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Comment by Tech-Noir | Hacker News Reader

> It is worth remembering that DS had claimed that Cloudflare's management secretly supported DS ideas/worldview/etc.

Where/when did they claim that?

I too have not seem evidence of this claim but I have often heard it repeated. It seems odd that they would make such a claim to me as well.

Cloudflare: We dumped Daily Stormer not because they're Nazis but because they said we love Nazis

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_dail...

Further reading indicates that it just someone posting on their forum. User-generated content is hard. Cloudflare users should make sure to censor what gets posted on their sites if it refers to the political opinions of Matthew Prince.

https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...

>“The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”

Let's not pretend that this is about Prince's "political opinions," as if the claim is about his views on tax reform or welfare programs. The claim was that he and the rest of Cloudflare's management supported nazi ideology.

again, this is someone saying DS said it, but not giving a screenshot or a quote

Again, no. The article cites Cloudflare and points to their statement on why they terminated DS. You can find that here:

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

My concern is that Cloudflare's decision is based on some generous interpretation of an otherwise innocuous post. If there was a direct quote of what DS said, I could accept it, but otherwise I am left concerned that Cloudflare's CEO just woke up angry one day and gave a hand-waving excuse wrapped in a big blog post.

While I personally accept cloudflare as a source, some are concerned that there are no screenshots of DS saying this to be found anywhere, on cloud flares site included.

I don't. This looks super shady. It's clearly in CF's interest to justify their decision. I'd even say they have a very powerful need to do so, given that they just took an unprecedented action against them in order to appease a mob, and now need to convince all of the rest of their customers that they won't do the same to them if they ever fall afoul of the internet hate mob.

We have 1. Cloudfare has a powerful need to justify their actions, 2. The person they're making these claims against has drastically reduced ability to provide his side of the story, thanks to Cloudfare's actions, 3. They already did one thing that most people believed they would never do, in arbitrarily terminating services to a site they didn't like, are we really going to make the claim that they would absolutely never twist somebody's words to serve their own purposes?

I don't think they straight made something up, but I can certainly believe that they took a quote out of context, interpreted something creatively, or misrepresented a post on their forum as an official statement by the site owner. In what other situation with such a powerful conflict of interests would we take the word of somebody in Cloudfare's position at face value?

As Daily Stormer's CTO I can personally attest that your concerns are very well founded.

I don’t know what was / wasn’t said. That said, I find this portion of your argument particularly unlikely:

> 2. The person they're making these claims against has drastically reduced ability to provide his side of the story, thanks to Cloudfare's actions…

Given the clickbait / pageview drive of modern “news” online, I think that someone at the middle of a hotly debated issue such as this could find many outlets happy to quote them on a perceived scandal. It has the potential to the flames and generates yet more controversy.

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