Cloudflare CEO on Terminating Service to Neo-Nazi Site | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare CEO on Terminating Service to Neo-Nazi Site

gizmodo.com

27 pointsrdl10 comments

I think we need to be mindful that anything used against a bad person might eventually be used against a good person. It is why due process exists. This time the outcome was positive, but what precedent does this set?

Due process is a concept of law. It's not applicable to the relationships between private individuals. If a person wants to break up with someone they are dating, do they owe the the other person due process?

It sets the precedent that we collectively value having a society where we can expect standards of behavior to exceed the bare minimum that will keep you out of jail. Are you actually confusing rights and values?

I respect him a lot for doing this but also realizing the precedent it sets. I’m not going to defend neo-nazis but I will defend their rights to speak their minds and think how they please (however bigoted and ignorant it is).

inb4 huge semantic discussion about "rights" leading to a "First Amendment" vs "private company" comment thread that repeats the same talking points ad nauseum.

My own take on this is that we've unwittingly placed huge swathes of newly created de-facto 'public spaces' into private hands. In the same way that I advocate for ISPs being forced to be neutral in delivery of content, I think that we need legal machinery that prevents infrastructure (the 'roads' of our new cyber-society) from being politicized in the way that DDOS-protection or domain registrars are now becoming.

Defense of free speech (principle/culture here, not just 1A) is ALWAYS going to be a defense of 'monsters', because they are the only ones that need defending, and because if you don't set up boundaries, eventually this power gets used more and more and the boundaries of acceptable discourse shrink.

Does anyone actually think that this is the last time that this power will get used, or that it's the least extreme target that will get hit?

We're ceding a lot of general society and discourse from the realm of public law and transparent oversight into the realm of private and arbitrary decisions by those who control enforcement of vague terms of service.

All I can say is that I hope we're careful and can build new social structures that get what we actually want in the future, rather than applying old precedents that lead into a path that we'll end up regretting down the road, no matter how reasonable and just it is now.

How can privately created spaces become "de-facto public spaces'? Just because Facebook is popular doesn't mean it should be publicly owned or controlled. Everyone has the ability to speak freely on their own web sites, and on many sites (4chan) that freely allow them to post whatever they want.

I think the right to free speech ends when it becomes threats of violence and white nationalism has gotten to that point.

> I think the right to free speech ends when it becomes threats of violence...

"True threats" may be the correct term (but IANAL). Not everything that sounds threatening makes the grade.

> ... and white nationalism has gotten to that point.

Some white nationalist speech has gotten to that point. But that point, legally, is further than you think, and most white nationalist speech, while ugly and absolutely not worth listening to, does not reach the legal standard of a threat.

Note well: People are not at liberty to redefine the legal definition to what they think it "should be" (short of amending the Constitution).

"Cloudflare: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer" (Discussion):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I can't believe this is what social media and the tech industry has become. And I can't believe there are people actually supporting this kind of censorship.

What ever happened to principles? Do people not realize that they are sowing seeds of their own destruction by supporting this kind of arbitrary censorship from large social media companies, CDNs, ISPs, etc.

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