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In August, local police arrived at Clara Sorrenti’s apartment in London, Ontario, with a search warrant, which they used to confiscate her computer, her cellphone, and some other possessions. Sorrenti, who is transgender and is a popular streamer on Amazon’s Twitch network, says she was held by police for eleven hours and questioned about a threatening email that a number of local city councilors said they received, which used her former name. Sorrenti, who was released without being charged, believes the email was sent by online trolls who are critical of her trans advocacy and hoped to target her with a police visit—a tactic known as “swatting.” Although the identity of the email sender remains unknown, Sorrenti had warned local police ahead of their visit that such a swatting attempt might occur; she said her physical address had been posted online, and several of her online accounts had been hacked by unknown actors. She also noted that she’d been harassed by users of an online forum known as Kiwi Farms.
Ben Collins and Kat Tenbarge of NBC News describe Kiwi Farms as “an internet message board known for being an epicenter of vicious, anti-trans harassment campaigns.” The site, previously known as CWCki Forums, is an offshoot of 8chan, another notorious online community that helped give birth to QAnon. According to Collins and Tenbarge, Kiwi Farms has become known for targeting trans and gay online personalities with doxxing and swatting, also for collecting and archiving the racist and homophobic “manifestos” written by mass shooters. After being swatted, Sorrenti and her supporters started lobbying Cloudflare, a company that provides hosting and security services to websites, asking it to cut off Kiwi Farms, a client.
Cloudflare initially declined to take such an action. In a blog post that did not mention Kiwi Farms by name, Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, wrote that removing its services from sites that host reprehensible content “is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character,” calling such a decision “a dangerous precedent.” Just a few days later, however, Prince changed his mind; in a new blog post, he wrote that Cloudflare had removed its security protections from Kiwi Farms, effectively rendering the site vulnerable to online attacks meant to disrupt its service. (Prince also noted that Cloudflare had never provided hosting services to Kiwi Farms.) “This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” Prince wrote.
The decision was made not because of a “pressure campaign,” he wrote, but because “the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life.” Cloudflare’s about-face was hailed by Sorrenti and others as a victory for trans rights, and a possible end to Kiwi Farms. In his blog post, Prince hedged his bets on the latter, cautioned readers against “seeing it as setting precedent,” and ultimately referred readers back to his first post, in which he emphasized that, for Cloudflare, “turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy.”
Prince has faced similar dilemmas on several previous occasions. In 2017, Cloudflare cut off the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website; Prince wrote at the time that he thought doing so was both the right decision to make and also a dangerous one. “You, like me, may believe that the Daily Stormer’s site is vile. You may believe it should be restricted. You may think the authors of the site should be prosecuted,” he wrote. However, he added, leaving “content control” to “vigilante hackers launching DDoS attacks subverts any rational concept of justice.” Two years later, Cloudflare cut off 8chan, because Prince said it had seemingly helped inspire a mass shooter in El Paso who killed twenty people. Prince reiterated then that he felt “uncomfortable” about deciding what content should be available and what should not. “Cloudflare is not a government,” he wrote. “While we’ve been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad.”
Writing about Kiwi Farms in his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton defended Prince’s reasoning to some extent, saying decisions about content removal shouldn’t be made at the level of an infrastructure provider such as Cloudflare. “Generally speaking, you don’t want Comcast deciding what belongs on Instagram,” Newton wrote. However, he said Prince’s arguments were also convenient for Cloudflare, because they allowed the company to avoid having to make difficult moderation decisions, which in turn allowed it to “keep out of hot-button cultural debates, and stay off the radar of regulators who are increasingly skeptical of tech companies moderating too little.” The bottom line, Newton argued, is that Cloudflare’s previous position “arguably made it complicit in whatever happened to poor Sorrenti, and anyone else the mob might decide to target.” Some might say removing such content is a slippery slope; however, as Will Oremus, a Washington Post technology writer, wrote to Newton, “you could make a good case that daily stormer, 8chan, and kiwifarms occupy a point in the slope that offers ample traction.”
As Newton writes, Cloudflare isn’t the only service provider struggling with moderation-related content dilemmas that have attracted the attention of regulators. Facebook has been down that particular road many times, whether for removing a famous photo of a Vietnam War victim or for not taking down disinformation about covid. At one point, the company was the target of legislation proposed by Republican members of Congress who felt it took down too much—primarily posts from conservative sources, they said—and at the same time was the target of proposed legislation from Democratic members of Congress who felt it was not removing enough. Then there is the contentious “deplatforming” of Donald Trump and others, something both Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for. (Elon Musk, who remains engaged in a legal battle with Twitter after ending his effort to acquire the company, previously said he would restore Trump’s account to the platform, which underscores how arbitrary platform content-moderation decisions can be.)
If there’s one thing that platforms and service providers could offer, it’s more transparency on why and how such decisions get made. In his post on removing the Daily Stormer in 2017, Prince wrote that without some kind of clear framework—from either government or industry—as a guide to moderation decisions, “a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.” There is plenty of talk about the First Amendment, Prince said, but equally important is due process, which, “at its most basic, means that you should be able to know the rules a system will follow if you participate in that system [and] requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary.” Despite the “transparency reports” that companies such as Facebook and Twitter release annually, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in that area.
