>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.”
(from internal email)
>Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to
me to be pretty much a pissant little blog.
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article:
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.
Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.
Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.
I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.
> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
Yeah, at least he should take down also the credit card fraud boards, they are doing real harm.
Since the argument is gone, i see no reason not to do that.
This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is also worrying.
Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon, or a president vetoes a bill? The point of an Executive is to be able to do act-utilitarian evaluations of context, while the organization itself is stuck following rule-utilitarianism.
It's better than if they had reverse engineered the policy. Do it or don't do it, but either way, stand by your actions and get outta here with the mealy mouthed BS. IMHO.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
People seem to be missing the entire substance of what he's getting at. That's why he mentions "no one should have that power". He even follows up about this in the blog.
> Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
Exactly! Extremely frustrating that the rest of the quote wasn't included.
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well:
“We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW.
If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
I think arbitrary is the wrong word, the correct word is subjective. The decision wasn't random, or capricious as is the denotation of arbitrary. But the decision was subjective in that it's based more on instinct, bias, opinion, feeling, than it is on something objective that can be articulated in a way that it's a reproducible judgement with different particulars.
Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter:
These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose.
1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve...
1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068...
2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof.
And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists.
"White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence."
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
I think what the subtext is is that he values free speech, but if he gets enough political pressure and threats he'll do what he has to to protect the company's bottom line on a case by case basis.
Due process? For what? It's a private company, deciding to terminate the contract with a shitty customer that is ruining their image. Worst case scenario the Nazis might have a case for breach of contract, but they won't get much out of it. Also, I'd love to see them show up in court to try to defend this as a "freedom of speech" case, and get told what a bunch of abhorrent human beings they are and to GTFO.
> I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content
how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?
Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter.
From today:
>Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
There will always be companies that care more about making a buck than anything else. For years spammers and malware authors have been able to find hosting without issue, and taking them down has been a serious pain in the ass. All these nazis need to do is rent a server in russia (where they've moved their name server) and they will be fine.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
>The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
> The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
Reading this it sounds like you missed the intent of the post. Cloudflare would have not done this had there not been circumstances in which it was indicated that cloudflare supports the organization.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
This is an argument over which companies should be designated as "common carriers". If ISPs are common carriers, they can't shut you off just because they don't like what you're hosting. The argument I hear is often that ISPs should be classified as common carriers. The difference between an ISP and a search engine is material. The search engine is, by its very nature, interpreting and ranking content. The ISP is what gets you online so you can use search engines or host pages.
The root of the problem is really the botnets. If it weren't for the DDOS attacks anyone could put a server online cheaply and communicate with their relatively small and fringe audience. But because we are incapable of enforcing laws against DDOS attacks you need to be a big a player to stay online.
"Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions."
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
Agreed in this specific case: Daily Stormer is a hate group that promotes horrible things, and there probably isn't a better solution than to just forcibly shut them down.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
The larger point about trying to censor people out of having opinions instead of ignoring or condemning them is valid. This has raised their profile far beyond simply ignoring or condemning them and treating them like any other repulsive website (of which there are PLENTY that Google/GoDaddy/Cloudflare now "officially endorse").
In practice the web can't prevent you from voicing your opinion. Even the worst of criminals manage to chat on the dark web. Companies can choose not to promote it though - Google has no obligation to put nasty stuff high in their search and the NYT has no obligation to put it on their front page. I'm not sure there's a problem there.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
If there's a real free market, then people are going to find someone willing to host anything for money. The real problem is when the law prevents companies from hosting them.
>'If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting.'
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
> and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
According to Blind, at least 40% of Silicon Valley workers support what Trump said regarding this incident. Probably less than 1% support the ideas of Neo-nazis or the Daily Stormer. You're making a false assumption and dehumanizing those who disagree with you.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:
In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
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 did not happen because the CEO grew a conscience and a backbone (how about those booter and malware sites then?), but because the Neo Nazi's claimed that Cloudflare was secretly in league with them. If that was the real reason then the whole thing sounds hollow and more as an attempt at damage control than a case of a moral line being crossed.
Anyway, from a strictly technical point of view Cloudflare is absolutely optional so no harm done, without the cloak of Cloudflare to protect it the Daily Stormer will have to go through life now as the Daily Naked Stormer.
The concerted effort to equate Neo Nazis to pornographers, atheists and lgbt people is rather worrying as well.
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.
> The concerted effort by the pro-censorship crowd to exploit nazis to promote censorship is rather worrying.
This, right here, is a straw-man that I've seen repeated countless times. I am not pro-censorship, but I'm sure as hell not for forcing companies to provide services to Nazis and other scum.
There's a huge, gaping difference between those two things and I'd appreciate it if you stopped conflating them.
Private internet services of many kinds prohibiting use for “adult” content much more broadly than pornography is routine, and has been for a long time.
But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking. I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking.
No, but there are obvious limits on what companies would like to be seen to be associating with. Cloudflare is a lot more lenient than most in this respect, but that got interpreted as 'there is no line they will not cross'. That assumption seems to not have borne fruit.
I'm reminded of the 'Slashdot will not censor posts' outrage a number of years ago because, yes, Slashdot did have that power and used it once. Of course for the absolutists that once was the sign that the end was neigh, only that's not how it played out.
> I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
Very astute observation, and definitely a thing to remember when looking at media output.
> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to?
Companies can be fined and executives imprisoned for say, selling weapons to terrorists. There's no magic hard line between "moral" / "amoral" in commerce; in a capitalist society consumption/sale are inherently moral concerns.
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.
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 abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.
You're confusing free speech with the first amendment. Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored, rather it should be debated, condemned, or ignored.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
> Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
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, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
If you label "not amplifying someone" as censorship, then there is obviously no such thing as uncensored free speech for everyone. The question then becomes who you step up to defend, and who you quietly ignore, when someone gets amplified over them.
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 speech” stands against.
I'm really playing devil's advocate here but if the CEO of Cloudflare wakes up and thinks to himself "man I hate that site, I'm going to remove it from my service", and the Internet says "no you can't", is that another form of censorship? In this situation we're either limiting what Daily Stormer can do, or limiting what Cloudflare can do.
That suit is filed against a government agency. Free speech protections in the US constitution are focused on preventing the government from stifling speech. These protections do not apply to private citizens or corporations.
It depends on where the line in the sand is, or if that kind of discrimination is legal or not.
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
Nazi's aren't a protected class. I don't have to sell you server space. But I also don't have the right to knock down your own server, should you set one up on the public internet.
> But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public setvice.
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
CloudFlare terminating their account in no way kicks them off the web. They have plenty of other options[1]. CF has just decided they don't want to help them promote their speech.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
In fact, free speech means that no private entity is compelled to help spread ideas they don't want to spread, outside of situations (mostly regulated monopolies) where a “private” entity acts as a quasi-public one.
This always sounded so silly to me. Are they legally allowed to refuse service to them? According to the law: absolutely. But that has no bearing on whether or not we are allowed to criticize them.
> 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 some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
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.
>Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue. You could have net neutrality ("free circulation for bits" if you will) and as long as no hosting providers want to take your content, you won't be able to publish them.
> In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
His point is that with the amount of DDoS power available out there to various parties, without a major ISP or CDN hosting your content you can trivially be booted off the internet. Once you accept that as a given, if one of the major ISP or CDN networks won't host your content, then you're open to censorship from anyone who doesn't like your message, which if your controversial enough that the ISPs and CDNs won't host you it's probably a given that someone is going to want to DDoS you out of existence. To further complicate things, most small ISPs when faced with a substantial and prolonged DDoS of one of the clients, will terminate that client in order to preserve service to their other clients, which means once again if you aren't being fronted by a major ISP or CDN will likely mean you'll be hoping from ISP to ISP until eventually nobody will be willing to host your content.
I think the point is, if you make a site forgo any sort of DDOS protection it effectively does not exist, especially if DDOSers want to take your site offline. Some website running on a VPS on a small hosting company likely won't be able to have the resources to keep their site running... which in my opinion is fine. If people want to shout you down in public because they don't want others to hear what you have to say, well then find somewhere else to express your views.
And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
> For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Something you'll be painfully aware once you try to browse the web through Tor and realise you have to waste your time with Cloudfare captchas every 10 minutes.
I'm really confused, have all the grown-ups returned to HN? Suddenly after several years of self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, HN realizes that self-righteousness censorship is not risk-free, and has long-term consequences? I'm glad I started coming back to HN. Maybe the long recess from reason is over.
We are going to have to have regulation to reign in these companies.
FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.
The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.
FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.
I have read many of the threads here, and I think it boils down to this: do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve?
Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are?
This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be enforced by private companies. I think of freedom of speech is the problem here: companies have more influence over our conversations and the old protections are simply not adapting well.
This is just the latest in a string of examples like this.
The Christian bakers / gay wedding cakes is one example.
But people being booted off services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are others.
We ought to have the right to exclude people from our own private spaces, our own private clubs, and our own private businesses (freedom of association).
However, at what point (and at what scale) does our private club become so large it is a de facto public space?
There does not seem to be any real precedent for discussions like this. The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
> The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
No, absolutely nothing has changed. What has changed is that the internet has given every idiot out there a megaphone and a way to link up with other idiots at a moments notice and groups like the Neo Nazis love like minded company because there is safety for them in a crowd, a way to be part of the monster without having to stand up to scrutiny.
The Christian bakers were sued and then forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because sexual orientation is a protected class. "Alt-right" or whatever Daily Stormer is, is not a protected class. "Political party" is a protected class, which puts Daily Stormer in a possibly fuzzy territory (I have never read Daily Stormer so I don't know if they count as a political publication).
The internet giants are monopolies and should be regulated as such, or broken up. But the government has basically abandoned monopoly enforcement over the last couple decades. The irony is that it is because of right-wing, anti-regulation, libertarian politics that the government has become so reluctant to enforce monopoly laws.
There's enormous precedent around the whole scale from public discrimination to privately owned public (government) forums to private discrimination in special critical circumstances (common carriers, employment, and housing), to private discrimination in businesses that are public accommodations generally, and mountains of statute and case law specific to each.
And, in each of the major categories, the law has already been applied on the internet.
While the specific scenarios may have some novelty, the general issues are not new with the internet.
1) Does the reason for terminating a customer violate law that protects certain classes of people/orgs? If so, you can't do it.
Obviously there are jurisdictional concerns here, but let's assume we can navigate them successfully, at least most of the time, without a messy court battle.
2) For any content, regardless of #1, does the customer have other choices besides you? If not, you can't do it.
For the second point, I think that should be there to protect from a company arbitrarily imposing its values. My feeling is that if there's enough healthy competition (I won't define what "enough" is because I don't know, but hope that it could be definable), someone will host your content. And if no one wants to, that should be a pretty clear signal that you're so unbelievably far away from what the vast majority (or even the near unanimity) would consider acceptable that you really will want to rethink some things.
If you are the only option, then likely you are a legally-regulated monopoly anyway and have some rules around needing to offer service blindly (rules imposed in exchange for that monopoly status).
> do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve?
Yes.
This is why VISA was instrumental in the 'war on porn' and why every service provider ever has a provision in their contracts stating they can terminate your online presence at their discretion.
That's a way for the industry to avoid becoming government regulated, as long as this self regulation takes care of the worst excesses companies will continue to be able to operate in relative freedom.
The few times that local national law (such as in France and Germany) has butted up against companies trying to re-write the law in a more lenient way this has - predictably - failed.
But as long as companies stay on the far side of that line they are free to draw more restrictive lines as they see fit with impunity so long as those lines do not affect the lives of so called 'protected classes' in a negative way and because of the item that triggers that class to be protected in the first place.
Others have touched on this: the concept of a protected class seems odd when faced with the idea that all people are to be afforded equal protection under the law (14th amendment)
Private companies certainly have the right to kick you of their service if they don't like you. However, everything that is legal is not right. And we should point it out and criticize such actions. Today it's Nazis, tomorrow it could be you.
The whole "Freedom of Speech" angle isn't really helpful here. I would phrase the question differently. From purely game-theoretical perspective, do you want companies that control large portions of our communication infrastructure make moral judgement calls regarding content passing through their servers and routers? Do you trust them to make the right moral judgements (however you define those) most of the time?
> do you want companies that control large portions of our communication infrastructure make moral judgement calls regarding content passing through their servers and routers?
If I open a bookstore, I'm not under any obligation to sell books promoting white nationalism. I choose my selection. So too can Cloudflare choose its business partners.
There are alternative CDNs. Cloudflare isn't equivalent to broadband monopolies like Comcast. You can easily switch to another CDN.
Plus, companies in general make moral judgements all the time. Deciding to start a medical services company vs. an educational services one can be a moral judgement.
However, for most companies it's a wash which CDN to pick.
Unless you're serving media to a large audience the cost is
usually in the low triple digits. And unless you need to serve problematic regions (parts of Asia, Africa), there is barely a difference in performance between most of the contenders.
So what tips the scale for any one of the CDNs?
Well, after this move me and certainly others will definitely
consider Cloudflare more often than previously - out of sheer sympathy.
For all the people who are warning of a slippery slope or a chilling effect, where do we draw a line? This site along with others like it likely helped spur a person on to murder a few days ago. This site along with other like it celebrated that murder. This site along with other like are organizing protests at that murder victim's funeral. How in good conscience can you be an accomplice in spreading that message?
I mean, the networking infrastructure carried that message. The people who manufactured the murder weapon assisted the murder goals.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.
I reported a website for human trafficking a year ago, which is still online and protected by cloud flare. I referenced parts of the forum to their staff where users mentioned enjoying raping women. Their response, "I don't see anything wrong with this content".
So what this says is Cloudflare believes in providing service to anyone until it causes bad publicity. It's certainly not a morally courageous stand, but fits in perfectly with most tech giants.
We can make burglary illegal without any additional explanation of why burglary is "wrong". This is because it is part of understanding the concept of burglary to know that it is wrong. It's the same sort of logic that applies to Nazi propaganda: it is wrong simply because it is Nazi propaganda. We understand what it is and what they are saying, so we do not need to go to additional lengths to explain why it is wrong. It should be silenced for no other reason than that it is Nazi propaganda. To promote Nazi propaganda is to undermine the social contract itself about what constitutes free speech. It is a mistake of Enlightenment political philosophy to say that every decision we make about what constitutes right and wrong must derive ultimately from basic principles by logical reasoning. In many cases merely understanding a concept suffices to directly condemn an activity and Nazi propaganda is almost the best example of how we can, without further conversation, simply say "NO"... we are not going to help you promote this and we are not going to politely explain to you why we do not agree with your views. All this talk about free speech and Nazis is nonsense. I support Cloudflare's decision.
Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. - Louis Brandeis
Unless the site was directly breaking the law, I see this move as troubling. It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground, and I think most HN readers figure why this is. The problem I see is that in the current political climate the general population won't understand that or is unwilling to.
> It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground
Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
The Daily Stormer is pretty radical, but afaik still operates within the law. Taking their platform will put them out of sight and into areas where respecting the law isn't necessary. The enemy you don't know is the enemy you have to fear the most. Unfortunately I feel like most people today are more comfortable with hiding and banning bad ideas than to confront them.
It's always better to appease Nazis. Society should take a long hard look at itself for not allowing Hitler free speech and to fully express his views.
Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So
was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then
you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views
you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
Non-sequitur. It's from Noam Chomsky so it's not surprising, he has a predilection for fallacies.
Just because two "bad" people liked something in a certain way does not mean that "good" people must therefore like it the converse way. Both Goebbels and Stalin may also have liked butter and jam on their toast, but that doesn't mean I should eat toast with just butter.
If that seems a little facetious, consider it this way: many leading figures deemed "good" by history were also in favour of regulated free speech. That doesn't make regulated free speech good, of course — though one might suppose that it means that these "good" people were probably not as liberal as many people seem to think.
In fact, during times of war, and of apprehension/anticipation of war, I'd say that there were many things that went on, which would make many liberal people take umbrage today. I would say all free speech was heavily regulated by most nations up until the perhaps the '90s or even the '00s.
I do not think it is unwise to regulate free speech. It is not wise for a civilisation, with laws, to allow people to flaunt their breaking of, or desire to break, said laws, without some legal consequence.
Are we to have rapist support rallies next? Join the Rapist Party for the legalisation of rape? No. The rape of anybody is a crime, just like murder. It is not legally permitted to be perpetrated by anyone in most countries.
The same should apply to racism — and you might say that it should not be illegal to make racist remarks, but actually, it should not be tolerated in terms of free speech either, because it is objectively wrong to believe a race is superior to another race.
It's not a question about the meaning of life or the existence of supernatural deities, so the answer is not something that lies beyond the bounds of our language to discuss. It's a question of whether one race of people is superior to another race of people, and this question is answerable scientifically: there is no superior race.
Given that there is no superior race, just like there is no superior gender i.e. women are not inferior to men, it should not be permissible for people to advocate views contrary to this — not because it is a "dominant discourse" or whatever Foucault might have said, but because it is a scientific fact.
Science is not a discursive means to enforce order, it's just the application of logic to evidence. There are no meaningful genetic differences between different races, and there are no bounds set to what a person can achieve other than those set by political regimes and by the person's financial situation/access to education.
Nothing should be able to call into question a scientifically-proven fact other than other scientifically-proven facts i.e. new evidence. It should not be legal to spread sophistry or incite dissent and disorder based on sophistry.
So, racism should not be permissible simply because it carries no truth. If racism had a basis in science, or indeed any truth to it whatsoever, it would not require fanatical cults and violence to spread its message. It would just be taught, as it is already taught that homo sapiens outmatched the neanderthal (though this is actually speculative and remains to be conclusively proven, but that's another debate).
There is no universal rule for handling free speech and it's not something that should be considered in terms of setting precedents. Every case of permissible free speech is distinct and the question must be asked each time: is the message that being advocated logically plausible/scientifically justified?
Remember, "rape is bad" is not something you can scientifically prove because it's not a comparison between two people from different places, it's a moral statement, albeit one that most agree with.
Thus, if you permit racist discourse against science, you will set a far more dangerous precedent for the rapists, human traffickers, murderers and paedophiles around the world who also feel that for too long their voices have gone unheard.
I wonder if Chomsky would readily be the one to grant them the freedom to speak openly about their preferences for murdering and raping people, from his armchair.
Just because two "bad" people liked something in a certain
way does not mean that "good" people must therefore like it
the converse way. Both Goebbels and Stalin may also have
liked butter and jam on their toast, but that doesn't mean I
should eat toast with just butter.
Chomsky is not claiming either of these people were bad, he's saying they were uncontroversially opposed to free speech, so as to highlight the defining characteristic of support: tolerance of views one finds odious. It doesn't really seem like you disagree, you just are not for free speech:
I do not think it is unwise to regulate free speech. It is
not wise for a civilisation, with laws, to allow people to
flaunt their breaking of, or desire to break, said laws,
without some legal consequence.
Which is fine. Just understand your position.
I wonder if Chomsky would readily be the one to grant them
the freedom to speak openly about their preferences for
murdering and raping people, from his armchair.
I have zero doubt he would, and have no qualms saying that I do as well.
>The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I support free speech, even when the speech is hateful and malignant, because I honestly believe the best way to combat vile ideas is out in the open where people can see them, hear them, discuss them and repudiate them. Cultures can't innoculate themselves against ideas without an intellectual herd immunity, and that is impossible without mass exposure.
On the other hand, fuck Nazis.
I think I'm quite willing to let them come for the Nazis then start caring when they come for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, etc. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
Of course, on the third hand, I have no real power over anyone else's speech, and I'm just some rando on the internet, so it doesn't really matter what I think.
I mean, he just has the authority over the company and can deny service to them, he can't effectively shut them down. Just give them downtime. I would compare this to a DoS more than a shut down.
A sensible business decision by Cloudflare, and a fine moral stand to take. There is nothing positive to be gained by servicing such neo-Nazi websites, and Cloudflare is under no obligation to keep them as customers.
Similarly, the Daily Stormer is free to take their custom to a provider who turns a blind eye to or supports their toxic ideology.
Cloudflaire did a lot damage today by releasing that statement. It's one thing to have a policy or guideline that would ban a site like this. To have the CEO tell us he woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick this site off of the internet sends the message cloudflaire's service isn't a stable place governed by rules and policies. Cloudflaire CEO moods will dictate policy.
I always felt Cloudflaire was a hotpot service with nsa hooks.
Honest question for people who think this stifles freedom: do you also think taking down ISIS recruitment videos is anti-free speech? Should we not do that either?
Online radicalization is real. The challenge of how to deal with that and offer considerable freedom on the Internet will be a challenge for our society.
A very good point. The anti-censorship narrative feels very similar to the right's denial (or at least it's willful ignorance) that white domestic terrorists are a thing in the US.
How is speech perpetrated by white supremacists to incite violence any different from that of foreign terrorist organizations?
Yes, both are anti-free speech. It's not that we want people to join these groups, it's that we're rapidly spiraling down the rabbit hole of censorship. IS was using Cloudflare to weaponize beheadings of foreign hostages into propaganda. TDS was, as @octal pointed out on Twitter today [1], a "stupid racist/troll crappostsite". We've lowered the bar significantly here. Of all pathetic things to give into, Cloudflare gave into the outrage over these TDS losers?
I think Cloudfare made the wrong decision here, but for me the reasons it's damaging to free speech are deeper than "is free speech at the level of government or private organizations?"
There's a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to say Cloudfare is a private company, they were free to make a decision, they exercised that right, and now white nationalists have the right to choose to go to a different provider. Others have the right to do business or withhold business from Cloudfare in response.
Another, though, is to say that Cloudfare is now in a unique position--by the CEO's own admission--and has power over another person's speech as a result. It would be akin to a husband controlling a wife's contacts with others. Sure, the wife could leave, but that's not really a good argument for the husband's behavior being ok; someone is, similarly in the hands of the company somewhat unfairly.
Yet another way to look at it is this: when Cloudfare decides it can and will make content-based decisions, have they now implicitly argued that when they don't remove content, they implicitly support that content, in that it's not aversive enough to remove? Where do you draw the line with that? And if a company nominally accepts that responsibility, does that mean we, in exchange, should allow them to regulate other traffic?
One argument for net neutrality is that while it binds a corporation's hands, it also frees them of responsibility for things they might otherwise be liable for. This was the bargain with phone companies, after all, with common carrier status. No one blames the phone company for supporting white supremacists because they carried their phone calls, but nor do they worry about the phone company dropping their calls because the phone company disagrees with their political position.
My impression is that the CEO of Cloudfare is freaking out at the moment because he realizes he has now made Cloudfare implicitly responsible for the content on its systems, and has opened up an argument against net neutrality. He's essentially saying to the government "please come up with rules that absolve us for responsibility in this situation."
If Cloudfare had simply said "we don't drop clients because of the nature of the content" they would have had a very strong position. Now they've opened a can of worms and have called into question their complicity in the content they carry.
They can't have it both ways: by saying that white supremacist groups are too aversive for them, they have now implicitly said that everything else is not too aversive. This is a very undesirable route to be going in in terms of freedom of speech.
For what it's worth, I also oppose network companies removing ISIS recruitment videos, all other things being equal. Now, if a court decided that the content poster/creator was in violation of some ethical and legal code to such an extent that their right to distribute content should be restricted, that's one thing, but that would require actual due process in a court of law.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content,"
...unless the press tells them what their philosophy needs to be? The lesson is that no capitalist company can remain neutral, today. Which has good and bad consequences. It's amazing how the small number of media conglomerates have solidified their political power alongside their commercial power. A true locus of control in Western society.
It's my fear this locus of control or suppression of voices is part of the reason we have an increase in violent rhetoric.
I learned an important lesson in 2016, my worldviews are not shared in America outside of big cities. It forced me to realize that I didn't even know people disagreed so fiercely because of media conglomerate created echo bubbles.
Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility?
My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
(Yes, you absolutely need to remove the bullet point now.)
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
Yes, you're one tough maverick for repeating something stated only about 20x in just this thread.
But you're indeed quite brave to pretend not to have seen the 25 answers pointing out that it's also this CEO (and everyone else's) right not to participate in the spreading of hate speech and nazi propaganda.
Also:
"slippery slope" is not an argument, it's a fallacy. Observe: "now, they're only imprisoning the murderers. It's only a matter of time until they'll throw you in jail for walking funny"
> you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so ...
Why? Does eating one apple pie obligate you to eat all the apple pie?
When I first clicked on the discussion link, there were two comments. I also took a break to go to the restroom before I submitted my comment. I'm sorry that I wasn't quick enough for you.
> unilaterally
Happy now?
Did you actually want to discuss/argue with my comment or just criticize the way I worded it?
>I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
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 finds offensive; rather, it will be anything that could, through any potential legalistic contortion, result in legal liability.
We should all be very concerned about these low-level infrastructure components like GoDaddy, Google DNS, and CloudFlare beginning to adopt a policy of content moderation.
I'm shocked that something as simple as "they're nazis" is actually being accepted by people here; it is pretty much the stock anti-speech argument that we've all rehearsed forever. Sad to see that many aren't living up to it now that the cards are on the table.
Domains should only be seized when the government issues a binding legal order, not when the registrar or CDN's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
This is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine it's not coordinated specifically to weaken/undermine any form of anti-establishment or politically incorrect speech online. These attacks on core infrastructure delivery components need to be denounced loudly.
"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 content without themselves becoming publishers"
I like the article as that it still shows that they're committed to being neutral, however, they will respond when you try to drag them down with you. From the article, it sounds like the stormer bit the hand that fed them.
Let's say you host porn. Let's also assume you wish to charge for porn. Many banks, credit card merchants, etc DO NOT wish to deal with your company at all. They wont take your transfers nor business. There are merchants that are comfortable taking payments from you (CCBill) but they cost much more since they have the expertise to deal with these types of chargebacks etc. I am not sure how I see this is different. If you create a hate website - you might get dropped from SendGrid. Tough. That is how it works.
Cloudflare is in the business of protecting websites from DDOS attacks (and various other things). They should of course try to estimate the cost of protecting a given client, and forward that cost onto them. However, if that client is willing to pay, their business centers around protecting them. I highly doubt daily stormer is their worst client in terms of DDOS protection or any other service.
Matthew Prince is asking for a conversation to begin on establishing policy for supporting free speech vs. policing a service. Service providers of all kinds have been more-or-less flying by the seat of their pants on this issue, making up policy according to their individual ideals, and a lot of arguments so far have fallen along ideological lines.
