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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#101
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much for believing in "due process".

Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.

He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline.

“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#102

Also on sort of related note, this is why I disparage the "cake baking" and "wedding flowers" lawsuits... While I don't care what two adults do in the bedroom, I do care that a private business could be forced to render services. What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law? I think these issues are better left unturne…

Do you think I should have a sign on my business door that says "no blacks allowed," too? Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#103
post #39
post #10

Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :). Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included. The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.

This response always strikes me as a huge cop-out. The phrase "free speech" can refer not just to the legal first amendment right but also to the more general societal principle. Nobody has claimed or will claim that Cloudflare's actions here violate the first amendment. The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should .

No, it's not.

Wiki:

  Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also said this: >“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”

Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky. The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways. Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we…

What about being upfront about a lack of principles and also marketing a the company as critical internet infrastructure?

I've pretty much reached the point where when someone vehemently declares their adherence to a principle I decide they probably haven't thought about it a lot.

Even in the US where there is a strong, fundamental legal protection of speech, it can't be said to be a principle. There's all sorts of places where it is compromised.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#105

This section is troubling. > In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba. For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests. Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of com…

Bonus question: what is cloudflare's role in either enabling or preventing the ddos attacks that one requires cloudflare to survive?

[deleted]

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#106

It is very important to distinguish something like Facebook blocking an account / Medium taking down a blog from a domain registrar refusing to cooperate. You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms . First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented i…

> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"

It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.

> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.

Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#108
post #68

It seems pretty obvious that all this hand-wringing over a little known site called The Daily Stormer has raised its profile worldwide far beyond their wildest dreams. This is likely causing the opposite effect of what activists want.

If you honestly think that the rest of the world is only now hearing about the Daily Stormer, then you must have a very plush rock that you've been living under. I assure you that many, many others have not had that particular luxury.

I can assure you many people had no idea what the Daily Stormer was before they were "kicked out" of the US internet. So no, not knowing about it doesn't mean living under a rock.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#109

I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies. If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally)…

"I will disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it."

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#110
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:

In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.

Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”

A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.

“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.

Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...

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