Another way to view this would be, "Cloudflare ends support for mass shooting early warning system."
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
Actually it's named after this publication.
So not a "free speech absolutist"
You and the poster I responded to are picking nits with absolutes. Aside from pedantics, is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
8chan totally still exists. All CloudFlare did was essentially erase the link between their IP and "8chan.org".
It took them probably 15 minutes to "go back up", if they hadn't already been abandoning CF anyway.
You massively overestimate law enforcement interest and ability, and massively underestimate the technical abilities of teenagers.
Indeed. The scary proposition is that it's competence.
And you really, _really_, don't want it to be.
If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a very pro-big government belief structure).
8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.