But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow.
They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
The opposite is true. CDA 230 makes it clear that companies can moderate their content without becoming responsible for it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t...
> I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different.
From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
I just know I'll remember that cloudflare could pull the pulg on my site if one of my users posts something they don't like. I don't think I can recommend their service to any of clients because of that.
On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit.
Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends.
There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort.
I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.
Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror.
They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed.
I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means.
Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing.
Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all.
The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not. Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it.
It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about.
Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right?
Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.
Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1].
Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse.
[0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347
[2] Not an expert, but it'd be nice if they allowed 30 to 90 day time period before termination, rather than doing it overnight?
Edit: Looks like CEO comment to the Guardian earlier today
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
That suffers from a selection effect. Since not many sites prioritize free speech and only allow things within some narrower region of the overton window to be discussed it follows that the more extreme positions get pushed to sites that allow more.
If, hypothetically, every site were tolerant then you wouldn't have that association.
Also note that even 8chan is still moderated, each sub-board has its own rules and there also are global rules. What it really enables is a diversity of rules, set by each sub-community. What people seem to want is for sub-communities not to be allowed to exist even though they're not illegal. And that seems pretty dangerous.
How do you determine what speech is "good" and what speech is "bad"? I feel like there is no absolute way to determine this. (I am being genuine in asking, I want to know what caused this change and how you see "free speech")
All speech is good in my opinion. Some actions are bad. 8chan is supporting these actions, they've crossed the line.
What you support is the selective suppression of ideas that you don't like. Don't call it moderation. Call it by its name. Censorship.
Cloudflare isn't 'moderating' 8chan. It's deplatforming it and enacting censorship.
And at the end of day that's fine, because that opinion is protected under free speech
What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you can’t
The point is that what 8chan is doing is egregious enough for them to step in and cease doing business with them. This isn't a slippery slope kind of thing.
What really happened: Cloudfare came under PR fire from the Washington Post, made a quick cost/benefit analysis and dropped 8Chan.
Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit.
Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it only depends on a fistful of people who will transmit their power to their biological offspring, no matter how fucked up they are.
The issue isn't whether or not it's possible for two nutjobs to converse in some way, obviously they can. It's whether or not there is a group of nutjobs all feeding on each others' nutjobbery to the point where someone gets radicalized into dangerous behavior.
I am actually quite surprised how complicit the media is in not reporting what goes on Reddit. It's the one place on the "mainstream" internet I run into where you can see calls for political assassinations in default subs, sub-reddits devoted to theft, ethno-nationalism, terrorism, and all sorts of content that makes 4chan seem tame in comparison.
Then there is the huge cross-polination of moderators with radical ideas, who just happen to moderate radical sub-reddits and some prominent default/mainstream sub-reddits.
If advertisers only paid attention. If journalists only cared.
"They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem."
These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn't been a net positive.
The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that no entity has a monopoly on truth and if you want to propagate your ideas, make your arguments persuasive and refute your opponents' arguments.
Free speech is ultimately a bet on human capacity for reason and goodness. The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers.
Sometimes, governments are the most powerful enemy of free speech while sometimes other entities can be.
I am not saying free speech is a good thing, but there is no "exclusive to government" limiting principle to free speech.
The often left unsaid basis of free speech is that each member of the audience is capable of rationality evaluating the argument, willing to invest in fact checking and is educated on background material. When these conditions are not satisfied, there will be members of audience who will make suboptimal choices based on misinformation with some probability. When scale of audience becomes large, even small probability can uproot sane society.
All these are very interesting questions and honestly I don't think anyone has answers.
So does free speech. Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. In which case, if 8chan has popularized itself as the platform to announce when and where to kill innocent people, and broadcast such message to its susceptible audience to follow, then to me it feels like indifference or dysfunction of a community to have it slip through under the umbrella of 'free speech'.
When you know you are ill, just take medication, not just set in vain to wait for your immune system to ultimately cure yourself.
OK, but what if the good ideas sink to the bottom and the bad ideas bubble to the top, and people die? Because someone found the psychological triggers and the technical means to turn around the expected functionality of the good idea?
We all get the nice, philosophical, humanistic idea of free speech. But in the moment, it doesn't work so well. When something doesn't work so well, we have to fix it. So, what is the fix, in your opinion?
'Speech I don't like' is the kind I can choose to argue with or roll my eyes and ignore. But if people are actively inciting murder, organizing it, and workshopping all aspects of murder technique and how to promote it effectively with the same gusto as any commercial product launch, it's foolish to ignore it.
I've always avoid getting involved in (semi-)political discussions but I'm very curious here:
It is fundamentally OK for customers to boycott vendors they do not like (right?), then is it wrong/illegal for the opposite? Are vendors disallow to pick and choose their customers?
We, netizen as a whole, are currently under go the sentiment to boycott Facebook and Google right now: for what we believe to be righteous. If Cloudflare believe it is righteous to boycott 8chan as their customer, are they in the wrong? Is Cloudflare as an organization not allow to have the freedom to pick their customer?
Comparing the two implicitly accepts the idea that one can choose to be gay (and can thus be changed with the right methods)
It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”.
They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.
