Comment by colechristensen
4 years ago
>Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities operating multiple decades behind the current landscape.
When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote. In that case you have a responsibility to choose wisely, though it is a hard problem. Hard enough that in many cases algorithmic suggestions need to be avoided.
When you are a specialist with few customers there's no problem with picking who you work with.
When you provide infrastructure for large numbers of organizations though, you must be very hesitant to moderate who you serve, for many reasons. For the most part, if what you're serving doesn't break laws in jurisdictions you respect, they should be left to operate as they will. There is a narrow band around that of "maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't". There are real problems with expanding this to moderate the topic of shouting for the day.
> When you have an algorithm that suggests things to people, you are a de facto publisher and whatever you do, you're choosing what to promote.
But CloudFlare doesn’t. That’s why they position themselves as a common carrier.
Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
Yes, I tried to separate things into three buckets, CloudFlare is in the third bucket.