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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#231

Post by jacalata »

adventured wrote: post #224
r721 wrote: 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…

I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control. Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like al…

Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#233

Post by spydum »

I have read many of the threads here, and I think it boils down to this: do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve?

Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are?

This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be enforced by private companies. I think of freedom of speech is the problem here: companies have more influence over our conversations and the old protections are simply not adapting well.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#234

Post by jacalata »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #159
thinkfurther wrote: post #142

Yeah, and you'll take it all down with your foolishness.

People have hated for thousands of years, and we've made it this far. Have some optimism. Mandating tolerance is about as likely to work as using a sieve to bail water out of a boat.

People have silenced dissidents for thousands of years too, why aren't you willing to be optimistic about that?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#235

Post by abiox »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #187
jquery wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre

Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?

As far as I can see, you are not correct.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#236

Post by smokeyj »

jacquesm wrote: post #223

I'm not a fan of cloudflare, I think the net would be better without them. That said I think this was the right call to make. Being the CEO of a company carries with it the weight of having the ultimate responsibility for each and every action of the company and to be an unwilling vehicle for the Neo Nazi movement is something that no company should want to aspire to. Where I have a problem is that ostensibly this di…

But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking. I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#237

Post by [deleted] »

spydum wrote: post #233

I have read many of the threads here, and I think it boils down to this: do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve? Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are? This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be…

[deleted]

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#238

Post by 6nf »

nickbauman wrote: post #29
jdavis703 wrote: post #2

> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. 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. So CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?

It could be argued that the mere presence of a Nazi flag as expression is incitement. Not ordinary speech. Naziism is nothing if not clear about violence to people about things that they cannot change about themselves. Skin color. Lineage. It's not like "if you don't do this we have no problem with you" (the Antifa fall into this category. Nazis fall into the former).

Ok maybe but cloudflare hosts actual ISIS content so why is that acceptable?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#239

Post by adventured »

Nition wrote: post #215
Clubber wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not censorship either way. The private corporation should be able to regulate its network as it pleases on the content it allows. People are free to use, or not use, that service in consequence.

If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.

Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.

Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#240

Post by [deleted] »

jquery wrote: post #180
dragonwriter wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values. That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will p…

Wow! What's up is down and down is up. I assume you are vehemently on the side those wedding cake bakers who refused to make a gay wedding cake, then? Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter.…

[deleted]
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