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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

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Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#381

Post by jackmott »

tuna-piano wrote: post #77
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…

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…

If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#382

Post by ng12 »

jacquesm wrote: post #269
hashberry wrote: post #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 va…

For those not following this closely: Aurenheimer == weev.

Wow. Sometimes it feels like the internet is a very small place.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#383

Post by davidreiss »

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…

> and to be an unwilling vehicle for the Neo Nazi movement is something that no company should want to aspire to.

Does that also apply to pornography? What about atheism? What about lgbt content?

The concerted effort by the pro-censorship crowd to exploit nazis to promote censorship is rather worrying.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#384

Post by stale2002 »

chickenfries wrote: post #130
jquery wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing free speech with the first amendment. Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored, rather it should be debated, condemned, or ignored. The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.

Free speech, the cultural value, can only be protected by the government. The market doesn't demand things like liberty and justice.

It can be protected in lots of ways!

For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.

Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#385

Post by kelnos »

default-kramer wrote: post #183
breadbox wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you label "not amplifying someone" as censorship, then there is obviously no such thing as uncensored free speech for everyone. The question then becomes who you step up to defend, and who you quietly ignore, when someone gets amplified over them.

It's not about amplifying someone. There is a difference between ignoring someone and silencing them. Cloudflare's move seems more like silencing than ignoring to me. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think everyone should be able to put their (sometimes terrible) opinions on the internet, and we'll trust society to decide which ideas are terrible and should be ignored.

CF terminating their service absolutely does not silence them. They have many other ways to get their message out, even ways that look identical to what CF was providing.

If they end up actually getting turned away everywhere, and have no avenue to get their message out, then perhaps that's saying something about what everyone else things of the quality of their message.

And yes, this sort of thing needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If every internet company decided to disallow accounts held by people of a particular ethnic group, then that would be a problem. But I don't see an issue with every internet company deciding they don't want to participate in spreading hate speech and giving a hate group a platform to spread their propaganda. We wouldn't be arguing about this if we were talking about shutting down a website distributing ISIS recruitment videos, would we?

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#386

Post by Spivak »

bqe wrote: post #306
Spivak wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few business decide not to provide goods and services to black people -- not great but there are other options. Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.

If you think Nazism, a racist, hateful ideology opposed to the existence of many groups of people, is equivalent to being black in America, we have nothing to discuss.

I don't. I'm trying to explain that there are limits to 'private businesses can choose not to do businesses with anyone' with a historical example.

In small doses businesses can refuse service to classes of people, but when the discrimination is so commonplace that it becomes a burden to those being discriminated against then you may see the creation of a new protected class (or realistically the broadening of an existing one) to make sure they aren't starved or unable to find employment.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#387

Post by _euac »

chroem- wrote: post #201
bwb wrote: 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.

>Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :). I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality. This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.

Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue. You could have net neutrality ("free circulation for bits" if you will) and as long as no hosting providers want to take your content, you won't be able to publish them.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#388

Post by chrissnell »

This makes me really sad. I will admit that I did not always feel this way. Several years ago, I spoke out against Cloudflare right here on HN for not terminating ISIS's al-Hayat Media Center and Amaq news agencies' websites that were serving up videos of the beheadings of foreign hostages. Cloudflare claimed content neutrality as their justification and I was appalled by this and actively recommend against them in my professional career as an infrastructure leader. To me, it was simple: ISIS was killing innocent people and Cloudflare was complicit in the weaponizing these killings into propaganda.

I can't believe I'm saying this but here in 2017, I've had a change of heart. It's not that I support ISIS, or Daily Stormer, or Nazis. Fuck all of those guys. The problem here is that I feel that the post-Charlottesville Internet is rapidly sliding into a very scary trend of _weaponizing speech_. Prior to last weekend, the weaponization of speech was mostly confined to SJW-speak, where people call others' speech "violence". No longer confined to Twitter outbursts and op-eds, we are now seeing the weaponization of speech by service providers.

It's easy to write off Daily Stormer as a bunch of inbred Nazi assholes because, hey, that's obvious, but who's next? Who's the next group that gets knocked off the Internet? Trump supporters? Civil War historians? Encryption experts? You? Me? Who gets to decide? Social activists? The government? Some other government? Matthew Prince?

Even if you're ready to drive a truck into Richard Spencer's house, you should be outraged by Cloudflare's action today. This is quite possibly, as one of his employees said, the end of the Internet--certainly the free Internet.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#389

Post by kelnos »

aphextron wrote: post #30
bwb wrote: 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.

(Playing devil's advocate here) But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service provide…

CloudFlare terminating their account in no way kicks them off the web. They have plenty of other options[1]. CF has just decided they don't want to help them promote their speech.

Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.

[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#390

Post by ceejayoz »

chrissnell wrote: post #388

This makes me really sad. I will admit that I did not always feel this way. Several years ago, I spoke out against Cloudflare right here on HN for not terminating ISIS's al-Hayat Media Center and Amaq news agencies' websites that were serving up videos of the beheadings of foreign hostages. Cloudflare claimed content neutrality as their justification and I was appalled by this and actively recommend against them in m…

> This is quite possibly, as one of his employees said, the end of the Internet--certainly the free Internet.

If one person at a private corporation can single-handedly end the free Internet, it was already over.

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