Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)(eff.org)
eff.org
Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/internet-not-facebook-why-infrastructure-providers-should-stay-out-content
16 comments
It really looks like the only motivation for Cloudflare stopping service to a client is whether it personally angers the CEO.
I think we've had three letters already where he's basically saying "gee I really hate doing that, but I'm doing it anyway".
I think we've had three letters already where he's basically saying "gee I really hate doing that, but I'm doing it anyway".
I agree with the general framework of the argument but as always there's more to it.
If a group of criminals are conducting their business out of a motel room, is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them? Most would say the police, right?
The thing with KiwiFarms and a lot of these other sites is that law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them because there are thousands of them and when one goes, another appears. So in the face of ineffective policing, the people pressure and protest the next entity who could actually affect change, Cloudflare.
The reality is that these sites cannot be effectively and efficiently policed and until someone finds a way to do that in the most minimally harmful way possible, we're still going to see mobs protesting take-downs and companies capitulating to the demands.
If a group of criminals are conducting their business out of a motel room, is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them? Most would say the police, right?
The thing with KiwiFarms and a lot of these other sites is that law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them because there are thousands of them and when one goes, another appears. So in the face of ineffective policing, the people pressure and protest the next entity who could actually affect change, Cloudflare.
The reality is that these sites cannot be effectively and efficiently policed and until someone finds a way to do that in the most minimally harmful way possible, we're still going to see mobs protesting take-downs and companies capitulating to the demands.
Law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them, because the ones in the spotlight haven't actually broken the law, and the "harassment campaign" is extremely exaggerated.
It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.
It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.
>but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it
This doesn't fill me with hope; I'm not sure why I should trust the website's claim[0] that they enforce these rules with a one strike policy over the people who say that KF users have harassed them after organizing on KF. The law may not have been broken, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a supposed moral imperative to carry those bytes if I'm someone like Cloudflare.
[0] A website which, uncontroversially, is more than happy to host (and encourage) users who are known to laugh at people for who they are and revel in scooped information, a fact which decreases the trustworthiness of the operators in my eyes.
This doesn't fill me with hope; I'm not sure why I should trust the website's claim[0] that they enforce these rules with a one strike policy over the people who say that KF users have harassed them after organizing on KF. The law may not have been broken, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a supposed moral imperative to carry those bytes if I'm someone like Cloudflare.
[0] A website which, uncontroversially, is more than happy to host (and encourage) users who are known to laugh at people for who they are and revel in scooped information, a fact which decreases the trustworthiness of the operators in my eyes.
How do you feel about living in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a moral imperative to provide someone with electricity if you're a power company, or with a telephone number if you're a telephone company?
For telephony I'd make the same argument. For electricity, probably not. If harassment happens over the telephone, then the telephone provider is sufficiently close to the proximal cause in my judgement for service to be cut off in certain circumstances. Electricity is too far removed.
Harassment happening over the telephone of course could mean two things.
What do you mean by harassment happening over the telephone? It could mean that someone calls someone else to harass them. Of course the victim could just block the harassers number in this case, but maybe the telephone company is justified in cutting off the harasser anyway.
But to stick with the KiwiFarms analogy: What if people talk to each other on the phone, ridicule others, share embarrassing information about others, and then some of them go on (allegedly) to harass the targets?
What do you mean by harassment happening over the telephone? It could mean that someone calls someone else to harass them. Of course the victim could just block the harassers number in this case, but maybe the telephone company is justified in cutting off the harasser anyway.
But to stick with the KiwiFarms analogy: What if people talk to each other on the phone, ridicule others, share embarrassing information about others, and then some of them go on (allegedly) to harass the targets?
To get closer with the KF situation, the phone company is not typically set up as a moderated venue where administrators, moderators, and janitors are aware of every call and interaction on the service, its content, and who is interacting with who.
They might be able to deduce some of this (and some of it they can't even deduce legally), but it's nothing like an online forum in which the administrators and moderators condone the behavior to (what they see as) reasonable limits just shy of breaking laws against harassment.
