391–400 of 1001 posts
I have similar thoughts about this. I do not want technology companies deciding what content is reachable.
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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…
Censorship is merely deciding what ideas you will or will not participate in promoting; protecting the right to do that is the heart of the ideal of free speech. Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free…
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
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.
If you can't see the difference between those groups then the problem is on your end.
Hint: Neo Nazis wish to return to the good old days of 1939 or so where Jews and people of color are either dead, outcast, deported, enslaved or stuck in camps while white men rule the land as is their god given right.
So just in case it needs explaining: that's not the moral equivalent of pornographers, atheists or lgbt related material and I'm surprised that that needs spelling out.
Absolutely correct. He is also effectively saying that since he can and will remove sites he personally doesn't like, that he personally approves of every other site using Cloudflare. The excuse he uses for terminating TDS is an absolute crock; if TDS genuinely did falsely and sincerely claim that Cloudflare supports them, then Prince could and should have simply asked them to remove that claim. It's an outrage that…
I get what you’re saying and agree with you, but please don’t compare gay people and neo-nazi. They’re not same or even similar.
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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…
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
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 :). Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services. Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So som…
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
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.
Sometimes its better if things have an outlet that's relatively benign and already mentally unstable people don't have cause for even more agitation. Plus it's easier to keep an eye on things and perhaps guide them a little. Confirming (in their eyes at least) what is already suspected doesn't help the situation. Let them have their site and their speech. Because you can't really stop it anyway and trying makes it worse.
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There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
How about ISIS? http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
Speaking with IBTimes UK, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule".
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
...
"We're the plumbers of the internet," Prince said. "We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China."
Must have been in a pretty bad mood.