Comment by mpyne
4 years ago
> Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
CloudFlare acts against speech all the time. They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.
CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well, in many conditions that don't come anywhere approaching "organizing an international manhunt to intimidate a minority": https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#email-routing
They should stop talking about this like it's "pure speech" because it's not that at all, and even to the extent that it is, they already limit actual "pure speech" in many other scenarios not nearly as threatening as this.
OK, you're willfully missing the point because we're talking about the position relating to Cloudflare's security services, not hosting or other products that have have a more restrictive TOS.
If what you say is true, Cloudflare's security service would be freely made available to email spammers.
Is that the case?
They laid out their position rather clearly:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
2 replies →
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“They'll sell you a service to screen the speech of others and then pass it onto you or not, at their decision.”
The problem with your logic here is that you’re considering the voluntary filtering of messages by a party as being the same as stifling someone’s ability to say something. The filtered party can still say what they want but the intended recipient should always have the ability to ignore that if they so choose.
“CloudFlare's own terms of use for their Email Forwarding product is very clear that they will squelch your speech as well”
The difference between controlling what gets sent out by their email service is more a question of legal liability than free speech. They are not limiting anyone’s ability to give free speech within the confines of the law here.
To make a stronger argument maybe you need to create a stronger definition of free speech than what is defined by law to prove any violations on CF’s part.
In the case of KF, CF has only suspended them on what they could identify as undealt-with legal violations. This is fundamentally different from revoking services to silence unsavory takes.
I also imagine the doxxed information on the platform (KF) is removed after a time so attacking the whole platform at this point just seems like an effort to stifle a community with subjectively unpleasant ideologies.