I'd love to see companies actually do the right thing and not talk about it; just like how they don't talk about it when they do the wrong thing. That would be a step forward.
Not a good idea with today's outage society
Was this being intentionally ironic? If companies do the right thing and don't talk about it, then you won't see it. They could be doing it right now, and you'd have no way to know.
You can kick a customer out because they espouse certain views or whatever, and it's fine to call it discriminatory, but it's not censorship. This isn't usually a relevant distinction, but here it is because Cloudflare hasn't built "a system that is technically possible for someone to censor".
They could, and thank fuck they don't, because that would absolutely be the day I'm getting off Cloudflare.
"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."
> Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack.
Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.
I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
You don't have to imagine it. Literally all of these things happen. Examples:
- Utilities restricting or even cutting off crypto miners (eg [1])
- Your phone service has prohibited uses that will get your service disconnected (eg see Section 8, Use of the Service in [2]).
- Getting water cut off is more difficult but not impossible, I imagine. Some places will cut you off for not paying your bill. Many don't as it's an essential service. I imagine if you resold a residential water supply for commercial purposes, you may well get cut off.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n...
[2] https://legal.hughesnet.com/VoiceServiceAgreement/index.cfm
These are flawed comparisons, because water and electricity flow from the utility towards the consumer. If water worked like the internet, and the utility was just a "dumb pipe" that would mean you could pee in my drinking water - I would hope they would disconnect you. And you can be sure that if you mess with the power coming to your house they will disconnect you, too.
If we use the example of a distributed water supply, Cloudpipe would be the company that said:
> yeah sure someone shit in the drinking water coming from my pipes, but I'm not going to tell them to stop, nor tell you who did it so you can tell them yourself.
This actually happens in Europe, typically when authorities decide squatters should not be tolerated.
TBH, services like Cloudflare should be free to operate as they please. A publisher is simply not entitled to a CDN. If there is a demand for specific niches, a supply will eventually emerge, like it has for porn.
I think it's key that in this case cloudflare are actively between you and 8chan. The phone provider is the most reasonable comparison, were you able to switch provider. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if one phone company out of several options (which when you call the line occasionally puts their branding in your face) dropped you if you were running a line that read out terrorist manifestos. I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened.
> Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
This is, what, the second time cloudflare have done this? That's a far cry from any controversy.
() My personnal definition is a minimum of 4-6 participant in any market with at least 5%-10% share each (Exemple : France has some of the lowest mobile telephony fares in the world, because there are 4 "biggish" providers (one is over 50%), and they are often trying to merge "to regain pricing power", luckilly they have so far failed. 3 can somewhat manage a cartel, 4 seems to be much harder.).
> Imagine if real life utilities did this
TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me.
But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.
You don't expect 1000V from your electricity company. You don't expect arsenic from your water utility. You expect the fcc no-call list to be honored. Very few utilities are truly dumb pipes.
(Not trying to draw the obvious comparison between 8chan & arsenic. Just that I think when we're holding "dumb pipes" up as a holy grail, it'd be worth remembering that the holy grail is a myth.)
Sites like 8chan, Hacker news, etc are publishers, and I think it's reasonable if the service providers that disagree with their content don't want to do business with them.
A proper analogy (IMO), would be if a newspaper was printing hate speech and the company that prints the newspaper refused to do business with them. That would be perfectly acceptable, and has nothing to do with the government protected free speech. People aren't robots (or dumb pipes) after all, and if they don't want to enable/support what they see as a morally reprehensible enterprise with their work that is their right.
> any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related
Giving a platform for manifestos that are propagating violence and mass shootings should not be dismissed as "any controversy at all." It feels like you are trying to minimize what happened here.
Instead of making me imagine the entire premise of your argument, maybe reason for why Cloudflare's services should be regulated as a utility, and convince me that it is at all comparable to drinking water and electricity.
Personally, on a list representing my hierarchy of needs, CDNs and clean drinking water end up on the opposite far ends.
I don't understand this free speach absolutism. If we can't agree that encouraging people to commit killings should not be allowed then what the fuck
Also, the silencing of dissidents seems like the wrong move in general for all internet companies. The truth can tolerate being harassed, bashed and unliked. What it does not seem to do so well with is a regime that does not tolerate the free flow of ideas.
I'm okay with the very worst people posting on youtube and twitter. Those platforms can require an extra login to determine who is so interested in these videos. The removal of videos on the basis of dislike does not seem to be the solution. I'm not even certain that demonetizing them is the right answer, because even that can create a money trail for police and detectives to follow.
Cloudflare is U.S. corporation providing services to other people and companies. You have to be a member in order to use their services, so you are tied to their terms. This basically a "private" club you are joining
Cloudflare is not beholden to uphold the Constitution of the USA. They are beholden to their shareholders and the laws of the USA in order to operate as a Corporation.
Cloudflare can do what ever it wants. People and Companies do not have to use cloudflare. Boycott them, do not recommend them ever.
Now if the USA had some kind of non-profit, Nationwide Municipal ISP (fibre), for instance, the US Public Library system could be a good choice. They could offer some basic services and at the same time be the location that would protect speech/text (based on the Constitution). It's not perfect, but it's something to consider & you wouldn't be kicked off because somebody doesn't like what you are saying/producing.
