So the EFF posted an article calling out Hurricane Electric (an ISP) for cutting off Kiwifarms, arguing that cutting off sites should never be possible: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

... and it's the most privileged, liberal shit I've seen in a while. Let's go into why.

As a refresher: KF is a community of harassers; people whose main goal is harassing particularly marginalized people, frequently to the point of actual death. They have a number of murders on their name, and they are only legally not murders because they were driven to suicide through harassment.

It's hard to get across how relentless this community can be. There have been attempts to get them cut off from internet service providers for quite a while, because "just ignoring them" clearly doesn't work, and they will go out of their way to harass people wherever they go, using their site as an organizing platform.

So: actual, real people are being deliberately and constantly harmed by them, to the point of trauma and death. The only defense against this that has had some effect so far, has been to get their service cut off.

It's under these circumstances that the EFF made a couple of arguments:
1. This blocking might cause collateral damage for other things hosted under the same organizations.
2. This creates a slippery slope; they might also start blocking other things, like marginalized people.
3. Prosecuting KF members is the job of the cops and the courts, not of an ISP.

The first one is an easy one; if organizations don't want to be caught in the crossfire, they shouldn't knowingly associate with a community of bigoted murderers. 11 nazis at the table, etc., you know how this goes.

The second one is deceptive, however; it *sounds* like a credible issue, and it's consistent with what the EFF has campaigned for before.

Slippery slopes can be a real thing where legislation and court mandates are concerned. If an ISP is compelled to start blocking one thing, and all the legal legwork is done to make that happen, then it is indeed very likely that this will experience scope creep, and blocks of other things start being demanded.

However, this isn't about government policy. This is about a first-party decision by a corporation to block using existing means. In other words, something they could've already done for anything anyway - this decision doesn't make anything possible, it doesn't remove any barriers, it's still just as possible to block stuff as it was before.

There is no slippery slope.

The third point, however, is where the privilege really shines through. It's the job of the cops, right? Sounds very principled and reasonable. But what if the cops just... don't?

KF has been around for a long time now. Authorities know about its existence. And yet, it's still untouched - clearly the cops and courts cannot be relied upon here.

A recurring problem with liberals is that they assume that the systems are there to serve them, and by extension, to serve everybody - even when there's clear evidence that they don't, like is the case here. Those legal systems aren't serving the many marginalized targets getting harassed and murdered by Kiwifarms.

Saying "the cops should handle this, not corporations" under circumstances where they clearly don't, is functionally equivalent to saying "this should not be handled at all". It doesn't matter what you *think* cops should do, what matters is the practical effect, and whether it prevents or perpetuates harm.

The reality is that *something* needs to be done - immediately, not in some hypothetical future - to protect marginalized folks from Kiwifarms. They are getting harmed *now*, it's not hypothetical. If the cops don't do that, then the job is unfortunately left to everybody else, whether you like it or not.

And the EFF's stance that "the cops should do something about this" would be a lot more credible if the EFF actually put in some effort to make that happen, rather than just using it as a cheap defense against people not Following The Procedures.

ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.

Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service pro…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}