So supporting ISIS is fine, but this is where he draws the line?
Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
So actual terrorists are acceptable, but not the website of those guys who killed that one lady last week. Okay.
Are you saying that intentionally driving your car into a group of peaceful pedestrians and killing someone, for political reasons, isn't terrorism?
ok maybe it is terrorism. But why is ISIS allowed on cloud front?
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#573We take down Al Qaeda terrorist websites all the time because they can be used to radicalize people. Nazis are no different. They are calling for the systematic violent overthrow of the US government and for the extermination of many millions of so called undesirables. This is a terrorist threat. I take this threat very seriously as do many people in the Jewish, Hispanic, and African American community.
There are literally thousands of hosts out there in and outside the United States. The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then. 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.
If you get what I'm saying - comparing two well-known instances from different parts of the political spectrum where businesses try and refuse custom for ideological reasons - why are you pretending I'm comparing gay people to neo-Nazis?
> comparing two well-known instances
> from different parts of the political
> spectrum
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#575Absolutely 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 never once in my life imagined that one of the first comments on a front-page HN post would be one that claimed that refusing service to Nazis was "spurious" and "bigoted" and that said comment was not flagged-to-oblivion. For anyone reading this thread, please know that this is NOT the majority opinion within the tech industry - not by a long shot. We are not Nazi sympathizers, and we do not think this is normal.…
I'm surprised at how many people are pretending not to understand what I wrote, seemingly in order to proclaim how anti-Nazi they are.
When I was a teenager and first read Chomsky, being anti-censorship was a left-wing thing. I don't think Chomsky has changed his opinion on censorship, or his political persuasion, and neither have I.
It's a pity that people who believe in fascistic ideals (censorship and discrimination based on political beliefs) are what is deemed "the left" these days.
IMO, if you believe in censorship and do not support free speech you are not left-wing.
> claimed that refusing service to Nazis was "spurious" and "bigoted"
Do you seriously need me to explain that "bigoted" referred to the cake example? Seriously?
As for the rest. Cloudflare did not refuse service to "Nazis". Had they done so, they would have not had to remove that service, under the entirely spurious reason that Matthew Prince woke up in a bad mood and claims they wrote something he didn't like.
They're still providing service to Stormfront, and who knows how many other "Nazi" sites.
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue extends beyond the moral. They've set a precedential behavior and now it can be used against them. "You took down X, but you won't take down Z?" This could be persuasive upon a judge or jury. By starting down this path, they've set up a standard of behavior that they will be judged against, for better or worse, moving forward. That's a bad thing for us overall because now it won't just be something the CEO…
"The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor con…
Good reference, another thing to go on my Not-A-Lawyer reading list.
However, this doesn't seem to indicate that such editorial activity can't have a legal effect in some areas. It is limited only to cases where the service provider would otherwise be implicated as the publisher/speaker instead of a neutral mechanism used in the delivery of others' publications and speech. There are many other relevant circumstances where such behavior creates at least a non-legal precedent (Not A Lawyer, so can't and don't want to get into the nitty-gritty) and expectation that CloudFlare will act in a specific manner that violates the content policy they claim to want to keep.
The simple fact is that even if the law unequivocally allowed such activity, that doesn't mean that Cloudflare hasn't set a standard of behavior that they will be expected to live up to, inside and outside of the coutroom. That's especially true in the case of a jury trial, but there are certainly no shortage of politically-aware judges who don't want to let their 15 minutes be wasted in falsely associating them as "pro-white-supremacist". And if Cloudflare is at all PR-sensitive, they are now in for a long, slow beating.
This is all a large can of worms that everyone should regret ever having opened. How hard would it have been to say "Sorry, that's not how DNS works" when some random person on Twitter said "You're supporting a white supremacist! Undo it!"?
IMO the evidence here indicates a coordinated takedown and censorship campaign by organized political forces, and this operation has undeniably been a resounding success for them. So much so that they have fundamentally undermined the core institutions of the internet itself, hardly realizing the sacrosanct barrier they've pierced.
And I know that the HN that recognizes this with near unanimity is lying around here somewhere. I'm just not sure why they're not showing up to these threads. Maybe the votes are being artificially manipulated? Maybe everyone has slowly earned themselves bans/account censures for touching a topic that the mods are sensitive about? Maybe employers are becoming extra vigilant about catching those who express heresy on HN in hopes of catching a Damore-esque figure before it becomes a national press story? I dunno. But this type of non-neutrality on the part of core online infrastructure providers should be a much bigger deal than it is.
