Comment by tuna-piano

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre

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.

First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.

I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.

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

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.

> 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.

no one should have that power, but fuck nazis

If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.

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.