CloudFlare CEO says his Daily Stormer takedown was “arbitrary” and “dangerous” | Hacker News Reader

CloudFlare CEO says his Daily Stormer takedown was “arbitrary” and “dangerous”

arstechnica.com

53 pointsuntangle48 comments

In the company blog post[0] one can read: "The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."

If this is true, then I agree with the takedown, because the Daily Stormer crossed the content neutral line first. But in this interview, the CEO says something totally different. This is what annoys me, because this is breaking the trust I have in CloudFlare.

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

You're free to let Ars' editing of the interview determine your trust level for CloudFlare. Ars used to be a Bastion of Truth, but slowly after the acquisition by Condé Nast, a bias started to appear. And then it started growing.

My take on this is the idea that any tolerance of free speech by extremists goes completely against Ars' bias. And that's why they didn't print the passage you highlight, despite Ars linking to that exact blog post.

I can see both being true; the decision to terminate based on the Stormer saying that CF and Prince supported them and Prince saying the decision was arbitrary. They pissed him off and he exercised his right to refuse service to anyone. Pissed off = arbitrary.

Quoting the quote:

> "My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough," Prince wrote. "Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision."

I understand your point that being severely annoyed can lead to arbitrary decision, but nowhere it says in the interview, something like - I'd had enough because they even implied we supported them - here I would have understand. My problem is that it looks like either:

1. Ars removed this from the interview or

2. CloudFlare added this line in the PR blog post even so it was not the case

I cannot tell which one is true or both or none...

Note: Updated for formatting.

I found out from the blog and so this has already been the reason why they withdrew they services. I have also seen it mentioned in every other article I have read on the issue, it seems like Ars are the only ones who have not included it. I think they only way to verify the claim is to go to the daily stormer site to see what was said but the site is down.

The possibility of revision is an important thing to consider. Here's a data point, though not concrete proof. The first pass by the Wayback scraped that quote: http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://blog.cloudflare.com/why...

There's a chilling effect to this. If checks and balances at cloudflare are so nonexistent that the CEO having a bad mood results in the company violating its own policy - well, you set the precedent no matter how much you're claiming that you didn't. Precedent is determined by your past actions, not by what you claim.

Blogging what appears to be post hoc rationalizations doesn't make this any better.

You might compare this to a governor's power to pardon people. It's arbitrary (not rule-based and not based on letting the judicial system work). But it's limited to special cases mainly because the governor has better things to do than issue pardons all day.

The reason a govenor how the ability to pardon people is because the scales are stacked infavor of the accused. This logic implies that the scales are stacked against free speech.

This is less like a governor pardoning people, and more like a governor condemning people without due process.

(The logic being that a pardoned criminal is a much lesser evil than a condemned innocent.)

> "It's important that what we did today not set a precedent," Prince added. "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral."

Huh? What changed then – why even do it? Cloudflare's action today could set a dangerous precedent. Prince now seems to be arguing for a committee of some sort to arbitrate who gets taken down. To me, that's not much better.

IMO the internet should be free. Let filtering be conducted at the edge and driven by users.

I find the free speech thing to be unappealing in the anything goes case. Like what if you trace an anti-vaxxer website causally to enough dead children. What if it's not even the person visiting the site's children. Should your children be at risk because this garbage inspires loons? Is there really a slippery slope if you just ban nazis, or is it the slippery slope fallacy. I think a lot of people who haven't visited it would change their minds about totally free speech being so infallible if they went to Berkenau

I think the problem lies in defining who a Nazi is. At Birkenau it is clear, and for a lot/most/all of those chanting ‘blood and soil’ in Charlottesville it is pretty clear, too.

There are many shades of grey between right wing and Nazi, though, and if we decide that Nazi speech is to be banned then we also need to start drawing a very clear line as to what is ‘Nazi enough to ban’ and what is just ‘approaching Nazi’.

I’m live and work in a country where the public denial of crimes against humanity is punished by fines and prison. I don’t deny crimes like the Holocaust or Srebrenica or Rwanda and I despise the people who do, but I still feel uncomfortable with laws that criminalise that sort of speech. This situation is not exactly the same - Daily Stormer can probably find someone else to support their site - but there’s something to the slippery slope argument.

In USA, anything less than full throated adherence to the party line of a San Francisco Marxist professor, is labeled "Nazi" by someone, somewhere.

I think if you are marching with a swastika flag then you get the Nazi moniker regardless of what your exact political stance is.

What about when somebody is making a historical movie.

Depends if they are a method actor or not.

No forget all this labeling of people as Nazis.

People who march under the swastika banner, adorn themselves with Nazi iconography, chant 'blood and soil' and identify themselves as Nazi can legitimately be labelled as Nazi.

The term is often over-used; not in this case.

I'm not surprised about the downvotes, I would point out they had nazi flags and yelled a known nazi slogan as a group.

Wow down-voted again on this post for pointing out two simple facts about the rally.

It would be great to get a comment from the anon on here about what was so wrong.

They clarified why they changed their position in this instance. Daily Stormer started telling people that Clodflare and Prince supported them, this took away from the neutral content provider stance that cloudlfare took. If daily stormer had not mentioned cloudlfare they would still be able to use its services.

