Perhaps you will be unsurprised to learn that this poster's first contribution to HN was, in fact, a multi-paragraph impassioned defense of said Nazi hate site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16731182
HN is being trolled by a polite racist. It's important that people know this, so they can avoid being trolled.
Surprisingly some elements of what Hitler said on education made sense.
Someone can be a racist bigot and still have a good idea in another field.
I do not want to get into a legal argument of if CloudFlare is allowed to discriminate (they likely are). But I do want to live in a world where they are not allowed to.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out because I hate Nazis.
Then, they came for me, and there were no institutional protections, because they would have protected those damn Nazis.
In the case under discussion, Cloudflare established the president that they could terminate service to customers based on what they say. We have already decided as a society that we do not want the government to have that sort of power. Why are we now insisting that private companies must have and use that power?
Freedom is not defended by defending people that we like. It is defended at the periphery; by defending people that most of us do not like.
Cloudflare didn't establish a precedent. It's standard boilerplate for any web service to reserve the right to terminate any account any time for any reason, as well as to alter their terms of service in any way at any time, for any reason, without notice.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not Cloudflare should have exercised their rights in this case, but they didn't upset the applecart of free speech by doing so.
>We have already decided as a society that we do not want the government to have that sort of power. Why are we now insisting that private companies must have and use that power?
As a society, we believe that government should be limited in scope to only those powers explicitly granted to it by the people. The people meanwhile enjoy the full scope of rights not granted to government, and those rights are considered inalienable and irrevocable.
Private entities like Cloudflare have and have always had greater power than governments to choose what to publish, and what not to publish, with whom to associate and not, merely by virtue of being private entities.
Cloudflare did reserve the right to do so in their ToS; but they had a precedent of not using that right to police speach (and activly argued that it was not their place to do so). While they did not establish any legal precedent here, they still established a social precedent.
>They didn't upset applecart of free speech by doing so.
Yes they did. Just because private companies are not subject to the first amendment does not mean that they are not arbiters of free speech.
>As a society, we believe that government should be limited in scope to only those powers explicitly granted to it by the people.
And we have already decided that one of those powers is to prevent private companies from discriminating. See the Civil Rights, which defined the notion of public accommodations. Despite being (potentially) privately owned, these public accommodations are not allowed to discriminate based on protected classes.
I would also like to point out that, in the course of this thread, we have gone from 'Andre_Wanglin should not be listened to because his defense of Cloudflare demonstrates that he is an impassioned Nazi sympathizer' to 'reasonable people can disagree, but Cloudflare's behavior did not violate the constitution or break any law'.
By your reductionist logic, we shouldn't jail pedophiles who have abused children. Those pedophiles, like the Nazi radicalizers are harming other people through their actions.
When the Nazis escalate to actual violence, I have no problem with taking legal action against them. (Although I do still have a problem with private companies bowing to public pressure to act against them in a vigilante manner. ) If you want to propose a specific rule/law you would like to see applied, you can do so and we can debate the merrits of that rule/law.
You should not get to decide on a specific group that the rules/laws should or should not get applied to.
[0] We do make illegal specific incitements to violence. But not the mere advocacy of violence.
But we should (and do) applaud when companies remove a platform for people who incite others to pedophilic abuses, and we should (and do) applaud when companies remove platforms for people inciting others to violent acts against groups.
In fact, your comment is a lie as my first "contribution" was a simple one-line assertion based on information I happened to be aware of.[0] It was only after being prodded for substantiation that I bothered to type a whopping 3+ paragraphs of facts relating to the matter under discussion.