What if the content is just generally in "bad taste" and not overtly Neo-Nazi, will CF feel the need to play "Content Cop" or are they willing to abide by their role as utility?
Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free speech?
Tech companies didn't choose to be the society police, yet here we are.
We just witnessed something very significant, when Russia interfered. They had an express goal and they carried it out with technologies we know.
A medium that is absolutely free of censorship is not in your best interest, because it can and will be used to compromise you.
The solutions are difficult, but what is clear (especially to folks who have had to moderate even a small channel or forum) is that a policy of no-censorship never scales in the real world, the question is how you do it, where to draw the line, etc..
https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-terrorist-hacker-group-re...
Cloudflare was quite clear on the criteria they used.
> 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.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
You can disagree with that criteria, and you can question whether this is the true criteria Cloudflare used. For the later, you need to provide evidence in opposition to this case.
“Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision.“
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
Name one person harmed by the site?
If you have ever seen a page of DailyStormer, you'd either laugh or go away.
No one has ever killed anyone after reading a few paragraphs on that site.
Putting in the argument of "Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free speech" is not an honest way of describing censorship of content that is silly at its worst and dumb at its best.
Clearly it’s the nazis who are out of control and we need to take down their websites. Freedom of speech be damned!
Seriously. This was a harmless, stupid, non-violent demo for nazis to out themselves in, before the antifa turned up and got people killed.
Are their websites being taken down? No? How come?
Disclaimer: think nazis are about as stupid as it gets.
Edit: not exactly expecting upvotes for this post, but this thread clearly needs some balance.
These are the guys who rushed a non-violent demo. These are the people you are defending: https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/90191505521...
It doesn't. Seriously, you're making excuses for a murderous white supremacist asshole.
Just because one has freedom of speech does not mean one is free of consequence. So actual murderers should be punished. People believe what they choose to believe, and if it's not the DailyStormer it's some other hate mongering source (that's not exclusive to the internet).
lots of people would say yes.
Yes, this decision has already been made. Freedom (of speech and more) is fought for and won through struggle and sacrifice. We have already lost much human life to defend these rights and continue to do so.
Bad actions will be dealt with the appropriate consequences, as they always have, but that does not mean we should start limiting rights. This is the foundation of the justice system and society itself.
publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism .. publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims by approving of, glorifying, or justifying National Socialist rule of arbitrary force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...
Edit: I'll take that downvote as a sign of "I casually claim censorship can be limited while doing nothing to stop its expansion."
A recent example of what appears to be a moderate, democrat voting professor experiencing it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4546704/Professor-ca...
No there isn't. That's like saying there is an increased trend among conservatives in general towards being Nazis.
There is an increase in the activity of the lunatic fringes on both sides. Ranging from hardcore tea party people to "OMG white people are the worst" morons all the way to antifa and neo-nazis.
Someone compared the election manifesto from the British National Party (who are basically neo-Nazi) for the 2005 UK election, and the 2017 manifesto from the Conservative party, the main centre-right party in the UK.
And there were an awful lot of similarities which the Conservatives wouldn't have put in before.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2017/04/23/compared-tories-polic...
If you're not British you might think "oh they are just another political party", that's not true at all.
Secondly there is nothing in that article about neo-Nazism, so I don't know why you brought it up? I'm talking about neo-Nazi sites, not general racism/etc.
--- ¹ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/902581a0-99ff-11e7-b83c-9588e5148...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/education/edlife/internet...
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/student-protestors-and-t...
It doesn't offend me. It's just not a reliable source.
And those links don't address my second point. There is no reference to neo-Nazism. I'm suggesting neo-Nazi website be taken offline/
There is a huge gap between “conservative bent” and those trying to actively incite violence in the name of Hitler. And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody. A single data point is not a trend.
If you read the blog[1] regarding that incident, it provides a lot more evidence than the datapoint of the removal. It also completely undermines Cloudflare's claims of being content-neutral. Given that content neutrality is a binary state...
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Also hosted by cloudflare: ISIS sites, which are a lot more of a clear and present danger to real people than a bunch of racists. That means the standard has gone from content neutrality - to content neutrality so long as you don't imply things the CEO doesn't like. I.e. not neutral.
From the blog:
>And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.
Anything I can say about this will be ridiculously snarky, but this is the hill you chose to sacrifice your principles on, Matthew? Really?
I agree they should remove ISIS sites. It’s marginally harder given you could argue it’s about religion/politics, but I’m happy to lump them in with neo-nazis inciting violence.
It’d be nice if you could create some perfect set of clear rules that you could cleanly apply to 100% of sites. Unfortunately the world is squishy and gray, which is why we have judges despite countless laws written in legalese that build on top of each other’s precedent. I don’t expect judging content to be the same. I appreciate the CEO thinking they should just defer to when gov forces them to shut something down. I also appreciate the perspective of removing extremist sites — you got one life to live so why not make a difference creating barriers to _EXTREME_ hate/violence around the world.
Seems an easy choice.
" I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet."
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
The point of the matter is services can host questionable content and remove it to comply with the law or services can based on their terms of service remove content "as they see fit."
The question remains, when will a service come for your content? I'm not advocating for hate speech or any illegal activities, I just think cloudflare strapped on their skis and are now on their way down the classic slippery slope.
Voat was targeting with a letter writing campaign saying they were a child porn host when they weren't. All the liberals said "if you don't like Reddit, make your own." So someone did. And then liberals DDoS'd it into the ground and had any ISP that dared host them, filled with DMCA and child porn notifications.
Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have all worked against anyone who dares question the status quo. Not "nazis", normal people. But surely the creator of Dilbert is a threat to the nation and worthy of retribution, right?
I guess you guys are only for regulation and fairness when it suits your cause...
Bucketing half the population together is intellectually dishonest and does nothing to solve any problems or convince others of your points. Labeling them the enemy only creates further divisions for division sake. All it does is give fodder to those wanting confirmation bias on a given side.
You should get your news from somewhere better than Breitbart. That’s not only transparently untrue – try spending 30 seconds watching the stream without seeing someone question the status quo – but comically so given the number of people complaining with cause that those services aren’t shutting down abusive users. I mean, Facebook and Twitter notoriously say that death and rape threats don’t violate their community standards until it gets widespread attention, and you think your unsourced assertion that simply asking questions gets anyone banned?
They have no issue providing service to ISIS: https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-terrorist-hacker-group-re...
The CEO literally said it was because he felt like terminating DailyStormer. Why is it suddenly wrong to repeat his own words?
Instead you make it sound like this is about the content, something cloudflare clearly doesn't have an issue with.
Do you have a quote where the CEO says this? Your statement gives the impression that this was nothing more than a whim. As I pointed out below, according to their own statement on the matter, that's not the case:
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
I've provided the link I have for two reasons:
* it's a link I know about that's relevant to the discussion
* it is from Cloudflare themselves, so the chance of it being a misquote (accidental or otherwise) is less likely. I don't have a knee-jerk instinct to reject official statements as issued in bad faith without other evidence.
I repeatedly linked likely for the same reason you have: I saw something I thought was misrepresentative or misinformed more than once.
I'm thankful for the link because I can use that to alter my understanding of the event. There's a quote that's sometimes attributed to Keynes "When the facts change, I change my mind."[0] That's something I endeavor to do.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
I'll also admit to a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the use of a throwaway account in a contentious discussion. I can understand the use of throwaways to protect identity, but in that case the standard should be higher: they should really be bringing something substantial to the discussion, not just repeating talking points.
Thanks again for the link. That's useful.
Cloudflare can't be trusted anymore. If they want to say they have actual standards and rules that operate on (and shut down nazi sites based on those rules) that's fine.
I know many YT firearms channels that have been basically blacklisted from monetization in recent months because YT classifies anything they do as "unsuitable for ads". It has forced a lot to double publish to https://www.full30.com/ to monetize their work.
Using your example, a firearms video stream could stream videos through Cloudflare Stream and sell ads themselves or partner with an ad network that was willing to sell them to an audience that cared about firearms. I totally agree that the one-size-fits-all solution of Facebook or YouTube reverts to the lowest common denominator and, in doing so, will inherently not be right for every publisher.
Whatever algorithm YT changed a few months ago is really putting a hurt on content creators for little gain. If certain advertisers don't want to be on channels with certain keywords they should be able to configure that, but wholesale demonetization is really stupid.
Yes, that's it!
The reality is of course somewhere in the middle, and there's some content which some advertisers would not want to be associated with, while others might actually want to target, and the current algorithm may not be serving these needs well. Hopefully it's just a matter of a better system being needed that might come later.
Interestingly, which topic was covered recently in Mozilla's IRL podcast[1].
The rhetoric of today and with people framing their opponents as the vilest people on earth, I just have a tough time with anything but absolutes on infrastructure decisions.
Of course, proper legal authority within their proper jurisdiction must be respected. I might disagree with a couple of court decisions, but a business needs to deal properly with those and I would never fault a business for that.
I would have hoped that their answer to impulsive decisions would be 'checks and balances' to prevent it from happening again.
Admittedly the stance for/against Tor discrimination is a wide one.... That's an issue with users, not content.
But the only case where I believed he nuked a site was against Daily Stormer. They call for violence and eradication of all non-whites, specializing on Jewish and African hatred.
He wont even kick off booters, which even he admits are fraud artists even when they do pay. That's because their frontend and backends are different. Technically this service is legal, and only illegal if used as a weapon (intent). Therefore, Eastdakota wont act. [Hopefully I best paraphrased his views...]
So yeah, I would consider your site to be safe, unless you call for extermination of $race and actions to back that up.
I more worried about someone telling Cloudflare I'm doing that or some other vile thing when I am not. It seems to be the standard way to get YouTube and Twitter to kick people off.
Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain.
>are they willing to abide by their role as utility?
I can remember when the conservative position was to support freedom of association, and to oppose regulating private businesses as utilities.
I can remember that as recently as this year, in the debate over net neutrality.
The nazis are shit too, no doubt, but it’s hard not to blame the antifa for the ultimate outcome.
Also worth remembering: the nazis were using their legal right to free speech in a legal demonstration. The antifas were illegally and violently obstructing it.
Don’t be too quick to pick sides.