PayPal’s censorship marks a vicious new phase in the war on free speech - Fraser NelsonUntil now, financial services have rarely policed the political opinions of their clients: such behaviour was thought to have been left behind after the collapse of communism. But to an extent that politicians have not properly realised, British traditions of free speech are being steadily replaced by de facto Silicon Valley censorship.
PayPal vs Toby Young isn’t about free speech – it’s about the free market - Chris Stokel-WalkerBut scratch beneath the surface of Young’s claims and you begin to realise that the ban may be more justified than people think. This isn’t just a rabble-rouser trying to keep the home fires burning in a fictitious, bubbly culture war. The Times reported that PayPal closed it down for spreading Covid disinformation – a real harm that puts lives at risk. The R value of disinformation discouraging people from taking up the offer of perfectly safe vaccines outstrips that of the virus that has killed, to date, 6.5 million people.
There's a battle [online] and it is ragin'
Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet - Joshua MoonI've moved the Kiwi Farms domain to Cloudflare's domain registrar. This is a very risky decision, because in the past the mob would direct its noise at both Dreamhost and Cloudflare. Now, there's a more centralized point of failure. I am ordinarily afraid to even say the name Cloudflare, as if speaking it aloud could remind them I exist and compel them to step on me.
The world should not need Kiwi Farms - Corinna CohnOn September 3rd, the security company Cloudflare dropped the website Kiwi Farms as a customer...
Kiwi Farms is one of the websites right-thinking journalists warn you to avoid visiting. Its users include journalists, lawyers, and academics arguing cheek-to-jowl with white supremacists, fascists, and every other type of rat-eating troglodyte with access to a keyboard. Unlike the highly-regulated social media platforms to which we’ve become accustomed, Kiwi Farms allows discussion of nearly any topic, but typically users flock to forums to document, discuss, and yes, sometimes harass outlandish public figures...
Journalists are swapping out their duties from reporting news to defining what is information and what is “disinformation.” The media companies, competing for attention first and dollars second, are providing their full backing. The world should not need a website like Kiwi Farms. Instead Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and the myriad other publishing platforms should already be open forums supporting free expression and committed to viewpoint neutrality. But this is not the reality. Kiwi Farms, though it may be a hive of scum and villainy, may also be one of the last places where free expression lives online. The only way to solve a problem like Kiwi Farms is to
restore the norm of free expression everywhere else.
(Oops, got myself in that screenshot)In the spirit of the post, I'll give a Kossack the last word.Whoever will stand up for the bigoted hatemongers behind KiwiFarms? Glenn Greenwald, of course - Darrell LucusKiwiFarms, the now-defunct website that made it its business to dox, swat, and harass innocent people—especially trans people—got a long-overdue dose of karma last weekend. Security firm Cloudflare stopped providing KiwiFarms with protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks late Saturday night. after initially resisting calls from one of its latest victims, trans activist and streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, to cut ties. Cloudflare’s claims that cutting the cord with KiwiFarms would do more harm than good came undone in the wake of increasingly violent posts from KiwiFarms users...
Now, who would have a problem with this deserved downfall? Glenn Greenwald, of course. He seems to think taking down one of the most noxious websites ever created is a sign of authoritarianism run amok.
No, let's let Ira Glasser have the last word instead:when I came to the ACLU, my major passion was social justice, particularly racial justice. But my experience was that free speech wasn't an antagonist. It was an ally. It was a critical ally. I said this to the audience, and I was astonished to learn that most of them were astonished to hear it—I mean, these were very educated, bright young people, and they didn't seem to know this history—I told them that there is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement for justice, to help its movement survive.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew it. Margaret Sanger knew it. [The labor leader] Joe Hill knew it. I can think of no better explication of it than the late, sainted John Lewis, who said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. And that's historically and politically true without exception. For people who today claim to be passionate about social justice to establish free speech as an enemy is suicidal.
Ira and this guy:
