Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated an imminent threat to human life was why he revoked our service.
He elaborates in his post, and claims violent rhetoric had ramped up.
This seems to be based off one of two things:
1. A post made on 4chan's /pol/ with a picture taken outside an apartment in Ireland which references the forum.
2. A series of posts made by one user, @Washizu Iwao (formerly @Serotonin).
This means that a community with 16,000 daily sign-ins is being punished for the behavior of a single user, or a person not even on our website.
The post by @Washizu Iwao was posted at 9:42pm EU time. It was reported seven times. After 32 minutes it was deleted by @Ride, one of our admins. The user was also banned.
Our website makes no money. All of our moderators are volunteers. It took Facebook (with a 24/7 staff of paid moderators) 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch shooting from Facebook Live.
This user joined in 2020, but the account remained inactive until July, 2022.
He made a single, low-effort post in an on-topic board before going dormant again until August 21st. Every subsequent post was in the Keffals thread.
This person is not an active member of the community. This appears to be a sleeper account someone had gotten access to in July, and kept on hand to use like this.
On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat.
The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face.
Even now, I have received zero communication from Cloudflare, U.S. Law Enforcement, the Irish Garda, or the Royal Ulster Constabulary regarding anything related to #DropKiwiFarms or its members.
This concerns me and should deeply concern everyone about the state of the Internet.
I'll have more to say later. I've not yet moved my domains from Cloudflare, because a part of me thinks that Matthew will recognize this as an err in judgement. The decision is simply too asinine for me to accept as reality.
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Suprised this comment hasn't been greyed out yet, but there are more than a few free-speechers and technolibertarians on slashdot and hackernews.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...
[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...
[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...
[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...
Taylor Lorenz going for the drama field goal kick
Cancel culture isn't real, and if it was it's a good thing chud
Hackercels are really spun up, I'm enjoying skimming through this. Great job on the post too
@InternetCustodian
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who, the 36 IRA bombers? are they real?
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Sorry King, should have put a /s there
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but also woman means anything i want it to mean!
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deadname > murder, chud
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