As more and more people continue to participate in the internet, there are going to be more issues like this, not fewer.
So let's maybe kick off that discussion a little bit? Someone that's articulate might be able to build the foundation for a policy here that would be attractive to lots of service providers.
Some things to consider:
-> Local law vs. ethical considerations. A lot of expressions and statements that are just fine by US standards are illegal or otherwise censored in other place. Google has struggled with this in China for years now. There's no reason to believe that the US will continue to be a beacon for free speech forever. Efforts to control, surveil, and censor speech are ongoing in the US, as Dreamhost recently pointed out. How should services handle this? Do you adhere to local laws or to what you believe is right?
-> Free speech vs. abuse. In this case, I don't mean abuse-by-meanness, but abuse by misuse of resources. From blatant spamming all the way down to just being the loud-mouthed jerk who posts too often in a forum, there's a whole spectrum of abuses here and most service providers happily block this content. What constitutes abuse? Should everything be supported, to the best of the service provider's ability, or is this a point where nearly everyone agrees that free speech should be limited?
-> Free speech vs. disruptive or disgusting speech. Communities gather assholes. Some of them are accidental or ill (HN has its own, which it has merrily perma-banned), some of them just want to stir shit up. Some of them give us something to think about, they just want to be really abrasive in the process. What are the limits here? What if we end up on the wrong side of some issue, what would our opinions about limited speech be then?
-> Nice vs. Free. These all kind of could be distilled down into a single debate: do we want a nice society, or a free society?
-> slippery slope vs whataboutism vs sanity: can we, for just a moment, not pretend that we're unable to distinguish between self-professed nazis calling for the extermination of jews and blacks, and legitimate speech in opposition of the government?
Yes, if you're drawing a line there will be, by definition, cases close to it, on both sides. But this isn't one of them. And it's not like this is some sort of new problem that we haven't successfully navigated before. Courts have always had to make binary decisions from continuous facts: pornography vs. art, or just naming that single grain of sand that makes this stretch of coast a beach per California regulation 343 etc.
"Free vs nice" is an insidious way to delegitimise the concerns of those actually targeted by torch-wielding nazis. People aren't asking for a "nice" country. They're asking for the freedom to peacefully walk around without the fear of being splattered onto the pavement by the next terrorist's car attack.
I say again -- he claims that the Daily Stormer claimed that Cloudflare NOT cutting them off was some kind of endorsement.
If true, that makes them a very special case.
I generally oppose almost all cases of a company using their legal right of censorship, at least when it's squarely aimed at censoring OPINIONS rather than just censoring specific modes of expression (e.g. threats, curse words, whatever). But he managed to find a legitimate-sounding loophole. He has no obligation to support the Daily Stormer's false claim of endorsement via his (in)actions.
If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?
It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.
I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
I think that private companies like Cloudflare that claim to uphold free speech whatever the circumstances are fooling themselves. In this case it wasn't the Nazi propaganda of TDS that tipped the balance, it was them claiming that Cloudflare supported them. That made it very personal to Cloudflare and it's management in a way Prince clearly had not anticipated could happen.
The reality is that private companies and individuals, unless compelled by law or regulation, have no obligation to facilitate the free speech of others. None. They certainly don't have an obligation to facilitate speech that falsely smears or defames them themselves. Trying to believe or claim that they could do so in all circumstances was naive.
The principle of absolute moral neutrality is simply untenable. Choosing not to choose is itself a choice. Given the existence of repulsive opinion and content, choosing not to exclude it is simply a choice to publish it. It doesn't in any way dodge moral responsibility. It's time companies like this did the truly hard thing and set actual policies they believe in and can follow as a matter of conscience.
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 my professional career as an infrastructure leader. To me, it was simple: ISIS was killing innocent people and Cloudflare was complicit in the weaponizing these killings into propaganda.
I can't believe I'm saying this but here in 2017, I've had a change of heart. It's not that I support ISIS, or Daily Stormer, or Nazis. Fuck all of those guys. The problem here is that I feel that the post-Charlottesville Internet is rapidly sliding into a very scary trend of _weaponizing speech_. Prior to last weekend, the weaponization of speech was mostly confined to SJW-speak, where people call others' speech "violence". No longer confined to Twitter outbursts and op-eds, we are now seeing the weaponization of speech by service providers.
It's easy to write off Daily Stormer as a bunch of inbred Nazi assholes because, hey, that's obvious, but who's next? Who's the next group that gets knocked off the Internet? Trump supporters? Civil War historians? Encryption experts? You? Me? Who gets to decide? Social activists? The government? Some other government? Matthew Prince?
Even if you're ready to drive a truck into Richard Spencer's house, you should be outraged by Cloudflare's action today. This is quite possibly, as one of his employees said, the end of the Internet--certainly the free Internet.
A previous blog addressed a similar issue, about ISIS, with a very clear policy. It's worth the read.
From Mr. Prince:
"> What safeguards do you have in place to ensure that CloudFlare does not support illegal terrorist activity?
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain." [1]
"Again, CloudFlare is not a hosting provider. If we were to terminate this, or any other customer, the material wouldn't go away, it would just be a bit slower and be more subject to attack. We do not believe that "investigating" the speech that flows through our network is appropriate. In fact, we think doing so would be creepy." [1]
> Your CEO has in the past publicly defended providing services to websites hosting dangerous material. Would his position change if one of his own family was hurt or killed in an incident that could be reliably linked to the [controversial website]?
In a word: no. As a way of proving that point, rather than speculate on a gruesome hypothetical, let's discuss a concrete example. About a year ago, a young hacker broke into my email accounts, rummaged around, and caused a significant amount of damage and embarrassment to me. At the time, the hacker was a CloudFlare user. He even used his CloudFlare-powered site to publish details of the attack. I was furious. It was a direct attack by one of our users specifically targeting me. Despite that, we did not kick him off our network nor should we have.
The fact that US hosting companies have the pretty much unquestioned choice to decide whether or not to host websites of organizations supporting a faction of armed rebellion against the US, to me says we're probably doing this right.
The whole Civil Rights Movement came about as a result of a faction of armed rebellion against the US in the 1960s! I suppose you think it was a mistake to let them have the right to be heard back then?
They are a business and they have the right to do this. 100% However they can no longer say they are "content-neutral". Also because they have taken an active step to censor they face the fact that in the future they could be sued for NOT censoring other content as there is now precedent created by this action. If you never censor then you have a clam of safe harbor. Emotionally the CEO is correct. From business point of view this decision opens them up to risk. Long term this was likely unwise.
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 act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers"
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 does not invalidated the risk.
Surprised no one has linked this back-and-forth discussion at Blackhat 2013 between cybercrime investigative reporter Brian Krebs and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince regarding CloudFlare's hosting of "booters"/DDOS marketing sites. I will put a bit of the conversation here, but please do listen to it in context.
It's funny that people still believe that exclusion will prevent other people from radicalization, rather than doing the opposite.
People get shouted down on college campuses if they disagree with politically correct views. So they go somewhere else to speak out their views, not being interfered with anymore. So they radicalize.
People in companies have to fear penalties if they speak out against developments they disagree with, so they don't speak out openly and form small circles and consult forums of their own. So they radicalize.
People see themselves misrepresented as extremists by what they perceive as the "mainstream media", so they turn to what they think is the opposite of that, so they enter their own world of facts with Fox, Breitbart, etc. So they radicalize.
Those people will vote for whoever they think represents the enemy of their enemies, and even support foreign governments that they think represent the opposite of their own establishment. They won't give a f about virtue-signaling platform providers in their own country, they will turn to providers elsewhere, whoever that may be (Russia etc).
The belief that further exclusion everywhere will make anything better is just absolutely ridiculous.
This is well done statement. He is acknowledging that he himself has no idea what the right way to go about it is and at the same time running his company the way he believes it should be run.
As much as I don't like cloudflare because it does create security issues (you are afterall proxying traffic through them) I have to respect the CEO's position on this. And it isn't easy.
> We're going to have a long debate internally about whether we need to remove the bullet about not terminating a customer due to political pressure.
I think you can safely say this has nothing to do with political pressure if it's something you've asserted yourself. You can't say, "We've never taken down a website due to internal moral pressure," but that's something I actually consider when picking a business to do business with, so it stands to reason a business should make decisions based on this. Not everyone feels this way, and that's fine, but I prefer to do business with people I consider principled in the way that I am.
Is this a dangerous notion? It doesn't seem so in practice, in that the only people being banned are Nazis and child porn distributors; tough luck making that slope slippery with those two players.
While this was the right choice and long overdue IMO, it was the wrong way to do it. They should update their TOS to remove the arbitrary clause about terminating for any reason, and replace it with a concrete list of behaviour which is against their terms, like perhaps hate speech, violent threats and harassment. Cloudflare can decide where this line is, but there is a line and it should be clear to everyone. Clients deserve to know what the criteria are prior to signup, and Cloudflare deserves the right to choose which clients to service.
Thankfully Cloudflare are not and should never be in the position where they decide what stays on the internet, as they are just one provider, and do not have a monopoly. This is why monopolies are undesirable, even though most companies aspire to one.
> They should update their TOS to remove the arbitrary clause about terminating for any reason, and replace it with a concrete list of behaviour which is against their terms, like perhaps hate speech, violent threats and harassment.
Companies make those clauses arbitrary for a purpose: that's so they don't get a bunch of amateur legal eagles who will attempt to argue forever about what they can and can not get away with. By purposefully leaving a gray area the company can draw the line by adjusting to fluid conditions when it suits them.
You can disagree with that but I totally understand why a company like Cloudflare would want to reserve some room for maneuvering: it is impossible to know what the future will throw at you.
I'm a long time lurker of HN. This is my first post. Decided to sign up to write this.
After all I have read in the news regarding Daily Stormer, I thought it best to go straight to the source, and find out whether what I had been reading was accurate, or if their views had been entirely, or in part, misrepresented.
As a result of Cloudflare revoking their services to DS, the site is down. I can't evaluate DS directly. To me, this is bad.
If everything that was said about DS is true, their own words would reveal their colours. People could judge them accordingly.
The media regularly misrepresents individuals and groups. We shouldn't have to take the media at their word. Whenever possible, we should be able to evaluate the source. Now we can't, and we're worse off for it.
All I have to say is the arguments being put forth by so many on this thread are poorly formed, appeal to logical fallacies, in particular false equivalence, and generally show a lack of understanding of American enlightenment ideals and the Constitution. I'm not going to get down in this mud by trying to refute all the bad points, but it makes me sad to see HN in such a state. I think perhaps it's time for country of origin tagging so we know where commenters are from... because these sentiments are somewhat understandable in less free european countries, but are much less so if the posters are American.
I hope this isn't a precursor to HN being sockpuppeted to death like Reddit...
For those making the "public company it's their right" argument, it's worth considering what that logic might imply.
Does it mean food stores could deny selling you food, based on your associations/affiliations? Airlines deny you travel? Cell phone companies, deny you a phone?
I think the reason we're seeing backlash here is that the internet is largely perceived as a utility now (I believe utility companies cannot deny service at will).
Secondly, more than once is US history have those attempting to be virtuous gone too far (e.g. McCarthyism). Surely it will happen again. When that day comes, will it be better if we err to the side of too dismissive or too open-minded?
Generally agree. Potential distinction between content consumer and content producer though. E.g. it might be a right to consume electricity, but is it a right to produce it, say.. with solar panels?
Dear CloudFlare, Hi mr prince i know you read this.
Could you please apply the same policy to malicious sites that are you are proxying which you never bother to take down because of 'insert poor reasons here'? I think thats worse then to see or read an opinion i don't agree with, regardless of how explicit that opinion is or how badly i disagree. People should be able to say what they want where they want and not only when the largest part of the population/media agrees.
The limit lies at VIOLENCE. There never is a reason to enforce or show your opinion through means of violence. Ever.
What about the case where Microsoft Frontpage's EULA forbid creation of websites that shed a negative light on Microsoft? Wasn't the verdict that such a clause is not enforceable?
I find it amusing that many of the same people who bemoan the loss of "net neutrality" are in this very thread applauding arbitrary censorship of content by a large company.
This is reasonable decision. If you say something bad about my company then "no soup for you" [1].
It seems like there is no free speech on internet: because free speech is controlled by corporations and the loudest people on social media. So there will be no ISIS websites, no Daily Stormer websites, etc.
> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?
I don't think that's fair because defamation of character could be applied here. What would you prefer they do, sue the Daily Stormer while continuing to distribute their content? Cutting off their services seems a far more rational approach.
At the end of the day Cloudflare are just exercising their own freedoms to accept the business they choose to. The Daily Stormer will (if they haven't already) just switch to another provider so it's not like they're being censored (well, not in any effective way) and everyone is now clear where Cloudflare's position is with regards to The Daily Stormer while very little time was wasted with expensive lawyers. On balance I think this seems a pretty fair outcome for all parties involved.
It could be argued that the mere presence of a Nazi flag as expression is incitement. Not ordinary speech. Naziism is nothing if not clear about violence to people about things that they cannot change about themselves. Skin color. Lineage. It's not like "if you don't do this we have no problem with you" (the Antifa fall into this category. Nazis fall into the former).
Can someone explain to me how the protection of free speech sits within the view of "the market will sort it out"? This seems like a very interesting case to take as an example.
In general this forum is pretty pro market but when a certain idea comes under attack from the market, people start talking about public goods. It seems like there are some contradictions here that feel under explored.
One thing a lot of speechers don't seem to get around here: taking down The Daily Stormer is speech. Also, keeping them up is speech. If you want to regulate CloudFlare so that it has to carry The Daily Stormer, take it up with your congressman. But don't pretend you're neutral in the fight between those who value the constitution and those who would trample over it.
So cloudflare terminates the account of some pathetic racists, but happily continues to host Ripoff Report, a company whose basic business model is to defame people online and then extort them for money. You know, a site that actively ruins people lives, employment, etc. But a silly racist message board is what moves the CEO to take action.
To describe the daily stormer as a silly message board is to ignore the broader context. It seems likely that what the CEO acted out against was the death of Heather Heyer at the hands of the kinds of people who visit the daily stormer (and are radicalized by it), the tacit endorsement of those people by Trump, and the specter of the US slowly transforming into something like Nazi Germany. None of those things are "silly" or "little."
Interesting that Matthew Prince did not think to list the owner of the device that is connected to the internet as a possible option of who could or should censor what one sees on the internet. This to me is the best option and not even put on the table. The old internet was amazing. Where is the new internet forming today?
In a strange way this reminds me of the Reddit controversy where the CEO was caught modifying comments. I have never trusted Reddit after that, in a way I am thankful to the Reddit CEO for shaking me out of my complacency.
I have similar thoughts about this. I do not want technology companies deciding what content is reachable.
"Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance... but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Northern Secs. case. (1904).
If you have not read the post and came straight to the comments, you should read the post. I found it well written, thoughtful, and cognizant of its potential role in dictating what the future of the internet could look like.
If you had a restaurant, and you don't feel comfortable having Nazis/neoNazis at your place of business, would you serve them or would you feel like it's your right to choose not to do business with them.
I'm glad to see CloudFlare do this, I think it's going to hard to defend themselves against attacks from the MPAA, RIAA, and other troll organizations now :/ I guess no good deed will go unpunished
This is definitely sparking the Streisand Effect now. I had never heard of this site before, and having their domain dumped by three major tech companies in a row has plastered it all over my news bubble.
If beating up a kid on a playground is free speech, then that is where my tolerance of free speech ends and I will go and stop the production of pain from a simply ethical harm-minimization standpoint
What about the question of, WHY is Cloudflare responsible for 10% of internet requests? Who are there competitors, and at what point should these service providers be subjected to antitrust laws?
Ignorance is bliss I guess, maybe the white nationalist shouldn't have a web presence for these SJWs to notice them else they would go on rampant like these gangs in LA/chicago.
All dangerous propaganda should be stopped, but mark this day as the start of a new era, the "Echo-chamber-Internet", censored by whoever shouts the loudest.
I would never shut down such websites. Not due to Freedom of speech, but because now they will hide better. Most of these people login with their Facebook accounts to post hateful comments etc. I mean, seriously, all it takes for any law enforcement is to keep these people under control and that's it and sue them if it's the case. On the other hand, now we risk to create more and more parallel societies and secret groups. I understand that a private company can decide to terminate any user's account just "because they can". Completely fine with that.
These aren't child pornographers trying to stay under the radar of the law. These are Nazis advocating for the murder of people who don't look like them, and trying to make their views mainstream.
Making them harder to for the vast majority of people to find is a major part of exactly how you shut a violent fascist movement down. And if you don't think a movement like this should be shut down, you're part of the problem.
> Making them harder to for the vast majority of people to find is a major part of exactly how you shut a violent fascist movement down.
Did you ever read about how Mussolini or Hitler gained their power? Do you really think that the governments back then didn't do anything to prevent what they were trying to start? That they didn't try to shut them down, etc.?
We are talking about a severe social problem that unfortunately ends up mostly with bulls* - white supremacy and all this cr. Why? Because nobody wants to listen to these people - what are the issues they have? I would say that most of the time, these people don't have a high income. Maybe they are unemployed, etc., maybe they don't feel secure/safe - do you actually know why they do these things? Some may be mentally ill, but hell, I don't want to believe that all of them are!
How many times does this have to happen again and again...? When will we ever learn? Rising walls and shutting people up are not good ways to build something - but only to destroy.
People that frequent TDS will probably believe this to be result of a secret globalist cabal further cementing their resolve that something must be done to save the white race.
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.
I'm not sure this is a good idea since Cloudflare came out initially in favor of maintaining their account. Mind you, I don't like Nazis and frankly I don't care that they lost their account but it's bad for a business to change its mind so quickly. Honestly, I say let the fascists have their crappy site, just don't help them monetize it. Let's see if they can keep up with their "recruitment" when it's clear the only class of people they can garner support from are the kind that spout nonsense like Alex Jones or worse.
I can't wait for the day that society figures out that individuals, small groups of people and big groups of people need different rules when it comes to what is and isn't free speech.
A small bakery not putting a confederate flag or a rainbow or a swastiaka on a cake or conversely being compelled by law to do so if requested is different than Google or Cloudflare kicking out a customer for their speech or being legally compelled not to.
I think Cloudlfare was in the right. The Daily Stormer was pretty stupid to say that Cloudflare supported or agreed with them and got kicked out.
In half of Europe Nazis were replaced by Stalinists...hope we're not on the same path.
Legally 1st amendment is protection against the government, but principally it should be applied to any entity with national or global power.
Racist, Nazis or anyone can say what they want (minus explicit call for violence), and the opposing side has the equal right to prove them wrong. That's the beauty and intent of the 1st Amendment. How people are cheering this decision, seems rather shortsighted to me.
Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" [1] . Scary to delegate such powers to a person who "literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet"
Cloudflare has also been crucial to malware vendors who are pushing out their exploit kits. When I worked at Malwarebytes we had the worst possible time working with the Cloudflare abuse team to take down active exploit kits.
They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.
I think that calling every decision unilaterally the same no matter the variables involved is pretty rash. Lots of discussions on HN devolve into this way of thinking and I really can't stand it.
An entity that puts child porn on the Internet isn't protected by freedom of speech. Soliciting hate, violence and prejudice is obviously not identical but it's a lot different from just having a different opinion than someone else.
Shitty people should be treated shitty by companies. I don't really see a democratic way of banning folks like this from Cloudflare besides Cloudflare deciding to do so.
"paid" as in you have to pay per DDoS to the booter. CF business is not in getting money directly from the booters, but in acquiring many paid CF subscriptions from the sites that the booters can attack. Some of these booters can generate 100+Gbps UDP attacks.
I'm Jewish, and a huge portion of my family was killed in the holocaust. Two great aunts were operated on by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. I hate and fear neo-nazis and people who ascribe to similar hateful, violent ideologies. I was shocked and scared by what I saw happened in Charlottesville. A small part of me even briefly fantasised about a modern day Inglorious Bastards.
But I know freedom of speech needs protection, because today, it is easier than ever to be given a label and associated with the worst of humanity, and for people to think that you're a racist/sexist/etc., even when you are very far from it. We all just saw this happen to James Damore, a pro-diversity guy, who suggested ways to make his workplace more attractive to a larger proportion of women, and cited only science that has been backed up by a significant number of studies. The tyrannical Left felt some of his comments go against their narrative, the narrative that oppression is the cause of everything unless proven otherwise. A intellectually lazy and innacurate narrative, obviously. The world is never so simple, and the evidence doesn't support such a view. If we give up freedom of speech and punish people like James Damore, we will have lost the freedom that supports our society, and allows us to have political discourse.
Do you know what separates us from Russia, China, and the rest? The freedom of speech. Democracy is only truly held by a country when political discourse is allowed. Obviously.
The Left is guilty of demonisation of their opponents and alienation of their allies, and is, from what I've seen, the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others. People need to wake up to its threat. It is much less obvious than the hideous Neo-Nazis, far more insidious.
The fact that I fear being called 'right-wing' for what I have just said is absurd. Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share. And of course because I disagree with both wings. They are both driven by fear instead of reason. Nothing clouds one's judgement more than strong negative emotion. The crocodile brain. The worst part of ourselves.
My limit? The explicit threat or encouragement of violence. This is never acceptible. This is where we can and should be coming down on the neo-nazis, white supremacists, socialists, antifa, and the rest of them. They are violent people, so this isn't hard.
Encouraging neo-nazism, given the holocaust, might be considered encouraging violence. This makes some sense to me. So perhaps, where there is incontrovertible evidence of encouraging Nazi belief, or belief systems that are explicitly and historically supportive of violence, we can consider the implicit threat of violence an explicit one. Can anyone poke holes in this? Or any of what I've said? Unlikely anyone will read this absurdly long comment, but I still want to post it.
I believe you have the right to express your views freely and I agree with you that violence on any end of the spectrum is unacceptable. Groups like Antifa and BLM have legitimate grievances which their violent actions completely undermine in my eyes. The narrative of the "middle class rural uprising" we've been presented with as the reason for Trump's election has, at its core, exposed perfectly understandable issues regarding middle American economic and political disenfranchisement, which have unfortunately been taken up as a banner by white supremacists, and twisted into a justification of their ideals.
However, I have to object to what I see as an attempt to portray yourself as a politically unbiased observer:
>Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share.
Prior to this, you assert that "the Left" is "the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others." Earlier, you refer to the "tyrannical Left" and mention that you consider James Damore to have been a victim of censorship, and their "(obviously) intellectually lazy and inaccurate narrative."
You may reject political parties but you appear to disagree with one ideological wing far less than the other. Such language only serves to poison the well, and encourage exactly the distraction and emotionally charged polarity you claim to oppose.
The linked post is PR, or more accurately, damage control; and I say this with no malice towards Cloudflare. Simply, it's in their Terms of Service [1] that they can terminate accounts for any reason, which is exactly what they did.
Unfortunately for them, this puts them squarely in the same category as, say, Google [2][3][4], whose near-ubiquitous presence in people's digital lives intersects with their black-box suspension behavior and near-memetic lack of customer support, to unpleasant effects. And no ill will towards Google either; they are just one of several examples who exist at the sweet spot of significant market share, widespread presence at various layers of information-networking, and a largely disconnected customer support experience.
Cloudflare is trying to set themselves apart from a company (and competitors) that evoke that association by blogging about the gravity of their decision, but at this stage their writings aren't backed by demonstrable due process, like they aspire to work towards. Instead, they truthfully admit that it's troubling that any number of private corporations up and down the stack can boot people and information off the net, and then segue off to a self-reflective, but inconclusive closing.
No new ground is blazed by this post. After all, those hosting content that they know has fallen afoul of contemporary sensibilities are still concerned, the people troubled by private corporations' control of the net stack have another example to add to their list, and the people who are most disturbed by the nature of the content banned in this instance are pleased this situation played out the way it did.
Some will invoke the slippery slope argument, and perhaps rightfully so. I'd argue from a pragmatic standpoint that mainstream views shift over time, so it's natural that some topics will become taboo, some views will become to be seen obsolete and even abhorrent, as history has shown. And absent government regulation (in all relevant jurisdictions), corporations will try to act in their own self-interest, trying to balance reassuring their own customer-base with satisfying wider public value-sets, while seeking to shed customers who may cause them a disproportionate amount of cost: monetary, reputational, or otherwise. Government regulation protects certain classes of people through various mechanisms, like those with disabilities, or certain, but not all intrinsic characteristics that have been commonly used in the past to discriminate. We, as societies, then overlay subjective judicial systems to try to reason whether corporations' behavior towards certain individuals was legal or illegal.
It's wasted effort to try to gauge, as outsiders, whether Cloudflare will enact a transparent process if any process they enact operates solely on the honor system. If it's checked by the legal system, then that's a different story. We're too early for that story.
Free speech is not important because it is a pleasant experience to be able to speak your mind. It is important because it is the only hope we have of society making moral and intellectual progress. Every time a new idea comes along, it starts out unpopular and faces resistance from the establishment. If we decide what is right by arguing, unpopular but correct ideas can win. If we resort to blows, they are much less likely to.
The government must permit free speech because we cannot improve a system we cannot criticize. But this is not a sufficient condition to give new and radical ideas a chance. Citizens must believe in the principle, too. Just like all the anti-discrimination restrictions on government offer little protection to the marginalized when any business can do it, a guarantee that the government will not throw you in jail for your speech means little when no one will host your website, no one will print your book, no one will hire you, and campaigns of bullying and harassment are fair game.
It is easy to feel that might makes right when you are on the side of the majority, but looking back in history, it is not always obvious what is right. For example, we often imagine that the historical opposition to interracial marriage proceeded from base hatred, but this wasn't so. The science of the time showed clearly and repeatedly that the races had vastly differing intelligences and that intelligence was heritable. We know now that this research was flawed, but at the time, it was well established scientific opinion. The concern was that by mixing the races, we would drop the intelligence of humanity down to the mean, and deprive ourselves of great thinkers, and bring about the doom of humanity in an idiocracy. It was argued that those who supported interracial marriage were blinded by compassion and would cause the downfall of civilization.
This was a very popular, very intellectually credible view, held by good and responsible upstanding citizens who were willing to work hard and fight hard to protect civilization.
Sure, they were able to pass laws based on their views. That's right and proper. But should they have been allowed to suppress dissent? Should the scientific community have rejected research that would lead to the doom of human civilization? Should people be fired for supporting it? Demonstraters identified, shamed, and harrassed? Print shops refuse to print their literature?