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not expert on the subject of neo-nazis or the nazi movement, so maybe this seems more complex because of my position of ignorance. But none of the statistics seem to imply that nazis are more than simply intellectually repulsive and socially disgusting. Eh. The statistics about nazism is clear: they have killed a few million people over the last 100 years. That is more than about everyone else except maybe the va…
I don't see how that's a particularly useful view of what the statistics reflect, especially since I clarified in the same post you quoted that I was speaking with regard to nazism in the modern context. Further, it wasn't simply nazis in the abstract that killed those few million people, it was nazi controlled Germany. It seems dishonest to ignore that aspect of the history because you gloss over all of the politica…
A Nazi is way more dangerous than an Al Qaeda member and yet we would have zero problem taking down a terrorist website because it can radicalize people.
Radicalization of people is quite literally spread like a disease. The internet has allowed this disease a means of spreading unlike ever before in the history of man.
Being tolerant of such communities that call for the violent overthrow of the government, institution of a fascist government, and the genocide of entire populations of people is like allowing a cancer to spread.
This train of thought is quite literally a cancer on humanity that needs to be chemo'd out of existence.
It's literally worse than Child Porn by many orders of magnitude.
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nazis aren't a protected class, yet. Do you think that businesses shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against skateboarders, or people who refuse to wear shirts and shoes? Not that you can't think that, but it's a weird personal ideology that calls for explanation and argument, not some pronouncement of what should or should not be done. I'm pretty sure you can make the argument why gay people, women and racial or r…
> Do you think that businesses shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against skateboarders, or people who refuse to wear shirts and shoes? I don't believe that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against anyone who is behaving in a lawful manner. Is that belief what you're calling a "weird personal ideology"? > Do you have an similar argument for why Nazis shouldn't be fired, or why we shouldn't consider whet…
> why should someone's beliefs be a factor in whether I do business with them? If I'm buying something from someone why would anything other than price and quality of the product or service even come up?
Okay, let's make an example. Let's make a really blatant one.
Imagine you're Jewish. Furthermore, imagine there are two bakeries in town: Bob's Bakery, and Pastry 88.
All of the people working at both of them are perfectly civil when you go in to buy a donut. But everyone in town knows that Al Hilter, the guy who owns Pastry 88, is a Nazi. And now and then Mr. Hilter takes out ads in the local paper espousing his Jew-killing views.
Bob's Bakery and Pastry 88 are right across the street from each other. You have a hankering for a donut. Where are you gonna go to fulfill this desire?
Let's make it a little more complicated: Pastry 88 makes an amazing lemon-filled donut, and Bob's Bakery Bob's kid has a major lemon allergy. So you can't buy anything with lemons in it at Bob's. And you love lemon donuts. Do you love lemon donuts enough to give money to someone who has said that you should be gassed and have your tanned skin used for lampshades?
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't even begin to make sense... Or at least you're 20 years too late with that argument: "The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This ac…
You should read more of the Wikipedia under limits. That law does not change the fact that one could argue "well they did censor this so...". It is a risk. If you have a record that says "we censor nothing" then you are much safer. I would agree that under the law you site it should be clear cut, but that is not the way it has worked lately. It's a risk based on a moral belief and I applaud the CEO for doing it. That…
The law doesn't change what anyone can argue. It only changes what a court will consider valid. The section on limitations says nothing about about the topic we're discussing, whereas the law was explicitly written to overturn this (since then invalid) belief that "any content moderation creates a burden to moderate all content". Quote:
"The important difference between CompuServe and Prodigy for the Stratton court was that Prodigy engaged in content screening and therefore exercised editorial control. The holding in Stratton was overruled in federal legislation when Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. As a result, Internet service providers in the United States today are generally protected from liability for user-generated content."
Anything else would obviously be unworkable. Facebook, for example, exerts wide-ranging control over content (i.e. they delete quite a lot). If that were to create liability for all user-generated content on Facebook, they would have seized to exist long ago.
Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
#580Absolutely 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…
OTOH if you're a private business, refusing service to someone can be a way to express your political opinion. It's easy to call out injustice and oppression for many categories (race, gender, ...) but that case is harder to make for categories like "political ideology that actually favors oppression".
Of course this should not result in human rights violations and being restricted from communicating your beliefs to the world is one of them. Especially in infrastructure, we rely on private companies to fulfill basic needs that are protected by human rights.
If your infrastructure company is huge and as powerful as a public institution, and is able to single-handedly mess with people's human rights, you should of course not be allowed to have a political agenda. Not selling cakes to Nazis in your corner shop is something completely different.