly the same as what I understand KiwiFarms do. Big difference is, KiwiFarms do this to random people for no other reason that for laughs from people they call lolcows.
These are trolls. Nasty horrible people. However, my understanding is they don't put people to death or even commit acts of violence. They are the internet version of the Phelps family.
Maybe we should ban criticism against politicians while we are at it. If we don't do that then politicians will be harassed off the internet which of course would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Politicians are harassed all the time and it is frequently organized. They are told they should die, they are bullied, etc. Their house address is frequently put on the internet. There is no difference between the harassment leveled towards people on KiwiFarms and what politicians experience on a daily basis.
I swear you have spent the last week doing nothing but making bad faith arguments and refusing to listen to or concede a single point. It’s QAnon level behaviour and for what?
I don't like people going after others while trying to censor them. You are doing the same thing as me. Honestly, it's authoritarian level behavior and for what?
Honestly, is it their goal? Admittedly, I'm not an expert in Kiwifarms, however, I understand they've taken a dislike to many people for various reasons, not just LGBT folk.
Calling it "harassment" is perhaps a bit misleading if it's people gossiping about and making fun of someone behind their back. Harassment generally involves intentional (as opposed to incidental) communication to the target. The issue is that this forum (like Twitter and other forums) is generally readable by the public, so someone can observe two people saying stuff about them, but it's not addressed to them.
It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.
KF's concept of “large public show” has very little connection to reality. No matter how small a target tries to make their audience, they are not guaranteed to escape harassment. Like on a school playground, the bullies pick on people who are unpopular.
Correct, and as an unpopular person myself (just ask around), I'm saying that the status quo is fine. The alternative is simply too dangerous to consider, particularly for queer communities that rely on the good graces of internet freedom to communicate within hostile regimes. Setting this precedent could very well encourage other countries to strongarm service providers into dropping customers, or worse yet lead to astroturfing that takes down perfectly innocent messageboards. What happens when China tries to claim that GitHub is hosting content that's highly offensive to Chinese citizens? Does Microsoft bend?
This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
I wonder how many people remember when the censorship online was wielded against queer people?
Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised.
I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
Maybe it's not my place to speculate, but I think the modern generation of TikTok queers and image-obsessed teens has completely forgotten that social media only gives them a platform because they profit off every like and view. If the shoe was on the other foot (say, they were trying to increase profits in queer-hostile countries) they would have no problem silencing your voice just to increase user retention. This already happens on TikTok, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened on Twitter and Facebook, to lesser extents. A sad allegory for the state of queer solidarity in 2022, I guess.
Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
> Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people.
I'm already starting to see the swing back.
Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
Of course corporations would crush queer people if it made them money. But defending KF won't change that one bit. The error is assuming that the people who'd treat gay people so badly would be swayed one bit by "well, we didn't get cloudflare to take down that forum full of bigots."
I don't want them to be swayed, I want them to be able to speak their (wrong) ideas. It's fine if people want to spread lies about gay people, or even engage in hateful harassment campaigns. Homophobic violence is where I draw the line, but we have hate crimes explicitly designed for deterring and prosecuting these offenses. Everything else, in my opinion, falls under the purview of fair expression. Obviously Cloudflare doesn't have any obligation to serve them, but that's not going to stop them from continuing their harassment campaigns. It just pushes them onto more esoteric, resilient platforms.
The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
Plenty of us remember. We also don't believe that protecting KF is in any way going to prevent those sorts of threats against the speech and association of queer groups online.
For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here.
And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?
And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.
Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it.
Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
I don't really understand the relevance here. The claim above, as I understood it, was that older queer people would be more cautious around supporting actions taken against unsavory speech because they remember being viciously targeted via those same means and fear them being used against their community once again.
I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.
This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.
This is going to be a subjective broad statement based on my experience of using the Internet for 20 years and growing up in the West: I think your thought experiment holds water. I think the older generations (30-35+) just care about being accepted by society for who they are and not denied anything everyone else has (jobs, housing, using the swimming pool, etc.). I think it is the younger generations who don't want just acceptance but almost a totalitarian adherence to their world view. This is where we get the majority of content around issues and it becomes non-negotiable as we've seen from other comments in this thread around medication. I still believe the most extreme voices are the ones that are the loudest.
"Hey, remember how we left up that hate website" isn't going to convince any authoritarian regime to treat gay people with respect. The history of oppression is littered with examples of legal protections simply not being granted to oppressed groups and I'd fully expect such an authority to just continue on crushing gay people beneath its heel regardless of how KF was dealt with.