The world is a weird place. Speech which we consider dangerous abnd abhorrent usually is. But sometimes? Sometimes it's right, either in part or in whole. Sometimes what you think is right, based on what you think you know, turns out to be wrong.
The reason it is critical to let Nazis speak, the reason it is critical to oppose arguments with arguments alone and never with any measure of force, is that this is the only system under which views which are true and right have a chance of winning.
Whatever you want the rule to be, however you want to treat the Nazis, remember that not that long ago, their ideas were the ones that were obviously popular and right, that all the well-informed and powerful and good people subscribed to.
The price of free speech is that there are always crazies. People starting cults of ignorance and hate, drawing the desperate and the damaged into them and threatening the very foundations of society. These ideas need to be fought, but it is crucial that they be fought WITH. WORDS. If we resort to collaborative blows, we will miss it when the crazies are right about something important.
I hope a civil lawsuit advances this conversation much faster than the Cloudflare CEO can.
Yes, speech and expression has consequences. The reactionary service provider likely faces consequences too.
A court could easily side with the "abhorrent neo-nazis" if DDOSing raises their bills and Cloudflare's adhoc policy was the culprit, no matter what arbitration clause was written in their contract, and put the damages on Cloudflare.
yeah, no. Because among those great freedoms is the freedom of contract. Just as you can, in the absence of an agreed-upon fixed term, cancel your subscription to "Armchair Paralegal Monthly" any day you want, CF is free to fire any of their customers.
Prince spoke at Blackhat in Vegas... several years ago. The video is on Youtube. He not only said a terrorist is someones 'freedom fighter' but he pretty much excused child pornography. It wasn't as clear as the terrorist content but when you hear and see it, you'll want to curb stomp the midget.
He's a coward and weasel whose word means nothing. This site was distasteful but it wasn't illegal. There's thosuands upon thousands of site which are and he does nothing about it.
Now we have wrong think. You don't like the politics? Ok, but if you believe in free speech, it's what needs to be defended. So it's censorship by a guy who defends terorrists and seems to be ok with child abuse.
We 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.
^^^ The parent comment hits the ball out of the park.
The commentary on past posts on HN and elsewhere floors me. It seems one or two things are prevalent:
1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
2. Support for Cryptofascism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism) is rampant. Either folks don't know that they already support it, or they wittingly do and are too afraid to say it out in the open.
Immensely disturbing. As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum. They are not pluralists; they don't care about the rules of the game. They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
I just don't see where this is stopping. What else needs to be taken down? /pol/? Who about Breitbart? Or maybe some 2nd WW Nazi propaganda? Or something from the US civil war?
You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows. And then you have the nerve to call us who believes that limits of free speech should be set by courts and open process "nazis"?!
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed.
If they have the power to? Yeah, in a heartbeat. But they're not the only ones, or the most powerful ones, just the most ostentatiously intolerant.
> 1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech.
If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech, then I can be supremely confident that I have free speech, and that I can use it without being expelled, jailed, or killed. (Chastisement, well, as long as you mean the verbal kind, I'll just have to cope.) I sure as Hell don't defend their rights because I like them.
Have you never actually felt your ability to speak out meaningfully threatened by the society around you?
>Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
Replace like 3 words in your comment, and I could make it into a rant advocating persecution of Communists. Which has happened before in the US. But it's ok now because it's against your political enemies?
Second, no they are not. They are a tiny tiny percentage of the population. They have been losing power and numbers for decades. They get little representation in the mainstream and in the media. When they speak up with their beliefs or attend a protest unmasked, they often lose their jobs. They are not even remotely a serious threat. Just like communists during the Red Scare.
I recommending watching 'The People vs. Larry Flynt' for a (much-needed) lesson in what Freedom of Speech means in the United States. I am certain Larry Flynt had a hard time finding print houses willing to publish Hustler but the fact he was being arrested and prosecuted – by the government – for distributing Hustler is when/where the line was crossed.
I have doubts that SCOTUS will ever consider 'The Nazis vs. Cloudflare'.
I always wondered why we didn't see the term crypto-fascism come up more in the last few years. Perhaps because it is too honest and gives room for manoeuvre (although equally it is going to be hard to disprove). Hence people shouting 'Nazi' - which reminds me of kids calling the cops in the UK 'The Feds' - both of which sound idiotic. We had the terms we needed (Neo-Nazi and Crypto-Fascist) and they both meant something.
I would say we also need to introduce a counterpart. e.g. crypto-stalinist or crypto-communist. As it is an equally plausible accusation to make that some people with hidden beliefs on that side of the spectrum could take them to those dark places.
I've got to agree. I was quite shocked by some of the comments on earlier threads about this topic.
For example, someone suggested that the German Nazi party was advocating mild socialist reforms very similar to modern social democrats, entirely ignoring "minor details" like that the SA actively beat up people on the streets and spread terror wherever they showed up, that the nazis attempted a Coup d'Etat, and that socialists and communists later went to prison and concentration camps for their political views. Not to speak of killing 5-6 million Jews and being responsible for the death of about 25 million soldiers and 55 million civilians in WW2...
The largest cognitive dissonance is with those people who suggest that jihadist propaganda should be interrupted but Nazi propaganda should be allowed to thrive unconditionally. That sounds very crazy to anyone who knows a little bit about history and can compare orders of magnitudes.
> As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum.
That's good. But the rule of law should apply over "not aiding" those people.
In the private sector, there have been a number of cases where companies (a) don't apply their ToS to people they agree with, and (b) over-apply their ToS to people they disagree with.
See Vidcon && Sargon for the most recent example.
i.e. When given the choice, the groups that value "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" and "due process" violate all of that...
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
Except I never really seen a 'neonazi' saying "punch a communist" I never seen mass media encourage such behavior either.
Do you not realize that this is cyclic reinforcement of behavior? (Antifa says punch nazis, nazis punch back, antifa ups their game with HIV needles and guns, nazis up their game etc)
Both sides are disgusting, but the fact that the media covers up for the leftist violence makes me stand on the side of the so called "right wing extremists".
Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
No, it's the last gasps of a dying breed of racists, empowered by the Internet and that look a lot more popular than they are due to media focus. Nazis are lame, but you leave them alone and there's nothing to fuel the fire. You send out counterprotesters, get in fights with them, act like these people are on the verge of starting a civil war and in their minds you've proved them right (delusional though they may be), and they get energized and then you have a real problem.
Kicking nazis off the Internet is one thing, but yours (and the grandparent) is the language that causes the slippery slope arguments. That people can't even discuss the issue of free speech without being assumed to be nazi sympathizers or "cryptofascists" or whatever we want to label people we don't agree with isn't ok.
Someone having a debate about the right of nazis to use modern services is not by extension a nazi.
The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.
No matter how evil some group is (may they be pedophiles, satan worshippers, nazis, whatever...) silencing them and assaulting them is a crime and is against freedom of expession. The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
(Neo-)Nazis are sure dumb as hell but as long as they have peaceful protest and they don't harm anybody physically (unlike their counter-protesters) it doesn't matter. And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
If we were to ban nazis and far-right organizations because they are racist and apparently a "threat" then what about anarchists? They also are extremely violent and want to overthrow the government. (and in the US officially categorized as terrorist threat) What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) If we start going down this slippery slope will have shitloads of organizations and ideas to ban.
Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.
And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.
The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection.
You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok?
And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line.
Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.
Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution.
If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.
> The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.
The first sentence is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
You know how I know you're actually a shill?
> And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph:
> What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.)
99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore.
You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin.
We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.
It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up.
This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world.
And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll".
We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter.
And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel.
People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that.
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
> 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.
This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
To be clear, this is a separate question from whether major internet infrastructure providers should be considered de facto public systems and fall under the 1st amendment. I don't think they should, so I think this falls within Cloudflare's rights (although I wish they had done otherwise). I'm just objecting to the characterization that the only people who could possibly object to Cloudflare here are neonazis or their sympathizers.
For what it's worth, I tried to find the Daily Stormer site to see what it is they actually advocate for, but I was unable to. I'm not sure if it's because of the domain name issues, Cloudflare, Google search or what, but it's a little disconcerting to me that ideas can be so easily expunged from the internet. So much for the "right to forget" controversy - I guess it is possible after all, if the companies were motivated to do so.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.)
So intimidation and threats of violence are ok? Are you really commending these people for their restraint in not using AK-47s at a demonstration?
One of the lessons from the first round of Nazis is that, by the time the threatening talk turns to actual large-scale violence, it's too late. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he made sure that he would be seen as an "all talk" kind of guy by those who could have shut him down.
> This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
Well, your theoretical beliefs are now put to a much more practical test, sympathizing with the Nazis in any way shape or form, even if it comes down to just sympathizing with their 'right to a platform' is an excellent way to see how strong ones beliefs really are.
If this is the first time you are in a situation where your strongly held principles are put to the test then I sympathize with you, the longer you live the more this will happen and the more likely you will end up in a situation where there is a conflict between a strongly held belief and a negative consequence for yourself.
Note that bringing weapons (loaded or not) to a march sends a message: we're an army, and we're armed. Not using those weapons should not get them points. One of them brought his car and did use it, the damage was as bad or even worse as if he had fired a rifle.
> The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
And they would do so again in a heartbeat if they knew they could get away with it.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
Neo Nazis only say disgusting things because they know they are still living in a society where they can not get away with doing more but make no mistake, the overthrowing of that very society is their goal and I'd love to see you arguing for 'free speech' in the society that they wish to create.
You'd be up against the wall faster than you can say 'jack shit'.
And they'll gag be back up by tomorrow no doubt. "Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes." What restraint.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence.
So people should be allowed to say anything? So you can organize any imaginable crime, threaten people and promote false information as long as you don't do any physical harm?
I agree that just objecting Cloudflare's decision doesn't make you anything. One being a potential Nazi sympathizer just because they don't see any limits to where free speech ends can just be a very crazy conspiracy theory - nothing else.
If you are referring to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me", clearly you have other problems with sympathy and empathy.
One of the neo-nazi's ran over a bunch of people with their car in attempt to kill and injure them. Did you miss that video? These nazi's are trying to kill people, they deserve life long prison sentences, not an internet platform to spew hate and calls to violence.
> This is an extremely frightening statement to me.
It truly is to me as well. It's something you expect nazis to say.
Imagine if the comment was
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by israel and other jewish sympathizing groups."
It's a form of intimidation to silence groups one disagrees with. I can't believe his comment is the most upvoted on HN of all places.
All the pro-censorship people here are behaving no differently than the neo-nazis they claim to hate. Not only that, both groups share the hatred of free speech and the principles which kept the US from being a nazi germany.
Everyone here is forgetting that Nazi Germany happened because germans supported censorship. Censorship allowed a minority group like the nazis to take over the government and silence everyone else. If the germans had an appreciation for free speech back then nazi germany would have been impossible since most germans opposed hitler and the nazi party. Nazi germany happened because of censorship laws which allowed hitler to ban all political parties and all speech he disagreed with.
But nobody learns history or philosophy anymore it seems.
> Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
It seems like kids are taking gender studies instead of philosophy and that is frightening. All the arguments are based on emotion rather than reason.
I guess the idea coming out of this is that if you want to be forgotten on the Internet, commit wrongspeak. If you want your arrest record and record of your divorce to disappear from the Internet, add some wrongspeak in there - Google, Cloudflare, and others will pull it down in an instant.
"If a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
> IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
It's an interesting point, but at what point does the intolerance of intolerance become intolerance in it's own right?
If the compromise on things we stand for (Freedom of speech, due process, equality for all) where is the line where we cease to be the things we claim to stand for?
FWIW I'm all for charging Nazis with crimes and putting them in jail whenever they commit them. I would be happier if they weren't covered in the media at all. I'd be over the moon if they didn't exist. But if we allow mob rule (which negates the rule of law) to take over, then we risk claiming to stand for things that we do not.
Popper's Paradox illustrates the theoretical. I would argue as a counterpoint that we're successfully as a society not tolerant without limit because of the rule of law.
It's a circular argument that leads nowhere. Just recurse one more time to see it: the people shutting down StormFront, Milo Whatshisname, James Damore, Brendan Eich etc are paragons of intolerance. They scream, they shout, they blockade, they demand firings and other forms of retribution, they DDoS and sometimes they get violent. Meanwhile many in the media and at places like Google stand by and do nothing to stop them.
So by your own argument, should we start tossing Google executives in prison, for tolerating intolerance?
This makes me think of the game theory site linked in an HN comment the other day. I suppose 100% tolerant people would be the naive "always cooperate" players, and 100% intolerant people would be the "always cheat" players.
Interesting to think about how we should behave in this context... If I recall correctly, the ideal behavior would be the copy-cat?
This seems to validate the 'intolerant of intolerance' objective.
Nassim Taleb talks a bit about this in his draft book on Medium. There's a concept of group renormalization which is quite interesting in relation to hardliner absolutists and how the majority must inevitably accommodate their positions.
But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think. The idea that censorship solves the problem is pretty flawed; I assume Trump got elected in part by people who felt they couldn't speak their own thoughts out loud anymore. Just like with the Google memo, you create silent resentment instead of keeping a debate open (in as far as some of these people are capable of debate – that's another discussion). You can stick a Nazi label on pretty much anything you don't like, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to censor the other side to death and pretend their concerns don't exist, even if some of those concerns are inapprehensible or appalling.
In some European countries, you were (and well, still are) not allowed to say certain politically incorrect things out loud, which in some countries gave the far right a lot of votes and almost a majority. So people didn't grieve their concerns out loud, but the resentment came out amplified in votes and by other means... While an open debate would likely have created a better atmosphere and perhaps have presented some solutions.
In the long run, you are doing yourself a disservice not pulling everybody into the debate, including terrorists and people sliding into that direction.
I think censorship should be avoided, unless there is a direct and unambiguous call to violent action or a clear violation of other peoples' personal privacy (e.g. "doc'ing", releasing personal information that harms a person).
Cloudflare here admits that large companies are increasingly gatekeeps to the internet, especially in the case of controversial content. They have made a trade-off, and this is probably more about philosophical considerations or personal ideology, but I'd have put freedom of speech and neutrality before censorship of questionable content.
>> But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think.
Then go ask them. If there are people that you think probably hate you nearby, I am almost sure there are places in a city where you could go to talk to them.
I know, personally, there has never been a time where I couldn't call the right evangelical church and find out exactly why I am hated.
I've experienced my share of drunk homophobic comments in my direction that do occasionally get violent. I certainly now where to go to find out 'exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think,' I don't for a minute believe they need the internet, let alone cloudflare, to achieve this goal.
That's not why they took them down. You can argue for censoring threatening dangerous terrorist speech all you want but it is incorrect to suggest that is the stance cloudflare took. They censored because stormfront falsely claimed cloudflare sympathized with their cause and pissed of the CEO. Not because the speech itself presented a clear and present danger.
Foreign hosts are not really the right solution to freedom of speech on the internet. First of all it depends on the agreeability with the opinion rather than the right to express it. But moreover they can be DDoS'd just the same without a service like cloudflare. Cloudflare is a proxy not a host.
The core problem is that the Internet is a modern public space while its management has been handled by private entities. Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits. They don't have to do it as a private entity, but if DDoS becomes the norm for unpopular speech then the internet is no longer a public space, just a space for views that don't get DDoS'd.
> Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits
The better analogy is that Cloudflare is performing the function of private security instead of a police force.
The United State government doesn't require any private entities to provide armed security for political groups they dislike (in fact, the US government couldn't make such a mandate as the mandate itself would fall afoul of the first amendment).
If we believe that there must be a steward of this resource that should provide this kind of service in a first amendment protected manner, then we should advocate that the government offer DDoS protection services.
What is this "public space" statement based on? Only because I can go there? Like in a shop or restaurant? So if I set up a server as a private person, it's a "public space" too?
Looks like some heavy reality bending for a questionable cause to me.
Except it is different. The CEO has clearly stated that they won't take terrorist sites down, or any other kind of site, because it's not their job as a utility provider. [1] Its concerning because of its a violation of clearly established policy with an arbitrary decision by the CEO. If it were policy, it wouldn't be a big deal, my own company has anti-terrorism/hatred etc policies. We take this stuff down. It sets a bad precedent for them, they can't have it both ways.
Not everyone who makes rational statements about this discussion is saying that other's disagreement is a sign of them being a Nazi sympathizer. Look through the comments and it's pretty clear what is being said by akujin.
Well, should we be taking down Alqueda websites? There seems to be an implicit assumption in this whole philosophy that if you prevent people from speaking their socially-backward beliefs (online, in person, in websites, in writing) then you'll somehow prevent negative behaviors.
I'm not convinced that's the case. I think progress requires a more nuanced approach than "punish the baddy," but an examination into the psychology and a discourse that shows you understand the frustrations that are being channeled into blind-rage.
The problem with this is that your definition applies to literal Nazis, and it's effectively become a fad to call people Nazis who aren't even remotely. The media being partly to blame with the Trump/Bannon/Brietbart 'fascist'/'white supremacist' hysteria.
An atmosphere of free speech that allows for satire and conversation are the best weapons against extremist ideology.
Your post is incredible; you are stating that advocates for free speech are Nazis and shit posters. You are stating that there are no good faith defenders of free speech.
Not all of us will argue to the contrary. On the other hand, expect no sympathy when the powers-that-be decide to knock your favorite site(s) off the grid because they haven't passed the (next fashionable) purity test. You've no leg to stand on.
> 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.
Are you serious? "And anyone who disagrees with me must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser."
Combined with the fact that the rest of your comment seems to be calling for Nazis to be silenced... I don't think I'm comfortable with where this is going.
"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."
What it comes down to is that the people arguing for "free speech" here feel safe in this world, with a growing neo-nazi presence.
They don't feel threatened--they're not a target, the system will protect them, maybe they even have guns or plans to live off the grid, whatever.
They can argue that neo-nazi speech is OK because it isn't an existential threat to them. They may even look at the terrorist car attack in Charlottesville and think "lone wolf, random unplanned attack," but what it comes down to is: they're going to be OK. Cops will protect them, their stuff, the system is on their side.
Those of us who are OK with Cloudflare shutting down the Nazis, we don't trust the system to keep us safe. Cops won't protect us, the system is not on our side. We see the actual threat of nazi violence and death coming our way, and the "free speech" people are doing nothing to stop it.
Al Qaeda websites are not taken down in the US because they can be used to radicalize people; they're taken down when they are used to radicalize people.
It's a mixture of teenagers trying out shock humor, people trying to be ironic, people who don't identify as Nazis but certainly identify with many of their ideals and straight up Nazis. There's a lot of abyss-gazing that pushes people over the edge into extremism.
/pol/ is not one person and it is in no way an organized movement. Some obviously sympathizes, other are edgelords. /pol/ seems like one of the last places where you can actually have a conversation with political adversaries without risking getting banned / shadowbanned or downvoted to obvlivion for having violated some snowflake safespace.
This comment perfectly illustrates the need for free spreech absolutism.
First, it's just about denying speech to Nazis. Then, everyone who "argues to the contrary" is also a Nazi, and presumably doesn't deserve free speech either. And voila, when you want to deny speech to anyone in the future, you can shut down anyone defending them as well.
Yup, I've been saying for a while that HN has a vocal majority of racists and sexists. They're now being exposed. Great. There should be a legal fund to sue the entire white supremacist and sexist assholes for damages, every time they speak.
Be careful of this. There are very few actual national socialists in the United States, and they certainly aren't all part of a single organisation like Al Qaeda.
Even among them the majority are probably against genocide since they all deny the holocaust.
What you say does however apply to The Daily Stormer. So I agree that they're a threat and should have been taken down years ago.
Holocaust denial is a pro-genocide ideology. To deny the holocaust of the past is part of denying violence in the present day. It also implies that Jews are liars - it's a very strong piece of anti-semitism.
"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."
Exactly. Thank you for this beautiful statement.
Dear writer of faul thoughts; have you considered that maybe one day this HN forum that you love so much will be closed due your writings here? Let's keep our forum clean from your Nazi sympathizing so that HN can continue as a part of the beautiful open web.
React driven should be confined to js frameworks not human interactions. This is a slippery slope but the ppl have already spoken. Sadly, we go forward in this half-cocked manner. It's hard to confront the underlying sources of this angst and that's our dilemma.
CloudFlare is a private business. Its their prerogative. The only thing the CEO did wrong here was explain himself.
I'm sure those Nazis can figure out by themselves why they got tossed out.
I think we are reaching dangerous levels of censorship. We already live in a world where we have guidelines of how we are allowed to think and what we are allowed to say.
I'm obviously being a bit facetious when I say this, but are there really few things worse than nazis? 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. That's not to say that nazi affiliated groups never commit crime or kill people. But by the numbers they seem like a very small blip on the crime radar compared to groups like the Sinaloa, MS-13, ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord's Resistance Army.
I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past. But there are actual talks about further restricting freedom of speech in America being put forth by some groups because of the attention that's being given to white supremacists and nazis right now with seemingly little attention being given to identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups actually have in the modern context.
> I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past
Generic ideological tangents are a pox on HN to begin with, let alone when people are having flamewars about Nazis, and this is flamebait to the point of being a parody of flamebait. It has the effect of trolling whether you're intentionally trolling or not, and the effect is all we care about. Please don't post like this again.
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 various communist regimes who together are in the tens of millions range IIRC.
Almost anyone that argues Hitler was agreat guy and nazism is great and should be ruling today are also arguing for continuing to kill people.
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 political maneuvering allowed the nazi party to become the force that it was such as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On top of this you ignore the history of antisemitic racism in early 20th century Europe that allowed the nazi party to gain enough popularity to attain traction as a political party.
Your point that anyone supporting the spread of nazism is supporting the actions of the nazi party that existed in Hitler's Germany is valid. However, in America this sort of speech is not as distinctly illegal as it is in much of (all of?) Europe and so from an American perspective a discussion needs to take place about how to approach the topic because for us blanketly outlawing nazi groups because of their beliefs would erode some part of the general freedom of speech that we operate with. Whether that erosion represents the loss of anything of value is debatable, but it would none the less represent a decrease in our overall speech protections. This is where my point about evaluating and qualifying the reach and influence that groups like this actually have becomes relevant, because a rational discussion would be dependent on this sort of information.
Communists killed multiple millions more. Yet Fidel Castro had world leaders at his funeral. The anti-Jewish progroms of the Soviet Union happened yet protesters who carry hammer and sickle flags aren’t treated with the same vile contempt as those who carry Nazi flags.
Che Guevara’s face is plastered across all manner of pop culture and products yet that face represents communism and for some reason, it’s culturally acceptable?
"I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up."
I'm a big fan of SSC, but this thesis is not holding up very well
In this instance I think it is because the point I was making in pushing a somewhat pedantic argument is that while what happened in Charlottesville, and arguably catalyzed the current popularity of nazi discussion, is obviously a tragedy it's also a highly emotional topic precisely because it's a tragedy.
This was why I concluded with the argument that we should at the same time be focused on identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups. Because in the wake of an extremely upsetting event it's important to emphasize the need for intelligent debate and evaluation or else the discourse becomes volatile and incapable of rational decision making.
I find it weird that everyone jumps at Nazis when they do something bad, but when it's police being killed at BLM protests or people getting hit in the head with bike locks and shot at at Antifa protests, no one bats an eye. Why is it okay to leave out Black Nationalists and Communists/Anarchists and solely focus on Nazis? All these groups have blood on their hands.
Cloudflare happily mirrors ISIS forums. The double standards, all because one person was killed by what looked like an inexperienced driver scared shitless by antifa goons.
Is anyone just taking the time to simply ask, WTF is going on?
At the emotional frequency everyone is operating on, do you really think you'll win? No one will win because everyone will lose. Let me explain why.
I think it's time everyone admitted their biases and that their biases if not TAMED will only serve to antagonize their political opponents.
Before I go on, here are my biases...
I'm a black libertarian(with a strong affinity for classical liberalism) and a supporter of Trump's presidency so words like 'uncle tom' have been thrown at me. I wasn't always a libertarian. Initially a liberal, I didn't pay much attention to politics but when I begun to think about the role that politics has in my life (at zero option), I realized that I was naturally inclined towards conservatism i.e. fiscal responsibility & frugality, tighter immigration control, less government intervention, anti-eminent-domain, pro-personal freedom and liberty, anti-common-core, and then some. I'm huge fan of Peter Thiel and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - I read them a lot. I no longer feel the need to watch CNN because their ability to hide their skew towards liberalism is all but gone
You should note that there's no where that I mentioned violence as a chosen means to get my voice heard. I don't support it but I fear that's where the world is headed in order to resolve this political conflict that's in the ether right now.
What we have today is a left that is too far gone - who mostly don't realize it - and a right that's intentionally too far gone also.
Just as much as there is a far-right, you best believe that Trump is right and there is a far-left (it is telling that today on the web, you'll find two clones of Wikipedia all skewed towards either leftism or rightism because neither trust Wikipedia - see Conservapedia & RationalWiki).
As much as Trump has been touted by some as a symptom (I agree), I think that Obama's presidency was also a symptom. Putting his(Obama) race aside, we had an American president who once said that [sic] between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate...You should just decide what works.
This shows that the world had once again reached a point where systems like communism which were disproven - when America won the cold war, the soviet collapsed, the Berlin wall came down and Fukuyama wrote the words 'End of History' - could now be viewed in a relativistic manner. As though it didn't matter what the world had gone through historically. This was one of those fatal flaws because, if you forget history, you're undoubtedly bound to repeat it.
I also subscribe to some Burkean views which espouse that, change in a society should be introduced gradually. Gradual change while all the while testing to see if there's truth in your claims. This is not what we're used to in the tech scene; we prefer disruption but disruption comes at a cost. You cannot have a Bernie without a Trump. You cannot have an Alt-Right without an Antifa.
We must all tone down our views. We must all tame our desires for instant political gratification. Revolutionary change comes at a painful cost. Let's all embrace gradual change. If we don't, right or left, the Daily Stormer will win whether you like it or not because there will be a race war as per their slogan. When this happens, it will all turn into rubble and only a few will be left to pick up the pieces.
The questions we should be asking is what can I cede (politically) in exchange for you ceding something of equal magnitude until some balance is restored. We aren't headed in the right direction otherwise.
