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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

blog.cloudflare.com

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#211

> Did not go well. And you're telling me this, why? > We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi Oh I see, that's why. Well, you should be careful to c) not confuse me with anyone else.

For those who downvote me: so you're actually believing I call "anyone I don't like" a Nazi? How fucking pathetic is that? And no I don't care about the votes, I just want you to stop and realize how incredibly dumb that is. This is a kindergarten level of discourse on a subject that ranks amongst the most important that even exist.

edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer

That's where names like "Daily Stormer" and "Stormfront" come from. Educate yourself at least a tiny shred.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#212

There is some monkey-business here. Anyone knows why a PR company hired "protesters" to the event in the first place? (and why HN tries to hide this link when posted as submission?) https://charlotte.craigslist.org/tfr/d/actors-and-photograph...

You know literally anyone can post a Craigslist ad, right?

I mean, https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/6256316306.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/chi/6216723045.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sea/6088811200.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/cle/6147468220.html all exist... and you think no right-winger ever went "let's spend a few minutes making a WordPress.com blog and a Craigslist post and cite that as evidence of paid protesters"?

(Also, Charlottesville VA isn't Charlotte NC...)

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#213
post #198
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The larger point about trying to censor people out of having opinions instead of ignoring or condemning them is valid. This has raised their profile far beyond simply ignoring or condemning them and treating them like any other repulsive website (of which there are PLENTY that Google/GoDaddy/Cloudflare now "officially endorse").

Serious question: where's the line? The government shouldn't be censoring. I don't allow white nationalists into my house. At what point does "I" represent something too big for me to no longer have the moral privilege to refuse to collaborate with white nationalists?

Maybe when you get in the business of providing speech as a service. For example, imagine you went into the wedding cake business, and someone came in and wanted you to make a gay wedding cake (note: not a wedding cake for gay people, but a wedding cake that normalized gay marriage). Now imagine you're a very old-school traditionalist about that sort of thing. Should you be compelled to make that cake with two women on the top?

Given that the Supreme Court has already decided that "wedding cake makers" are part of critical speech infrastructure, I think that Cloudflare, a service that hosts ISIS, pirates, and others, should be subject to the same restrictions as wedding cake makers.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse, you don't get to claim the moral highground on account of a bunch of people that would like to do the same to a fairly large number of people. Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.

> This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism. > Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way. More of this will come regardless if these people get their way. Protests, tweet storms, and tearing down Co…

> I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism.

I didn't use the word terrorism in my response to you so no need to bring it back into circulation, I've used your terms. The word terrorism (and terrorist) has already been cheapened beyond recognition, they're in a worse state than 'hacker', where were you the last 15 years or so?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#215
post #58
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.

Every time someone says that, I just hear "I'm defending censorship." Is that what you are doing, or am I just overly sensitive? I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates. This is going to sound unfair…

I'm really playing devil's advocate here but if the CEO of Cloudflare wakes up and thinks to himself "man I hate that site, I'm going to remove it from my service", and the Internet says "no you can't", is that another form of censorship? In this situation we're either limiting what Daily Stormer can do, or limiting what Cloudflare can do.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#216
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value. Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech. But more ab…

> Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.

Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.

The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.

If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#218
post #4

>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.” (from internal email) >Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning i…

It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy. I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I…

Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
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