Not surprising at all that Cloudflare went through with its plan to terminate its contract with Kiwifarms. Reddit had the exact same process happen back in 2021 with r/NoNewNormal. People cried and whined on the site for the subreddit to be banned, Spez wrote an official post defending the subreddits existence by pointing out its freedom of speech, and not long after crumbled and banned the subreddit (And still banned to this day). Corporations do not care about freedom of speech, especially when certain types of speech threaten their health.
These flowery corporate blog posts are close to worthless, and I am glad that this step has been taken, as Kiwifarms will reinforce itself further as it has numerous times in the past in response to external threats and will become even more difficult to take down. At the time of Cloudflares decision earlier, Cloudflare had been the weakest link in the infrastructure of the site. Any solution implemented now will certainly be more resilient and reliable.
The argument is that companies aren't police. Companies, especially infrastructure companies, should not have a personal view of things like these.
What Kiwifarms is doing is either illegal already or should be made illegal. Law enforcement should be the one deplatforming them and taking action against the human drivel that drives people to suicide, it shouldn't be an ISP deciding what is or isn't acceptable.
ISPs should not be filtering out LGBT+ content even if that content is considered undesirable by the general population and that argument goes both ways. With the way things are turning in large areas of the USA, I expect state-wide LGBT+ content bans to be up for debate in less than five or ten years, despite the USA's extremely liberal free speech laws. I think most of us here agree that such bans should not happen and ISPs should be dumb pipes in terms of content selection.
However, if this holds for your Verizons and Amazons, it should probably also hold for DDoS-protection platforms like Cloudflare. Cloudflare is setting out to be in a similar position to your ISP, a piece of infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks rather than a hosting company where you put your content. I think there's a perfectly fair argument to be made that net neutrality should also apply to companies like Cloudflare, especially in a position of this much power. A company should be able to host anything that's not illegal if it chooses to be infrastructure rather than a hosting provider.
In practice, law enforcement doesn't really give a damn about sites like these unless a big story hits the news. The lack of regulation and enforcement is the problem and the burden of combating these societal problems is shifting from the police to companies. Rather than forcing companies to decide what is or isn't right, concrete steps should be taken by the people that are supposed to protect and serve our communities.
What is happening to Kiwifarms will soon be happen to content other people get mad about; be it reproductive rights, gay marriage, or any other civil liberty at risk because of conservative outrage.
The benefits of Kiwifarms existence outweigh its cons, and I say this as someone who greatly dislikes the site after having used it for an extended amount of time. The site has and still discovers, documents, and reports criminal and disgusting activity, from bestiality to the grooming of children online by extremely predatory, mentally ill individuals, and it provides a platform for uncensored speech as well as the dissemination of media that had and continues to be censored on mainstream websites.
NoNewNormal was not wholly misinformation, and in fact had very little of it, and even if a particularly high percentage of the threads were misinformation, why does that justify censoring it? Who gets to decide what is and isn't valid information and what discussions should and shouldn't occur?
For the time I used it, I did not see anyone confuse mRNA and DNA. You are either completely fabricating evidence or disingenuously cherry-picking individual threads/posts to represent the entire community.