Or there should be a law in the USA, stating that companies doing business in the USA cannot refuse service if they find the clients content to be offense and protected under the Constitution of the USA
Peace
Edit: and when you do fall into that relativist trap, the bad guys win because they don’t care about any of it. They don’t worry about slippery slopes, or unintended consequences. Overthinking and other various mental masturbation by good people let’s bad people win.
Online services are not utilities, it's not like an ISP without competition in their area was to refuse them service. There are plenty of alternatives to CloudFlare, they're just usually not as cheap or easy to use.
In the case of water supply, electricity, phone, internet service, etc... it's not just value-added, you can't function without those, there's no alternative.
Coming soon to a wrongthinker near you.
- Voltaire
No, no, no. Let's not put this in the box of "any controversy". This is not that.
This is people using an online forum to breed their hatred of a race of human being which led to more than one mass-shooting event and one of the providers who played a part in supporting them said enough was enough.
White supremacists/Nazis are bad. There isn't a subjective measurement of "badness" when it comes to white supremacy. It is bad. They have proven themselves to be bad. Society needs to stop being so tolerant of intolerance.
I would appreciate even more transparency details to be published. When talking about cloudflare following the rule of law - will you all be more specific about which countries and which locales?
There are rules in the UK I have read about that people wanted to bust through cloudflare to get to people.
Will the countries that have anti-gay laws be included in this rule of law thing? What about ones that have laws about sex info? How about religions?
How many people need to be up in arms about something before cloudflare ejects something? If we get enough of religion A to be angry about the lawless killing espoused in Religion B's texts - can we get all of the various religious sites ejected?
To read that this is all going on with cloudflare is terrible - but I am glad you all decided to share that you have also monitoring web site content and sending information to multiple law enforcement agencies as well.
I'm shocked, but not surprised at this point. As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. It's been rolling down that hill ever since it seems.
Cloudflare has really opened the floodgates to be used for additional censoring by many other groups and gov agencies at this point.
The internet needs more anti-ddos options aside from this has been company.
I have personally suffered months of agony from people using 4chan in the past, but I would not ask internet companies to shut them down. Around that time is when I started looking for a service like cloudflare. It was too easy to dox and ddos - cloudflare helped.
Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.
There will likely be an 18chan dot com and a 818chan dot com and a blackerhatter dot net and a... I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.
Now I definitely have some idea, what your sites are all about ;-)
They have done this several times in the past, but don’t talk about it publicly.
>As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will.
So what makes the nazis special to you? Cloudflare had banned many other sites prior to that.
You're defending the Daily Stormer, do I read that correctly?
> I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.
Cloudflare is not "the Internet". If Stormer or 8chan get kicked off of them, you can still access them if they find an upstream provider - which Stormer managed to do and 8chan likely will, too.
> Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.
I would seriously hope that this happens rather sooner than later.
What does "lawless by design" mean?
It's a euphemism for sites that are not censored and still allow free speech. Matthew Prince used to support freedom of speech but he's abandoned that concept a while back.
That is pretty obviously 'lawless by design'.
Criminalizing free speech limits our ability to think and arrive at the truth, and that can’t be good for anyone long term.
I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning.
If you come to believe that the time humanity's brain spends occupied with these pursuits leads to negative real world consequences then I don't think the argument you've presented is very compelling. Put another way, if I were someone's therapist and my patient confided in me that, the more time he spends thinking about shooting up his school, the more he feels like actually doing it - I might advise him to spend less time thinking about shooting up the school. If I had the power, I might forbid him from thinking about it at all.
Really, what, but the amusement of edgy people, does humanity gain from entertaining these dark conversations? Perhaps such conversations play a role in the detection or prevention of bad outcomes. For example, police detectives are sometimes taught to identify with the criminal to understand their behavior, and so maybe having access to dark thoughts would help in that regard.
To me, the question of moderation hinges on whether you think permitting speech will be, on net, positive or negative. I don't have data or solid evidence - but I do have intuitions.
But, neither does anyone have a right to an audience. And that’s what this is really about. Cloudflare is not depriving 8chan of their freedom of speech; they are just declining to assist 8chan in finding an audience.
I also disagree that speech is the highest form of thought in humans, but that is a sort of a side topic.
Thus, limiting a speech when it first comes out is never good. Any point of view should be discussed, debated, and its truthiness assessed. However, if something has been deemed untrue over and over, it would be pointless to keep bringing it up and trying to assert it as truth. At that point, it deserves to be censored out as to not interfere with the other ongoing legitimate pruning processes.
In the US, we are currently undergoing the Democratic primaries, and consequently are having many televised debates. Almost anyone in this country who has watched one would scoff at the idea that an unmoderated debate would arrive at anything approaching truth. As it is, I've heard many people criticize the moderators in previous debates for not being more heavy handed in what blatant mistruths they allow the candidates to say on stage. You can't arrive at the truth if one member of a dialogue is not interested in getting there.
All important philosophy and epistemology has occurred in countries with free speech restrictions.
Since ideas are just as viral and as deadly there is nothing inherently wrong with limiting the spread of some.
