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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

blog.cloudflare.com

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#311
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find this section peculiar. Why does the company have "values"? I though companies were supposed to be looking after the intrests of their shareholders, i.e., profit. Do the shareholders consent to the lost profit being donated to political motives? This broader trend of companies becoming political organizations is terrible, frankly. This ship has sailed since about 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmen…

> - No tolerance to anything but work. If you sexually harrass someone, instantly fired. > - No woke HR training (no one watches it, yet no one has the courage to say anything about it) Given that a chunk of the HR training is about reminding people not to sexually harass, I'm not sure how you can achieve both of those? Especially when you don't have an HR department. Who's investigating the allegations? In practice…

Who gets to decide what is "political", too.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#312
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I wish we had a law enforcement apparatus that cared about protecting transgender people. But we don't have a clear path to that at the moment, and in the meantime we want to avoid more people being killed. Thus you have people trying to argue for more informal procedures that revolve around social pressure, telling companies basically "This is obviously way beyond the pale, you should not associate yourself…

What evidence is there for the law enforcement apparatus not protecting transgender people in this particular case? Have their been similar cases for cisgender people where the law enforcement apparatus has cared more? I am not sure saying we need mob action to stop other mob action is a good long term solution.

Law enforcement is the tool being used to do the violence ffs, they’re not protecting anyone

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#313

Never thought I'd see the Left trying to weaponize corporations to suppress speech they dislike. Reminds me a LOT of Evangelicals in the 2000s - I know that comparison has been made frequently but that's the last group that made a serious censorship push. I wonder how all of this will end? I support CloudFlare here - they should act as a utility, not as an arbiter of content. This ends poorly and one day will bite th…

Big turn of the tables. Back in the 2000s Bush administration we had pornography site raids and suppression, now we have ideologically-motivated censorship of a different form.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#314
post #300
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can provide lots of examples of Kiwi Farms doxxing and harassing queer people. Whether they happen to work for Cloudflare at the time is a matter of chance, and not particularly relevant to the point.

Swatting people is illegal, if you have evidence of a crime you should bring it to the police, not to cloudflare.

Oh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#315
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every large platform. There is so much harassment, doxing, and other disturbing behavior on all the platforms.

All of those platforms regularly remove that type of content and ban users that post it.

No post body was provided.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

They're referring to a niche academic term that has within the past few years started gaining usage outside of academia. It can be approximately defined as[0]: > The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random. [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism Only…

Sounds synonymous to "speech that could anger people". What a load of bollocks.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unarmed police shootings are amazingly rare on a yearly basis.

And yet there are compilation videos of streamers being swatted on stream[0]. If someone has an address, all it takes are some anonymous calling techniques / a burner phone to traumatize the occupants by calling in a fake hostage situation or something of that caliber. 0: https://youtu.be/coa7tP54kDY?t=6

what % of the videos in the compilation involve an "unarmed police shooting" vs. a "swatting"? The original assertion by GP was that actually dying at the hands of police during such an event is extremely rare, an assertion that your link does not seem to refute.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every large platform. There is so much harassment, doxing, and other disturbing behavior on all the platforms.

Twitter and Meta have policies against doxing. Difficulty preventing it at much larger scale does not make them equivalent to Kiwi Farms.

I don't care if they have policies. They have a huge amount of posts directly advocating violence and doxing that don't get removed.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#319
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swatting people is illegal, if you have evidence of a crime you should bring it to the police, not to cloudflare.

Oh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.

Then charge them with racketeering.

If that doesn't work make the part you don't like illegal. Enshrine something like the "right to be forgotten" stuff into law and make them take down threads if the people they refer to don't want them up.

I know it's hard to word something like a "right to be forgotten" without making it to broad and a tool for abuse of chilling speech but it seems worth the effort if the consequences are this dire.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#320
It's a thoughtful document and I appreciate the time it took to write it.

I think there may be a missing factor in their decision-making process. I'll quote the document itself: "We also believe that an Internet where cyberattacks are used to silence what's online is a broken Internet, no matter how much we may have empathy for the ends."

That seems correct to me. It is intuitively understandable how it applies to some people who want Kiwifarms to go away. It is, perhaps, less clear how it applies to Kiwifarms itself, so let's dig into that some.

First: if it's bad to use cyberattacks to silence what's said online, it's presumably also bad to use other forms of attack to silence what's said, online or otherwise.

Second: does Kiwifarms (or sites like instant-stresser.com, noted in another comment) overall have a silencing effect?

That's a hard determination to make! I actually wouldn't want to be in the business of making that decision. You need to have a clear public rubric and evaluation process, you should be very transparent about it, and you should be willing to defend your decisions and not allow your criteria to slip based on pure public opinion. I am heartened by their description of their ability to make that decision for the Daily Stormer and hold to their principles despite attempts to create slippage -- that tells me that, as an organization, Cloudflare is capable of making nuanced decisions.

However, we shouldn't avoid hard decisions just because they're hard, or even because we might make mistakes from time to time. We should do a real risk analysis, evaluate the effect of making mistakes, and compare that to the effect of not making decisions at all.

I'd encourage Cloudflare to go back and consider whether or not the principle of maximizing the ability to speak has implications about providing services to sites which are in the business of making fun of people -- sometimes lethally -- for things they say.

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