How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please. They are drawing the line at imminent threats to human life. The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...
Somehow it's Freedom when a company refuses to make a cake for a gay couple, but Tyranny if a company providing hosting and DDOS protection services decide not to work with a company who explicitly violates their terms of service.
I'm not saying they are equivalent. I'm saying that all the people screaming that this is tyranny hold very different views on denying other people services based on a protected class. I'm pointing out how silly it is to be okay with a baker refusing gay customers but thinking this is the end of freedom on the internet.
The subject of both is a business denying service. The difference is the motivation for denying the service. The folks who complain the most about denying services to bigots and trolls who violate terms of service are completely okay about denying service based off of innate characteristics. I'm not suggesting that if you support one you need to support the other, rather that it's very curious which things these people most vocally support and which things are unacceptable to them. Just like you'll literally never find them defending leftists who get kicked off of these services either.
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
Kiwifarms deserve no love, but this argument doesn't add up the slightest. Instagram was founded to make money from its users, so why would I allow it to operate if people kill themselves because of the peer pressure displayed in such social networks?
Is it really so hard to understand that it is still censorship even if it is legal?
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
>How is this censorship? They are a company and can do business with whoever they please.
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
No single company has "the ability to exercise total control" on the internet, otherwise Kiwifarms / DailyStormer / 8chan would all be offline. This is not censorship, it's cause and effect or consequences or the free market depending on your slant.
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
Drone strikes and domestic spying have always had huge literal and figurative blast radiuses. Ask someone who is on the no fly list because they have the exceedingly common name of Mohammad.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd put money on that. Your wager is "by September 2027, Cloudflare will remove sites critical of the imperial powers using hate speech as a cover for removing said critical content"?
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
> Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
That’s an idiotic saying which justifies criminalizing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people for something they have no control over. In none of the cases that I mentioned are these ideologies anything but an extremely fringe and non-influential minority.
Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.
There's a logical fallacy called the slippery slope. It's not an effective thinking strategy. Cloudflare simply chose not to protect a site full of bullies. As is their right. They hardly silenced anyone.
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
"Surely, we will see many more websites go down"
These sites all chose to use cloudflare - not the other way around. cloudflare has zero control over these sites. If cloudflare stops to provide them with their service, they can just move somewhere else. cloudflare is not the internet, they just take themselves way to seriously. What they have built is not unique, it is just very large. They are not preventing kiwifarm from expressing themselves in any way shape or form. If kiwifarm wants DDOS protection, they can find a different DDOS protection service, and if they find out they are so despised that noone will take them, then they can make their own DDOS protection service. They aren't owed a platform for their shitty views. Just like I am not owed one for my arguably much less shitty views.
I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
They’ve lost numerous hosts already. Very few companies want to be associated with this kind of thing. So as they were discovered they tend to get dropped.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
More importantly: they're not protected by a reverse proxy anymore. Behold, people can attack freely. Uptime will turn to shit, people will grow bored of trying to access it.
i too enjoy supporting fascist and right wing groups whose only goal is to spread hatred anarchy and violence.
CF is not the internet, nor is it a government. you can always found or find a provider for your hate speech, just like KF did with an .RU domain.
your viewpoint is the terrifying one, and quite frankly one that has been used over the decades to allow hateful bullshit in the name of "tolerance" and has caused undue harm and death.
your philosophical pure idea of freedom of speech is just that-- it does not work in the real world.