We can arrive at truth through dialogue, but dialog can also lead to propagation and affirmation of misinformation. One does not necessarily converge on truth.
Though, to entrust any government to control free speech to that end is an entire different point.
Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.
By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?
Yet nobody's (thankfully) taking up the opportunity in these other countries. Certainly not every week, or even every year.
It's not the media. It's not attention-seeking. It's not games (duh). Maybe it's a bit about mental health, but other countries also have problems with crazies and they don't just shoot up schools and nightclubs.
Can we stop beating around the bush?
The problem is there is a simmering domestic nationalistic terrorism threat to the country - and that is news.
The killer in TX directly referenced it, as did very many of the prior mass-murders of recent. That is noteworthy, and fundamentally different from people killed in a gas station robbery.
This rising domestic terrorism is fed and incited by nationalistic groups who have explicitly stated this as their plans and goals.
Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.
The murderers like the idea of their face on TV and their words read to the world. And content that shows chaos.
They don't like stories about the victims portrayed as people with lives, scenes of community comming together, and etc.
NPR did some stories about that research and shortly after you saw more stories about the victims lives.
As pointed out by an ever prescient Charlie Brooker almost ten fucking years ago. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4).
On a similar subject, The Samaritans publish very specific and thorough guidelines as to how to report and publish suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...) which are still ignored by many even if unknowingly.
Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature. Or at least things that provide utility in return for this risk (e.g. cars). Mass shootings don't really fit that mould.
"stop telling people things" strikes me as a strange response. We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely. Sometimes issues need to faced head on.
(and even if the national media didn't say a peep, 8Chan would be all over it, tracking the number of deaths for their high score board. It's a forum for radicalisation that's been ignored for a very long time)
News reports what happened. These days people seem to see news organizations as the enemy or at least the news organizations they don't like.
Although one thing I have noticed about news these days is it tends to voice personal opinion openly much more than years ago. Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings wouldn't spout their own opinion they'd tell you what happened, and that's it.
Show the bodies, name the attackers, send reports to the NRA, government officials don't take no for an answer hound them day and night for a reply. Make it uncomfortable for everyone so much so that everyone wants to prevent another event from occurring.
There is no way to hide what happened or who did it in this age of information. If information lacking people just make up their own story or create conspiracy theories to fill the void.
I can see that point. There is also something odd about what shootings get publicized and which don't. Some shooters, seem to be getting more media attention than others.
Is it the manifestos or maybe the number of victims? I remember the Congressional baseball shooting, but I think there was no manifesto so it wasn't talked about as much, even though it involved members of Congress. The Christchurch one was publicized and was very visible, and there was a manifesto. The youtube shooter was a strange case. Given what media likes to do, I would have expected that one to be front page news for a long time since it had a manifesto in her videos and it involved a major tech company. However, it disappeared from the news cycle relatively quickly.
Now, I would rather they all not be publicized as much. There needs to be legislative action about guns, what resources, especially mental health, are available, etc. But, it is probably better if that is handled after some time and not in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
The USA Government is doing nothing to even attempt to prevent the next one.
Correct me if I’m wrong, would definitely like to change that opinion.
Similarly, if a person or organization in the United States is silenced because they were deplatformed by a corporate oligarchy, it's ridiculous to argue "the US doesn't have any law which prevents that, so Free Speech has not been violated".
Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision.
Roger Ebert[1], Tristan Harris[2], and others argue that the way CNN (and others) covers these events incentivises further occurrences.
[1]: https://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/roger-ebert-on-how-the-pre...
[2]: I’m having trouble finding the video amongst the flood of news reports from the recent events.
So go look, it would not take you much (site down for now though, for obvious reasons). I did it back with the Christchurch terrorist attack and won't do it again it's so vile and that's a euphemism.
Most people who commit mass murders are not "crazy" - they don't have psychosis, they know what they're doing, they plan the attack.
They regularly praise previous mass murderers and goad others into doing the same.
The media also keeps saying 8chan, 8chan, 8chan over and over, when it is really just the one most popular board ("pol") that is being discussed. But there are hundreds of boards on the site for different topics, which are moderated separately and according to their own rules.
It seems like most of the outrageous incitement to violence people have posted on 8chan would be illegal under Brandenburg v. Ohio (speech is illegal if it will lead to imminent lawless action), given the mostly-valid assumption there will be readers of the post who are both radicalized and armed. This seems like the way to take down most of the violent content on 8chan if anyone would think about it for more than 5 seconds.
This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to moral panic and bad PR, not a solution to anything. Cloudflare would have been in a better position to actually change 8chan if they had kept them on and pressured them.
And yet, no one wants to police that. So... Cloudflare did it themselves.
I mean, look, I get the principled point you're making, but it's on really shaky ground. Either the conduct on that site was garbage that should be removed or it wasn't. And if it was... well, good riddance.
After the third (third!) mass murder advertised on the site, I think the time for principled and careful consideration has passed. Shut the garbage down, then we'll figure out if there's a better way to police this stuff going forward.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/nyregion/crown-heights-ri...
> “If that mural goes down, the restaurant gonna go down next,” read one comment on Ms. Price’s post [ on twitter ] , accompanied by flame emojis.
