They're Just Going to Start a New Hate Site, Obviously
you can't censor extremism in the internet era
Prior to hearing that it was recently banned by Cloudflare, I had no idea that there was such a site as Kiwi Farms. I know very little about it, other than that it seems scary and like the kind of place that I know better than to frequent. I have seen it repeatedly compared to 8chan, the notorious home of GamerGate and QAnon and similar that similarly had its CDN privileges denied by Cloudflare. And that comparison should give you pause if you’re celebrating the demise of Kiwi Farms: if the new 8chan met the fate of the old 8chan, what’s to stop a new Kiwi Farms from cropping up in short order? And even 8chan lives on in some form as 8kun, thanks to Russian hosting companies. It turns out that extremism isn’t so easily stamped out in a digitally connected world; you can kill a site, maybe, but until you kill the human attitudes that such a site reveals, you have never actually solved the problem.
Early in the history of this newsletter I wrote a whole long thing about this topic, so I won’t belabor the point here. The basic thing to understand is that in countries with strong anti-extremism laws, the extremists still flourish by being endlessly adaptable - when a group is disbanded, they form a new group, when a symbol is banned, they make a new symbol, when slogans are outlawed, they come up with new slogsns. France and Germany have spent 75 years fruitlessly attempting to stamp out right-wing extremism. But the problem, at its root, is not the expression of extremism in any particular form but the existence of extremist feelings within the populace. And it turns out that no law can stop that with technological or legal fixes You either address the problem at its foundations by presenting more appealing alternatives or you don’t.
I will also repeat the point that despite the best efforts of the most powerful establishment governments in the world, drug cartels and terrorist groups effortlessly communicate via the internet. That is part of the Pandora’s box of the internet; there can be no real central moderation of what remains a stubbornly distributed system. People endlessly debate whether we should censor certain views on the internet without doing the basic work of establishing whether we can. The simple fact of the matter is that there will always be some solution, however sketchy, whereby extremists are able to exchange noxious views. So do politics and be better at it than them. I promise, there will be a next 8chan or Kiwi Farms. There always is.
Kiwi Farms is a museum of our internet culture.
Sorry to see it go.
Take a big helping of safetyism and a Do Something attitude, and you’ll be playing the internet extremism whackamole banning game forever.