You don’t have an inherent right to a private company’s services. That extends to a website whose main attraction is a forum that is discriminatory against people of certain races, religions, and sexual orientations, which are protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.
Arbitrary censorship of legal content for consenting adults is still utterly despicable, even when undertaken by private companies against content which is not associated with membership in a protected class.
It's still censorship, it's still paternalistic, it's still bias, and it's still wrong.
Imagine if the phone company denied you access to their privately owned towers because you criticized them on a phone call, or if gmail decided that you aren't allowed to email your own family members links to a certain domain name they deem unsavory or "inappropriate".
That's exactly why phone companies are bound by extra regulations. They are deemed core infrastructure and private censorship from phone networks would effectively be public censorship.
If CloudFlare or Gmail became the only way to communicate online, they would certainly fall under the same regulations, but they're not even close. You can still host any legal website you want and email your family any legal content you want.
> You can still host any legal website you want and email your family any legal content you want.
That's not really practically true. Recent examples include Parler and Gmail.
It's very, very difficult to publish online (at scale) anonymously. The vast majority of any western audience uses services like gmail and facebook messenger, which can (and do) censor messages at will.
Yes I understand that argument. I am part of a "protected class" in the US. I'm glad 8kun is gone. Not afraid to admit that I did browse certain 8kun boards for fun too. Anyway, you should at least be conflicted over the scenario where we need to pick the lesser of two evils. That is to say, the direction the web is headed is still very bad.
More worrisome than that is that they pledged very specifically that they weren't going to do that and that companies in their position should not do that, a stance I agree wholeheartedly with.
Then they did that.
They had a halfway decent reason for the first one (the racist site they censored was claiming their continued existence was tacit endorsement by Cloudflare, a lie) but once they crossed that line they didn't go back.
