I think this is rediculius. If they took down child porn, would you also have an issue with this? What about a phishing site hosting malware and capturing passwords for the Russian mafia? It seems clear to me you can’t be 100% agnostic to your content.
There is a huge gap between “conservative bent” and those trying to actively incite violence in the name of Hitler. And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody. A single data point is not a trend.
The point of the matter is services can host questionable content and remove it to comply with the law or services can based on their terms of service remove content "as they see fit."
The question remains, when will a service come for your content? I'm not advocating for hate speech or any illegal activities, I just think cloudflare strapped on their skis and are now on their way down the classic slippery slope.
> The CEO literally said it was because he felt like terminating DailyStormer.
Do you have a quote where the CEO says this? Your statement gives the impression that this was nothing more than a whim. As I pointed out below, according to their own statement on the matter, that's not the case:
I find it bizarre that you repeatedly link to the sanitized corporate blog. The CEO has explicitly stated it was pure whim: “Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision.”
Thank you for providing a link to support what the other poster commented.
I've provided the link I have for two reasons:
* it's a link I know about that's relevant to the discussion
* it is from Cloudflare themselves, so the chance of it being a misquote (accidental or otherwise) is less likely. I don't have a knee-jerk instinct to reject official statements as issued in bad faith without other evidence.
I repeatedly linked likely for the same reason you have: I saw something I thought was misrepresentative or misinformed more than once.
I'm thankful for the link because I can use that to alter my understanding of the event. There's a quote that's sometimes attributed to Keynes "When the facts change, I change my mind."[0] That's something I endeavor to do.
I'll also admit to a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the use of a throwaway account in a contentious discussion. I can understand the use of throwaways to protect identity, but in that case the standard should be higher: they should really be bringing something substantial to the discussion, not just repeating talking points.
And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody.
If you read the blog[1] regarding that incident, it provides a lot more evidence than the datapoint of the removal. It also completely undermines Cloudflare's claims of being content-neutral. Given that content neutrality is a binary state...
Also hosted by cloudflare: ISIS sites, which are a lot more of a clear and present danger to real people than a bunch of racists. That means the standard has gone from content neutrality - to content neutrality so long as you don't imply things the CEO doesn't like. I.e. not neutral.
From the blog:
>And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.
Anything I can say about this will be ridiculously snarky, but this is the hill you chose to sacrifice your principles on, Matthew? Really?
I was going off my memory of stormfront situation. Apologies if I incorrectly cited number of data points. I still am not concerned about the GP’s issue given the CEO expressed remorse and created a debate. It’s hard to imagine neo-nazis doing such a thing themselves should they create a cloud front competitor.
I agree they should remove ISIS sites. It’s marginally harder given you could argue it’s about religion/politics, but I’m happy to lump them in with neo-nazis inciting violence.
It’d be nice if you could create some perfect set of clear rules that you could cleanly apply to 100% of sites. Unfortunately the world is squishy and gray, which is why we have judges despite countless laws written in legalese that build on top of each other’s precedent. I don’t expect judging content to be the same. I appreciate the CEO thinking they should just defer to when gov forces them to shut something down. I also appreciate the perspective of removing extremist sites — you got one life to live so why not make a difference creating barriers to _EXTREME_ hate/violence around the world.
If you bothered to Google before posting, you'd see more than a single data point.
Voat was targeting with a letter writing campaign saying they were a child porn host when they weren't. All the liberals said "if you don't like Reddit, make your own." So someone did. And then liberals DDoS'd it into the ground and had any ISP that dared host them, filled with DMCA and child porn notifications.
Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have all worked against anyone who dares question the status quo. Not "nazis", normal people. But surely the creator of Dilbert is a threat to the nation and worthy of retribution, right?
I guess you guys are only for regulation and fairness when it suits your cause...
“Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have all worked against anyone who dares question the status quo.”
You should get your news from somewhere better than Breitbart. That’s not only transparently untrue – try spending 30 seconds watching the stream without seeing someone question the status quo – but comically so given the number of people complaining with cause that those services aren’t shutting down abusive users. I mean, Facebook and Twitter notoriously say that death and rape threats don’t violate their community standards until it gets widespread attention, and you think your unsourced assertion that simply asking questions gets anyone banned?
I, too, worry about the bigger trend of knocking legal sites offline because someone disapproves of them, but the discussion here is about Cloudflare's trustworthiness. So I'd like to point out that Voat is currently relying on Cloudflare to stay online.
“All the liberals,” “you guys are X,” intentionally loaded sarcastic Qs without an honest context... I feel like I’m reading Fox News here.
Bucketing half the population together is intellectually dishonest and does nothing to solve any problems or convince others of your points. Labeling them the enemy only creates further divisions for division sake. All it does is give fodder to those wanting confirmation bias on a given side.
It's pretty much paraphrasing what the CEO said about why they stopped providing services to the daily stormer.
Cloudflare can't be trusted anymore. If they want to say they have actual standards and rules that operate on (and shut down nazi sites based on those rules) that's fine.
