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This has to be one of the most narrow definitions of censorship I've seen. Suppression of information is censorship, full stop. Suppression does not need to be committed by government for it to be censorship.
You can call the police, and they will arrive and probably remove the person. But they won't be removing them because of the threat; they'll be removed because they don't have a right to be a nuisance in someone's store. This is precisely the position Cloudflare is in: they are entirely within both their rights and the realm of acceptable social behavior to remove nuisances from their premises.
No, Cloudlfare is more in the position of a random person coming to the counter to ask that one of their customers be thrown off the premises because they have posted on a forum that someone should be murdered.
While Cloudflare does have the right to ask anyone to leave their premises, they also have the right, and are well in the realm of acceptable social behavior, to not investigate what their customers are saying, and to ignore people coming off the street to demand they throw customers out.
They are perfectly within their right to ignore harassment coming from their customers. But it's absolutely not within the realm of socially acceptable behavior; nobody (successfully) runs a coffee shop where 2% of customers actively seek out victims within the other 98%.
How many coffee shops have asked you for your facebook name to check whether you are engaging in online harassment of their other customers before serving you coffee? If the customer in line in front of you claimed you harassed them, and even showed the barista some proof, would you think it's normal for the barista to throw you out of the shop?
The rest is another indirection: if I'm known to the establishment for harassment, then it makes perfect sense that they'd not want me around. There's no investigative aspect to this situation: KF's history of harassment is a matter of public record.
To be blunt: this is a ridiculous hill to die on. Boycotts are about as old as capitalism; the only thing that really distinguishes calls to boycott Cloudflare from any other boycott in history is how ridiculously trivial it would be for them to do the right thing.
But extending this to other random people or companies who choose to do business with the thing you are personally boycotting is often going too far.
Their own TOS makes this clear, and provides justification for a boycott rather than just general ire: it would be one thing if they merely declined to intervene at all, but they're decided to do so selectively.
If cloudflare stop provinding service they can move their hosting anywhere else or even self host in their own servers if no one want to host then.. They have literally dozens of hosting options other then cloudflare..
It is not like cloudflare is the only place around and they are required to use it..
If it's not illegal, Cloudflare should be able to make their own determination on what they choose to host and facilitate. Others can have an opinion on whether they wish cloudflare did that or not, and they might choose to do business (or not) depending on that. I think this is all completely normal and none of this is censorship.
This thread is not about defending KF, it is about defending Cloudflare from demands that they stop doing business with some organization that some have decided is undesirable.
If I'm running a business, I may wish to make a moral judgement and not do business with an energy company because I don't think they're climate-friendly, or avoid doing business with Facebook because of their stance/impact to privacy, or not/stop buying peaches from 9/11 truthers www.palisadeproduce.com. I think these are all completely reasonable and normal ways for me to run a business.
In the same vein, other people are welcome to a view on the above, who i do business with, and try and change my mind, and might withhold their business from me because of it. I think that is also completely fair and normal.
No one is forcing anyone to do anything. Everyone's just having an opinion and operating by it.
Personally, I don't think Cloudflare should stop providing service for these website. I think they have a leg to stand on with saying they're a neutral dumb pipe who will just follow the law. But I also don't think it's abhorrent for people to think different, and try and persuade Cloudflare to cut their relationship with kiwifarms
Abhorrent no, but it goes against our codified laws to try to persuade one business to stop doing business with another.
So, it sounds like you're in agreement that Cloudflare's role here is fairly impartial; they're not editorializing or supplementing the KiwiFarms data with any of their own opinions or biases. They take no part in the creation of this material, just the preservation of it. So, where do we draw this line? Should we remove Terry A. Davis' videos off the Internet Archive for intolerable racism and encouraging hateful behavior? Or maybe we should delete all the GNU projects because the public opinion on Stallman has changed of late? I simply don't follow this line of logic; there is nothing to gain from de-platforming this content. They'd only be giving them a reason to reincarnate as a Matrix server or Onion domain, and good luck getting your self-conscious service providers to take out the trash when that happens.
I despise Cloudflare from the bottom of my blackened heart, but seeing people think a Twitter campaign is going to stop a forum from existing is silly. We're begging for an "Epik" situation, where a replacement pops up with the sole purpose of catering to extremist politics. Congratulations, now nobody wins.
Also the details of America's legal implementation of the principle of free speach don't resolve the moral debate over what constitutes censorship, especially in regards to a global platform like the internet.
They already aren't neutral. For example, if you mirror or seed a Kali ISO, you're in violation of Comcast's TOS (even if you have business-class service), which says you may not "distribute tools or devices designed or used for compromising security or whose use is otherwise unauthorized, such as password guessing programs, decoders, password gatherers, keystroke loggers, analyzers, cracking tools, packet sniffers, encryption circumvention devices, or Trojan Horse programs."
I agree that no one is entitled to this, but why do you feel entitled to demand others refuse service in this way?
My point is more related to this idea of a private company punishing an individual or organization for behavior it doesn't like. I believe this is a dangerous notion, and we should be demanding it stops, not encouraging it to happen more.
First, who's the "asshole?" In ANY situation, people point at each other.
But more importantly, free speech is how we democratically resolve conflicts.
Rather than fighting about things, we discuss and vote. As a conflict resolution mechanism, democracy which rests on freedom of speech, has been extraordinarily successful.
And yet it's always under threat by people who when they are in power feel the temptation to ban the people they don't like from taking part. Even though the people we disagree with are exactly the people with whom we have to resolve conflicts.
For thousands of years, when someone got into power, they would use force to keep others from gaining that same power, meaning the only way to get power was by force. That puts the most brutal in power. Welcome to the dark ages.
Talking about things is much better, even if it means hearing things you don't like. Sometimes you are right, and sometimes you are wrong.
There's actually an easier argument against KF than XKCD 1357. The forum is specifically a platform for discussing and distributing the personal information of notorious public figures[0] in the interest of generating drama and lulz. They actively brag about having a kill count[1]. My personal opinion is that KF is actually engaging in illegal conduct and the only reason why they get away with it is because the US legal system has many blind spots.
[0] Originally just one particularly weird Sonic fan comic author, but now a mish-mash of transgender streamers and alt-right nutters
[1] Except when it comes to emulator developers, when they instead go full Alex Jones trying to claim Near didn't commit suicide
That KF is a horrible place for horrible people should simply not be Cloudflare's concern. A company that is offering web hosting or DDOS protection services is too far removed from this idea of "publishing" for this to make any sense.
I am not even necessarily against things like YouTube removing Alex Jones' videos - but this type of content validation needs to stop early. If you believe Cloudflare shouldn't do business with these people, neither should their ISP, nor should Github or Nginx or wherever they get their code from, and soon you'll say that they cleaning services company and their accountant should similarly stop providing service to such an evil organization (without any legal recourse, of course).
And to be clear, I don't in any way sympathize with what KF is doing (assuming what you are saying is true, which I do believe but have not checked myself). But suing them or at least seeking to alert the authorities is what you should do, not complaining to Cloudflare about it.