> turns out that about 10 days before the meeting, Apolinar Severino, the owner of the building housing the mural, had told Mr. Caldwell that he claimed full responsibility for attempting to paint over the image of Mr. Price. Mr. Severino had been advised by a real estate agent to whitewash the entire wall while trying to refinance his mortgage on the property, he said.
It turns out the owner of the building was responsible for painting over part of the graffiti and not the restaurant across the street.
I reported the tweet that called for burning the restaurant across the street down to Twitter, and Twitter did remove that tweet, but didn't ban the user.
There's a better article covering the story with links to the false rumors being spread on Twitter -- many with threats -- in the Brooklyn eagle https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/07/25/sean-price-mur...
Maybe I'll go to Twitter's hosting providers and Cloudflare to get all of twitter removed, or at least made a lot slower.
So, this was Cloudflare's position as of earlier today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
> "It would be the easiest thing in the world and it would feel incredibly good for us to kick 8chan off our network, but I think it would step away from the obligation that we have and cause that community to still exist and be more lawless over time."
> "For us the question is which is the worse evil? Is the worse evil that we kick the can down the road and don’t take responsibility? Or do we get on the phone with people like you and say we need to own up to the fact that the internet is home to many amazing things and many terrible things and we have an absolute moral obligation to deal with that."
So, the question for you and for Matthew Prince-as-of-a-few-hours-ago is, if Cloudflare was in fact in such a better position to actually change 8chan, why didn't they?
as such, even taking down the offending material, while possibly legal, will only escalate the situation, requiring ever more force to control. sure, you may successfully thwart this attempt, but what about the next one? rising stakes eventually lead to a police state undergirded by pervasive surveillance.
this is multi-rooted social problem that's certainly bigger than one company, especially a tech company. it's not even certain that online outlets like 8chan don't lessen real violence by allowing members to find consolation among like-minded people rather than stewing in their anger.
Speaking of 4chan if I was Hiro right now I would be batting down the hatches and moving most of the moderation force to the problem boards to snipe any incoherent manifestos until this all blows over.
I call bullshit.
What plan do you have in mind for _Cloudflare_ to create a culture change on _8chan_?
How does this fit into Cloudflare's strategy and competencies as a network provider?
Are you suggesting they have some obligation to provide service and to try and shape the community, or just that they are compelled to provide a commercial service to people who encourage massacres?
You haven't thought through your own suggestion.
I’m not so sure. We “ban” drug markets and terrorist groups by denying them access to infrastructure all the time. Private businesses get to decide which businesses they provide services to. Freedom of assembly doesn’t mean you get to live in a trash strewn public square, nor on private property that is leeching toxic waste into the surroundings.
I'd encourage anyone who thinks it's plausible that /pol/ is "moderated" and "lawful" to go read that board for a few minutes. Perhaps then they can comment here on whether there's a problem with the moderation, or the policing, of the board.
The community will find a way around this, there's no doubt. But now they're more radical and more threatened than they used to be. The harder it is to get to the community the more insulated and radical it becomes as fewer outside voices come in. Only the most dedicated continue on, and those are the people you want to deradicalize more than anyone.
These boards have been open to everyone, if others wanted to talk to these people and provide counter arguments they're free to do so. It's the only thing that's going to go a long way in dissolving toxicity in these communities.
And no, /pol/ is not the only hive of extremism on 8ch, although it's the best known and although there are many other boards.
That's not how it works anywhere.
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS/CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.
Surely this has no downsides at all. For example, you can rest easy because YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line.
... how is it people in tech can’t see past their own noses on things like this?
Really, we should all just reference Popper's Paradox of Tolerance[1].
A just, tolerant society should tolerate anything other than intolerance. Yes, this isn't as simple as "freedom of speech", but it makes a lot of sense.
Popper's words argue this as well as anyone:
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
At some level does a person not have the right to say, "I don't like you and won't take your money?"
Sure, the US and others have protected classes that limit the reasons you can refuse to do business with someone but those are more to do with people in those classes being unfairly burdened and facing difficulty living tier day-to-day lives.
"[...] the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-t...
If it does something illegal, the law can close it down.
If it doesn't, it's should be absolutely no concern of Cloudlfare to police it.
That's more dystopian than a wacko shooter posting their message there. They could have posted it anywhere, or just posted it on their profile, send it to the news, etc.
Scam (lots of phishing and fake webshops), spam, piracy, illegal pornography, it's all chilling on CF's network en masse. When they get notified about this, do you think they terminate that client? No, they will just come up with some dogmatic story [1] and ignore every call to action/cooperation.
"we are rebuilding the Internet, and we don't believe that we or anyone else should have the right to tell people what content they can and cannot publish online."
Yes, ladies and gentleman, he said it. In 2012 Mr Prince was trying to build a proprietary internet. These days he would never say that again. I mean, it's just laughable that you feel zero responsibility over your clients. Hence they publicly deny this now of course.
CloudFlare: it would be great if you start actively participating in abuse prevention, instead of behaving like an offshore/bulletproof provider behind red 'n blue curtains.