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 businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN, nor are accounts that use the site primarily for ideological battle. That isn't what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for. Therefore we ban such accounts, and I've banned this one. Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with?
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
I have a problem with this, because in effect it is saying that if you want to be in business, you have to check your principles at the entrance.
I do run a business, and I do reserve the right to withhold service from people whose principles I find offensive. Just as as an employee, I would reserve the right to withdraw my service (resign) from an employer whose principles I disagreed with.
All this is very healthy for our society - it provides excellent feedback about your views, in both directions. The business owner losing business if they are overly intolerant, and the customer loses a valuable service if they are overly offensive. The system works pretty well - much better than any legal solution could.
I think that your point would be correct if businesses did not wield the enormous amount of power that they currently do. Who competes with Cloudfare right now? Who competes with AWS? There's already jokes about how if one of those services is down then the internet is down. While everyone might agree currently with getting rid of the Daily Stormer because they are assholes, the precedent and power is now set.
For the same reason is not ok for a public business to not make cakes for gay couples, we should not allow public businesses to pick and choose who is allowed to be part of the economy. If you want to argue against that, that is fine, but you have to accept it when people with the completely opposite set of morals start discriminating against _you_
edit: In case it wasn't clear, I am not a fan of Nazis, but I don't want to even set up the opportunity for businesses to have the power to just exclude me from normal day to day activity just because the CEO has decided he doesn't like whatever group I am in
> I have a problem with this, because in effect it is saying that if you want to be in business, you have to check your principles at the entrance.
Well, welcome to the club! Other noteable groups objecting to their principles being regulated by a government office include Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, CO, and Memories Pizza of Walker, IN. (For the moment, disregard the likes of Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, as their matters of principle-regulation are less directly relevant.)
I figure there are three-ish main options.
1. People are consistently required to suppress their principles, and do business with groups like the Daily Stormer.
2. People are consistently allowed to exercise their principles, and refuse service to gay weddings.
3. A disaster area of conflicting regulations both for and against the right of various groups to be served by various businesses, conforming to no consistent set of principles but rather to whatever is politically popular and expedient today, and hypocritical to the core.
My money's on 3.
(There's a theoretical possibility they'll actually nail down specific principles and not make it a total mess, but I don't think it's plausible.)
"Public service" is an important distinction here that you're missing. There's a big difference between opening a shop and running a telecommunications business. While it would be totally appropriate for you to set the tone and messaging of your shop and even discriminate among customers, I submit it would not be good for our society if telecom companies banned customers based on their legal speech. You wouldn't want that, because while it would be great if it only targeted racists and Nazis, what if it didn't? This is basic public communication infrastructure, just like the public streets that link up private shops.
The principle that applies is a basic Enlightenment one: everyone has the right to speak. You don't have to agree. You can not visit their shop. You can protest outside their shop. But you don't get to barricade their shop and cut its wires.
Gender, race, age, sexual orientation, etc. are “protected classes” that you can’t discriminate on. Being a Nazi is not a protected class. If you have a business, you can feel free to discriminate against Nazis. And you probably should.
If you operate on public infrastructure, like being granted public right of ways to lay fiber, I think you lose the right to discriminate. This feels good because Nazis are assholes but it sets a very dangerous precedent. This is why the ACLU has a long history of defending Nazis and their ilk. Because one day it will be you on the other side. We should all discriminate against Nazis by denouncing them, ignoring them, etc. Public infrastructure should not.
This isn't so clear cut though. Religion is usually included in that list, even though That is pertly ideological. Recently, gender and/or sexual orientation/identity has become arguably ideological too. Racial identity has some problematic examples (are jews white? what about light-skinned hispanics?)
It may be helpful for people to understand some of the underlying legislation that lays out protected classes. Of course, there is state and local legislation that can further refine the protections at a state/local level in addition to the national legislation.
> 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.
The damage of libel is reputational damage. Getting the libelous claim retracted after the claim has been seen by the public doesn't undo or erase the damage the claim does. Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
It doesn't even have to cause reputational damage yet I don't think. IANAL, but the contracts one signs with this sort of company tends to include things like not claiming endorsement of the content by the provider.
> Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim
Yes, that something is called suing for libel and proving it is libel in a court.
Simply claiming something is libel (which Prince doesn't even do in his blog post) doesn't make it libel.
> Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
Because of Cloudflare's action there are now 1000 times as many people, including myself, who are aware of TDS's claim who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it.
> 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.
Well... Yeah. I'm not sure why people think this is not how the internet works. It's a knit of private industry in most of the west and with the exception of a few (eroding) laws, private industries do all kinds of things.
The problem for DS is: there aren't many sites that WILL CDN them now that are as good as the alternatives that will surely not.
We can talk about strengthening guarantees of access to internet services and hosting, but that'd almost certainly be government mandated. Very few governments in a position to dictate this kind of policy to a global entity like the internet are terribly friendly to outright fascist, nazi policy.
So you can pick your poison: inconsistent rules from private entities or more consistent but more likely unfavorable and less mutable rules from government mandate (probably with the weight of government survey and law enforcement).
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
Even for deeply held religious beliefs, we've long recognized a difference in fairness between discriminating on the circumstances and nature of birth vs. the circumstances and nature of choices made.
I think CDNs are a problem in general (their existence speaks to the self-inflicted wounds of an ultimately lawless internet, bad actors contained within gradually destroying it from abuse). It's a bad thing if they start consistently policing content.
But I think it's much worse to vigorously justify murder of people exercising their rights to free speech. Ultimately, people opting out of the tit-for-tat game of free speech and engaging in spontaneous acts of violence are opting out of society as a whole, and will start finding themselves exiled and imprisoned formally. And it's difficult to see any other way to proceed.
> The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
I don't understand why this argument gets thrown about so often. Obviously not so much about neo-nazis in particular, but whenever a comparison is made to LGBT people. And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am not about to argue that sexual orientation is a choice.
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of all kinds, from all sorts of sources, there are people that seem to honestly believe the earth is flat. There is no way to make a reasoned decision to believe that. It must be something they are not in control of. It could be something they were born with, something in their experiences, or both, but it's clearly something they are not rationally deciding.
I'm not certain it can be said that the neo-nazis are definitely making a choice. It seems to be a pretty vehement emotional response, which would indicate it's not.
I don't mean to say we should tolerate neo-nazis in the sense that we just let them do their thing. But I do think we might be better off treating them as people that have some predisposition to being neo-nazis than as people that just decided to be one.
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
Work and business is an enormous part of human life: exempting businesses from Constitutional protections dramatically limit the scope of those protections. Should federal agents be able to raid a business without regard for the Fourth Amendment? Should Texas be able to take legal action against Amazon, Microsoft, etc. for speaking out against the anti-bathroom bill?
In America, you get to run a business with whatever political views you have, subject to very narrow restrictions of a handful of anti-discrimination statutes (which are, incidentally, all based on the much-maligned Commerce Clause).
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 religious minorities shouldn't be discriminated against. Make the same argument for skateboarders if you don't want to make it for Nazis. Do you have an similar argument for why Nazis shouldn't be fired, or why we shouldn't consider whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
Political affiliation is a protected class. I don't really know what the word "Nazi" means these days because people have used it to label everyone from far-right conservatives to Trump voters to people who self-identify as neo-Nazis. Unless a person registered with the NSDAP prior to 1945, technically they are not a Nazi.
> 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 whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
If someone's beliefs don't negatively affect their ability to do their job, why should they be fired for their beliefs? Should Democrats be fired? Should atheists? Are "Nazis" the only people capable of bias and discrimination?
Likewise, 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?
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
I don't think that Cloudflare (or any company) should be legally obligated to work with someone they don't like. (Besides, do you really want your wedding cake baked by someone who hates you?)
However, I think it's a moral and practical travesty that companies have the ability to effectively deplatform people from the modern internet. It's our responsibility as technologists to make sure that you cannot be silenced, whether you're a persecuted minority or someone who would persecute minorities. Having political gatekeepers to the internet is bad for everyone in the long run.
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. It's not normal.
Nobody is sympathizing with Nazis. And who is “we” and what don’t you think is normal? Essentially who elected you as a tech industry representative or the official pollster of the tech industry?
This my isn’t about Nazis. This is about speech and freedom, business policies, discrimination.
Change the word “Nazi” to “Communist” and I would be willing to bet you would not be making the same statements, despite communists being more murderous throughout the 20th century than the Nazis.
Is the ACLU a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. Use your brain and stop being distracted by the “Nazi” part of the discussion. It isn’t relevant.
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.
> 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.
I'd go a step further. If cloudflare were a branch of the government like the literal internet police, then it would be immaterial if an entity claimed they supported them. The response would be to simply ignore or refute the claim, not demand that they withdraw it lest they lose police protection.
Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police protecting the KKK's right to march, just like they protect the right of civil rights marchers to be free of denial-of-marchedness. The core issue here is that government-like functions on the internet are handled by an amalgamation of private entities, who are not bound to the same constitutional requirements.
I have the right to police protection, but that doesn't mean I get to have a cop patrolling my building 24/7. That's why businesses hire private security.
Likewise, DDoS is a crime and TDS has every right to present a criminal complaint. Cloudflare is just the Internet equivalent of private security.
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.
> 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
A -> B does not imply !B -> !A
Example: if you eat an Apple, saying "hey, that's one good-looking Apple!", it does not require you to heretofore eat every good-looking Apple you come across.
A -> B does imply !B -> !A. The error in reasoning here seems to be that attitude towards a website is assumed to be a binary "like/not like" variable, while in reality one can also neither like nor dislike something.
False equivalence. Gay people don't choose to be gay, and gay people aren't harming others. A business can refuse to serve skateboarders, shirtless people, and other people who are being a nuisance; and it can certainly refuse to serve people who bring violence wherever they go.
If you're saying that Nazis choose to be Nazis, then could you choose to become a Nazi? I don't mean pretend to be one, or act like one, but actually believe their disgusting ideology. If you couldn't choose to do that, then presumably they didn't choose to either, and they couldn't choose to not believe their ideology. And maybe gay people could choose not to enter gay relationships, and maybe them having that ability still isn't a good reason for businesses to discriminate against them.
You seem to contradict the recent view in the LGBTQ. community that gender is a social construct and that you can choose which gender feels right for you!
Your implication that being gay has to do with biology and hence it has a hereditary component is at odds with what we are currently hearing from everywhere.
Which view is it the valid one?
To me these are exclusive so in the community should choose just one discourse.
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?
Right, the distinction is that neo-Nazi's are bad -- hateful, intolerant, divisive, problematic or however you want to put it. I'm uncomfortable saying that it's okay to do these things to the bad guys, even when it's obvious, because in an alternate universe it might be obvious that gays marrying is hateful toward Christians and intolerant of their sacred rituals.
Are you being serious? The Nazi party is based on doing horrible shit to minorities. That's the ideology, that's what the leadership believed and that's the reason why people joined them.
Are you being serious? Islam is based on doing horrible shit to infidels. That's the ideology, that's what the leadership believed and that's the reason why people were forced to join them.
I understand how hard it is not to be overcome by annoyance right now, but regardless of wrong other people are, would you please not post things like this subthread here? It really just makes things worse.
For those who downvote me: so you're actually believing I call "anyone I don't like" a Nazi? How fucking pathetic is that? And no I don't care about the votes, I just want you to stop and realize how incredibly dumb that is. This is a kindergarten level of discourse on a subject that ranks amongst the most important that even exist.
To be fair to the GP, I've, for example, seen/heard my friends and acquaintances call people Nazis for condemning vigilante violence (e.g. "punching Nazis"), the Berkeley riots, and Antifa protests.
I think the sentiment GP is trying to communicate is that many seem to throw the label out there without any further investigation as to whether its justified.
As for the downvotes, it might be because your comment came across very hostile.
Also, I agree that it's easy to see that the Daily Stormer is neo-Nazi type stuff.
Flamewars like this get accounts penalized and banned on HN, regardless of how correct your underlying views may be. Plenty of other users are able to express similar views without stooping to personal attacks and other abuse. Please follow their example and don't do this again.
This isn't mere hate, and I'm not "mandating tolerance" either. I'm mandating you at least read people like Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner instead of you projecting your naivety on me.
> We might agree on a few points but trying to clarify that the murder wasn't a terrorist attack, that it was just "unplanned murder with a vehicle", makes me want to re-examine my opinions on the points where we agree.
Are we going to call every road rage incident (1200/year in the US) a terrorist attack now? Please.
I'd encourage you to evaluate your agreement with each of my points on an individual basis; each idea either stands or falls on its own.
This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse, you don't get to claim the moral highground on account of a bunch of people that would like to do the same to a fairly large number of people. Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
> This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse
I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism.
> Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
More of this will come regardless if these people get their way. Protests, tweet storms, and tearing down Confederate monuments will not dissuade hate. The only way to win is to drag the argument into the daylight where it can be fought.
Would you please not post like this here? Especially on divisive topics. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
Saying that banning certain things is a slippery slope, and using that excuse to never ban things, means that it's ok to allow truly horrendous things to happen, just because of fear of overreach.
When we say we have freedom of speech, but then in the next sentence remind people that you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded space, we recognize that restricting some speech can be a slippery slope, but we do so anyway because not doing so would be much worse.
Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not generally recognized as political speech. At what point is it acceptable to ban unpopular political speech, provided that speech is not a direct incitement to riot/violence?
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not in itself illegal. If a panic resulted, you could be held responsible for that panic and any injuries that resulted, but the speech itself is not, as many like to pretend, "an exception to freedom of speech." The Supreme Court corrected itself on this because it feared the very same slippery slope argument you're trying to dismiss.
> I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
I think it's something stronger than that: be sure there's a clear sharp line that you can draw that separates the things that you want from the things that you don't want. I think "clear and present danger" works as that kind of line. I'm not convinced there's that kind of line when doing something like this.
Slippery slope is not a fallacy. It's a real phenomenon in certain cases. It does, however, have to be proved relevant to any given question, which is GP's real offense.
Interesting read.
The consequences of this will be important.
I always thought the balkanization of the internet would occur because of world governments not because of tech leaders personal feelings or corporate influence.
I expect tech leaders to be dragged in front of the senate real soon.
It is very important to distinguish something like Facebook blocking an account / Medium taking down a blog from a domain registrar refusing to cooperate.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet, cutting off all communication.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
> "Isolation only promotes extremism"
Is it? Several wars have been fought over this particular ideology. Massive amounts of resources were expended with the sole goal of stamping it out. The goal then was to eradicate it, because this sort of ideology is the stuff that eats civilizations. We don't have an obligation to amplify it. There is no reasoning with it.
In the hypothetical there's a potential censorship issue which we can address when we get to it. But where's the line? The site called for and celebrated murder and terrorism. On a daily basis they spew actual neo-nazi propaganda. Why, exactly, should we let that be echoed unchecked? We're not even talking about a public entity/government stifling the nazi speech, but rather we're asking whether we should without thinking allowing them to use someone else's private resources to spread their message.
It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.
> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.
Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
Sure, fire is good when you're dealing with them roaches, but kill them as you will, does nothing for the ideas, which sunlight is good for.
Yes, the US actually does have excellent lines on what's acceptable speech. In my not-professional judgement, it's speech that is the proximate cause of violence and incites it, and the daily stormer is outside of that. If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
Sunlight in this case would be doing for Nazis what they themselves won't do because they're unable -- recognize them for who they are and act accordingly.
> In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought
I'm not sure - the ad is supposedly from last week. I just thought I ask if anyone new something about this. The PR company seem legit (in the sense it actually exist).
It raises a few questions if related to what happened though.
In return, CloudFlare's service provider immunity should be terminated. They've demonstrated that they do effectively control what happens with their networks and should not enjoy qualification for immunity.
What's the mechanism for this claim? Are you suggesting there was, previously, any uncertainty regarding Cloudflare's ability to (a) know which domains are hosted with them or (b) to look at those websites?
Because it seems as if they have always had the ability to "control what happens with their networks".
Same mechanism for any internet service provider - immunity is granted under the auspice that you are not exerting control over the flow of information as a supposedly neutral provider. The second you don't do that, you're not neutral and you're aiding and abetting. This is how IXL Memphis got a big bite in their butt in the late late 90s.
It seems pretty obvious that all this hand-wringing over a little known site called The Daily Stormer has raised its profile worldwide far beyond their wildest dreams. This is likely causing the opposite effect of what activists want.
If you honestly think that the rest of the world is only now hearing about the Daily Stormer, then you must have a very plush rock that you've been living under. I assure you that many, many others have not had that particular luxury.
I can assure you many people had no idea what the Daily Stormer was before they were "kicked out" of the US internet. So no, not knowing about it doesn't mean living under a rock.
Unless I have a reason to seek out The Daily Stormer or similar sites, why/how would I know about them? Some of us just want to go about our lives without having to be stressed about all of this.
It's easy to defend the speech of those which you agree or, at the very least, don't vehemently disagree with.
With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.
Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.
CloudFlare could've just sued DS out of existence if the claim they are making is true, for libel/slander/defamation of character. Instead, they lose out on free money, lose out on delivering a bigger black eye to ethnicists, and possibly lose their service provider immunity.
Should've resisted the urge to punch a Nazi and acted like a real American instead. We don't fight, we sue.
Also on sort of related note, this is why I disparage the "cake baking" and "wedding flowers" lawsuits... While I don't care what two adults do in the bedroom, I do care that a private business could be forced to render services. What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law? I think these issues are better left unturned; in this case, CloudFlare was able to take the right action and terminate their account without having to think about a lot of legal precedent.
Do you think I should have a sign on my business door that says "no blacks allowed," too? Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
> Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
Wait a minute... where did you see that? This is the first time I have heard this part of the story. I thought the owners simply said "no", and then got sued for several hundred thousand dollars.
No, of course not! I think the line is pretty clear there, a person can't choose to be black or white, but a marriage is an "opt in" event, two people are freely choosing to be married.
There have been a lot of these sorts of incidents; I didn't hear about the DOXing incident, that's quite sad, and of course, inexcusable, for any reason.
However, there was an incident [http://bit.ly/1MxG5S8] where a lady was good friends with a man and was a regular customer for years. She did not want her company's name associated with his wedding (sounds oddly similar to the OP), so she politely declined.
This all being said, I'm very curious how you reconcile the two situations, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint.
> What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law?
Wait, how exactly would the precedent set by lawsuits under state laws forbidding certain private discrimination in public accommodations enable federal establishment of religion?
>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.”
(from internal email)
>Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to me to be pretty much a pissant little blog.
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
4 replies →
Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
16 replies →
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
5 replies →
He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article:
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.
2 replies →
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
5 replies →
I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.
20 replies →
It's not that bizarre. He isn't trying to have it both ways, he'd rather have it the other way, but until that's law, he's forced to have it this way.
Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.
Aside from the net neutrality or freedom of expression concerns, I wonder if it just became too costly to host them because of ddoses
2 replies →
Condemn the message, but protect the medium.
Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.
He is a human being after all with his ideas and opinions...
I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.
Agreed, wholeheartedly
Gee, I hope my site doesn't happen to anger him in some way.
63 replies →
> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
2 replies →
no one should have that power, but fuck nazis
If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.
1 reply →
Yeah, at least he should take down also the credit card fraud boards, they are doing real harm. Since the argument is gone, i see no reason not to do that.
This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is also worrying.
Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon, or a president vetoes a bill? The point of an Executive is to be able to do act-utilitarian evaluations of context, while the organization itself is stuck following rule-utilitarianism.
11 replies →
It's better than if they had reverse engineered the policy. Do it or don't do it, but either way, stand by your actions and get outta here with the mealy mouthed BS. IMHO.
2 replies →
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
People seem to be missing the entire substance of what he's getting at. That's why he mentions "no one should have that power". He even follows up about this in the blog.
> Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
Exactly! Extremely frustrating that the rest of the quote wasn't included.
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well:
“We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
Well, at least the CEO fully admits that it's an arbitrary decision. And indeed it is in his power to make.
CloudFlare is not the only player in town, and that's far from censorship.
If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW.
If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
If he doesn't like your site, he may not allow you to use his service, which is something the TOS already cover.
Over time, such capricious terminations could lead to the Board seeking action against the CEO, depending on the impact to the business.
5 replies →
I think arbitrary is the wrong word, the correct word is subjective. The decision wasn't random, or capricious as is the denotation of arbitrary. But the decision was subjective in that it's based more on instinct, bias, opinion, feeling, than it is on something objective that can be articulated in a way that it's a reproducible judgement with different particulars.
Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter:
These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose.
1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve...
1934-1936 Nazis at Madison Square Garden http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/
1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068...
2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof.
And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists. "White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence." https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
I think what the subtext is is that he values free speech, but if he gets enough political pressure and threats he'll do what he has to to protect the company's bottom line on a case by case basis.
So much for believing in "due process".
Due process? For what? It's a private company, deciding to terminate the contract with a shitty customer that is ruining their image. Worst case scenario the Nazis might have a case for breach of contract, but they won't get much out of it. Also, I'd love to see them show up in court to try to defend this as a "freedom of speech" case, and get told what a bunch of abhorrent human beings they are and to GTFO.
6 replies →
His only mistake is explaining himself.
If it were my call, every hate group's content would have inexplicable persistent problems. I'd use the Simple Sabotage Field Manual as my playbook.
2 replies →
Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.
30 replies →
> So much for believing in "due process".
Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
1 reply →
> I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content
how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?
So what other arbitrary decisions has made that haven't attracted as much publicity?
This is excellent context to have. Thank you for providing it.
Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter.
From today:
>Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.
If eastdakota said it, it's damning, regardless of the later PR scrubbing.
97 replies →
Couldn't he face personal liability in a civil lawsuit for monetary damages? Like if Daily Stormtrooper's hosting costs go up in a DDOS
Obviously, absolutely not.
19 replies →
I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
In fact private corporations already have the right to censor or refuse service to any of their customers.
5 replies →
Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
2 replies →
I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
There will always be companies that care more about making a buck than anything else. For years spammers and malware authors have been able to find hosting without issue, and taking them down has been a serious pain in the ass. All these nazis need to do is rent a server in russia (where they've moved their name server) and they will be fine.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
>The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
6 replies →
> The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
1 reply →
Reading this it sounds like you missed the intent of the post. Cloudflare would have not done this had there not been circumstances in which it was indicated that cloudflare supports the organization.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
The organization was publicly claiming that cloudflare secretly supported them.
> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
I completely agree with you in this section.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
A few business decide not to provide goods and services to black people -- not great but there are other options.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
7 replies →
> So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
That depends. Who are you? Is there a code of ethics that would compel you to interact with someone? Is it damaging to society if there isn't?
2 replies →
This is an argument over which companies should be designated as "common carriers". If ISPs are common carriers, they can't shut you off just because they don't like what you're hosting. The argument I hear is often that ISPs should be classified as common carriers. The difference between an ISP and a search engine is material. The search engine is, by its very nature, interpreting and ranking content. The ISP is what gets you online so you can use search engines or host pages.
The root of the problem is really the botnets. If it weren't for the DDOS attacks anyone could put a server online cheaply and communicate with their relatively small and fringe audience. But because we are incapable of enforcing laws against DDOS attacks you need to be a big a player to stay online.
"Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions."
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
Agreed in this specific case: Daily Stormer is a hate group that promotes horrible things, and there probably isn't a better solution than to just forcibly shut them down.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
The larger point about trying to censor people out of having opinions instead of ignoring or condemning them is valid. This has raised their profile far beyond simply ignoring or condemning them and treating them like any other repulsive website (of which there are PLENTY that Google/GoDaddy/Cloudflare now "officially endorse").
15 replies →
In practice the web can't prevent you from voicing your opinion. Even the worst of criminals manage to chat on the dark web. Companies can choose not to promote it though - Google has no obligation to put nasty stuff high in their search and the NYT has no obligation to put it on their front page. I'm not sure there's a problem there.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
If there's a real free market, then people are going to find someone willing to host anything for money. The real problem is when the law prevents companies from hosting them.
"I will disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it."
>'If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting.'
That's why the distributed web exists, things like Freenet ( https://freenetproject.org/) Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com/ ) and MaidSafe ( https://maidsafe.net/ ) and tons more exist.
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
Related-ish: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-money-20170811...
> and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
> but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them
If we're gonna talk about Nazis, let's talk about Nazis.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument
Are you sure? Because it doesn't sound like you do.
No one who supports Trump or Daily Stormer are likely not applying nearly as much inductive reasoning to their decisions as you are in this comment.
According to Blind, at least 40% of Silicon Valley workers support what Trump said regarding this incident. Probably less than 1% support the ideas of Neo-nazis or the Daily Stormer. You're making a false assumption and dehumanizing those who disagree with you.
4 replies →
› if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it
If Google actually does that, they're asking for an anti-trust suit.
Google does this all the time, has been sued a few times, and has yet to lose.
No, they're not.
Kinderstart v. Google for one of many examples.
1 reply →
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:
In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...
For those not following this closely: Aurenheimer == weev.
Wow. Sometimes it feels like the internet is a very small place.
3 replies →
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
Would it have been possible to deal with this problem this way instead: http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defama...
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 did not happen because the CEO grew a conscience and a backbone (how about those booter and malware sites then?), but because the Neo Nazi's claimed that Cloudflare was secretly in league with them. If that was the real reason then the whole thing sounds hollow and more as an attempt at damage control than a case of a moral line being crossed.
Anyway, from a strictly technical point of view Cloudflare is absolutely optional so no harm done, without the cloak of Cloudflare to protect it the Daily Stormer will have to go through life now as the Daily Naked Stormer.
> 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.
The concerted effort to equate Neo Nazis to pornographers, atheists and lgbt people is rather worrying as well.
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.
19 replies →
> The concerted effort by the pro-censorship crowd to exploit nazis to promote censorship is rather worrying.
This, right here, is a straw-man that I've seen repeated countless times. I am not pro-censorship, but I'm sure as hell not for forcing companies to provide services to Nazis and other scum.
There's a huge, gaping difference between those two things and I'd appreciate it if you stopped conflating them.
6 replies →
> Does that also apply to pornography?
Private internet services of many kinds prohibiting use for “adult” content much more broadly than pornography is routine, and has been for a long time.
But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking. I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking.
No, but there are obvious limits on what companies would like to be seen to be associating with. Cloudflare is a lot more lenient than most in this respect, but that got interpreted as 'there is no line they will not cross'. That assumption seems to not have borne fruit.