I agree with everything you said, but that's only because none of it addressed anything I said. Authoritarian regimes will always have reason to hate anyone outside the standard model of a citizen. Our concept of internet freedom and service neutrality is what helps these oppressed people connect and share their stories. This already happened in the 90s, where LGBT BBS' and messageboards gave like-minded people places to reach out with each other. Later, this gave rise to platforms like Vice News and dozens of other media outlets that could freely report on queer topics without fear of persecution.
In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
So, they pick on Russians and Islamic fundamentalists? Labor organizers? Democratically elected socialist leaders in Latin America? Or maybe Julian Assange? Oh wait, they must pick on poor people! If any of that has been the case, then good riddance. Somehow one doubts that.
Sounds like you've internalized the idea that it's OK to be a punching bag for other people and if you retaliate when attacked that makes you a bad person. This is your right of course, but why should anyone else feel obliged to subscribe to your moral/risk calculus?
It has nothing to do with being good or bad. Might is right. Being morally good doesn't prevent harm from coming to you unless an effectively mightier faction deters it.
> Same rules as getting bullied on the playground, if you pick a fight with the people harassing you, then you're liable to get beat up.
Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
For a standard school bully, if you're a big enough problem for the bully they move on to an easier target. Even if you fight back and lose, the bully is far more likely to move on to another target that doesn't pose a response damage risk to them (the only way that isn't true, is if you're entirely unable to pose any physical threat to them, then they may be amused by the attempt to fight back).
This has very little in common with how playground rules work.
> Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
I don't think any fight has ever stopped once someone else starts throwing punches, certainly not on KiwiFarms. The only thing they care about is how you react. If you start getting mad on Twitter, then they'll take the fight to Twitter. If you start a public campaign to take them down, the users will obviously take it personally. If you reached out to the police and talked with a therapist/loved one... what would they do? In the hyper-sensational age though, the only response anyone wants is to make an eye-opening TikTok for their 15 seconds of fame... so long as they aren't hated, that sort of fame is obviously verboten.
My goal isn't to take a shot for KiwiFarms or blame the victims here. I'm simply expressing that, as a queer person, I prefer to live in a world where KiwiFarms is allowed to exist. It's a horrible place populated by increasingly toxic people, but without it the internet lacks balance. Without websites like KiwiFarms, it's hard to feel secure hosting anything that others are allowed to use. On the other side of that coin, the people lobbying against KiwiFarms are largely stationed on centralized platforms. They're encouraging a future where all of our communication is commodified and owned by private interests. Maybe it is too late to save the internet, but I'll be the last one to adopt the fatalist mindset that everything requires direct moderation.
> Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
Honestly, this is a myth. One day, I decided to follow the "stand up to the bullies and they'll leave you alone" stuff my mother sprouted off. It started with two on two. Two bullies were threatening me and my mate, and I said to my mate we should stand up to them and they'll leave us alone. My mate decided to run. The bullies chased after him. I decided to stop the bullies and stood in there way. What happened over the course of 5-10 minutes was me standing up to these bullies, every time someone they knew came along they asked for help, eventually it was something silly like 10 of them versus me. I'm not too sure of the number because eventually someone jumped me from behind and I was beated until I was out cold. I was found by some girls who then told Janitor that I was dead. That Janitor then came to where they said I was and saw me not moving and thought I was dead. He had the unpleasurable experience of thinking he just found a 10-year old kid dead in a school hallway.
I stood up to every bully. I beat every single one of them up at some point. One bully left the school because of a beating I gave him. You know what changed? Nothing until i started dealing with them differently. Once I started acting like I couldn't care less they stopped their taunting and name calling and all the other stuff that I would beat them up for.
Hard to believe that people honestly use that poem in situations like this. The poem was about not resisting virulent bigotry enough. It isn't about platforming bigots.
This is a pretty weak argument and extremely susceptible to Goodhart’s Law. It feels like you’re treating the existence of vile sites like this as a metric for the health of internet free speech. Be careful you don’t make the continued existence of such bigotry your target
This is just civilized society finally catching up with criminals on the internet, the internet as a tolerant forum for information exchange and discussion was lost as soon as serious money got involved.
Sure! We just need websites that organize brigading and harassing trans-people, women, and minorities until they commit suicide. Its an utter requirement of civilization. /cringe
I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this).
When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.