CF forwards DMCA complaints to the website host so they can deal with the illegal content. CF already uses Safe browsing (or perhaps another system) to flag domains[0] that might be phishing/malware related. Illegal porn is something the sites themselves have to remove since (as said above) removing the site from CF only saves face for CF and doesn't change the content being on the service[1].
0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/your-domain-has-been-susp...
1: to add, CF doesn't allow video files to be directly proxied on their network (when the main point of your site/service is serving these video files), you either need to use CF stream or have your video files on a separate non-proxied subdomain. If something illegal is stored on CF stream or Workers KV, they can take it down via the abuse form since they're the host of that content.
Quite the strong and matter-of-fact opinion, stated as accepted fact, about a direct cause here.
What should normally happen if you come across some criminal or reprensible content, is that it's possible to figure out who owns the IP space,and if it's not already a criminal organisation decide to aid the ISP in running a reputable business and send them an abuse notice. This has the effect that bad actors need to move to bad networks, which you can quarantine at your own network boundary - I get to make a decision as private citizen on what is allowed on my network.
That is a process that works.
Cloudflare obfuscates the real IP space, which means that the best outcome I can achieve from them is that they will forward my abuse complaint to possibly the mob, which is not a move I am willing to make.
In this way they are not just a DDOS protection service, they are business protection for criminals. And because of their size and because they allow them to hide behind their IPs it makes it impossible for me to make a private decision about what to not allow on my networks.
If they are so happy about hosting the vomit that the internet has to offer, why not assign an IP block to the easily identifiable garbage that exists.
(Their service terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ allow them to do this, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.)
There is also an effect similar to martyrdom where whenever some subgroup of society is mistreated they gain in power. Many see being cut-off as over-the-top and thus a mistreatment, irrespective of the fact that the group has a clearly evil ideology. There is a risk this action will embolden their cause, as a natural instinct to protect the mistreated and come to the defense of the underdog kicks in. Read some of the other comments and you'll see what I mean. This comment itself is admittedly partially motivated by my instinct to come to the defense of the mistreated (granted the obviousness that the murdered and their families are clearly the most mistreated).
Like I said, this is complicated. The simple ideological answers are simply not good enough.
So the hard question is this: how do you prevent the spread of their ideology without excising them from (online) society? I believe it is possible, but it is going to take a more nuanced approach going forward. We could start by not labelling people as racists or white supremacists. We should reserve these labels for actions, words and ideologies, not people. Attack the ideas, not the people. Deplatform (censor) the posts (if you control the platform), don't ban the accounts. Throttle accounts of repeat abusers as necessary. And always be willing to talk.
BTW I always feel queasy posting things like this to HN because I know some people will utterly reject me and downvote me, but I feel this point is just too important.
[1] Katherine Newman, https://www.livescience.com/21787-predicting-mass-shootings.... [2] James Knoll, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201405...
Also, they stated that they were "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network", which makes me wonder what kind of monitoring we're talking about here, and whether and where else they share traffic that they're proxying.
Regardless of what you think about 8chan (I'm not familiar with the site but there seems to be consensus that it's a cesspool), these points are interesting to note.
You can learn from a baby. Silencing people leads nowhere.
Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/technology/8chan-cloudfla...
And in its appendix it lists QAnon as one such fringe political conspiracy theories.
https://www.scribd.com/document/420379775/FBI-Conspiracy-The...
(page 8)
So what's Twitter going to do when people tweet or retweet anti-government, identity based, fringe conspiracy theories or theorists, given the FBI considers at the very least that such things are very likely to motivate domestic terrorism? And are only heads of state going to be allowed to do that?
Q and movement followers, having moved to 8chan because 4chan was compromised, surely will consider the FBI memo, Cloudfare's decision, just move evidence of "deep state" fighting back. In the outlook section of the FBI report, it expects these conspiracy theories to spread, and foster more violence, leading up to the 2020 election.
There are other groups listed in the FBI report. 8chan isn't one of them. But the FBI field office in Nevada issued a search warrant for 8chan in Reno regarding the Poway Synagogue shooting.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p...
I believe Cloudflare's action is necessary to try to stem the tide here. Sometimes ... just sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
Get a legal definition of well regulated militia, get it to not map to the national guard or some homebred terrorist group via some ritual like the pledge or whatever, and police the crap out of the gun sales to groups outside this definition.
By the Constitution's own legitimacy it's the government's choice to forego this control under those terms, and it musts be the government's choice to tighten this control up.
Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? For this exact reason: Definitions were established, and strapping guns to drones was deemed a dick move.
Same here, define legitimate civillian militias and take all the guns off the hands of every other random guy.
Couple years after that maybe we could start having the discussion of why you need armed death squads on your home turf but hey at least the ease of access for the general public is out, and with it a large part of the reason why the US os the only place where this happens day in and day out.
It's not federally illegal to attach firearms to drones, so long as you do so within FAA guidelines for flying self-built vehicles low to the ground on your own property.
What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that.
I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
This is a horrifying and immoral position to take. Governments are the entities that have no legitimacy to restrict speech or "make determinations on what content is good and bad". Man requires free speech because the freedom to think is essential to man's existence. The role of government is to protect man's rights so that he may think, evaluate ideas, and live a productive life.
