Comment by r721
9 years ago
>“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.)
You sound pretty privileged to only be asking for all of us to get along when so many people are asking not to be shot or subjugated by systems built to work against them.
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> I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
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.
That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms.
Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
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It's not black and white, or even shades of gray. Different entities make different decisions about what they'll allow, along multiple dimensions.
"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
Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
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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.
You should fear this. And you should acknowledge that owners always have this power and the precedence here isn't going to be what enables them to wield it.
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First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
...and then everything was fine–because "slippery slope" isn't actually an argument.
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I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.
And ISIS would want them to do it to the US government and a bunch of other sites.
Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side.
What happens when they're not?
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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
That doesn't seem to be the case. It could be hypothetically (Cloudflare certainly has no interest in admitting that there's an upper bound to the DDOS they can mitigate and hackers have found it), but I think the "I remembered I'm a CEO in a country where there is not much restrictive policy on who a company chooses to do business with, and I think even my customers will agree 'Nazis suck and don't deserve a platform'" explanation holds here.
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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.
There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
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Then 1. Don't be a nazi 2. Don't have Google and GoDaddy boot you off their services already leaving you looking like you support nazis. But mainly just 1.
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> 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.
> The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing
The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
Tech companies have been banning and censoring since the start of the commercial Internet. This is not a precedent for anyone except Cloudflare itself.
no one should have that power, but fuck nazis
If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.
Boycott, divest and sanction Cloudflare!
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.
Well, when a president convicts someone to a prison sentence because they said the president is a nazi, I'm pretty sure most people would call that corruption (if he bypasses the courts and written laws).
I agree not all principles can be effectively codified into rules, and sometimes exceptions are needed, but I do think the exceptions need to be in line with the bigger principles and ethical standards themselves. However I do not think this is the case here. It seems like a clear case of content policing, because the CEO did not like what the Daily Stormer had to say about him or his company.
> Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon
Well... umm... I've always thought this was a very strange perversion of the separation of powers and the fundamentals of our legal/justice system...
How do you feel about bakeries refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings?
Pretty sure this is the same concept.
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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.
I feel like a lot of Supreme Court decisions are reverse engineered. I'm not sure that bell can be un-rung.
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> 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.
I'm no lawyer, but I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract (the legal term is "illusory promise" or "illusory contract").
Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
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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.
The CEO's explanation includes a section titled "freedom of speech < due process." But he defines "due process" as, roughly, predictable decision making. Legally speaking, due process involves a lot more than that.
The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light.
For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
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Due process is something the CloudFlare CEO mentioned believing in.
I didn't see how it was relevant either.
I think private companies serving public with ability to control visibility, especially those with majority marketshare should be subject to similar laws as anti-trust.
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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.
And the hate group would be defined as such by whom?
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Much like free speech due process concerns citizens and their government rather than people and any public organization.
No. The 1st amendment is specific to the government, but free speech is a much broader normative concept. It is about cordoning off the market place of ideas from reprisals in meatspace. A canonical defense is John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (available free online).
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He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline.
“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
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Even when one explicitly calls it out as something they believe in?
Do you honestly believe this is a good argument?
> So much for believing in "due process".
Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
Due process is not a synonym for "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" either.
> 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.
Damning? I find it humble and self-deprecating to call a lucid moment as this a "bad mood".
He also said this:
>“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
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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.
The site could, in theory, sue Cloudflare for failing to provide the services they paid for.
That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't).
And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
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Can you give me several reasons why a judge wouldn't merely grant summary judgement in favor of Daily Stormer? Or why their arguments would fail?
"Cloudflare unexpectedly revoked our traffic mitigating service in the middle of our highest costly traffic, our costs went up this much. Cloudflare caused this, these are the damages, and here are the punitive damages to deter this behavior in the future, the CEO even said this is not company policy."
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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.
That is not the primary issue being debated here.
The issue is: once all the big platforms are aggressively enforcing speech controls, supported by a wider shift in the culture that backs that, how likely is it that the government will take the opportunity to become a speech regulator as it pertains to the Internet just as they are with broadcast & radio today.
I say: it's guaranteed as an inevitable outcome, if the platforms & wider culture keep moving the direction things are going now.
The consequence: the next Trump will do horrific things with those new speech control powers. It's extremely obvious this is where we're heading. The fear people are using as an excuse to argue in favor of controlled speech today, is identical to the fear that was taken advantage of by the government to implement dozens of new abusive post 9/11 powers on the basis of a constantly terrified (eg the Bush terror color codes) citizenship.
The platforms are putting the levers into place, that a future government will use at their pleasure to silence opposition. We have a very, very aggressive, power hungry government; we have a very consolidated power base politically, with only two major parties. You can't see what's going to come out of that?
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Unless you bake cakes.
No. Cake maker must make cakes for gay wedding. duh.
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Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
> Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11.
The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate.
The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread.
The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech.
How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration.
The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
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