I've lurked on KF with an empty account for a couple of years. (I have an interest in niche drama and as a lesbian, trans drama is pushed into any space for lesbians ANYWAY).
I didn't see brigading, but I did see doxxing.
And of course the whole thing is a mentally-toxic nut-picking echo chamber, but that's kind of par for the course on the modern Web.
This is my experience of Kiwifarms. If you do not have a thick skin, you should not be reading there. Moreover, most of the internet is probably not suitable for people who do not want to experience offense.
And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
I have seen many more threats against Kiwifarms that I have seen originate from within it. The forum seems to be a melting pot for grossly offensive people to make grossly offensive comments. And considering 4chan is still around (even if it only used to have a problem with CSAM) I'm at a loss at why Kiwifarms is being "deplatformed".
I can only assume it's like the "jailbait" subreddit - something reprehensible but action is only taken when it gets media attention.
The hilarious thing is that neither side are good or nice people. I've been queer online longer than keffels has been alive and I've been anti-censorship the entire time partially because I remember when people were trying to censor LGBT+ information. This is like my two mentally ill parents fighting.
One side is going to call me a dyke, carpet-muncher, and link the fact that I like women to being a child groomer.
The other is going to call me transphobic, a bitch, a cunt, and a TERF for not wanting to suck dick/not wanting all queer spaces to be about trans issues 24/7.
> And if I am brutally honest, from the threads I have seen, the people they make posts about are not people I would want to associate myself with or anywhere near young members of my family.
This is one thing that pisses me off about people like keffals. When I was a baby queer in the mid 90s, it was functionally impossible to talk to gay adults in person at all because the AIDS epidemic had convinced society that all gay people were dangerous degenerates. The Internet changed that. Since I had WWW access, I could talk to gay adults and realize that a.) you could find love being gay, b.) get advice on what to avoid and how to stay safe, and c.) start to plan out a gay life for myself. Nobody was ever inappropriate with me. (That was always straight men...) Keffels et al. are dragging us right back so gay adults can't support gay kids that are genuinely in danger or suicidal. Thanks, guys.
At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
> At this point, parents are RIGHT to be leery of the most vocal parts of the queer community, because we refuse to eject predators.
This is something I feel too, having seen some of the most fringe communities on the internet (a good example is furrys) and how they act predatory around children. I am afraid to say it to any of my friends, colleagues, or even my partner as I feel like I would be seen as bigoted.
I think some people don't see how some behaviour is completely inappropriate (like that Reddit moderator who had a parent that raped children in the attic and, thanks to Kiwifarms, you saw how they were also very predatory). It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
Those people are sometimes right that an INORDINATE amount of moral panic are focused on LGBT+ people. (Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women).
On the other hand, most of them are so urban and online that they can't conceive of trying to navigate this space as a normie parent. Most normal parents are AWARE that strange men are potential dangers to female people and teach us about it accordingly so we're wary, we can go to them or teachers if someone DOES prey on us, etc. (I see a lot of warnings to teen girls that 'that guy doesn't think he's mature for your age, he just wants someone easy to manipulate').
But most normal parents aren't plugged into the queer community enough to teach their kids how to avoid predators in those spaces. And most of those parents just have too much else going on to learn - if somebody is working 50 hours a week with 3 kids, they don't have TIME to keep up with the drama of who was revealed to be a predator this week. And the instinct to not take chances when it comes to one's child's safety makes sense.
> What annoys me is this is the exact behaviour that turns people into right wing lunatics. It provides the fuel for their conspiracies/hoaxes/insane ramblings.
One of the reasons I made an account for lurking was to watch and see where waves of newbies arrived to KF from and why. There are a lot of participants who ended up there after what they wanted to discuss was completely banned from the other places they talked about things online.
> It seems that as soon as you say this about someone that is trans though, you are a labeled a massive bigot.
The lack of tolerance for dissent or deviation bothers me. In a lot of places, you can't even have procedural or intellectual disagreements about trans orthodoxy, or discuss how some of the rhetoric is hurtful to other members of the community. It's very 'there is one way to be and only one way'. Very similar to conservative Christian spaces. (My family is half conservative Christians, so I'm familiar with THEIR filter bubbles too).
> Again, all the people who tried to prey on me were straight dudes and I think the percentage of predators are roughly equal between straight cis guys and trans women
Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women? But you're further saying that you think trans women are as likely to be predators as straight men? Doesn't your own experience contradict that?