Disappointingly, the last time an incident like this happened, an FBI agent accidentally revealed himself to be actively fuelling the fire by participating in a smear campaign against Russia (https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/). Looks like law enforcement are watching, but are just making problems worse? Baffling.
There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.
But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.
That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"
In this case, they said "No."
Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.
But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.
Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.
You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
Like how some companies won't service porn-related ventures.
It's fine if a company doesn't want to make their money doing this, but it shouldn't just be, "Oh something bad happened... time to react..." They should take philosophic stances, "I don't want to help with un-moderated user content. Show me your moderation policy and plan, and then we can do business..."
What bugs me is that the Cloudflare CEO flip-flopped on this like 8 times. They have no coherent policy, other than, "Don't give us bad press before our IPO." Shitty.
But I guess that's not what you want.
On one hand, this seems to be a praiseworthy deed, and they took all the credit. On the other hand, it shows corporations are wielding too much power, which probably they can wielding it to other factions they don't like.
Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.
If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
And while I believe you wouldn't do that randomly to other customers, I won't recommend your sevice again. It is just not your decision to make and pretty much the exact opposite that I require from a service like yours.
Do we actually KNOW that banning "hate speech" results in less hateful actions in the short and long term as well?
I'll wait.
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattles-bitmitigate-now-prote...
This would create an incentive for companies to be better.
If you really want to take down 8chan, why not reach out to their colo provider? https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200...
People inevitably trot out counter examples that they believe will “own” my “libtard” views like the whole bakery thing. Should the bakery have had to make the cake for the gay customers? Nope. Their a business and can refuse service for whatever reason. Turns out there were some legal things involved. Guess what. Consequences.
We have a tenuous and often brittle social contract. The social contract decides what is and what isn’t ok. And once you break the contract there are often consequences. That’s not censorship. That’s existing in a society. Companies and people that don’t like those consequences are free to exit this society and begin their own at any time. But guess what. There’s consequences to that, too. The only real question is if they can be adults about it and accept those consequences. And in most cases they can’t.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-s...
Anyway, when it comes to online communities, almost no one does it right, and so not only is the consensus wrong, but so are all known examples.
Trying to understand this from a ethics and philosophical perspective. Appreciate your comments.
The other difficult problem is that people think that their country is an exception to all other countries and history with regards to censorship and everything else.
One other issue: corporations that have as much or more centralized power as governments. In line with the rest of my comment, one reason this is problematic is because it is much easier for governments to assert control over individual companies. And those policies (sometimes good or sometimes very bad) affect masses of people.
It really seems to me that we are moving towards a more homogeneous global political system that honestly appears to be modeled after the Chinese one and will probably be controlled from there.
A couple may have posted on 8chan.
Guess which platform is being criticized for allowing hate?
By staying idle the conversation would've moved onto gun control, but now they're going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.
Probably a good idea, if only to send the message that there is a limit to how much garbage you can allow people to dump on your site before the neighbors decide to do whatever it takes stop the terrible smell.
> The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent.
That's great! Most tech companies seem to prefer the Rule of Men where they try to fix problems behind the scenes with obscured methods and inconsistent (and often arbitrary) policies.
> Cloudflare is not a government.
While technically true, as your control of infrastructure approaches monopoly, you tend to acquire more and more government-like traits. At a functional level, "is a government" is not a Boolean value.
> that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad
That's true, but your success in the market ("a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network") gives you a lot of power to make that kind of determination. If that power isn't managed carefully (e.g. with a consistent and transparent Rule of Law), it is easy to accidentally use that power in dangerous or irresponsible ways. The fact that you're even talking about a Rule of Law means you're already acting far more responsibly than most big tech companies.
> We will ... engage with lawmakers ... as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable ... through [their] due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.
(I'm interpreting "[their] due process of law" as referring to the lawmaker's process, not something implemented internal to Cloudflare. If this is incorrect, ignore this section)
Engaging with lawmakers (and other relevant organizations) is incredibly important. I would expect any company that wants to act lawfully to comply with legislated regulations. It is also important to realize that governments are often slow. You cannot simply abdicate responsibility to the government when you de facto have significant power over and involvement with a problem.
> We ... have an obligation to help propose solutions
Yes, proposing solutions is part of that obligation. If you really are concerned with creating Rule of Law, then you also have to act in ways consistent with that goal. If you're going beyond the limits of an uninvolved/neutral "common carrier" and terminating a customer for reasons unrelated to the technical services you provide, you need to make sure you have and follow your own "due process", while the lawmaker's solution is still pending and/or incomplete.
> What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward.
I agree that this is very hard. It's also an obligation you accepted when you decided to take responsibility (and profits) for a large piece of infrastructure that many people now rely on. This is where transparency can help a lot; it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness for a mistake if you have a reputation of openly explaining your reasoning.
Can you tell us when @Cloudflare will be holding its next "How to Protect Nazi Extremists" workshop? You guys seem to be the experts. 10:25 AM - 14 Aug 2017
The recent string of violence has forced their hand here.