I'm reminded of the 'Slashdot will not censor posts' outrage a number of years ago because, yes, Slashdot did have that power and used it once. Of course for the absolutists that once was the sign that the end was neigh, only that's not how it played out.
> I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
Very astute observation, and definitely a thing to remember when looking at media output.
1 reply →
> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to?
Companies can be fined and executives imprisoned for say, selling weapons to terrorists. There's no magic hard line between "moral" / "amoral" in commerce; in a capitalist society consumption/sale are inherently moral concerns.
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.
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 abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
18 replies →
No, it's not.
Wiki:
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.
You're confusing free speech with the first amendment. Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored, rather it should be debated, condemned, or ignored.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
> Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
4 replies →
> Free speech is a cultural value
I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
Cool when can I come over to your house and spout crazypants shit?
1 reply →
Free speech, the cultural value, can only be protected by the government. The market doesn't demand things like liberty and justice.
8 replies →
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value.
More like "The first amendment purports to guarantee that the government will uphold this value."
1 reply →
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, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
If you label "not amplifying someone" as censorship, then there is obviously no such thing as uncensored free speech for everyone. The question then becomes who you step up to defend, and who you quietly ignore, when someone gets amplified over them.
4 replies →
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 speech” stands against.
2 replies →
I'm really playing devil's advocate here but if the CEO of Cloudflare wakes up and thinks to himself "man I hate that site, I'm going to remove it from my service", and the Internet says "no you can't", is that another form of censorship? In this situation we're either limiting what Daily Stormer can do, or limiting what Cloudflare can do.
3 replies →
Seems like this is debateable at least - considering the ACLU is filing a lawsuit against DC's transit situation for not placing Milo's ads they agreed to post - http://nypost.com/2017/08/10/milo-yiannopoulos-gains-aclu-su...
What counts as "spreading"? Do cell phone companies kick off customers with views they disagree with? Where is the line?
That suit is filed against a government agency. Free speech protections in the US constitution are focused on preventing the government from stifling speech. These protections do not apply to private citizens or corporations.
1 reply →
It depends on where the line in the sand is, or if that kind of discrimination is legal or not.
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
(Playing devil's advocate here)
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
Nazi's aren't a protected class. I don't have to sell you server space. But I also don't have the right to knock down your own server, should you set one up on the public internet.
7 replies →
> But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public setvice.
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
CloudFlare terminating their account in no way kicks them off the web. They have plenty of other options[1]. CF has just decided they don't want to help them promote their speech.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
The equal time rule exists because they are broadcasting on finite wireless spectrum that belongs to the public. It does not apply here.
In fact, free speech means that no private entity is compelled to help spread ideas they don't want to spread, outside of situations (mostly regulated monopolies) where a “private” entity acts as a quasi-public one.
This always sounded so silly to me. Are they legally allowed to refuse service to them? According to the law: absolutely. But that has no bearing on whether or not we are allowed to criticize them.
> 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 some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
That would indeed be a problem.
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.
2 replies →
>Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue. You could have net neutrality ("free circulation for bits" if you will) and as long as no hosting providers want to take your content, you won't be able to publish them.
This section is troubling.
> In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
Bonus question: what is cloudflare's role in either enabling or preventing the ddos attacks that one requires cloudflare to survive?
Do they enable any? I don't recall hearing about that.
1 reply →
That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.
From the linked post:
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
1 reply →
His point is that with the amount of DDoS power available out there to various parties, without a major ISP or CDN hosting your content you can trivially be booted off the internet. Once you accept that as a given, if one of the major ISP or CDN networks won't host your content, then you're open to censorship from anyone who doesn't like your message, which if your controversial enough that the ISPs and CDNs won't host you it's probably a given that someone is going to want to DDoS you out of existence. To further complicate things, most small ISPs when faced with a substantial and prolonged DDoS of one of the clients, will terminate that client in order to preserve service to their other clients, which means once again if you aren't being fronted by a major ISP or CDN will likely mean you'll be hoping from ISP to ISP until eventually nobody will be willing to host your content.
I think the point is, if you make a site forgo any sort of DDOS protection it effectively does not exist, especially if DDOSers want to take your site offline. Some website running on a VPS on a small hosting company likely won't be able to have the resources to keep their site running... which in my opinion is fine. If people want to shout you down in public because they don't want others to hear what you have to say, well then find somewhere else to express your views.
And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
To me it seems like decentralization is actually very popular on HN.
2 replies →
In fairness your particular example isn't necessarily a good one. Snapchat is a trivial idea and it's frankly amazing it got as far as it did.
2 replies →
If you had something that would disrupt it would :)
> For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Something you'll be painfully aware once you try to browse the web through Tor and realise you have to waste your time with Cloudfare captchas every 10 minutes.
I'm really confused, have all the grown-ups returned to HN? Suddenly after several years of self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, HN realizes that self-righteousness censorship is not risk-free, and has long-term consequences? I'm glad I started coming back to HN. Maybe the long recess from reason is over.
We are going to have to have regulation to reign in these companies.
FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.
The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.
FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.
I have read many of the threads here, and I think it boils down to this: do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve?
Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are?
This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be enforced by private companies. I think of freedom of speech is the problem here: companies have more influence over our conversations and the old protections are simply not adapting well.
This is just the latest in a string of examples like this.
The Christian bakers / gay wedding cakes is one example.
But people being booted off services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are others.
We ought to have the right to exclude people from our own private spaces, our own private clubs, and our own private businesses (freedom of association).
However, at what point (and at what scale) does our private club become so large it is a de facto public space?
There does not seem to be any real precedent for discussions like this. The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
> The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
No, absolutely nothing has changed. What has changed is that the internet has given every idiot out there a megaphone and a way to link up with other idiots at a moments notice and groups like the Neo Nazis love like minded company because there is safety for them in a crowd, a way to be part of the monster without having to stand up to scrutiny.
The Christian bakers were sued and then forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because sexual orientation is a protected class. "Alt-right" or whatever Daily Stormer is, is not a protected class. "Political party" is a protected class, which puts Daily Stormer in a possibly fuzzy territory (I have never read Daily Stormer so I don't know if they count as a political publication).
6 replies →
> at what point (and at what scale)
The internet giants are monopolies and should be regulated as such, or broken up. But the government has basically abandoned monopoly enforcement over the last couple decades. The irony is that it is because of right-wing, anti-regulation, libertarian politics that the government has become so reluctant to enforce monopoly laws.
There's enormous precedent around the whole scale from public discrimination to privately owned public (government) forums to private discrimination in special critical circumstances (common carriers, employment, and housing), to private discrimination in businesses that are public accommodations generally, and mountains of statute and case law specific to each.
And, in each of the major categories, the law has already been applied on the internet.
While the specific scenarios may have some novelty, the general issues are not new with the internet.
I think this is key. We're in new territory with the internet.
Will we ever be at a point where a VoIP call is filtered because the service doesn't want to transmit what you're saying?
I think there should be two tests:
1) Does the reason for terminating a customer violate law that protects certain classes of people/orgs? If so, you can't do it.
Obviously there are jurisdictional concerns here, but let's assume we can navigate them successfully, at least most of the time, without a messy court battle.
2) For any content, regardless of #1, does the customer have other choices besides you? If not, you can't do it.
For the second point, I think that should be there to protect from a company arbitrarily imposing its values. My feeling is that if there's enough healthy competition (I won't define what "enough" is because I don't know, but hope that it could be definable), someone will host your content. And if no one wants to, that should be a pretty clear signal that you're so unbelievably far away from what the vast majority (or even the near unanimity) would consider acceptable that you really will want to rethink some things.
If you are the only option, then likely you are a legally-regulated monopoly anyway and have some rules around needing to offer service blindly (rules imposed in exchange for that monopoly status).
> do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve?
Yes.
This is why VISA was instrumental in the 'war on porn' and why every service provider ever has a provision in their contracts stating they can terminate your online presence at their discretion.
That's a way for the industry to avoid becoming government regulated, as long as this self regulation takes care of the worst excesses companies will continue to be able to operate in relative freedom.
The few times that local national law (such as in France and Germany) has butted up against companies trying to re-write the law in a more lenient way this has - predictably - failed.
But as long as companies stay on the far side of that line they are free to draw more restrictive lines as they see fit with impunity so long as those lines do not affect the lives of so called 'protected classes' in a negative way and because of the item that triggers that class to be protected in the first place.
Others have touched on this: the concept of a protected class seems odd when faced with the idea that all people are to be afforded equal protection under the law (14th amendment)
3 replies →
Private companies certainly have the right to kick you of their service if they don't like you. However, everything that is legal is not right. And we should point it out and criticize such actions. Today it's Nazis, tomorrow it could be you.
The whole "Freedom of Speech" angle isn't really helpful here. I would phrase the question differently. From purely game-theoretical perspective, do you want companies that control large portions of our communication infrastructure make moral judgement calls regarding content passing through their servers and routers? Do you trust them to make the right moral judgements (however you define those) most of the time?
> do you want companies that control large portions of our communication infrastructure make moral judgement calls regarding content passing through their servers and routers?
If I open a bookstore, I'm not under any obligation to sell books promoting white nationalism. I choose my selection. So too can Cloudflare choose its business partners.
There are alternative CDNs. Cloudflare isn't equivalent to broadband monopolies like Comcast. You can easily switch to another CDN.
Plus, companies in general make moral judgements all the time. Deciding to start a medical services company vs. an educational services one can be a moral judgement.
I am surprised by the criticism of CloudFlare in these comments.
I was a systems admin for a while; User privacy and security were very important to me, despite my lack of technology or skills. FWIW.
CloudFlare did not necessarily follow "Due Process" because no such process exists. They seem to think that's a problem worth addressing.
This is what I call good marketing!
There's dozens of CDNs to choose from (https://www.cdnplanet.com/), with the best one obviously being https://fastly.com
However, for most companies it's a wash which CDN to pick.
Unless you're serving media to a large audience the cost is usually in the low triple digits. And unless you need to serve problematic regions (parts of Asia, Africa), there is barely a difference in performance between most of the contenders.
So what tips the scale for any one of the CDNs?
Well, after this move me and certainly others will definitely consider Cloudflare more often than previously - out of sheer sympathy.
For all the people who are warning of a slippery slope or a chilling effect, where do we draw a line? This site along with others like it likely helped spur a person on to murder a few days ago. This site along with other like it celebrated that murder. This site along with other like are organizing protests at that murder victim's funeral. How in good conscience can you be an accomplice in spreading that message?
I mean, the networking infrastructure carried that message. The people who manufactured the murder weapon assisted the murder goals.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
>If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process.
That sounds like a much bigger conflict with the 1st amendment than society simply deciding to shun messages we want to suppress.
1 reply →
I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.
I reported a website for human trafficking a year ago, which is still online and protected by cloud flare. I referenced parts of the forum to their staff where users mentioned enjoying raping women. Their response, "I don't see anything wrong with this content".
So what this says is Cloudflare believes in providing service to anyone until it causes bad publicity. It's certainly not a morally courageous stand, but fits in perfectly with most tech giants.
We can make burglary illegal without any additional explanation of why burglary is "wrong". This is because it is part of understanding the concept of burglary to know that it is wrong. It's the same sort of logic that applies to Nazi propaganda: it is wrong simply because it is Nazi propaganda. We understand what it is and what they are saying, so we do not need to go to additional lengths to explain why it is wrong. It should be silenced for no other reason than that it is Nazi propaganda. To promote Nazi propaganda is to undermine the social contract itself about what constitutes free speech. It is a mistake of Enlightenment political philosophy to say that every decision we make about what constitutes right and wrong must derive ultimately from basic principles by logical reasoning. In many cases merely understanding a concept suffices to directly condemn an activity and Nazi propaganda is almost the best example of how we can, without further conversation, simply say "NO"... we are not going to help you promote this and we are not going to politely explain to you why we do not agree with your views. All this talk about free speech and Nazis is nonsense. I support Cloudflare's decision.
Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. - Louis Brandeis
Unless the site was directly breaking the law, I see this move as troubling. It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground, and I think most HN readers figure why this is. The problem I see is that in the current political climate the general population won't understand that or is unwilling to.
> It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground
Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
The Daily Stormer is pretty radical, but afaik still operates within the law. Taking their platform will put them out of sight and into areas where respecting the law isn't necessary. The enemy you don't know is the enemy you have to fear the most. Unfortunately I feel like most people today are more comfortable with hiding and banning bad ideas than to confront them.
It's always better to appease Nazis. Society should take a long hard look at itself for not allowing Hitler free speech and to fully express his views.
Noam Chomsky
Non-sequitur. It's from Noam Chomsky so it's not surprising, he has a predilection for fallacies.
Just because two "bad" people liked something in a certain way does not mean that "good" people must therefore like it the converse way. Both Goebbels and Stalin may also have liked butter and jam on their toast, but that doesn't mean I should eat toast with just butter.
If that seems a little facetious, consider it this way: many leading figures deemed "good" by history were also in favour of regulated free speech. That doesn't make regulated free speech good, of course — though one might suppose that it means that these "good" people were probably not as liberal as many people seem to think.
In fact, during times of war, and of apprehension/anticipation of war, I'd say that there were many things that went on, which would make many liberal people take umbrage today. I would say all free speech was heavily regulated by most nations up until the perhaps the '90s or even the '00s.
I do not think it is unwise to regulate free speech. It is not wise for a civilisation, with laws, to allow people to flaunt their breaking of, or desire to break, said laws, without some legal consequence.
Are we to have rapist support rallies next? Join the Rapist Party for the legalisation of rape? No. The rape of anybody is a crime, just like murder. It is not legally permitted to be perpetrated by anyone in most countries.
The same should apply to racism — and you might say that it should not be illegal to make racist remarks, but actually, it should not be tolerated in terms of free speech either, because it is objectively wrong to believe a race is superior to another race.
It's not a question about the meaning of life or the existence of supernatural deities, so the answer is not something that lies beyond the bounds of our language to discuss. It's a question of whether one race of people is superior to another race of people, and this question is answerable scientifically: there is no superior race.
Given that there is no superior race, just like there is no superior gender i.e. women are not inferior to men, it should not be permissible for people to advocate views contrary to this — not because it is a "dominant discourse" or whatever Foucault might have said, but because it is a scientific fact.
Science is not a discursive means to enforce order, it's just the application of logic to evidence. There are no meaningful genetic differences between different races, and there are no bounds set to what a person can achieve other than those set by political regimes and by the person's financial situation/access to education.
Nothing should be able to call into question a scientifically-proven fact other than other scientifically-proven facts i.e. new evidence. It should not be legal to spread sophistry or incite dissent and disorder based on sophistry.
So, racism should not be permissible simply because it carries no truth. If racism had a basis in science, or indeed any truth to it whatsoever, it would not require fanatical cults and violence to spread its message. It would just be taught, as it is already taught that homo sapiens outmatched the neanderthal (though this is actually speculative and remains to be conclusively proven, but that's another debate).
There is no universal rule for handling free speech and it's not something that should be considered in terms of setting precedents. Every case of permissible free speech is distinct and the question must be asked each time: is the message that being advocated logically plausible/scientifically justified?
Remember, "rape is bad" is not something you can scientifically prove because it's not a comparison between two people from different places, it's a moral statement, albeit one that most agree with.
Thus, if you permit racist discourse against science, you will set a far more dangerous precedent for the rapists, human traffickers, murderers and paedophiles around the world who also feel that for too long their voices have gone unheard.
I wonder if Chomsky would readily be the one to grant them the freedom to speak openly about their preferences for murdering and raping people, from his armchair.
Chomsky is not claiming either of these people were bad, he's saying they were uncontroversially opposed to free speech, so as to highlight the defining characteristic of support: tolerance of views one finds odious. It doesn't really seem like you disagree, you just are not for free speech:
Which is fine. Just understand your position.
I have zero doubt he would, and have no qualms saying that I do as well.
"Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
I've been jumping back and forth over the fence on this topic, but this stance is where I've ended up.
I think he's overstating the case. There are plenty of ways for that content to get on the internet that don't involve CloudFlare.
Booting them off cloudflare caused downtime at best.
2 replies →
I'm struggling to connect these two phrases:
"No one should have that power"
"I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet"
Seems like a very tricky precedent to set that you can just not allow someone on the internet.
The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
>The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I support free speech, even when the speech is hateful and malignant, because I honestly believe the best way to combat vile ideas is out in the open where people can see them, hear them, discuss them and repudiate them. Cultures can't innoculate themselves against ideas without an intellectual herd immunity, and that is impossible without mass exposure.
On the other hand, fuck Nazis.
I think I'm quite willing to let them come for the Nazis then start caring when they come for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, etc. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
Of course, on the third hand, I have no real power over anyone else's speech, and I'm just some rando on the internet, so it doesn't really matter what I think.
1 reply →
I mean, he just has the authority over the company and can deny service to them, he can't effectively shut them down. Just give them downtime. I would compare this to a DoS more than a shut down.
It is not they can't be on the internet, it is we are not going to help them spread their message.
A sensible business decision by Cloudflare, and a fine moral stand to take. There is nothing positive to be gained by servicing such neo-Nazi websites, and Cloudflare is under no obligation to keep them as customers.
Similarly, the Daily Stormer is free to take their custom to a provider who turns a blind eye to or supports their toxic ideology.
Yet they don't block ISIS.
I don't recall ISIS claiming that Cloudflare support their ideology.
Cloudflaire did a lot damage today by releasing that statement. It's one thing to have a policy or guideline that would ban a site like this. To have the CEO tell us he woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick this site off of the internet sends the message cloudflaire's service isn't a stable place governed by rules and policies. Cloudflaire CEO moods will dictate policy.
I always felt Cloudflaire was a hotpot service with nsa hooks.
He stays in the article The Daily Stormers claim tbat cloudflair was a supporter of them because of their hosting.
Honest question for people who think this stifles freedom: do you also think taking down ISIS recruitment videos is anti-free speech? Should we not do that either?
Online radicalization is real. The challenge of how to deal with that and offer considerable freedom on the Internet will be a challenge for our society.
A very good point. The anti-censorship narrative feels very similar to the right's denial (or at least it's willful ignorance) that white domestic terrorists are a thing in the US.
How is speech perpetrated by white supremacists to incite violence any different from that of foreign terrorist organizations?
Yes, both are anti-free speech. It's not that we want people to join these groups, it's that we're rapidly spiraling down the rabbit hole of censorship. IS was using Cloudflare to weaponize beheadings of foreign hostages into propaganda. TDS was, as @octal pointed out on Twitter today [1], a "stupid racist/troll crappostsite". We've lowered the bar significantly here. Of all pathetic things to give into, Cloudflare gave into the outrage over these TDS losers?
[1] https://twitter.com/octal/status/897887095821402112
I think Cloudfare made the wrong decision here, but for me the reasons it's damaging to free speech are deeper than "is free speech at the level of government or private organizations?"
There's a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to say Cloudfare is a private company, they were free to make a decision, they exercised that right, and now white nationalists have the right to choose to go to a different provider. Others have the right to do business or withhold business from Cloudfare in response.
Another, though, is to say that Cloudfare is now in a unique position--by the CEO's own admission--and has power over another person's speech as a result. It would be akin to a husband controlling a wife's contacts with others. Sure, the wife could leave, but that's not really a good argument for the husband's behavior being ok; someone is, similarly in the hands of the company somewhat unfairly.
Yet another way to look at it is this: when Cloudfare decides it can and will make content-based decisions, have they now implicitly argued that when they don't remove content, they implicitly support that content, in that it's not aversive enough to remove? Where do you draw the line with that? And if a company nominally accepts that responsibility, does that mean we, in exchange, should allow them to regulate other traffic?
One argument for net neutrality is that while it binds a corporation's hands, it also frees them of responsibility for things they might otherwise be liable for. This was the bargain with phone companies, after all, with common carrier status. No one blames the phone company for supporting white supremacists because they carried their phone calls, but nor do they worry about the phone company dropping their calls because the phone company disagrees with their political position.
My impression is that the CEO of Cloudfare is freaking out at the moment because he realizes he has now made Cloudfare implicitly responsible for the content on its systems, and has opened up an argument against net neutrality. He's essentially saying to the government "please come up with rules that absolve us for responsibility in this situation."
If Cloudfare had simply said "we don't drop clients because of the nature of the content" they would have had a very strong position. Now they've opened a can of worms and have called into question their complicity in the content they carry.
They can't have it both ways: by saying that white supremacist groups are too aversive for them, they have now implicitly said that everything else is not too aversive. This is a very undesirable route to be going in in terms of freedom of speech.
For what it's worth, I also oppose network companies removing ISIS recruitment videos, all other things being equal. Now, if a court decided that the content poster/creator was in violation of some ethical and legal code to such an extent that their right to distribute content should be restricted, that's one thing, but that would require actual due process in a court of law.
Cloudflare refuse to withdraw services to ISIS
It's funny what a company will say, then turn around and do... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content,"
...unless the press tells them what their philosophy needs to be? The lesson is that no capitalist company can remain neutral, today. Which has good and bad consequences. It's amazing how the small number of media conglomerates have solidified their political power alongside their commercial power. A true locus of control in Western society.
It's my fear this locus of control or suppression of voices is part of the reason we have an increase in violent rhetoric.
I learned an important lesson in 2016, my worldviews are not shared in America outside of big cities. It forced me to realize that I didn't even know people disagreed so fiercely because of media conglomerate created echo bubbles.
4 replies →
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?
2 replies →
So that guy who drove the car ran the website mentioned? That seems like new news for all of us. I would love a citation.
This is a slippery slope, Cloudflare.
Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility?
My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
(Yes, you absolutely need to remove the bullet point now.)
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
Yes, you're one tough maverick for repeating something stated only about 20x in just this thread.
But you're indeed quite brave to pretend not to have seen the 25 answers pointing out that it's also this CEO (and everyone else's) right not to participate in the spreading of hate speech and nazi propaganda.
Also:
"slippery slope" is not an argument, it's a fallacy. Observe: "now, they're only imprisoning the murderers. It's only a matter of time until they'll throw you in jail for walking funny"
> you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so ...
Why? Does eating one apple pie obligate you to eat all the apple pie?
> ... unilaterally
As opposed to bilateral moderation?
When I first clicked on the discussion link, there were two comments. I also took a break to go to the restroom before I submitted my comment. I'm sorry that I wasn't quick enough for you.
> unilaterally
Happy now?
Did you actually want to discuss/argue with my comment or just criticize the way I worded it?
>I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.
> No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it
Their right to say it.
Their ability to say it is a different thing.
5 replies →
Would you hang a sign with a writing of my choice out of your window?
If I were in the sign hanging business and you paid the advertised fee, yes.
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
You may want to read this comment of mine I put in a thread that probably won't get seen much because it's not intellectually stimulating enough, or something: > Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness!cookiecaper
9 years ago
matt4077
9 years ago
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 finds offensive; rather, it will be anything that could, through any potential legalistic contortion, result in legal liability.
We should all be very concerned about these low-level infrastructure components like GoDaddy, Google DNS, and CloudFlare beginning to adopt a policy of content moderation.
I'm shocked that something as simple as "they're nazis" is actually being accepted by people here; it is pretty much the stock anti-speech argument that we've all rehearsed forever. Sad to see that many aren't living up to it now that the cards are on the table.
Domains should only be seized when the government issues a binding legal order, not when the registrar or CDN's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
This is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine it's not coordinated specifically to weaken/undermine any form of anti-establishment or politically incorrect speech online. These attacks on core infrastructure delivery components need to be denounced loudly.
"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 content without themselves becoming publishers"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
2 replies →
I like the article as that it still shows that they're committed to being neutral, however, they will respond when you try to drag them down with you. From the article, it sounds like the stormer bit the hand that fed them.
This is how life is for people in Porn.
Let's say you host porn. Let's also assume you wish to charge for porn. Many banks, credit card merchants, etc DO NOT wish to deal with your company at all. They wont take your transfers nor business. There are merchants that are comfortable taking payments from you (CCBill) but they cost much more since they have the expertise to deal with these types of chargebacks etc. I am not sure how I see this is different. If you create a hate website - you might get dropped from SendGrid. Tough. That is how it works.
Cloudflare is in the business of protecting websites from DDOS attacks (and various other things). They should of course try to estimate the cost of protecting a given client, and forward that cost onto them. However, if that client is willing to pay, their business centers around protecting them. I highly doubt daily stormer is their worst client in terms of DDOS protection or any other service.
Matthew Prince is asking for a conversation to begin on establishing policy for supporting free speech vs. policing a service. Service providers of all kinds have been more-or-less flying by the seat of their pants on this issue, making up policy according to their individual ideals, and a lot of arguments so far have fallen along ideological lines.
As more and more people continue to participate in the internet, there are going to be more issues like this, not fewer.
So let's maybe kick off that discussion a little bit? Someone that's articulate might be able to build the foundation for a policy here that would be attractive to lots of service providers.
Some things to consider:
-> Local law vs. ethical considerations. A lot of expressions and statements that are just fine by US standards are illegal or otherwise censored in other place. Google has struggled with this in China for years now. There's no reason to believe that the US will continue to be a beacon for free speech forever. Efforts to control, surveil, and censor speech are ongoing in the US, as Dreamhost recently pointed out. How should services handle this? Do you adhere to local laws or to what you believe is right?
-> Free speech vs. abuse. In this case, I don't mean abuse-by-meanness, but abuse by misuse of resources. From blatant spamming all the way down to just being the loud-mouthed jerk who posts too often in a forum, there's a whole spectrum of abuses here and most service providers happily block this content. What constitutes abuse? Should everything be supported, to the best of the service provider's ability, or is this a point where nearly everyone agrees that free speech should be limited?
-> Free speech vs. disruptive or disgusting speech. Communities gather assholes. Some of them are accidental or ill (HN has its own, which it has merrily perma-banned), some of them just want to stir shit up. Some of them give us something to think about, they just want to be really abrasive in the process. What are the limits here? What if we end up on the wrong side of some issue, what would our opinions about limited speech be then?
-> Nice vs. Free. These all kind of could be distilled down into a single debate: do we want a nice society, or a free society?
-> slippery slope vs whataboutism vs sanity: can we, for just a moment, not pretend that we're unable to distinguish between self-professed nazis calling for the extermination of jews and blacks, and legitimate speech in opposition of the government?
Yes, if you're drawing a line there will be, by definition, cases close to it, on both sides. But this isn't one of them. And it's not like this is some sort of new problem that we haven't successfully navigated before. Courts have always had to make binary decisions from continuous facts: pornography vs. art, or just naming that single grain of sand that makes this stretch of coast a beach per California regulation 343 etc.