You're upset that the trans women posted on KF are going to make the public think all LGBT people are groomers. I'm upset that they'll make the public think all trans women are groomers. And comments like yours feel like punching down, frankly.
Girls are mostly preyed on when they're younger than 20- and mostly when they're in middle and high school. At the time, out trans women were rare enough that no, none of the people who tried to prey on me identified as such. I haven't looked everyone up to make sure that they still identify that way, obviously.
So there's a confounding variable. If 5% of straight cis men and 5% of trans women are predators but I only meet 2 trans women, odds are I'm never going to run into a trans woman predator. Whereas being a geek in the 90s and 00s I was SURROUNDED by cis straight dudes. It was very common for me to be the only female in the room, or there to be less than 5 of us at a computer show.
(I also think women and trans men are about as likely to be predators but that they show/act it out differently. I tend to think assholeishness/predatory natures are fairly equally dispersed across different identity groups but expressed differently due to socio-cultural factors.)
> Wait, so you're saying 100% of the people who tried to prey on you were straight cis guys, and 0% were trans women?
Isn't it a numbers game? ~50% of the population are men. You see thousands of men a day (if you don't WFH). I think the occurrence rate of trans people (in real life) is vastly smaller.
I think it is entirely reasonable for the likelihood of predation to be the same, but not experience any from one group that is vastly under-represented in daily life.
Trans people weren't a substantial portion of queer spaces until the mid to late 2010s, and I'm talking about the 90s and early-mid 00s. There was also more of a focus on passing/not talking about it + it was more common to be in the closet, so even if I had been acquainted with trans women, I probably wouldn't have known.
On the other hand, I've seen entitled behavior from trans women in lesbian spaces post 2015ish. It just hasn't been directed at me personally because predators choose their victims based on vulnerability and I aged out of that. Not many sexual predators go after men or women OLDER than they are.
The focus on passing/not talking about it might return. I'm fortunate enough to pass. The past few years I felt like I ought to be out, irl, to dispel the negative stereotypes my conservative acquaintances were hearing about. But things are getting increasingly ugly, and I get treated better when people don't know I'm trans, so I've stopped speaking up.
I'm growing my hair out and have started painted my nails and wearing dresses again, and the binders have gone back in a box. (I'm not trans but I like male clothing).
Likewise, I WANT to be out, especially since a lot of younger queer people are so very '!' when they see stable adult queer people, but unfortunately, the in-fighting means not only can I not trust the general populace to be chill, I can't trust my fellow queers not to throw me under the bus for being too 'privileged'. (Even though I'm poor and disabled, because all that matters is cis + white.)
Good point, actually, I forgot about prior probability. I concede the logic of your point.
Personally, I am a trans woman, so my social circle includes many more trans women than the average. And I am not a predator, and I don't know any predators personally, so I conclude we're not likely to be predators. But I'm just a random person on the internet, so you can't know if I'm telling the truth, or even if I am, whether my circle of friends is a representative sample of trans women in general.
I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
> I do find it distressing how the worst examples of my group are held up as typical of us, though.
I agree! Which is why I made the point about straight men also being gross and my point that people should be leery because we (queer people) are doing a bad job ejecting predators and holding them accountable, not because we're any worse. And that's not just about trans women: There's a large problem with some cis gay men sexualizing teenage boys, and I will absolutely throw hands over that, too.
Also, since you are not a predator, I assume you wouldn't want to be friends with predators and would not support groups with predators in them, so predatory trans women probably don't want to be friends with you bc you'd call their asses out. Predators seek out friends and spaces that allow them to prey on people. You not having predatory friends just says your circle is not a safe space for predators which is good.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that you may not know. A lot of abusers/predators act like good people outside of their abuse victims. Nobody in my communities would have known or suspected my parents were abusive, for example. Or how many people find out suddenly that their dad/grandpa/uncle are creeps.
I just point this out because a loooot of cis straight guys say the same thing to girls and women: "Well, none of MY friends sexually harrass/rape/assault people, so it can't be that common!" Except that it is.
I think there are a lot of variables that go into understanding these things, and that non-queer people who are suddenly thrust into it once their kids come out have no way to orient themselves, which is WHY we should be more diligent.
Yes. I follow/consume media from roughly 400-1000 people on the internet. I don't know any trans people in real life but probably a good dozen or two dozen of these people I follow online (tech, art, etc. you know, normal stuff people like) are trans. That's quite statistically significant, I've only (knowingly) met 1 trans person in real life but at least 4% of the people I follow online are trans. Nearly all of them being trans women.