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1124091916520497153
https://twitter.com/klarajk/status/1122625367490146304
https://twitter.com/Riverseeker/status/1122612031234945024
https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1123592717341200384
https://twitter.com/NathanBLawrence/status/10562868097418199....
https://twitter.com/NJDemocrat/status/897147112273608705
We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States' First Amendment. That is incorrect. First, we are a private company and not bound by the First Amendment. Second, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our revenue, comes from outside the United States where the First Amendment and similarly libertarian freedom of speech protections do not apply. The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.
Not a great plan.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. They are suggesting that it's the fact that 8chan is unmoderated that is a problem, and they'll similarly refuse service to any unmoderated discussion platform?
I actually totally approve of them refusing 8chan as a customer.
I don't think this is really the reason, or a good reason. Articulating the real/good reason is hard. I'm not sure I can do it either.
But when they say "The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent" -- that obligation is actually incumbent upon THEM, cloudflare. What is their own transparent and consistent policy that led to this? The implication is that... any unmoderated discussion forum would be banned, but they don't go out and say it, which isn't quite "transparent".
And I don't think they really mean that (so it's not "consistent" either). An unmoderated discussion forum that wasn't being used to egg on mass murder, they probably wouldn't ban. I think the possible "consistent" approach here would be simply admitting that they dont' want as customers sites whose owners seem to have no problem with them being used to egg on mass murder.
As they said in another statement quoted by media, a site that has "repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate." This is more honest, and really no less vague, than dancing around talking about "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (I really don't know what that means; I'm not sure you can really "actively thwart the rule of law" without being in the government). And I personally agree it is a fine reason to refuse someone as a customer, that they've repeatedly proven themselves to be a cesspool of hate.
They are correct that the first ammendment in fact gives them the right to refuse as customers entities whose actions they find abhorent and whose business they don't wish to aid. The principle of "transparent and consistent" requires them to try harder than they are to explain what their standards are in an honest way. (It can be a process, I'm not totally sure what they should be either, even though I totally support refusing 8chan as a customer).
I think calling an unmoderated discussion forum "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (in all caps nonetheless!), then calling for government discipline of such, is something you gotta back up with more reasoning than they did here, and is not in fact necessary for them to justify denying service to 8chan. They're trying to get out of actually explaining their reasoning/motivation (what is required for THEM to be "consistent and transparent") by hand-waving about all-capitals Rule of Law.
Don't host fascists. Don't do business with nazis.
For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
When I was a child I used to think the ideals of freedom of expression were ingrained in this society. But apparently all it takes is the MSM running a few hitpieces and the 'intellectuals' are all 'lol 1st Amendment technically applying to government means it is not only permitted but great that all censorship is now offloaded to megacorporate oligarchies! fuck free speech!'
To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy.
Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.
I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don't spread - because if those things spread then they leak into the real world as death. 8chan has been shut down not only because it hosted hate communities, but because it refused to apply any moderation there.
However, the problem is not 8chan alone. It's good to shut down websites where hate speech proliferates without constraints, but a couple of days or weeks later new *chan websites are likely to pop up to replace them, or maybe they'd make a Telegram group. The root problem is Americans. And I'm honestly not sure of how to fix the problem with a whole population that has become so irrational, polarized, ignorant and sensitive to hate speech.
The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual free expression.
Here, if you post something that someone doesn't like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion.
Case in point, I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I'm pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I'm sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes.
The /pol/ board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists.
This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Anti-Defamation League
...
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Wikipedia:
"The ADL has faced criticism for its support for Israel, charges of defamation, spying allegations, its former stance on the Armenian Genocide, and possible conflation of opposition to Israel with antisemitism."
Thanks a lot Cloudflare. First you are complaining about hate and online discussion and then you share shit like this. It seems there is nothing but lies ja propaganda these days. Either far-right or far-left or some other far-shit.
The last thing I want is a large, un-elected, tech company moralizing about content hosted on it. Frankly, they are not good at it. If what 8-chan is doing is illegal this can be addressed through the legal system. Also, as needed, laws to address this can go through democratic processes that have checks and balances instead of this. Yes it may be slower, but due process is important.
At some point left un-checked they can and will target other content they disagree with, IE: labeling other fairly main stream right wing stuff as "hate speech". That is ultimately bad for everybody.
-no one
I legitimately get angrier reading this shitty site more than just about anything else.
I wish whatever dopamine hit I got from reading this place would go away.
This ain't the internet I was promised when I was 11.
I'm old enough to remember all of the court cases that involved distressed parents blaming hard rock/metal bands for influencing their children's suicides.
These sorts of incidents are starting to remind me of the religious right's censorship crusade in the 90s...this time it's coming from the left.
Banning these sites will only push them underground. They aren't going away. The end result will be absolutely no way of knowing when and where a shooting may occur.
Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.
And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.
Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.
The first comment to the guy on 8ch who posted the manifesto was "hello FBI". Not a 8ch user but they don't appear to support shootings. I'm more familiar with 4chan shenanigans and they definitely don't support it, with any threat of real-life violence being met with something along the lines of "[alphabet agency] fuck off". Not saying they don't have crazies but every "social media" (and 8ch is social media, just an old fashioned version of it) site has crazies.
"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]
As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k...
Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