"Free vs nice" is an insidious way to delegitimise the concerns of those actually targeted by torch-wielding nazis. People aren't asking for a "nice" country. They're asking for the freedom to peacefully walk around without the fear of being splattered onto the pavement by the next terrorist's car attack.
I say again -- he claims that the Daily Stormer claimed that Cloudflare NOT cutting them off was some kind of endorsement.
If true, that makes them a very special case.
I generally oppose almost all cases of a company using their legal right of censorship, at least when it's squarely aimed at censoring OPINIONS rather than just censoring specific modes of expression (e.g. threats, curse words, whatever). But he managed to find a legitimate-sounding loophole. He has no obligation to support the Daily Stormer's false claim of endorsement via his (in)actions.
I don't like this...
If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?
It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.
I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
I think that private companies like Cloudflare that claim to uphold free speech whatever the circumstances are fooling themselves. In this case it wasn't the Nazi propaganda of TDS that tipped the balance, it was them claiming that Cloudflare supported them. That made it very personal to Cloudflare and it's management in a way Prince clearly had not anticipated could happen.
The reality is that private companies and individuals, unless compelled by law or regulation, have no obligation to facilitate the free speech of others. None. They certainly don't have an obligation to facilitate speech that falsely smears or defames them themselves. Trying to believe or claim that they could do so in all circumstances was naive.
The principle of absolute moral neutrality is simply untenable. Choosing not to choose is itself a choice. Given the existence of repulsive opinion and content, choosing not to exclude it is simply a choice to publish it. It doesn't in any way dodge moral responsibility. It's time companies like this did the truly hard thing and set actual policies they believe in and can follow as a matter of conscience.
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 my professional career as an infrastructure leader. To me, it was simple: ISIS was killing innocent people and Cloudflare was complicit in the weaponizing these killings into propaganda.
I can't believe I'm saying this but here in 2017, I've had a change of heart. It's not that I support ISIS, or Daily Stormer, or Nazis. Fuck all of those guys. The problem here is that I feel that the post-Charlottesville Internet is rapidly sliding into a very scary trend of _weaponizing speech_. Prior to last weekend, the weaponization of speech was mostly confined to SJW-speak, where people call others' speech "violence". No longer confined to Twitter outbursts and op-eds, we are now seeing the weaponization of speech by service providers.
It's easy to write off Daily Stormer as a bunch of inbred Nazi assholes because, hey, that's obvious, but who's next? Who's the next group that gets knocked off the Internet? Trump supporters? Civil War historians? Encryption experts? You? Me? Who gets to decide? Social activists? The government? Some other government? Matthew Prince?
Even if you're ready to drive a truck into Richard Spencer's house, you should be outraged by Cloudflare's action today. This is quite possibly, as one of his employees said, the end of the Internet--certainly the free Internet.
> 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.
"the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology"
What does this have to do with the termination?
Cloudflare's tired of being subject to that defamation?
A previous blog addressed a similar issue, about ISIS, with a very clear policy. It's worth the read.
From Mr. Prince:
"> What safeguards do you have in place to ensure that CloudFlare does not support illegal terrorist activity?
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain." [1]
"Again, CloudFlare is not a hosting provider. If we were to terminate this, or any other customer, the material wouldn't go away, it would just be a bit slower and be more subject to attack. We do not believe that "investigating" the speech that flows through our network is appropriate. In fact, we think doing so would be creepy." [1]
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/
Also from the article:
> Your CEO has in the past publicly defended providing services to websites hosting dangerous material. Would his position change if one of his own family was hurt or killed in an incident that could be reliably linked to the [controversial website]?
In a word: no. As a way of proving that point, rather than speculate on a gruesome hypothetical, let's discuss a concrete example. About a year ago, a young hacker broke into my email accounts, rummaged around, and caused a significant amount of damage and embarrassment to me. At the time, the hacker was a CloudFlare user. He even used his CloudFlare-powered site to publish details of the attack. I was furious. It was a direct attack by one of our users specifically targeting me. Despite that, we did not kick him off our network nor should we have.
shrug
The fact that US hosting companies have the pretty much unquestioned choice to decide whether or not to host websites of organizations supporting a faction of armed rebellion against the US, to me says we're probably doing this right.
The whole Civil Rights Movement came about as a result of a faction of armed rebellion against the US in the 1960s! I suppose you think it was a mistake to let them have the right to be heard back then?
> Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
enuf said
Apparently he doesn't have that power, since they're still on the internet.
It always perplexes me when libertarians (the Silicon Valley kind) argue for radical freedom but don't like it when a company chooses to exercise it.
Don't like it? Create a competitor to Cloudflare.
They are a business and they have the right to do this. 100% However they can no longer say they are "content-neutral". Also because they have taken an active step to censor they face the fact that in the future they could be sued for NOT censoring other content as there is now precedent created by this action. If you never censor then you have a clam of safe harbor. Emotionally the CEO is correct. From business point of view this decision opens them up to risk. Long term this was likely unwise.
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 act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
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 does not invalidated the risk.
1 reply →
Surprised no one has linked this back-and-forth discussion at Blackhat 2013 between cybercrime investigative reporter Brian Krebs and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince regarding CloudFlare's hosting of "booters"/DDOS marketing sites. I will put a bit of the conversation here, but please do listen to it in context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14654680
It's funny that people still believe that exclusion will prevent other people from radicalization, rather than doing the opposite.
People get shouted down on college campuses if they disagree with politically correct views. So they go somewhere else to speak out their views, not being interfered with anymore. So they radicalize.
People in companies have to fear penalties if they speak out against developments they disagree with, so they don't speak out openly and form small circles and consult forums of their own. So they radicalize.
People see themselves misrepresented as extremists by what they perceive as the "mainstream media", so they turn to what they think is the opposite of that, so they enter their own world of facts with Fox, Breitbart, etc. So they radicalize.
Those people will vote for whoever they think represents the enemy of their enemies, and even support foreign governments that they think represent the opposite of their own establishment. They won't give a f about virtue-signaling platform providers in their own country, they will turn to providers elsewhere, whoever that may be (Russia etc).
The belief that further exclusion everywhere will make anything better is just absolutely ridiculous.
This is well done statement. He is acknowledging that he himself has no idea what the right way to go about it is and at the same time running his company the way he believes it should be run.
As much as I don't like cloudflare because it does create security issues (you are afterall proxying traffic through them) I have to respect the CEO's position on this. And it isn't easy.
If you feel the need to make such a long post about it, perhaps it was a bad decision?
Perhaps a statement that you did not support them in their ideals would have suited both the situation and your minds.
I've always felt like Cloudflare was one of the better leading internet companies, especially because of their neutrality towards their customers.
This is kind of a downer.
> We're going to have a long debate internally about whether we need to remove the bullet about not terminating a customer due to political pressure.
I think you can safely say this has nothing to do with political pressure if it's something you've asserted yourself. You can't say, "We've never taken down a website due to internal moral pressure," but that's something I actually consider when picking a business to do business with, so it stands to reason a business should make decisions based on this. Not everyone feels this way, and that's fine, but I prefer to do business with people I consider principled in the way that I am.
Is this a dangerous notion? It doesn't seem so in practice, in that the only people being banned are Nazis and child porn distributors; tough luck making that slope slippery with those two players.
While this was the right choice and long overdue IMO, it was the wrong way to do it. They should update their TOS to remove the arbitrary clause about terminating for any reason, and replace it with a concrete list of behaviour which is against their terms, like perhaps hate speech, violent threats and harassment. Cloudflare can decide where this line is, but there is a line and it should be clear to everyone. Clients deserve to know what the criteria are prior to signup, and Cloudflare deserves the right to choose which clients to service.
Thankfully Cloudflare are not and should never be in the position where they decide what stays on the internet, as they are just one provider, and do not have a monopoly. This is why monopolies are undesirable, even though most companies aspire to one.
> They should update their TOS to remove the arbitrary clause about terminating for any reason, and replace it with a concrete list of behaviour which is against their terms, like perhaps hate speech, violent threats and harassment.
Companies make those clauses arbitrary for a purpose: that's so they don't get a bunch of amateur legal eagles who will attempt to argue forever about what they can and can not get away with. By purposefully leaving a gray area the company can draw the line by adjusting to fluid conditions when it suits them.
You can disagree with that but I totally understand why a company like Cloudflare would want to reserve some room for maneuvering: it is impossible to know what the future will throw at you.
I'm a long time lurker of HN. This is my first post. Decided to sign up to write this.
After all I have read in the news regarding Daily Stormer, I thought it best to go straight to the source, and find out whether what I had been reading was accurate, or if their views had been entirely, or in part, misrepresented.
As a result of Cloudflare revoking their services to DS, the site is down. I can't evaluate DS directly. To me, this is bad.
If everything that was said about DS is true, their own words would reveal their colours. People could judge them accordingly.
The media regularly misrepresents individuals and groups. We shouldn't have to take the media at their word. Whenever possible, we should be able to evaluate the source. Now we can't, and we're worse off for it.
All I have to say is the arguments being put forth by so many on this thread are poorly formed, appeal to logical fallacies, in particular false equivalence, and generally show a lack of understanding of American enlightenment ideals and the Constitution. I'm not going to get down in this mud by trying to refute all the bad points, but it makes me sad to see HN in such a state. I think perhaps it's time for country of origin tagging so we know where commenters are from... because these sentiments are somewhat understandable in less free european countries, but are much less so if the posters are American.
I hope this isn't a precursor to HN being sockpuppeted to death like Reddit...
For those making the "public company it's their right" argument, it's worth considering what that logic might imply.
Does it mean food stores could deny selling you food, based on your associations/affiliations? Airlines deny you travel? Cell phone companies, deny you a phone?
I think the reason we're seeing backlash here is that the internet is largely perceived as a utility now (I believe utility companies cannot deny service at will).
Secondly, more than once is US history have those attempting to be virtuous gone too far (e.g. McCarthyism). Surely it will happen again. When that day comes, will it be better if we err to the side of too dismissive or too open-minded?
Generally agree. Potential distinction between content consumer and content producer though. E.g. it might be a right to consume electricity, but is it a right to produce it, say.. with solar panels?
The self-proclaimed mission of the alt-right: "Creating a Subculture Which Becomes the Dominant Culture"
https://web.archive.org/web/20170721194819/www.dailystormer....
I wonder if censoring the Alt-Right only reinforces them as subculture via Streisand effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
These might give an interesting perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-man-daryl-davis-be...
Dear CloudFlare, Hi mr prince i know you read this.
Could you please apply the same policy to malicious sites that are you are proxying which you never bother to take down because of 'insert poor reasons here'? I think thats worse then to see or read an opinion i don't agree with, regardless of how explicit that opinion is or how badly i disagree. People should be able to say what they want where they want and not only when the largest part of the population/media agrees.
The limit lies at VIOLENCE. There never is a reason to enforce or show your opinion through means of violence. Ever.
What about the case where Microsoft Frontpage's EULA forbid creation of websites that shed a negative light on Microsoft? Wasn't the verdict that such a clause is not enforceable?
link?
My memory failed me. There was no case, simply speculation. I remember discussing it WRT some other EULA case. https://books.google.com/books?id=9jgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&lpg=P...
I find it amusing that many of the same people who bemoan the loss of "net neutrality" are in this very thread applauding arbitrary censorship of content by a large company.
Malware distributors, DDoS purveyors, sellers of stolen credit cards, all those welcome as customers. However nazis isn't.
Good to know they had a line somewhere. I was just surprised to see it.
This is reasonable decision. If you say something bad about my company then "no soup for you" [1].
It seems like there is no free speech on internet: because free speech is controlled by corporations and the loudest people on social media. So there will be no ISIS websites, no Daily Stormer websites, etc.
That is how it is.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svSGKJFSl-8
> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?
I don't think that's fair because defamation of character could be applied here. What would you prefer they do, sue the Daily Stormer while continuing to distribute their content? Cutting off their services seems a far more rational approach.
At the end of the day Cloudflare are just exercising their own freedoms to accept the business they choose to. The Daily Stormer will (if they haven't already) just switch to another provider so it's not like they're being censored (well, not in any effective way) and everyone is now clear where Cloudflare's position is with regards to The Daily Stormer while very little time was wasted with expensive lawyers. On balance I think this seems a pretty fair outcome for all parties involved.
It could be argued that the mere presence of a Nazi flag as expression is incitement. Not ordinary speech. Naziism is nothing if not clear about violence to people about things that they cannot change about themselves. Skin color. Lineage. It's not like "if you don't do this we have no problem with you" (the Antifa fall into this category. Nazis fall into the former).
Well, the Supreme Court and the law of the land disagrees with you.
2 replies →
Ok maybe but cloudflare hosts actual ISIS content so why is that acceptable?
Can someone explain to me how the protection of free speech sits within the view of "the market will sort it out"? This seems like a very interesting case to take as an example.
In general this forum is pretty pro market but when a certain idea comes under attack from the market, people start talking about public goods. It seems like there are some contradictions here that feel under explored.
One thing a lot of speechers don't seem to get around here: taking down The Daily Stormer is speech. Also, keeping them up is speech. If you want to regulate CloudFlare so that it has to carry The Daily Stormer, take it up with your congressman. But don't pretend you're neutral in the fight between those who value the constitution and those who would trample over it.
Would not a formal PR response, like, "No, we are not in league with neo-nazis," have been more effective and less contradictory?
So cloudflare terminates the account of some pathetic racists, but happily continues to host Ripoff Report, a company whose basic business model is to defame people online and then extort them for money. You know, a site that actively ruins people lives, employment, etc. But a silly racist message board is what moves the CEO to take action.
To describe the daily stormer as a silly message board is to ignore the broader context. It seems likely that what the CEO acted out against was the death of Heather Heyer at the hands of the kinds of people who visit the daily stormer (and are radicalized by it), the tacit endorsement of those people by Trump, and the specter of the US slowly transforming into something like Nazi Germany. None of those things are "silly" or "little."
Interesting that Matthew Prince did not think to list the owner of the device that is connected to the internet as a possible option of who could or should censor what one sees on the internet. This to me is the best option and not even put on the table. The old internet was amazing. Where is the new internet forming today?
In a strange way this reminds me of the Reddit controversy where the CEO was caught modifying comments. I have never trusted Reddit after that, in a way I am thankful to the Reddit CEO for shaking me out of my complacency.
I have similar thoughts about this. I do not want technology companies deciding what content is reachable.
"Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance... but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Northern Secs. case. (1904).
If you have not read the post and came straight to the comments, you should read the post. I found it well written, thoughtful, and cognizant of its potential role in dictating what the future of the internet could look like.
If you had a restaurant, and you don't feel comfortable having Nazis/neoNazis at your place of business, would you serve them or would you feel like it's your right to choose not to do business with them.
I'm glad to see CloudFlare do this, I think it's going to hard to defend themselves against attacks from the MPAA, RIAA, and other troll organizations now :/ I guess no good deed will go unpunished
This is definitely sparking the Streisand Effect now. I had never heard of this site before, and having their domain dumped by three major tech companies in a row has plastered it all over my news bubble.
If beating up a kid on a playground is free speech, then that is where my tolerance of free speech ends and I will go and stop the production of pain from a simply ethical harm-minimization standpoint
What about the question of, WHY is Cloudflare responsible for 10% of internet requests? Who are there competitors, and at what point should these service providers be subjected to antitrust laws?
So far we've partially lost our freedom of movement (take a look at the borders, the airports, etc).
We've heavily lost our freedoms around privacy.
Speech is the big prize for the authoritarians. Do not give it to them.
Ignorance is bliss I guess, maybe the white nationalist shouldn't have a web presence for these SJWs to notice them else they would go on rampant like these gangs in LA/chicago.
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029852
All dangerous propaganda should be stopped, but mark this day as the start of a new era, the "Echo-chamber-Internet", censored by whoever shouts the loudest.
I would never shut down such websites. Not due to Freedom of speech, but because now they will hide better. Most of these people login with their Facebook accounts to post hateful comments etc. I mean, seriously, all it takes for any law enforcement is to keep these people under control and that's it and sue them if it's the case. On the other hand, now we risk to create more and more parallel societies and secret groups. I understand that a private company can decide to terminate any user's account just "because they can". Completely fine with that.
They could have played this card better I think.
Hide better?
These aren't child pornographers trying to stay under the radar of the law. These are Nazis advocating for the murder of people who don't look like them, and trying to make their views mainstream.
Making them harder to for the vast majority of people to find is a major part of exactly how you shut a violent fascist movement down. And if you don't think a movement like this should be shut down, you're part of the problem.
> Making them harder to for the vast majority of people to find is a major part of exactly how you shut a violent fascist movement down.
Did you ever read about how Mussolini or Hitler gained their power? Do you really think that the governments back then didn't do anything to prevent what they were trying to start? That they didn't try to shut them down, etc.?
We are talking about a severe social problem that unfortunately ends up mostly with bulls* - white supremacy and all this cr. Why? Because nobody wants to listen to these people - what are the issues they have? I would say that most of the time, these people don't have a high income. Maybe they are unemployed, etc., maybe they don't feel secure/safe - do you actually know why they do these things? Some may be mentally ill, but hell, I don't want to believe that all of them are!
How many times does this have to happen again and again...? When will we ever learn? Rising walls and shutting people up are not good ways to build something - but only to destroy.
2 replies →
People that frequent TDS will probably believe this to be result of a secret globalist cabal further cementing their resolve that something must be done to save the white race.
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.
I'm not sure this is a good idea since Cloudflare came out initially in favor of maintaining their account. Mind you, I don't like Nazis and frankly I don't care that they lost their account but it's bad for a business to change its mind so quickly. Honestly, I say let the fascists have their crappy site, just don't help them monetize it. Let's see if they can keep up with their "recruitment" when it's clear the only class of people they can garner support from are the kind that spout nonsense like Alex Jones or worse.
I can't wait for the day that society figures out that individuals, small groups of people and big groups of people need different rules when it comes to what is and isn't free speech.
A small bakery not putting a confederate flag or a rainbow or a swastiaka on a cake or conversely being compelled by law to do so if requested is different than Google or Cloudflare kicking out a customer for their speech or being legally compelled not to.
I think Cloudlfare was in the right. The Daily Stormer was pretty stupid to say that Cloudflare supported or agreed with them and got kicked out.
Principles are tested in hard times.
In half of Europe Nazis were replaced by Stalinists...hope we're not on the same path.
Legally 1st amendment is protection against the government, but principally it should be applied to any entity with national or global power.
Racist, Nazis or anyone can say what they want (minus explicit call for violence), and the opposing side has the equal right to prove them wrong. That's the beauty and intent of the 1st Amendment. How people are cheering this decision, seems rather shortsighted to me.
> principally it should be applied to any entity with national or global power
It's ridiculous to call Cloudflare this. There are tons of alternative CDNs. They have as much "power" as your local bookstore.
Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" [1] . Scary to delegate such powers to a person who "literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet"
1. https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087295.h...
Cloudflare has also been crucial to malware vendors who are pushing out their exploit kits. When I worked at Malwarebytes we had the worst possible time working with the Cloudflare abuse team to take down active exploit kits.
They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.
I think that calling every decision unilaterally the same no matter the variables involved is pretty rash. Lots of discussions on HN devolve into this way of thinking and I really can't stand it.
An entity that puts child porn on the Internet isn't protected by freedom of speech. Soliciting hate, violence and prejudice is obviously not identical but it's a lot different from just having a different opinion than someone else.
Shitty people should be treated shitty by companies. I don't really see a democratic way of banning folks like this from Cloudflare besides Cloudflare deciding to do so.
>Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters"
No it isn't, this is complete nonsense. There's not very many booters and besides a few exceptions they don't have paid CF plans.
"paid" as in you have to pay per DDoS to the booter. CF business is not in getting money directly from the booters, but in acquiring many paid CF subscriptions from the sites that the booters can attack. Some of these booters can generate 100+Gbps UDP attacks.
1 reply →
If people were educated better, there would be no need to close sites like that down.
This topic seems to bring out the worst in people. HN is usually better than this.
Makes total sense, not sure why they would even need to write all of this up.
can we get some proper discussion about this or some stronger moderation in here please? this thread is awful on all accounts
What about their .ru domain though?
I'm Jewish, and a huge portion of my family was killed in the holocaust. Two great aunts were operated on by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. I hate and fear neo-nazis and people who ascribe to similar hateful, violent ideologies. I was shocked and scared by what I saw happened in Charlottesville. A small part of me even briefly fantasised about a modern day Inglorious Bastards.
But I know freedom of speech needs protection, because today, it is easier than ever to be given a label and associated with the worst of humanity, and for people to think that you're a racist/sexist/etc., even when you are very far from it. We all just saw this happen to James Damore, a pro-diversity guy, who suggested ways to make his workplace more attractive to a larger proportion of women, and cited only science that has been backed up by a significant number of studies. The tyrannical Left felt some of his comments go against their narrative, the narrative that oppression is the cause of everything unless proven otherwise. A intellectually lazy and innacurate narrative, obviously. The world is never so simple, and the evidence doesn't support such a view. If we give up freedom of speech and punish people like James Damore, we will have lost the freedom that supports our society, and allows us to have political discourse.
Do you know what separates us from Russia, China, and the rest? The freedom of speech. Democracy is only truly held by a country when political discourse is allowed. Obviously.
The Left is guilty of demonisation of their opponents and alienation of their allies, and is, from what I've seen, the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others. People need to wake up to its threat. It is much less obvious than the hideous Neo-Nazis, far more insidious.
The fact that I fear being called 'right-wing' for what I have just said is absurd. Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share. And of course because I disagree with both wings. They are both driven by fear instead of reason. Nothing clouds one's judgement more than strong negative emotion. The crocodile brain. The worst part of ourselves.
My limit? The explicit threat or encouragement of violence. This is never acceptible. This is where we can and should be coming down on the neo-nazis, white supremacists, socialists, antifa, and the rest of them. They are violent people, so this isn't hard.
Encouraging neo-nazism, given the holocaust, might be considered encouraging violence. This makes some sense to me. So perhaps, where there is incontrovertible evidence of encouraging Nazi belief, or belief systems that are explicitly and historically supportive of violence, we can consider the implicit threat of violence an explicit one. Can anyone poke holes in this? Or any of what I've said? Unlikely anyone will read this absurdly long comment, but I still want to post it.
I believe you have the right to express your views freely and I agree with you that violence on any end of the spectrum is unacceptable. Groups like Antifa and BLM have legitimate grievances which their violent actions completely undermine in my eyes. The narrative of the "middle class rural uprising" we've been presented with as the reason for Trump's election has, at its core, exposed perfectly understandable issues regarding middle American economic and political disenfranchisement, which have unfortunately been taken up as a banner by white supremacists, and twisted into a justification of their ideals.
However, I have to object to what I see as an attempt to portray yourself as a politically unbiased observer:
>Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share.
Prior to this, you assert that "the Left" is "the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others." Earlier, you refer to the "tyrannical Left" and mention that you consider James Damore to have been a victim of censorship, and their "(obviously) intellectually lazy and inaccurate narrative."
You may reject political parties but you appear to disagree with one ideological wing far less than the other. Such language only serves to poison the well, and encourage exactly the distraction and emotionally charged polarity you claim to oppose.
The linked post is PR, or more accurately, damage control; and I say this with no malice towards Cloudflare. Simply, it's in their Terms of Service [1] that they can terminate accounts for any reason, which is exactly what they did.
Unfortunately for them, this puts them squarely in the same category as, say, Google [2][3][4], whose near-ubiquitous presence in people's digital lives intersects with their black-box suspension behavior and near-memetic lack of customer support, to unpleasant effects. And no ill will towards Google either; they are just one of several examples who exist at the sweet spot of significant market share, widespread presence at various layers of information-networking, and a largely disconnected customer support experience.
Cloudflare is trying to set themselves apart from a company (and competitors) that evoke that association by blogging about the gravity of their decision, but at this stage their writings aren't backed by demonstrable due process, like they aspire to work towards. Instead, they truthfully admit that it's troubling that any number of private corporations up and down the stack can boot people and information off the net, and then segue off to a self-reflective, but inconclusive closing.
No new ground is blazed by this post. After all, those hosting content that they know has fallen afoul of contemporary sensibilities are still concerned, the people troubled by private corporations' control of the net stack have another example to add to their list, and the people who are most disturbed by the nature of the content banned in this instance are pleased this situation played out the way it did.
Some will invoke the slippery slope argument, and perhaps rightfully so. I'd argue from a pragmatic standpoint that mainstream views shift over time, so it's natural that some topics will become taboo, some views will become to be seen obsolete and even abhorrent, as history has shown. And absent government regulation (in all relevant jurisdictions), corporations will try to act in their own self-interest, trying to balance reassuring their own customer-base with satisfying wider public value-sets, while seeking to shed customers who may cause them a disproportionate amount of cost: monetary, reputational, or otherwise. Government regulation protects certain classes of people through various mechanisms, like those with disabilities, or certain, but not all intrinsic characteristics that have been commonly used in the past to discriminate. We, as societies, then overlay subjective judicial systems to try to reason whether corporations' behavior towards certain individuals was legal or illegal.
It's wasted effort to try to gauge, as outsiders, whether Cloudflare will enact a transparent process if any process they enact operates solely on the honor system. If it's checked by the legal system, then that's a different story. We're too early for that story.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/, section 5 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972554 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3839568
Freedom of Speech - The right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint
This is insane
Free speech is not important because it is a pleasant experience to be able to speak your mind. It is important because it is the only hope we have of society making moral and intellectual progress. Every time a new idea comes along, it starts out unpopular and faces resistance from the establishment. If we decide what is right by arguing, unpopular but correct ideas can win. If we resort to blows, they are much less likely to.
The government must permit free speech because we cannot improve a system we cannot criticize. But this is not a sufficient condition to give new and radical ideas a chance. Citizens must believe in the principle, too. Just like all the anti-discrimination restrictions on government offer little protection to the marginalized when any business can do it, a guarantee that the government will not throw you in jail for your speech means little when no one will host your website, no one will print your book, no one will hire you, and campaigns of bullying and harassment are fair game.