I think trans people get a shit time online because as soon as the topic enters anything to do with activism it is only the loudest and most extreme voices that are amplified.
This is a shame for all of the people within LGBT who these voices drown out, including other trans people.
I've been on there when some harrassment stuff has came up in the past and have seen some threads. It's probably 0.00x% of it's posts but it's also what it's famous for.
So you go to the source site _after_ the evil things they've done are reported on, and the site posted a rebuttal. And you think you're getting a true, unaltered representation of the things that occured BEFORE this happened? Bad take.
> saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading
Either because it was now removed or hidden from public view. These activities have definitely occured on KF and just because you "don't see it happening now", doesn't mean it hasn't.
Right now there is no way to have a good faith argument due to the witch hunt. Anyone who 'confessed' to being active is a witch so their word is no good, and anyone who isn't active doesn't know the dark sorceries of the inner circle so their word is no good.
I walked into a nightclub and asked for sex. I did not get sex, so therefore nightclubs are not places people go for sex. All those people claiming nightclubbers hook up for one night stands seems like scurrilous slander to me. It’s terrible to see people believing the journalists who attended night clubs for years and reported on their supposed sexual exploits over my story which is clearly a sign of leftist bias. Why do these people believe a journalist over my reliable reporting?
I am sometimes very worried about the apparent naivete of people who think this way, and then I am even more worried thinking that they might just be intentionally obtuse.
If freedom of speech doesn't protect Kiwifarms I don't see why we should put up with sex workers either. Either we should defend speech we don't like or we should make the world a better place.
You realize that Cloudflare took down a bunch of sites with sex workers on them already, right? Including ones that weren't actually violating any laws. The internet already slipped off that particular slippery slope.
"First they came for the Nazis" is how World War II could be described (1), and with the exception of a few misguided sympathizers the story ends well with the destruction of their power structure and hanging of their leadership.
Probably worth noting that among the reasons KF just lost their newest DDoS protector is that many Russians are understandably sensitive to Nazi sympathizing, even "for the lulz".
(1) One could even argue that hesitating to come for the Nazis sooner was a significant mistake in the international community that allowed the severity of the War and the atrocities that occurred in it.
The Germans came for the Nazis. The Weimar Republic was very much in favor of imprisoning them for their (detestable) ideals and proposals. The Nazis were able to parlay this persecution (and Weimar failures) into an increasing share of the electorate and eventually total control.
Leaving out the 1923 putsch in Munich damages your argument beyond repair. Nazis' legal troubles in the Weimar era were not simply the result of unpopular ideas ruffling feathers in high places.
This is what my critics who say things like "lol, we know you're for censorship" don't understand. The Nazi movement rose because they were free to express their vile ideology. Germany prevented renazification for 80 years through censorship.
This was what Marcuse was getting at in "Repressive Tolerance". Some views deserve free expression. Others do not. If you give free expression to all perspectives, the vile ones will spread until you can't control them anymore, and then you're no longer a tolerant society but a repressive one.
We have the means and now the will to identify vile speech online and shut it down at the network level.
The Nazis also breathed air; that doesn't make breathing air immediately suspect.
Can we think of some good reasons for suppression of communication? I can name several (disruption of ongoing stochastic terrorism, disruption of immediate harassment process, failure to comply with the TOS of a private corporation voluntarily doing business with the offending party, use of network compromising service provision for third parties in the same system), and many of them apply to the KF situation.
Correct, and the difference between them and KF is (a) their market cap and (b) the work they've done, consistently, to address issues when they come up, up to and including using automation to scale the moderation pipeline.
KF either can't or won't keep its house in order, and at this point, the can't-won't difference is immaterial. I welcome someone making a solid run at providing another channel alongside Twitter / FB / et al, but this ain't it.
That difference is, I fear, ideological rather than principled.
Think of all the harassment directed at Kyle Rittenhouse, or the Covington Catholic kids, or just Republicans generally, on reddit and Twitter. Harassment was featured on the front page.
That isn't a small problem that the moderators are unaware of; it's an ideological belief that certain harassment is acceptable.
It's almost certainly both, because Nazism is also an ideology (one with no platform given and no platform deserved).
FWIW, I've gotten kicked from FB far more often for vitriolic criticism of the right than the left. At least to my eye, they try to steer an even keel... If people are seeing more Republicans get snagged, I think it's because of their own social circle (because filter bubbles are pretty thick these days).
