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.
The point is network effects. The reason people use Twitter is not because its functionality is better than any other site, it's because there is an audience. Censoring people off Twitter means that they are basically talking to themselves, which is why goodthink types are so eager to do so.
Censors also point out that Twitter is a private company (although Twitter and other tech giants censor at the behest of and in cooperation with government organs) and doesn't owe you a platform. That said, natural monopolies such as the electric company cannot cut off your service, even if you say things that they don't like, such as opposing the latest rate hike.
Finally, censors claim that denial of Twitter access isn't really "censorship" since you can take your message elsewhere. The whole point of speech is to be heard. By that logic, you also had freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, as long as you were entirely alone.
There are two issues with trying to "moderate" (read: censor) content:
(1) You pointed out this, but I'll go a step further and suggest that by "banning" these groups, you give them a legitimacy they did not have. People think that "deplatforming" people removes their legitimacy, but it doesn't. Among certain groups, if you're "deplatformed" that simply means that you are exactly what you portray yourself to be: the person that speaks the truth the amorphous they don't want the masses to hear. This is because . . .
(2) Censorship (even if it's given the harmless sounding title of "content moderation") has, no matter how well-intentioned it started out, always been turned on people who are actually speaking the truth the amorphous they don't want the masses to hear. In the case of the US, we started off by "deplatforming" Alex Jones, and the next thing you know we're kicking people off of Twitter for telling the truth about a laptop simply because it was a story that would have destroyed the media's favored presidential candidate and telling the truth everyone knew about masks, lockdowns, and the vaccines regarding COVID. The "truth" could sometimes be as simple as the government collected data that Twitter claimed someone might "misinterpret," which meant "interpret accurately but not in a way we want." And that is why people will default to the side of the moderated and not the moderators. We've seen this pattern endlessly repeated.
As I said, even when well-intentioned (and really, in the US, the intentions have never been anything but self-serving, so they're not even good), "moderation"/censorship will always and without exception be used as a political weapon or a weapon to control the masses for the interests of the elite. And anyone with a brain and any sense of self-preservation should demand that everyone be allowed to speak, no matter how vile what they say is because honestly the bigger threat is the "power of moderation" ending up in the wrong hands.