Furthermore, if we likened web services to phone services, you'd find we're using a service which doesn't allow half of what KF allows to be posted in accordance with the HN guidelines. And I'm fine with that sort of moderation.
Most phone companies are set up with the implicit assumption that they are content neutral within the bounds of the law, though some do provide further restrictions. KF was not set up as such - this 'ridicule' and 'embarrassing information' is the entire point of the website, and is much closer as a proximal cause to the harassment. It aided that ridicule and connecting people of like minds with bad intentions with the knowledge that this kind of discussion is explicitly banned on Reddit, HN, and to some extent 4chan.
If there were a phone company set up with its advertising and moderation similar to KF's, I'd say the phone company is just as culpable as KF.
They might be able to deduce some of this (and some of it they can't even deduce legally), but it's nothing like an online forum in which the administrators and moderators condone the behavior to (what they see as) reasonable limits just shy of breaking laws against harassment.
Furthermore, if we likened web services to phone services, you'd find we're using a service which doesn't allow half of what KF allows to be posted in accordance with the HN guidelines. And I'm fine with that sort of moderation.
Most phone companies are set up with the implicit assumption that they are content neutral within the bounds of the law, though some do provide further restrictions. KF was not set up as such - this 'ridicule' and 'embarrassing information' is the entire point of the website, and is much closer as a proximal cause to the harassment. It aided that ridicule and connecting people of like minds with bad intentions with the knowledge that this kind of discussion is explicitly banned on Reddit, HN, and to some extent 4chan.
If there were a phone company set up with its advertising and moderation similar to KF's, I'd say the phone company is just as culpable as KF.
But I'm not comparing the phone company to KF, I'm comparing the phone company to cloudflare. (Admittedly, rereading my comment, that wasn't clear.)
If the phone company knowingly carried a clique of users matching the description of KF, I don't think it significantly changes the argument.
to be fair it is an open website with no registration required to see its contents, shouldn't be hard to show how that is supposedly not true through archives especially considering the sheer scale of what is being alleged and in a span of ~10 odd years of operation. And yet since looking closer at kiwifarms during the start of the cloudflare campaign I'm still trying to find some that isn't a random twitter user going full on trust me, and I asked.
The website is put at a complicated position of having to prove a negative, and even if they do show evidence of "hey we banned this person" one could very much just say it was because they were in the spotlight. While on the other hand the accusations are just vague ones that are taken as gospel, and even outright admitted lies that journalists publish knowingly[0].
There are for sure moral questions surrounding it and its not a nice place that makes sense to not want to be involved in because of it not being a nice place. But using the nebulous accusations to make that decision instead of what is known already is not fair in my view.
This whole happenning seems to be intrinsically linked to streamer/twitter drama so it becomes a tangled mess, but a streamer seems to have done a good writeup on it with most of everything sourced[1]. Jesse singal also did a two part podcast on it doing a pretty interesting deep dive on it as well[2].
[0]:Some of many relating to the keffals case: Journalists claiming it was kiwifarms that hacked the uber when it was done by doxbin(not gonna link her doxbin, just search for the name on google and you'll find it), several doxes that were claimed to be done by kiwifarms also fall in this doxbin did it but kiwifarms is the one that gets written up for it. This wouldn't bother me much since the website does dox people and its not against the rules so what difference does it make, but when its journalists in the mainstream media clearly making them a scapegoat for something that is not uncommon nor will be fixed if the website goes down its just dishonest. And then there's places like cbc claiming that the christchurch shooting was livestreamed there[3] and the perpetrator was an user which is just blatantly false and I can't give the benefit of the doubt given how everyone knows it was facebook, let alone a journalist. Blaming the website for people showing up and taking pictures close to the streamers house then posting it on 4chan(!) and somehow its kiwifarms doing, the list goes on.