It is easy to feel that might makes right when you are on the side of the majority, but looking back in history, it is not always obvious what is right. For example, we often imagine that the historical opposition to interracial marriage proceeded from base hatred, but this wasn't so. The science of the time showed clearly and repeatedly that the races had vastly differing intelligences and that intelligence was heritable. We know now that this research was flawed, but at the time, it was well established scientific opinion. The concern was that by mixing the races, we would drop the intelligence of humanity down to the mean, and deprive ourselves of great thinkers, and bring about the doom of humanity in an idiocracy. It was argued that those who supported interracial marriage were blinded by compassion and would cause the downfall of civilization.
This was a very popular, very intellectually credible view, held by good and responsible upstanding citizens who were willing to work hard and fight hard to protect civilization.
Sure, they were able to pass laws based on their views. That's right and proper. But should they have been allowed to suppress dissent? Should the scientific community have rejected research that would lead to the doom of human civilization? Should people be fired for supporting it? Demonstraters identified, shamed, and harrassed? Print shops refuse to print their literature?
The world is a weird place. Speech which we consider dangerous abnd abhorrent usually is. But sometimes? Sometimes it's right, either in part or in whole. Sometimes what you think is right, based on what you think you know, turns out to be wrong.
The reason it is critical to let Nazis speak, the reason it is critical to oppose arguments with arguments alone and never with any measure of force, is that this is the only system under which views which are true and right have a chance of winning.
Whatever you want the rule to be, however you want to treat the Nazis, remember that not that long ago, their ideas were the ones that were obviously popular and right, that all the well-informed and powerful and good people subscribed to.
The price of free speech is that there are always crazies. People starting cults of ignorance and hate, drawing the desperate and the damaged into them and threatening the very foundations of society. These ideas need to be fought, but it is crucial that they be fought WITH. WORDS. If we resort to collaborative blows, we will miss it when the crazies are right about something important.
I hope a civil lawsuit advances this conversation much faster than the Cloudflare CEO can. Yes, speech and expression has consequences. The reactionary service provider likely faces consequences too.
A court could easily side with the "abhorrent neo-nazis" if DDOSing raises their bills and Cloudflare's adhoc policy was the culprit, no matter what arbitration clause was written in their contract, and put the damages on Cloudflare.
yeah, no. Because among those great freedoms is the freedom of contract. Just as you can, in the absence of an agreed-upon fixed term, cancel your subscription to "Armchair Paralegal Monthly" any day you want, CF is free to fire any of their customers.
Prince spoke at Blackhat in Vegas... several years ago. The video is on Youtube. He not only said a terrorist is someones 'freedom fighter' but he pretty much excused child pornography. It wasn't as clear as the terrorist content but when you hear and see it, you'll want to curb stomp the midget.
He's a coward and weasel whose word means nothing. This site was distasteful but it wasn't illegal. There's thosuands upon thousands of site which are and he does nothing about it.
Now we have wrong think. You don't like the politics? Ok, but if you believe in free speech, it's what needs to be defended. So it's censorship by a guy who defends terorrists and seems to be ok with child abuse.
We 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.
^^^ The parent comment hits the ball out of the park.
The commentary on past posts on HN and elsewhere floors me. It seems one or two things are prevalent:
1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
2. Support for Cryptofascism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism) is rampant. Either folks don't know that they already support it, or they wittingly do and are too afraid to say it out in the open.
Immensely disturbing. As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum. They are not pluralists; they don't care about the rules of the game. They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
I don't have any sympathy for the Daily Stormer.
I just don't see where this is stopping. What else needs to be taken down? /pol/? Who about Breitbart? Or maybe some 2nd WW Nazi propaganda? Or something from the US civil war?
You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows. And then you have the nerve to call us who believes that limits of free speech should be set by courts and open process "nazis"?!
220 replies →
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed.
If they have the power to? Yeah, in a heartbeat. But they're not the only ones, or the most powerful ones, just the most ostentatiously intolerant.
> 1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech.
If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech, then I can be supremely confident that I have free speech, and that I can use it without being expelled, jailed, or killed. (Chastisement, well, as long as you mean the verbal kind, I'll just have to cope.) I sure as Hell don't defend their rights because I like them.
Have you never actually felt your ability to speak out meaningfully threatened by the society around you?
49 replies →
>Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
Replace like 3 words in your comment, and I could make it into a rant advocating persecution of Communists. Which has happened before in the US. But it's ok now because it's against your political enemies?
Second, no they are not. They are a tiny tiny percentage of the population. They have been losing power and numbers for decades. They get little representation in the mainstream and in the media. When they speak up with their beliefs or attend a protest unmasked, they often lose their jobs. They are not even remotely a serious threat. Just like communists during the Red Scare.
3 replies →
I recommending watching 'The People vs. Larry Flynt' for a (much-needed) lesson in what Freedom of Speech means in the United States. I am certain Larry Flynt had a hard time finding print houses willing to publish Hustler but the fact he was being arrested and prosecuted – by the government – for distributing Hustler is when/where the line was crossed.
I have doubts that SCOTUS will ever consider 'The Nazis vs. Cloudflare'.
I always wondered why we didn't see the term crypto-fascism come up more in the last few years. Perhaps because it is too honest and gives room for manoeuvre (although equally it is going to be hard to disprove). Hence people shouting 'Nazi' - which reminds me of kids calling the cops in the UK 'The Feds' - both of which sound idiotic. We had the terms we needed (Neo-Nazi and Crypto-Fascist) and they both meant something.
I would say we also need to introduce a counterpart. e.g. crypto-stalinist or crypto-communist. As it is an equally plausible accusation to make that some people with hidden beliefs on that side of the spectrum could take them to those dark places.
This has already has a name, and the eminent Karl Popper describes its precepts better than I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance.
I've got to agree. I was quite shocked by some of the comments on earlier threads about this topic.
For example, someone suggested that the German Nazi party was advocating mild socialist reforms very similar to modern social democrats, entirely ignoring "minor details" like that the SA actively beat up people on the streets and spread terror wherever they showed up, that the nazis attempted a Coup d'Etat, and that socialists and communists later went to prison and concentration camps for their political views. Not to speak of killing 5-6 million Jews and being responsible for the death of about 25 million soldiers and 55 million civilians in WW2...
The largest cognitive dissonance is with those people who suggest that jihadist propaganda should be interrupted but Nazi propaganda should be allowed to thrive unconditionally. That sounds very crazy to anyone who knows a little bit about history and can compare orders of magnitudes.
> As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum.
That's good. But the rule of law should apply over "not aiding" those people.
In the private sector, there have been a number of cases where companies (a) don't apply their ToS to people they agree with, and (b) over-apply their ToS to people they disagree with.
See Vidcon && Sargon for the most recent example.
i.e. When given the choice, the groups that value "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" and "due process" violate all of that...
2 replies →
An atmosphere of free speech that allows for satire and conversation are the best weapons against extremist ideology.
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
Except I never really seen a 'neonazi' saying "punch a communist" I never seen mass media encourage such behavior either.
Do you not realize that this is cyclic reinforcement of behavior? (Antifa says punch nazis, nazis punch back, antifa ups their game with HIV needles and guns, nazis up their game etc)
Both sides are disgusting, but the fact that the media covers up for the leftist violence makes me stand on the side of the so called "right wing extremists".
5 replies →
Get out of here with the crying wolf.
Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
No, it's the last gasps of a dying breed of racists, empowered by the Internet and that look a lot more popular than they are due to media focus. Nazis are lame, but you leave them alone and there's nothing to fuel the fire. You send out counterprotesters, get in fights with them, act like these people are on the verge of starting a civil war and in their minds you've proved them right (delusional though they may be), and they get energized and then you have a real problem.
Kicking nazis off the Internet is one thing, but yours (and the grandparent) is the language that causes the slippery slope arguments. That people can't even discuss the issue of free speech without being assumed to be nazi sympathizers or "cryptofascists" or whatever we want to label people we don't agree with isn't ok.
Someone having a debate about the right of nazis to use modern services is not by extension a nazi.
7 replies →
The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.
No matter how evil some group is (may they be pedophiles, satan worshippers, nazis, whatever...) silencing them and assaulting them is a crime and is against freedom of expession. The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
(Neo-)Nazis are sure dumb as hell but as long as they have peaceful protest and they don't harm anybody physically (unlike their counter-protesters) it doesn't matter. And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
If we were to ban nazis and far-right organizations because they are racist and apparently a "threat" then what about anarchists? They also are extremely violent and want to overthrow the government. (and in the US officially categorized as terrorist threat) What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) If we start going down this slippery slope will have shitloads of organizations and ideas to ban.
Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.
And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na...
PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.
24 replies →
> "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"
Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.
7 replies →
The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection.
You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
14 replies →
Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok?
And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line.
Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.
> radical leftist agenda
Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?
6 replies →
Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution.
If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.
There is always a line. Nearly everyone, every company, has a line.
Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.
> The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.
As a "radical leftist", it's certainly not on my agenda, and in fact I hold views that they'd likely denounce.
Would you say the same about a takedown of an ISIS website?
2 replies →
The first sentence is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
You know how I know you're actually a shill?
> And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph:
> What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.)
99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore.
You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin.
We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.
23 replies →
It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up.
This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world.
And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll".
We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter.
And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel.
People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that.
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
19 replies →
> 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.
This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
To be clear, this is a separate question from whether major internet infrastructure providers should be considered de facto public systems and fall under the 1st amendment. I don't think they should, so I think this falls within Cloudflare's rights (although I wish they had done otherwise). I'm just objecting to the characterization that the only people who could possibly object to Cloudflare here are neonazis or their sympathizers.
For what it's worth, I tried to find the Daily Stormer site to see what it is they actually advocate for, but I was unable to. I'm not sure if it's because of the domain name issues, Cloudflare, Google search or what, but it's a little disconcerting to me that ideas can be so easily expunged from the internet. So much for the "right to forget" controversy - I guess it is possible after all, if the companies were motivated to do so.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.)
So intimidation and threats of violence are ok? Are you really commending these people for their restraint in not using AK-47s at a demonstration?
One of the lessons from the first round of Nazis is that, by the time the threatening talk turns to actual large-scale violence, it's too late. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he made sure that he would be seen as an "all talk" kind of guy by those who could have shut him down.
9 replies →
> This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
Well, your theoretical beliefs are now put to a much more practical test, sympathizing with the Nazis in any way shape or form, even if it comes down to just sympathizing with their 'right to a platform' is an excellent way to see how strong ones beliefs really are.
If this is the first time you are in a situation where your strongly held principles are put to the test then I sympathize with you, the longer you live the more this will happen and the more likely you will end up in a situation where there is a conflict between a strongly held belief and a negative consequence for yourself.
Note that bringing weapons (loaded or not) to a march sends a message: we're an army, and we're armed. Not using those weapons should not get them points. One of them brought his car and did use it, the damage was as bad or even worse as if he had fired a rifle.
> The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
And they would do so again in a heartbeat if they knew they could get away with it.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
Neo Nazis only say disgusting things because they know they are still living in a society where they can not get away with doing more but make no mistake, the overthrowing of that very society is their goal and I'd love to see you arguing for 'free speech' in the society that they wish to create.
You'd be up against the wall faster than you can say 'jack shit'.
The internet archive? https://web.archive.org/web/*/daily%20stormer
And they'll gag be back up by tomorrow no doubt. "Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes." What restraint.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence.
So people should be allowed to say anything? So you can organize any imaginable crime, threaten people and promote false information as long as you don't do any physical harm?
I agree that just objecting Cloudflare's decision doesn't make you anything. One being a potential Nazi sympathizer just because they don't see any limits to where free speech ends can just be a very crazy conspiracy theory - nothing else.
2 replies →
If you are referring to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me", clearly you have other problems with sympathy and empathy.
Free speech does not protect dangerous speech.
24 replies →
One of the neo-nazi's ran over a bunch of people with their car in attempt to kill and injure them. Did you miss that video? These nazi's are trying to kill people, they deserve life long prison sentences, not an internet platform to spew hate and calls to violence.
> This is an extremely frightening statement to me.
It truly is to me as well. It's something you expect nazis to say.
Imagine if the comment was
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by israel and other jewish sympathizing groups."
It's a form of intimidation to silence groups one disagrees with. I can't believe his comment is the most upvoted on HN of all places.
All the pro-censorship people here are behaving no differently than the neo-nazis they claim to hate. Not only that, both groups share the hatred of free speech and the principles which kept the US from being a nazi germany.
Everyone here is forgetting that Nazi Germany happened because germans supported censorship. Censorship allowed a minority group like the nazis to take over the government and silence everyone else. If the germans had an appreciation for free speech back then nazi germany would have been impossible since most germans opposed hitler and the nazi party. Nazi germany happened because of censorship laws which allowed hitler to ban all political parties and all speech he disagreed with.
But nobody learns history or philosophy anymore it seems.
> Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
It seems like kids are taking gender studies instead of philosophy and that is frightening. All the arguments are based on emotion rather than reason.
3 replies →
I guess the idea coming out of this is that if you want to be forgotten on the Internet, commit wrongspeak. If you want your arrest record and record of your divorce to disappear from the Internet, add some wrongspeak in there - Google, Cloudflare, and others will pull it down in an instant.
"If a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
> IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
It's an interesting point, but at what point does the intolerance of intolerance become intolerance in it's own right?
If the compromise on things we stand for (Freedom of speech, due process, equality for all) where is the line where we cease to be the things we claim to stand for?
FWIW I'm all for charging Nazis with crimes and putting them in jail whenever they commit them. I would be happier if they weren't covered in the media at all. I'd be over the moon if they didn't exist. But if we allow mob rule (which negates the rule of law) to take over, then we risk claiming to stand for things that we do not.
Popper's Paradox illustrates the theoretical. I would argue as a counterpoint that we're successfully as a society not tolerant without limit because of the rule of law.
It's a circular argument that leads nowhere. Just recurse one more time to see it: the people shutting down StormFront, Milo Whatshisname, James Damore, Brendan Eich etc are paragons of intolerance. They scream, they shout, they blockade, they demand firings and other forms of retribution, they DDoS and sometimes they get violent. Meanwhile many in the media and at places like Google stand by and do nothing to stop them.
So by your own argument, should we start tossing Google executives in prison, for tolerating intolerance?
This makes me think of the game theory site linked in an HN comment the other day. I suppose 100% tolerant people would be the naive "always cooperate" players, and 100% intolerant people would be the "always cheat" players.
Interesting to think about how we should behave in this context... If I recall correctly, the ideal behavior would be the copy-cat?
This seems to validate the 'intolerant of intolerance' objective.
Nassim Taleb talks a bit about this in his draft book on Medium. There's a concept of group renormalization which is quite interesting in relation to hardliner absolutists and how the majority must inevitably accommodate their positions.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think. The idea that censorship solves the problem is pretty flawed; I assume Trump got elected in part by people who felt they couldn't speak their own thoughts out loud anymore. Just like with the Google memo, you create silent resentment instead of keeping a debate open (in as far as some of these people are capable of debate – that's another discussion). You can stick a Nazi label on pretty much anything you don't like, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to censor the other side to death and pretend their concerns don't exist, even if some of those concerns are inapprehensible or appalling.
In some European countries, you were (and well, still are) not allowed to say certain politically incorrect things out loud, which in some countries gave the far right a lot of votes and almost a majority. So people didn't grieve their concerns out loud, but the resentment came out amplified in votes and by other means... While an open debate would likely have created a better atmosphere and perhaps have presented some solutions.
In the long run, you are doing yourself a disservice not pulling everybody into the debate, including terrorists and people sliding into that direction.
I think censorship should be avoided, unless there is a direct and unambiguous call to violent action or a clear violation of other peoples' personal privacy (e.g. "doc'ing", releasing personal information that harms a person).
Cloudflare here admits that large companies are increasingly gatekeeps to the internet, especially in the case of controversial content. They have made a trade-off, and this is probably more about philosophical considerations or personal ideology, but I'd have put freedom of speech and neutrality before censorship of questionable content.
>> But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think.
Then go ask them. If there are people that you think probably hate you nearby, I am almost sure there are places in a city where you could go to talk to them.
I know, personally, there has never been a time where I couldn't call the right evangelical church and find out exactly why I am hated.
I've experienced my share of drunk homophobic comments in my direction that do occasionally get violent. I certainly now where to go to find out 'exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think,' I don't for a minute believe they need the internet, let alone cloudflare, to achieve this goal.
That's not why they took them down. You can argue for censoring threatening dangerous terrorist speech all you want but it is incorrect to suggest that is the stance cloudflare took. They censored because stormfront falsely claimed cloudflare sympathized with their cause and pissed of the CEO. Not because the speech itself presented a clear and present danger.
Foreign hosts are not really the right solution to freedom of speech on the internet. First of all it depends on the agreeability with the opinion rather than the right to express it. But moreover they can be DDoS'd just the same without a service like cloudflare. Cloudflare is a proxy not a host.
The core problem is that the Internet is a modern public space while its management has been handled by private entities. Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits. They don't have to do it as a private entity, but if DDoS becomes the norm for unpopular speech then the internet is no longer a public space, just a space for views that don't get DDoS'd.
> Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits
The better analogy is that Cloudflare is performing the function of private security instead of a police force.
The United State government doesn't require any private entities to provide armed security for political groups they dislike (in fact, the US government couldn't make such a mandate as the mandate itself would fall afoul of the first amendment).
If we believe that there must be a steward of this resource that should provide this kind of service in a first amendment protected manner, then we should advocate that the government offer DDoS protection services.
3 replies →
What is this "public space" statement based on? Only because I can go there? Like in a shop or restaurant? So if I set up a server as a private person, it's a "public space" too?
Looks like some heavy reality bending for a questionable cause to me.
10 replies →
Except it is different. The CEO has clearly stated that they won't take terrorist sites down, or any other kind of site, because it's not their job as a utility provider. [1] Its concerning because of its a violation of clearly established policy with an arbitrary decision by the CEO. If it were policy, it wouldn't be a big deal, my own company has anti-terrorism/hatred etc policies. We take this stuff down. It sets a bad precedent for them, they can't have it both ways.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/
Everyone who disagrees with you may not be a Nazi sympathizer
Not everyone who makes rational statements about this discussion is saying that other's disagreement is a sign of them being a Nazi sympathizer. Look through the comments and it's pretty clear what is being said by akujin.
Well, should we be taking down Alqueda websites? There seems to be an implicit assumption in this whole philosophy that if you prevent people from speaking their socially-backward beliefs (online, in person, in websites, in writing) then you'll somehow prevent negative behaviors.
I'm not convinced that's the case. I think progress requires a more nuanced approach than "punish the baddy," but an examination into the psychology and a discourse that shows you understand the frustrations that are being channeled into blind-rage.
The problem with this is that your definition applies to literal Nazis, and it's effectively become a fad to call people Nazis who aren't even remotely. The media being partly to blame with the Trump/Bannon/Brietbart 'fascist'/'white supremacist' hysteria.
An atmosphere of free speech that allows for satire and conversation are the best weapons against extremist ideology.
Your post is incredible; you are stating that advocates for free speech are Nazis and shit posters. You are stating that there are no good faith defenders of free speech.
Not all of us will argue to the contrary. On the other hand, expect no sympathy when the powers-that-be decide to knock your favorite site(s) off the grid because they haven't passed the (next fashionable) purity test. You've no leg to stand on.
We don't actually take down Al Qaeda websites in the US.
You make a good point, though I feel you undermine yourself somewhat by adding the "and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi" onto the end there.
> 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.
Are you serious? "And anyone who disagrees with me must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser."
Combined with the fact that the rest of your comment seems to be calling for Nazis to be silenced... I don't think I'm comfortable with where this is going.
"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."
What it comes down to is that the people arguing for "free speech" here feel safe in this world, with a growing neo-nazi presence.
They don't feel threatened--they're not a target, the system will protect them, maybe they even have guns or plans to live off the grid, whatever.
They can argue that neo-nazi speech is OK because it isn't an existential threat to them. They may even look at the terrorist car attack in Charlottesville and think "lone wolf, random unplanned attack," but what it comes down to is: they're going to be OK. Cops will protect them, their stuff, the system is on their side.
Those of us who are OK with Cloudflare shutting down the Nazis, we don't trust the system to keep us safe. Cops won't protect us, the system is not on our side. We see the actual threat of nazi violence and death coming our way, and the "free speech" people are doing nothing to stop it.
>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.
If you're not with me, then you're my enemy. Spoken like a true Sith Lord.
Al Qaeda websites are not taken down in the US because they can be used to radicalize people; they're taken down when they are used to radicalize people.
Do /pol/ actually sympathise with the Nazis or are they just trying and getting a rise out of people ?
It's a mixture of teenagers trying out shock humor, people trying to be ironic, people who don't identify as Nazis but certainly identify with many of their ideals and straight up Nazis. There's a lot of abyss-gazing that pushes people over the edge into extremism.
1 reply →
/pol/ is not one person and it is in no way an organized movement. Some obviously sympathizes, other are edgelords. /pol/ seems like one of the last places where you can actually have a conversation with political adversaries without risking getting banned / shadowbanned or downvoted to obvlivion for having violated some snowflake safespace.
This comment perfectly illustrates the need for free spreech absolutism.
First, it's just about denying speech to Nazis. Then, everyone who "argues to the contrary" is also a Nazi, and presumably doesn't deserve free speech either. And voila, when you want to deny speech to anyone in the future, you can shut down anyone defending them as well.
> 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.
Infiltrated? You talk like having a different opinion than you justifies social stigma and exclusion, do you really think that helps anyone?
I didn't realize that HN was full of 16 year old communists.
> I didn't realize that HN was full of 16 year old communists.
Was the irony on purpose?
3 replies →
Yup, I've been saying for a while that HN has a vocal majority of racists and sexists. They're now being exposed. Great. There should be a legal fund to sue the entire white supremacist and sexist assholes for damages, every time they speak.
> Nazis are no different.
Be careful of this. There are very few actual national socialists in the United States, and they certainly aren't all part of a single organisation like Al Qaeda.
Even among them the majority are probably against genocide since they all deny the holocaust.
What you say does however apply to The Daily Stormer. So I agree that they're a threat and should have been taken down years ago.
Holocaust denial is a pro-genocide ideology. To deny the holocaust of the past is part of denying violence in the present day. It also implies that Jews are liars - it's a very strong piece of anti-semitism.
4 replies →
"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."
Exactly. Thank you for this beautiful statement.
Dear writer of faul thoughts; have you considered that maybe one day this HN forum that you love so much will be closed due your writings here? Let's keep our forum clean from your Nazi sympathizing so that HN can continue as a part of the beautiful open web.
React driven should be confined to js frameworks not human interactions. This is a slippery slope but the ppl have already spoken. Sadly, we go forward in this half-cocked manner. It's hard to confront the underlying sources of this angst and that's our dilemma.
CloudFlare is a private business. Its their prerogative. The only thing the CEO did wrong here was explain himself. I'm sure those Nazis can figure out by themselves why they got tossed out.
I think we are reaching dangerous levels of censorship. We already live in a world where we have guidelines of how we are allowed to think and what we are allowed to say.
If a baker can be forced to bake for a gay couple, the web performance company should be forced to provide web performance for a nazi.
I'm obviously being a bit facetious when I say this, but are there really few things worse than nazis? 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. That's not to say that nazi affiliated groups never commit crime or kill people. But by the numbers they seem like a very small blip on the crime radar compared to groups like the Sinaloa, MS-13, ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord's Resistance Army.
I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past. But there are actual talks about further restricting freedom of speech in America being put forth by some groups because of the attention that's being given to white supremacists and nazis right now with seemingly little attention being given to identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups actually have in the modern context.
> I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past
Generic ideological tangents are a pox on HN to begin with, let alone when people are having flamewars about Nazis, and this is flamebait to the point of being a parody of flamebait. It has the effect of trolling whether you're intentionally trolling or not, and the effect is all we care about. Please don't post like this again.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032574 and marked it off-topic.
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 various communist regimes who together are in the tens of millions range IIRC.
Almost anyone that argues Hitler was agreat guy and nazism is great and should be ruling today are also arguing for continuing to kill people.
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 political maneuvering allowed the nazi party to become the force that it was such as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On top of this you ignore the history of antisemitic racism in early 20th century Europe that allowed the nazi party to gain enough popularity to attain traction as a political party.
Your point that anyone supporting the spread of nazism is supporting the actions of the nazi party that existed in Hitler's Germany is valid. However, in America this sort of speech is not as distinctly illegal as it is in much of (all of?) Europe and so from an American perspective a discussion needs to take place about how to approach the topic because for us blanketly outlawing nazi groups because of their beliefs would erode some part of the general freedom of speech that we operate with. Whether that erosion represents the loss of anything of value is debatable, but it would none the less represent a decrease in our overall speech protections. This is where my point about evaluating and qualifying the reach and influence that groups like this actually have becomes relevant, because a rational discussion would be dependent on this sort of information.
5 replies →
Communists killed multiple millions more. Yet Fidel Castro had world leaders at his funeral. The anti-Jewish progroms of the Soviet Union happened yet protesters who carry hammer and sickle flags aren’t treated with the same vile contempt as those who carry Nazi flags.
Che Guevara’s face is plastered across all manner of pop culture and products yet that face represents communism and for some reason, it’s culturally acceptable?
11 replies →
Scott Alexander has a good article relating to this issue and Trump[1].
[1]http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
"I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up."
I'm a big fan of SSC, but this thesis is not holding up very well
3 replies →
That was surpringly entertaining, and perhaps even more relevant today than when it was written 9 months ago.
dude you're being pedantic about how bad nazis are, is this really worth it
In this instance I think it is because the point I was making in pushing a somewhat pedantic argument is that while what happened in Charlottesville, and arguably catalyzed the current popularity of nazi discussion, is obviously a tragedy it's also a highly emotional topic precisely because it's a tragedy.
This was why I concluded with the argument that we should at the same time be focused on identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups. Because in the wake of an extremely upsetting event it's important to emphasize the need for intelligent debate and evaluation or else the discourse becomes volatile and incapable of rational decision making.
I find it weird that everyone jumps at Nazis when they do something bad, but when it's police being killed at BLM protests or people getting hit in the head with bike locks and shot at at Antifa protests, no one bats an eye. Why is it okay to leave out Black Nationalists and Communists/Anarchists and solely focus on Nazis? All these groups have blood on their hands.
Cloudflare happily mirrors ISIS forums. The double standards, all because one person was killed by what looked like an inexperienced driver scared shitless by antifa goons.
DailyStormer had this coming for a long time
Weird branding misstep tbh.
