@eff is totally wrong with this take about KiwiFarms and HE: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it
Every customer of HE signs a contract, which states that they will abide by the TOS/AUP or their service may be interrupted.
There is no world where KiwiFarms abides by their TOS/AUP. By design the entire purpose of the website is an egregious violation of multiple points of the HE AUP.
HE has the right to enforce their TOS/AUP by not routing traffic to Joshua Moon.
EFF should retract this article immediately.
@ariadne @eff I disagree. EFF is, as usual, taking the long and broad view, and they are right. As far as I can tell, KiwiFarms does not have a contractual relationship with with Hurricane Electric. So they are not bound by their TOS/AUP. I know nothing about KiwiFarms except what's in the EFF article. They sound horrible. But we do not destroy bridges because some awful people use them.
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff This isn’t destroying a bridge, it’s putting up a checkpoint to stop drunk drivers.
@fluffy @ariadne @eff I don't think that is a good analogy. But if we use it: Once you have the checkpoints, you can also check for black drivers, for union drivers, for communist drivers, and so on. It is a slippery slope. On the other hand, the parking lot attendant (i.e. the local hosting company) can stop just the drunk drivers from getting into the car in the first place.
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff what’s it like being this tedious?
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff ah yes, the “rationality” argument. Which makes it easy to claim that people who don’t agree with you are “irrational.”
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff To paraphrase someone else’s much better post than I could have come up with on my own: everyone always frets about the “slippery slope” towards censorship, but nobody frets about the slippery slope towards stalking, harassment, doxing, and acts of violence.
It’s hard for me to be “rational” about protecting the first amendment rights of the people who have directly affected me and my friends in violent ways.
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff I have been doxed and endured protracted harassment campaigns as a result. What I experienced is *nothing* compared to what a lot of people I know have gone through. The actual people who did the doxing were “just” doing free speech, and were being “rational” and used the emotional responses of their victims to say “Look how irrational these people are, don’t they deserve what happened to them?”
@StephanSchulz @ariadne @eff Anyway. My rational argument is:
We should reduce harm.
Especially to marginalized people. But reducing harm in general is a good thing.
If your house is on fire, it is harm reduction to put the fire out, even though that uses water that might be used to fill a swimming pool.
@fluffy @ariadne @eff We should reduce harm - with that I can agree. But it's net harm. No action is without consequences. Putting your fire out is a good choice if your house is in downtown Seattle. But not if you are on an isolated island and the water is the only drinking water around. OK, maybe that overstretches the analogy, but the point is: Every action has multiple effects. One-sided "harm reduction" is too simplistic.