What exactly did the Daily Stormer say about Cloudflare and Prince? I haven't found a source for it anywhere.

I believe it was on their site as the articles usually say something like:

"the web blog's administrators suggested Cloudflare was protecting them because it secretly agreed with the site's neo-Nazi articles."

So you need to visit the site to confirm why cloudlfare dropped them and their site is down because Cloudlfare dropped them. Joseph Heller would be proud.

Whatever happened to:

"the Internet detects censorship as damage, and routes around it" and

"the answer to speech you don't agree with is more speech"?

I guess, like "don't be evil", those concepts have ended up on the trash heap...

What did happen to it? Why is the Daily Stormer site down?

Go daddy suspended their registration, then they went to Google who also suspended it. So they went to a Russian host, all the while they had cloudlfare protection. Then they said they had cloudlfare protection because cloudlfare supported them, thus taking cloudlfare from an independent, neutral party to being involved and a supporter. So cloudlfare withdrew services from them and hackers DDoS the site to oblivion.

Ah, DDoS, that makes sense, thanks.

Those concepts are extremely important, as long as they don´t interfere with profits.

We created too many silos online.

Too few companies have far too much power

This invalidates all of their previous statements. A very bad PR move. I think we all knew it was at their whim, based on some of the other sites they continue to host. Just more greed masqurading as virtue. That seems to be the speed of progress these days.

Has anyone even heard of this website before all of this? What's the point of all this free publicity for them? Streisand effect is real.

People following the rise of the far-right (and to some extent the MRA movement since there's a strong overlap) have, yes, because it's been a focal point for a good long while now.

MRA? You mean the group of mostly men pushing for equal rights to custody and/or visitation of their kids? Wasn't that group started by a male feminist scholar?

What do they have to do with this fringe hate website most of us never heard of before?

"You're either with us or you're against us."

Well, for a current example, there's Christopher Cantwell - Daily Stormer writer, helped organise "Unite The Right", was at the rally waving guns around, unabashed racist, etc. - and also quite a popular contributor to A Voice For Men (until he fell out with Elam.)

Also many articles along this theme, eg: https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/14/13576192/alt-right-se...

And Hitler himself was a big believer in no smoking spaces. That doesn't mean that anti-smoking groups have anything to do with the genocide Nazis engaged in, just because Nazis were also officially against smoking.

Ok, I can't even understand how you've got to this analogy.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're trying to understand, I'll restate the logical fallacy a bit more formally:

    Person A believes thing 1.
    Person A believes thing 2.
    Therefore people who believe 1 also believe 2.

This line of reasoning can be rhetorically powerful but it's flawed and, IMO, toxic to the discussion.

> the far-right (and to some extent the MRA movement since there's a strong overlap

What I actually said was:

    People in set A believe thing 1.
    People in set B believe thing 2.
    There is a strong overlap between set A and set B.

You'll note there's nothing about a causal connection, only a correlation.

[edit for formatting]

This is the first week in my life I've been genuinely afraid for the First Amendment. Charlottesville is the one event that pushed government content neutrality outside the Overton window. Up until now, most people (or at least the loudest) treated groups like the EFF and ACLU as kind of like garbage collectors: they do an unpleasant job, defending people who say wicked things, in order to protect the rest of us from government persecution when someone we don't like has the reins. This is the first time I've seen this view being described as literal Nazi sympathizing. It's the first time when hate speech laws are considered so necessary that we're willing to give that power to the Trump administration of all people.

You are right in your fear.

I don't know if you have already linked it yourself, but this is why there has been orchestrated removal/damage of confederate monuments in multiple cities recently. They are trying to taint and delegitimize the original writers of the constitution by associating them with slave ownership/racism, in order to then delegitimize their product, i.e. the constitution and especially the 1st and 2nd amendment rights.

I am clearly in the minority in my opinion here, but I'm happy for this. CloudFlare is a private business and as such have a right to refuse service to anyone.

"It's important that what we did today not set a precedent," Prince added. "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral."

> one that gives publishers a right to due process and doesn't put power over those decisions in the hands of a few CEOs like Prince.

Fox and CNN have the final say in the content they host, they don't give publishers due process. I don't see how google is any different, other than scope.

I really hope this isn't the beginning of the end

Me too, but it wouldn't be bad if it takes Cloudflare down a notch.

This entire ordeal has had many other hidden consequences, for me personally for example I've made the decision to never ever voice my political opinion ever again, whether offline or online. It is simply too dangerous, I do not consider my political opinions to be anywhere near as important as my livelihood or internet access. Take that as an overreaction if you want, but that's a real consequence that I've drawn for my life. I cannot risk accidentially running afoul somebody's idea of 'unacceptable opinion to hold'.

There is no "neutral" when people are questioning other people's right of self determination, existence and value as a human being.

To quote Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

There is a big difference between speech and action. People can "question" things all they want.

I'd also note, If Nazis are banned, then they will simply no longer go by that label - then their right to self-determine means you won't be able to call them Nazis.

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