Is anyone just taking the time to simply ask, WTF is going on?
At the emotional frequency everyone is operating on, do you really think you'll win? No one will win because everyone will lose. Let me explain why.
I think it's time everyone admitted their biases and that their biases if not TAMED will only serve to antagonize their political opponents.
Before I go on, here are my biases...
I'm a black libertarian(with a strong affinity for classical liberalism) and a supporter of Trump's presidency so words like 'uncle tom' have been thrown at me. I wasn't always a libertarian. Initially a liberal, I didn't pay much attention to politics but when I begun to think about the role that politics has in my life (at zero option), I realized that I was naturally inclined towards conservatism i.e. fiscal responsibility & frugality, tighter immigration control, less government intervention, anti-eminent-domain, pro-personal freedom and liberty, anti-common-core, and then some. I'm huge fan of Peter Thiel and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - I read them a lot. I no longer feel the need to watch CNN because their ability to hide their skew towards liberalism is all but gone
You should note that there's no where that I mentioned violence as a chosen means to get my voice heard. I don't support it but I fear that's where the world is headed in order to resolve this political conflict that's in the ether right now.
What we have today is a left that is too far gone - who mostly don't realize it - and a right that's intentionally too far gone also.
Just as much as there is a far-right, you best believe that Trump is right and there is a far-left (it is telling that today on the web, you'll find two clones of Wikipedia all skewed towards either leftism or rightism because neither trust Wikipedia - see Conservapedia & RationalWiki).
As much as Trump has been touted by some as a symptom (I agree), I think that Obama's presidency was also a symptom. Putting his(Obama) race aside, we had an American president who once said that [sic] between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate...You should just decide what works.
This shows that the world had once again reached a point where systems like communism which were disproven - when America won the cold war, the soviet collapsed, the Berlin wall came down and Fukuyama wrote the words 'End of History' - could now be viewed in a relativistic manner. As though it didn't matter what the world had gone through historically. This was one of those fatal flaws because, if you forget history, you're undoubtedly bound to repeat it.
I also subscribe to some Burkean views which espouse that, change in a society should be introduced gradually. Gradual change while all the while testing to see if there's truth in your claims. This is not what we're used to in the tech scene; we prefer disruption but disruption comes at a cost. You cannot have a Bernie without a Trump. You cannot have an Alt-Right without an Antifa.
We must all tone down our views. We must all tame our desires for instant political gratification. Revolutionary change comes at a painful cost. Let's all embrace gradual change. If we don't, right or left, the Daily Stormer will win whether you like it or not because there will be a race war as per their slogan. When this happens, it will all turn into rubble and only a few will be left to pick up the pieces.
The questions we should be asking is what can I cede (politically) in exchange for you ceding something of equal magnitude until some balance is restored. We aren't headed in the right direction otherwise.
Totally agree. If we focus on our differences we'll end up divided.
Hate speech != free speech
alright sure, but can we get twitter to ban donald trump?
alright sure, but can we get twitter to ban donald trump?
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 businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN, nor are accounts that use the site primarily for ideological battle. That isn't what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for. Therefore we ban such accounts, and I've banned this one. Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032227 and marked it off-topic.
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
I have a problem with this, because in effect it is saying that if you want to be in business, you have to check your principles at the entrance.
I do run a business, and I do reserve the right to withhold service from people whose principles I find offensive. Just as as an employee, I would reserve the right to withdraw my service (resign) from an employer whose principles I disagreed with.
All this is very healthy for our society - it provides excellent feedback about your views, in both directions. The business owner losing business if they are overly intolerant, and the customer loses a valuable service if they are overly offensive. The system works pretty well - much better than any legal solution could.
I think that your point would be correct if businesses did not wield the enormous amount of power that they currently do. Who competes with Cloudfare right now? Who competes with AWS? There's already jokes about how if one of those services is down then the internet is down. While everyone might agree currently with getting rid of the Daily Stormer because they are assholes, the precedent and power is now set.
For the same reason is not ok for a public business to not make cakes for gay couples, we should not allow public businesses to pick and choose who is allowed to be part of the economy. If you want to argue against that, that is fine, but you have to accept it when people with the completely opposite set of morals start discriminating against _you_
edit: In case it wasn't clear, I am not a fan of Nazis, but I don't want to even set up the opportunity for businesses to have the power to just exclude me from normal day to day activity just because the CEO has decided he doesn't like whatever group I am in
36 replies →
> I have a problem with this, because in effect it is saying that if you want to be in business, you have to check your principles at the entrance.
Well, welcome to the club! Other noteable groups objecting to their principles being regulated by a government office include Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, CO, and Memories Pizza of Walker, IN. (For the moment, disregard the likes of Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, as their matters of principle-regulation are less directly relevant.)
I figure there are three-ish main options.
1. People are consistently required to suppress their principles, and do business with groups like the Daily Stormer.
2. People are consistently allowed to exercise their principles, and refuse service to gay weddings.
3. A disaster area of conflicting regulations both for and against the right of various groups to be served by various businesses, conforming to no consistent set of principles but rather to whatever is politically popular and expedient today, and hypocritical to the core.
My money's on 3.
(There's a theoretical possibility they'll actually nail down specific principles and not make it a total mess, but I don't think it's plausible.)
12 replies →
"Public service" is an important distinction here that you're missing. There's a big difference between opening a shop and running a telecommunications business. While it would be totally appropriate for you to set the tone and messaging of your shop and even discriminate among customers, I submit it would not be good for our society if telecom companies banned customers based on their legal speech. You wouldn't want that, because while it would be great if it only targeted racists and Nazis, what if it didn't? This is basic public communication infrastructure, just like the public streets that link up private shops.
The principle that applies is a basic Enlightenment one: everyone has the right to speak. You don't have to agree. You can not visit their shop. You can protest outside their shop. But you don't get to barricade their shop and cut its wires.
As long as they are not baking cakes they can turn down any customer that they want.
Gender, race, age, sexual orientation, etc. are “protected classes” that you can’t discriminate on. Being a Nazi is not a protected class. If you have a business, you can feel free to discriminate against Nazis. And you probably should.
If you operate on public infrastructure, like being granted public right of ways to lay fiber, I think you lose the right to discriminate. This feels good because Nazis are assholes but it sets a very dangerous precedent. This is why the ACLU has a long history of defending Nazis and their ilk. Because one day it will be you on the other side. We should all discriminate against Nazis by denouncing them, ignoring them, etc. Public infrastructure should not.
13 replies →
Protected classes in California include "political activities or affiliations".
Also, did the website actually self-identify as Nazi, or were they just called that by other people?
4 replies →
This isn't so clear cut though. Religion is usually included in that list, even though That is pertly ideological. Recently, gender and/or sexual orientation/identity has become arguably ideological too. Racial identity has some problematic examples (are jews white? what about light-skinned hispanics?)
1 reply →
It may be helpful for people to understand some of the underlying legislation that lays out protected classes. Of course, there is state and local legislation that can further refine the protections at a state/local level in addition to the national legislation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
Hmm... Nazis are typically white & male. Do I need to ask all my white male patrons if they're Nazis before I serve them?? /s
> 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.
The damage of libel is reputational damage. Getting the libelous claim retracted after the claim has been seen by the public doesn't undo or erase the damage the claim does. Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
If TDS did make such a claim publicly enough to cause reputational damage, there should be evidence we can all see.
Anyone know where that evidence is?
2 replies →
It doesn't even have to cause reputational damage yet I don't think. IANAL, but the contracts one signs with this sort of company tends to include things like not claiming endorsement of the content by the provider.
> Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim
Yes, that something is called suing for libel and proving it is libel in a court.
Simply claiming something is libel (which Prince doesn't even do in his blog post) doesn't make it libel.
> Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
Because of Cloudflare's action there are now 1000 times as many people, including myself, who are aware of TDS's claim who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it.
> 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.
Well... Yeah. I'm not sure why people think this is not how the internet works. It's a knit of private industry in most of the west and with the exception of a few (eroding) laws, private industries do all kinds of things.
The problem for DS is: there aren't many sites that WILL CDN them now that are as good as the alternatives that will surely not.
We can talk about strengthening guarantees of access to internet services and hosting, but that'd almost certainly be government mandated. Very few governments in a position to dictate this kind of policy to a global entity like the internet are terribly friendly to outright fascist, nazi policy.
So you can pick your poison: inconsistent rules from private entities or more consistent but more likely unfavorable and less mutable rules from government mandate (probably with the weight of government survey and law enforcement).
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
Even for deeply held religious beliefs, we've long recognized a difference in fairness between discriminating on the circumstances and nature of birth vs. the circumstances and nature of choices made.
I think CDNs are a problem in general (their existence speaks to the self-inflicted wounds of an ultimately lawless internet, bad actors contained within gradually destroying it from abuse). It's a bad thing if they start consistently policing content.
But I think it's much worse to vigorously justify murder of people exercising their rights to free speech. Ultimately, people opting out of the tit-for-tat game of free speech and engaging in spontaneous acts of violence are opting out of society as a whole, and will start finding themselves exiled and imprisoned formally. And it's difficult to see any other way to proceed.
> The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
I don't understand why this argument gets thrown about so often. Obviously not so much about neo-nazis in particular, but whenever a comparison is made to LGBT people. And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am not about to argue that sexual orientation is a choice.
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of all kinds, from all sorts of sources, there are people that seem to honestly believe the earth is flat. There is no way to make a reasoned decision to believe that. It must be something they are not in control of. It could be something they were born with, something in their experiences, or both, but it's clearly something they are not rationally deciding.
I'm not certain it can be said that the neo-nazis are definitely making a choice. It seems to be a pretty vehement emotional response, which would indicate it's not.
I don't mean to say we should tolerate neo-nazis in the sense that we just let them do their thing. But I do think we might be better off treating them as people that have some predisposition to being neo-nazis than as people that just decided to be one.
1 reply →
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
Work and business is an enormous part of human life: exempting businesses from Constitutional protections dramatically limit the scope of those protections. Should federal agents be able to raid a business without regard for the Fourth Amendment? Should Texas be able to take legal action against Amazon, Microsoft, etc. for speaking out against the anti-bathroom bill?
In America, you get to run a business with whatever political views you have, subject to very narrow restrictions of a handful of anti-discrimination statutes (which are, incidentally, all based on the much-maligned Commerce Clause).
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 religious minorities shouldn't be discriminated against. Make the same argument for skateboarders if you don't want to make it for Nazis. Do you have an similar argument for why Nazis shouldn't be fired, or why we shouldn't consider whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
Political affiliation is a protected class. I don't really know what the word "Nazi" means these days because people have used it to label everyone from far-right conservatives to Trump voters to people who self-identify as neo-Nazis. Unless a person registered with the NSDAP prior to 1945, technically they are not a Nazi.
24 replies →
> 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 whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
If someone's beliefs don't negatively affect their ability to do their job, why should they be fired for their beliefs? Should Democrats be fired? Should atheists? Are "Nazis" the only people capable of bias and discrimination?
Likewise, 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?
6 replies →
To be fair if being the single worst nazi site on the internet is the thing that gets him so angry he removes a site, thats an exceptionally high bar.
> It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
I don't think that Cloudflare (or any company) should be legally obligated to work with someone they don't like. (Besides, do you really want your wedding cake baked by someone who hates you?)
However, I think it's a moral and practical travesty that companies have the ability to effectively deplatform people from the modern internet. It's our responsibility as technologists to make sure that you cannot be silenced, whether you're a persecuted minority or someone who would persecute minorities. Having political gatekeepers to the internet is bad for everyone in the long run.
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. It's not normal.
Nobody is sympathizing with Nazis. And who is “we” and what don’t you think is normal? Essentially who elected you as a tech industry representative or the official pollster of the tech industry?
This my isn’t about Nazis. This is about speech and freedom, business policies, discrimination.
Change the word “Nazi” to “Communist” and I would be willing to bet you would not be making the same statements, despite communists being more murderous throughout the 20th century than the Nazis.
Is the ACLU a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. Use your brain and stop being distracted by the “Nazi” part of the discussion. It isn’t relevant.
1 reply →
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.
4 replies →
> 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.
I'd go a step further. If cloudflare were a branch of the government like the literal internet police, then it would be immaterial if an entity claimed they supported them. The response would be to simply ignore or refute the claim, not demand that they withdraw it lest they lose police protection.
Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police protecting the KKK's right to march, just like they protect the right of civil rights marchers to be free of denial-of-marchedness. The core issue here is that government-like functions on the internet are handled by an amalgamation of private entities, who are not bound to the same constitutional requirements.
I have the right to police protection, but that doesn't mean I get to have a cop patrolling my building 24/7. That's why businesses hire private security.
Likewise, DDoS is a crime and TDS has every right to present a criminal complaint. Cloudflare is just the Internet equivalent of private security.
1 reply →
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.
> 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
A -> B does not imply !B -> !A
Example: if you eat an Apple, saying "hey, that's one good-looking Apple!", it does not require you to heretofore eat every good-looking Apple you come across.
> A -> B does not imply !B -> !A
A -> B does imply !B -> !A. The error in reasoning here seems to be that attitude towards a website is assumed to be a binary "like/not like" variable, while in reality one can also neither like nor dislike something.
4 replies →
False equivalence. Gay people don't choose to be gay, and gay people aren't harming others. A business can refuse to serve skateboarders, shirtless people, and other people who are being a nuisance; and it can certainly refuse to serve people who bring violence wherever they go.
>Gay people don't choose to be gay
Out of interest, if tomorrow it was somehow proved beyond doubt that being gay was a choice, would this make discrimination OK?
1 reply →
If you're saying that Nazis choose to be Nazis, then could you choose to become a Nazi? I don't mean pretend to be one, or act like one, but actually believe their disgusting ideology. If you couldn't choose to do that, then presumably they didn't choose to either, and they couldn't choose to not believe their ideology. And maybe gay people could choose not to enter gay relationships, and maybe them having that ability still isn't a good reason for businesses to discriminate against them.
You seem to contradict the recent view in the LGBTQ. community that gender is a social construct and that you can choose which gender feels right for you!
Your implication that being gay has to do with biology and hence it has a hereditary component is at odds with what we are currently hearing from everywhere.
Which view is it the valid one?
To me these are exclusive so in the community should choose just one discourse.
3 replies →
Fuck off Nazi apologist
>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.
That was kind of the point. Non-discrimination, like free speech, is worthless if it only applies to things you approve of.
28 replies →
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?
16 replies →
Right, the distinction is that neo-Nazi's are bad -- hateful, intolerant, divisive, problematic or however you want to put it. I'm uncomfortable saying that it's okay to do these things to the bad guys, even when it's obvious, because in an alternate universe it might be obvious that gays marrying is hateful toward Christians and intolerant of their sacred rituals.
8 replies →
Just because someone does horrible shit in the name of the Nazi party does not mean the Nazi party itself is at fault.
We've banned this account for ideological trolling, religious flamewar (below), and personal attack (ditto).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035271 and marked it off-topic.
Speaking of banning, can you please tell me why are my submissions shadowbanned? Thank you.
Are you being serious? The Nazi party is based on doing horrible shit to minorities. That's the ideology, that's what the leadership believed and that's the reason why people joined them.
Are you being serious? Islam is based on doing horrible shit to infidels. That's the ideology, that's what the leadership believed and that's the reason why people were forced to join them.
You're a hypocrite.
4 replies →
> Did not go well.
And you're telling me this, why?
> We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi
Oh I see, that's why. Well, you should be careful to c) not confuse me with anyone else.
I understand how hard it is not to be overcome by annoyance right now, but regardless of wrong other people are, would you please not post things like this subthread here? It really just makes things worse.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032510 and marked it off-topic.
For those who downvote me: so you're actually believing I call "anyone I don't like" a Nazi? How fucking pathetic is that? And no I don't care about the votes, I just want you to stop and realize how incredibly dumb that is. This is a kindergarten level of discourse on a subject that ranks amongst the most important that even exist.
edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
That's where names like "Daily Stormer" and "Stormfront" come from. Educate yourself at least a tiny shred.
To be fair to the GP, I've, for example, seen/heard my friends and acquaintances call people Nazis for condemning vigilante violence (e.g. "punching Nazis"), the Berkeley riots, and Antifa protests.
I think the sentiment GP is trying to communicate is that many seem to throw the label out there without any further investigation as to whether its justified.
As for the downvotes, it might be because your comment came across very hostile.
Also, I agree that it's easy to see that the Daily Stormer is neo-Nazi type stuff.
1 reply →
Yeah, and you'll take it all down with your foolishness.
Flamewars like this get accounts penalized and banned on HN, regardless of how correct your underlying views may be. Plenty of other users are able to express similar views without stooping to personal attacks and other abuse. Please follow their example and don't do this again.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032400 and marked it off-topic.
People have hated for thousands of years, and we've made it this far. Have some optimism.
Mandating tolerance is about as likely to work as using a sieve to bail water out of a boat.
People have silenced dissidents for thousands of years too, why aren't you willing to be optimistic about that?
3 replies →
This isn't mere hate, and I'm not "mandating tolerance" either. I'm mandating you at least read people like Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner instead of you projecting your naivety on me.
> We might agree on a few points but trying to clarify that the murder wasn't a terrorist attack, that it was just "unplanned murder with a vehicle", makes me want to re-examine my opinions on the points where we agree.
Are we going to call every road rage incident (1200/year in the US) a terrorist attack now? Please.
I'd encourage you to evaluate your agreement with each of my points on an individual basis; each idea either stands or falls on its own.
Would you please stop? This subthread has gone way over the uncivil/unsubstantive line and you've been fuelling this in other places as well.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032418 and marked it off-topic.
I apologize. I wasn't aware I was being uncivil, nor was I attempting to troll or fuel an argument unproductively. I've signed out of my HN account.
This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse, you don't get to claim the moral highground on account of a bunch of people that would like to do the same to a fairly large number of people. Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
> This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse
I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism.
> Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
More of this will come regardless if these people get their way. Protests, tweet storms, and tearing down Confederate monuments will not dissuade hate. The only way to win is to drag the argument into the daylight where it can be fought.
18 replies →
He wasn't stuck in traffic or being chased by a tailgater or forced off the road.
He got into his car. He started it. He pointed it towards a group of pedestrians. He accelerated into them.
This is factually identical to attacks in Stockholm and elsewhere which have been called acts of terrorism.
> Are we going to call every road rage incident (1200/year in the US) a terrorist attack now?
No, just like the fact that we call some attacks with guns terrorism doesn't mean every incident in which a firearm is discharged is terrorism.
The weapon used isn't what makes it terrorism.
slippery slope
Would you please not post like this here? Especially on divisive topics. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032574 and marked it off-topic.
I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
Saying that banning certain things is a slippery slope, and using that excuse to never ban things, means that it's ok to allow truly horrendous things to happen, just because of fear of overreach.
When we say we have freedom of speech, but then in the next sentence remind people that you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded space, we recognize that restricting some speech can be a slippery slope, but we do so anyway because not doing so would be much worse.
Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not generally recognized as political speech. At what point is it acceptable to ban unpopular political speech, provided that speech is not a direct incitement to riot/violence?
7 replies →
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not in itself illegal. If a panic resulted, you could be held responsible for that panic and any injuries that resulted, but the speech itself is not, as many like to pretend, "an exception to freedom of speech." The Supreme Court corrected itself on this because it feared the very same slippery slope argument you're trying to dismiss.
> I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
I think it's something stronger than that: be sure there's a clear sharp line that you can draw that separates the things that you want from the things that you don't want. I think "clear and present danger" works as that kind of line. I'm not convinced there's that kind of line when doing something like this.
I don't think Nazis are anywhere near the slope.
Literally a fallacy. You just named a fallacy as an attempt at argument.
Slippery slope is not a fallacy. It's a real phenomenon in certain cases. It does, however, have to be proved relevant to any given question, which is GP's real offense.
2 replies →
I didn't know Daily Stormer existed until today.
Now, I have a little less respect for the companies who terminated their services, and a little more curiosity about Daily Stormer.
Congrats, you did nothing but give them free publicity while damaging your own reputation.
Interesting read. The consequences of this will be important.
I always thought the balkanization of the internet would occur because of world governments not because of tech leaders personal feelings or corporate influence.
I expect tech leaders to be dragged in front of the senate real soon.
It is very important to distinguish something like Facebook blocking an account / Medium taking down a blog from a domain registrar refusing to cooperate.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet, cutting off all communication.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
"Isolation only promotes extremism"
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" > "Isolation only promotes extremism"
Is it? Several wars have been fought over this particular ideology. Massive amounts of resources were expended with the sole goal of stamping it out. The goal then was to eradicate it, because this sort of ideology is the stuff that eats civilizations. We don't have an obligation to amplify it. There is no reasoning with it.
In the hypothetical there's a potential censorship issue which we can address when we get to it. But where's the line? The site called for and celebrated murder and terrorism. On a daily basis they spew actual neo-nazi propaganda. Why, exactly, should we let that be echoed unchecked? We're not even talking about a public entity/government stifling the nazi speech, but rather we're asking whether we should without thinking allowing them to use someone else's private resources to spread their message.
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.
> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.
Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
Sure, fire is good when you're dealing with them roaches, but kill them as you will, does nothing for the ideas, which sunlight is good for.
Yes, the US actually does have excellent lines on what's acceptable speech. In my not-professional judgement, it's speech that is the proximate cause of violence and incites it, and the daily stormer is outside of that. If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
1 reply →
> Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech.
You got that upside down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Sunlight in this case would be doing for Nazis what they themselves won't do because they're unable -- recognize them for who they are and act accordingly.
> In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought
This is not how any of this works.
We are NOT fighting the people here, we're fighting the ideas. I don't think we should ever forget this.
6 replies →
There is some monkey-business here. Anyone knows why a PR company hired "protesters" to the event in the first place?
(and why HN tries to hide this link when posted as submission?)
https://charlotte.craigslist.org/tfr/d/actors-and-photograph...
You know literally anyone can post a Craigslist ad, right?
I mean, https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/6256316306.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/chi/6216723045.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sea/6088811200.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/cle/6147468220.html all exist... and you think no right-winger ever went "let's spend a few minutes making a WordPress.com blog and a Craigslist post and cite that as evidence of paid protesters"?
(Also, Charlottesville VA isn't Charlotte NC...)
As much as apps paying people to stay in front of resturants:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/08/1...
Did something happen in Charlotte I didn't hear about?
I'm not sure - the ad is supposedly from last week. I just thought I ask if anyone new something about this. The PR company seem legit (in the sense it actually exist).
It raises a few questions if related to what happened though.
2 replies →
Boycott those hypocrites
So supporting ISIS is fine, but this is where he draws the line?
Adolf Hitler: ~9 million deaths
Joseph Stalin: Estimates range from 3 million - 60 million deaths.
Mao Zedong: Estimates range from 49 million - 78 million deaths.
All evil men. Why aren't the latter two nearly as reviled as Hitler or 'Nazis'?
You mean, why aren't they idolised as much? Or used as a racist symbol to rally around as much?
The reviling comes as a reaction to the idolisation, and the use of that figure as a racist symbol to rally around.
Otherwise, you revile them while you do history in high school, and then move on with your life.
That's a long ass philosophical article, but they buried the lede: they terminated them because the CEO woke up feeling like doing it.
Today isn't the day the internet dies, today is the day Cloudflare dies.
In return, CloudFlare's service provider immunity should be terminated. They've demonstrated that they do effectively control what happens with their networks and should not enjoy qualification for immunity.
What's the mechanism for this claim? Are you suggesting there was, previously, any uncertainty regarding Cloudflare's ability to (a) know which domains are hosted with them or (b) to look at those websites?
Because it seems as if they have always had the ability to "control what happens with their networks".
Same mechanism for any internet service provider - immunity is granted under the auspice that you are not exerting control over the flow of information as a supposedly neutral provider. The second you don't do that, you're not neutral and you're aiding and abetting. This is how IXL Memphis got a big bite in their butt in the late late 90s.
It seems pretty obvious that all this hand-wringing over a little known site called The Daily Stormer has raised its profile worldwide far beyond their wildest dreams. This is likely causing the opposite effect of what activists want.
If you honestly think that the rest of the world is only now hearing about the Daily Stormer, then you must have a very plush rock that you've been living under. I assure you that many, many others have not had that particular luxury.
I don't think that's fair. Some of us work very hard for a living or have kids. I just learned about the Daily Stormer, this weekend.
EDIT: on second thought, I wonder if this is what Daily Stormer wanted all along. They have raised their profile enormously now.
3 replies →
I can assure you many people had no idea what the Daily Stormer was before they were "kicked out" of the US internet. So no, not knowing about it doesn't mean living under a rock.
Unless I have a reason to seek out The Daily Stormer or similar sites, why/how would I know about them? Some of us just want to go about our lives without having to be stressed about all of this.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
It's easy to defend the speech of those which you agree or, at the very least, don't vehemently disagree with.
With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.
Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.
CloudFlare could've just sued DS out of existence if the claim they are making is true, for libel/slander/defamation of character. Instead, they lose out on free money, lose out on delivering a bigger black eye to ethnicists, and possibly lose their service provider immunity.
Should've resisted the urge to punch a Nazi and acted like a real American instead. We don't fight, we sue.
Also on sort of related note, this is why I disparage the "cake baking" and "wedding flowers" lawsuits... While I don't care what two adults do in the bedroom, I do care that a private business could be forced to render services. What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law? I think these issues are better left unturned; in this case, CloudFlare was able to take the right action and terminate their account without having to think about a lot of legal precedent.
Do you think I should have a sign on my business door that says "no blacks allowed," too? Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
> Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
Wait a minute... where did you see that? This is the first time I have heard this part of the story. I thought the owners simply said "no", and then got sued for several hundred thousand dollars.
1 reply →
No, of course not! I think the line is pretty clear there, a person can't choose to be black or white, but a marriage is an "opt in" event, two people are freely choosing to be married.
There have been a lot of these sorts of incidents; I didn't hear about the DOXing incident, that's quite sad, and of course, inexcusable, for any reason.
However, there was an incident [http://bit.ly/1MxG5S8] where a lady was good friends with a man and was a regular customer for years. She did not want her company's name associated with his wedding (sounds oddly similar to the OP), so she politely declined.
This all being said, I'm very curious how you reconcile the two situations, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint.
8 replies →
> What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law?
Wait, how exactly would the precedent set by lawsuits under state laws forbidding certain private discrimination in public accommodations enable federal establishment of religion?