[0.1]: https://archive.ph/6JvRJ (claims that journalists knew about doxbin, while blaming kiwifarms)
[1]: https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int... (Just read chapters 2-3-4, the rest is dumb internet spats)
[2]: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-131-who-is-stal...
[3]: https://archive.ph/JF35i
The website is put at a complicated position of having to prove a negative, and even if they do show evidence of "hey we banned this person" one could very much just say it was because they were in the spotlight. While on the other hand the accusations are just vague ones that are taken as gospel, and even outright admitted lies that journalists publish knowingly[0].
There are for sure moral questions surrounding it and its not a nice place that makes sense to not want to be involved in because of it not being a nice place. But using the nebulous accusations to make that decision instead of what is known already is not fair in my view.
This whole happenning seems to be intrinsically linked to streamer/twitter drama so it becomes a tangled mess, but a streamer seems to have done a good writeup on it with most of everything sourced[1]. Jesse singal also did a two part podcast on it doing a pretty interesting deep dive on it as well[2].
[0]:Some of many relating to the keffals case: Journalists claiming it was kiwifarms that hacked the uber when it was done by doxbin(not gonna link her doxbin, just search for the name on google and you'll find it), several doxes that were claimed to be done by kiwifarms also fall in this doxbin did it but kiwifarms is the one that gets written up for it. This wouldn't bother me much since the website does dox people and its not against the rules so what difference does it make, but when its journalists in the mainstream media clearly making them a scapegoat for something that is not uncommon nor will be fixed if the website goes down its just dishonest. And then there's places like cbc claiming that the christchurch shooting was livestreamed there[3] and the perpetrator was an user which is just blatantly false and I can't give the benefit of the doubt given how everyone knows it was facebook, let alone a journalist. Blaming the website for people showing up and taking pictures close to the streamers house then posting it on 4chan(!) and somehow its kiwifarms doing, the list goes on.
[0.1]: https://archive.ph/6JvRJ (claims that journalists knew about doxbin, while blaming kiwifarms)
[1]: https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int... (Just read chapters 2-3-4, the rest is dumb internet spats)
[2]: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-131-who-is-stal...
[3]: https://archive.ph/JF35i
The reason "law enforcement is not effective at dealing with [kiwifarms]" is quite simply because kiwifarms is not doing anything illegal.
> is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them
Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers.
If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?
Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers.
If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?
The reality is that not all people should be able to vote, and not all people should be able to speak publicly.
Of course the challenge is in deciding who is worthy of each.
The new problem because of the internet is that critical masses of people who arguably should not be able to speak publicly are now able to. Worse, they can do it anonymously.
Threats, slander, and harassment are often illegal and always undesirable. Platform providers enable these things. So ultimately if people want freedom to speak publicly, then they must be personally identifiable (so they can be held accountable for illegal forms of speech)… or the platform providers must attempt to police the content. It has to be one or the other.
Of course the challenge is in deciding who is worthy of each.
The new problem because of the internet is that critical masses of people who arguably should not be able to speak publicly are now able to. Worse, they can do it anonymously.
Threats, slander, and harassment are often illegal and always undesirable. Platform providers enable these things. So ultimately if people want freedom to speak publicly, then they must be personally identifiable (so they can be held accountable for illegal forms of speech)… or the platform providers must attempt to police the content. It has to be one or the other.
> It is something that anyone with technical expertise (no platform is guaranteed a right to good programmers) can accomplish.
If a DDoS attack overwhelms the network connection, there's no technical expertise that can protect against that.
> In the case of KiwiFarms, they’ve transitioned to using a modified fork of a free and open source load balancer to protect against DDoS and other bot-driven attacks.
That only shows that no one attacking them has enough resources to overwhelm their network connection.
If a DDoS attack overwhelms the network connection, there's no technical expertise that can protect against that.
> In the case of KiwiFarms, they’ve transitioned to using a modified fork of a free and open source load balancer to protect against DDoS and other bot-driven attacks.
That only shows that no one attacking them has enough resources to overwhelm their network connection.
My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in.
I recognise the irony.
[0] https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cl...