Here’s more on deplatforming:
- Stochastic terror: Alejandra Carabello, an attorney at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, told NBC News that she worries the Kiwi Farms’ “playbook”—in which trolls use doxxing and access to other forms of online data to target individuals they believe are on the wrong side of certain cultural issues such as sexuality or abortion—will be expanded as political rhetoric around those issues heats up in advance of the 2024 election. “This is stochastic terror that’s being implemented as part of the culture war,” Carabello told NBC. “Kiwi Farms’ goal is a world where LGBTQ users are not going to be as out and open on social media—they’re going to live in fear of threats and harassment.”
- Hiding in plain site: Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the former head of security for Facebook, said on Twitter that while he understood the situation Cloudflare found itself in, the company’s defense of its initial approach to Kiwi Farms was wrong. “I certainly understand the impulses reflected [in Prince’s blog post],” he wrote. “Few commentators on tech policy have a consistent position on platform responsibility versus net neutrality, and Cloudflare falls right into that difficult intersection.” Stamos argued, however, that the company did more than just provide security for Kiwi Farms, since Cloudflare’s structure also effectively hides a site’s true location.
- Libs of TikTok: Children’s hospitals across the US are “facing growing threats of violence, driven by an online anti-LGBTQ campaign attacking the facilities for providing care to transgender kids and teens,” the Washington Post reports. The campaign has been led by a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok, which has more than 1.3 million followers and is run by Chaya Raichik, a former Brooklyn real estate agent. Twitter has allowed the account to remain online despite criticism, including from its own employees, who the Post says have been “voicing concerns in internal Slack channels that it’s only a matter of time before the posts lead to someone getting killed.”
- Gift of the Gab: In 2018, I wrote for CJR about the moves to deplatform Gab, a right-wing service that saw itself as an alternative to Twitter. “In Gab’s case, the service has been rejected by hosts such as Joyent and Microsoft’s Azure, which ended its contract with Gab earlier this year, and it has also been blocked by payment processors PayPal and Stripe,” I wrote. “On the weekend, after a user of Gab allegedly opened fire and killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, domain registrar GoDaddy cut the service off and told it to find another registrar. So, even if Gab manages to find a new host for the network, it would be difficult for users to find it just by typing in a Web address.” In 2019, however, Gab managed to find alternative hosting and domain registration, and it remains online.
Other notable stories:
- Police in Las Vegas arrested Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles on Wednesday on suspicion of murder in the stabbing death of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German, the Review-Journal reported. “German’s investigation of Telles this year contributed to the Democrat’s primary election loss, and German was working on a potential follow-up story about Telles before he was killed,” the paper wrote. Las Vegas police had interviewed Telles and searched his home earlier that day, then returned in tactical gear that evening; Telles was “wheeled out of the home on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance,” the paper reported.
- Vice Media is “exploring a deal with MBC, a media giant partly owned by the Saudi government, to start a new content partnership in the region,” the New York Times reported Wednesday, quoting two people with knowledge of the talks. “The deal, which may include the creation of a media brand focused on lifestyle coverage and training local media workers, could be worth at least $50 million over multiple years, one of the people said.” In April last year, Vice’s decision to open a commercial office in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, became a point of contention inside the company, the Times said. One producer called it “morally bankrupt.”
- A Delaware court has denied Elon Musk’s attempt to push back the date of the trial over his delayed Twitter acquisition, which is currently scheduled to start October 17 in Delaware’s Chancery Court, The Verge reports. However, the judge agreed that Musk could incorporate claims made by Peiter Zatko, the former Twitter security chief turned whistleblower, into his case. Meanwhile, Bob Iger, former CEO of Disney, told the Code Conference that he decided not to acquire Twitter in 2016 in part because an investigation into the company’s user base showed that “a substantial portion were not real.”
- Google News Showcase, a feature that pays publishers for their news content, is “almost a year behind its intended launch schedule in the US, as negotiations with some media outlets have bogged down,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Some publishers felt Google wasn’t offering enough; in one case, Gannett was offered $6 million a year as part of a multi-year deal, the WSJ wrote, but the newspaper chain asked for $300 million a year. Meanwhile, “some publishers want to wait and see the fate of legislation in Congress that would give publishers a stronger negotiating hand with tech platforms,” the WSJ said.
- Shailesh Prakash, the longtime head of technology for the Washington Post, is leaving the company for a new executive role at Google, Sara Fischer reported for Axios. Prakash led the Post’s publishing arm, Arc XP, since its inception in 2015, as well as its ad tech arm, Zeus. Axios reported earlier this year that the Post decided not to sell Arc XP, despite having conversations with a number of parties. “It’s unclear if Prakash’s departure is tied to the fact that a spin-off didn’t happen,” Fischer wrote.
- Muck Rack, which has compiled an automated database of journalists and their coverage areas and contact information—a tool used by the public relations and marketing industry— has raised $180 million in financing, its first outside funding, TechCrunch reported. “The money is coming from a single, big-name investor, Susquehanna Growth Equity, which is taking a minority stake in the company,” the site wrote. Founders Gregory Galant and Lee Semel will continue to control the company, which they founded in 2009.
- Twitter is expanding Birdwatch, its crowdsourced misinformation-debunking product, Gizmodo reports. “Beginning this week, Twitter will begin to accept 1,000 new contributors per week to Birdwatch, adding to the roughly 15,000 it already has,” Jody Serrano wrote for the site. “Contributors’ work will be more visible on timelines, with Twitter aiming to eventually roll out the feature to 50% of US users.” Birdwatch was launched as a pilot product in 2021 and uses a community approach to reduce misinformation on the platform. “Birdwatch contributors, who are anonymous, are able to write notes that appear below tweets or link to outside sources,” Serrano wrote.
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