Comment by chrissnell

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.