Comment by Borgz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Borgz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Cloudflare believes it is their responsibility to protect content that they admit to finding morally reprehensible when they are under no moral or legal obligation to do so.

It seems that Cloudflare believes that they are the only ones who can protect the websites hosting this content from being DDoS'd out of existence, and thus they are protecting their right to freedom of speech. But the owners of these websites can just use a different provider that is more aligned with their sense of morality, and Cloudflare doesn't need to protect websites that they morally disagree with.

DDoS-Guard still exists and I have no doubt they would be perfectly happy to protect websites like The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and KiwiFarms. They have shown themselves to be capable at mitigating large-scale DDoS attacks against the Russian government, so it's not like Cloudflare is the only place these websites can survive.

Cloudflare should only continue to provide services to websites like these if whatever they gain by having them as customers outweighs their moral disagreement with them. And I can't see how a few thousand dollars per year does that.

Other people who might want to host content that certain groups of people and/or governments don't want kept online are surely noticing and may start or continue using CF as a result of this message. Even someone in this situation who is completely opposed to KF's content should be able feel some comfort in that.

I feel like you missed the core points of this post.

- Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments. Refusing to deplatform isn't about protecting Kiwifarms, but protecting other groups in a global environment where they face legal and social pressure on differing and conflicting views. A hands-off policy on moderating the content of their customers removes the possibility of using deplatforming to suppress human rights.

- They rarely get paid by any of these sites, and when they do, tend to donate the proceeds to charities opposed to such awful websites.

So wait, they don't get paid, meaning they are happy to provide protection to these sites at their expense? You see how that's worse, right?

I don't. My personal position is that corporations are awful at moral judgments, and I'd vastly prefer infrastructure companies not decide who can and can't be on the Internet. I think it's imperative we solve this legally by pursuing a proper takedown of Kiwifarms, not by trying to encourage DDoSes to deal with it and then getting upset a company which prevents DDoS attacks prevented DDoS attacks.

I'm not trying to encourage ddos, I'm saying only that Cloudflare doesn't need to protect them from ddos. You might argue that those things are a distinction without a difference, but I would disagree.

Imo, kiwi farms will be the target of ddos no matter what, that's table stakes. So to me, the only thing I see is "is Cloudflare stepping in to help kiwi farms (at their own expense) or not".

Cloudflare isn't "stepping in". Anyone can sign up for Cloudflare. So you're asking Cloudflare to explicitly step in and strip protection from a particular website against their policies of basically non-interference, presumably to enable a DDoS attack to succeed.

> Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments. Refusing to deplatform isn't about protecting Kiwifarms, but protecting other groups in a global environment where they face legal and social pressure on differing and conflicting views. A hands-off policy on moderating the content of their customers removes the possibility of using deplatforming to suppress human rights.

Except this is a bullshit excuse, because a) you can just tell those authoritarian governments "no", and b) they have been removing customers like sex workers for many years already, this is not some novel change. The only change is that it affects literal fascists now.

"Banning nazis means we also have to ban human rights organizations" is some grade-A spin doctor bullshit, and I would expect better from people here than to fall for that.

Precedent from decisions on The Daily Stormer and 8chan was used to pressure Cloudflare to deplatform human rights organizations by authoritarian governments.

Cloudflare isn’t a court, its decisions are not legal precedents, it can decide on a case by case basis who it wants to do business with.

If authoritarian government comes knocking, just say no. What are they gonna do?

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