As the article says, "... [not providing services based on moral character] is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."
Assholes and trolls are still going to exist regardless of what any platform does.
You can’t have what you want by trying to pressure cloudflare, it won’t make a positive difference. Do something real instead of advocating for something toothless and symbolic.
People need to get it through their head that speech is not violence, words are not weapons. Your Exquisite Analogy about how speech laws should Akshually reflect gun laws or martial laws doesn't work, never worked, and never will.
Every single argument against free speech is a general argument against living in any kind of large networked society. Your problem is not the tools the harrasser uses, your problem is the harrasser themself, the tools they use is the same tools used by dissidents and freedom fighters to "harrass" the oppressive governments they are rebelling against.
We went through this entire tiresome arguments before with the debates around cryptography and anonymity, people just keep Missing The Point. Yes, building backdoors into encryption standards and harvesting data without users' permission will allow you to catch The Big Bad Pedos, but it will also allow Putin and Ibn Salman unprecedented power to catch their own type of enemies. "Oh, we just want to do bad things to the bad guys only" no, you can't, believe me, you can't and you won't, every single thing you advocate for can and will be used against you.
"Nazism is bad" EOM
That wasn't so hard, was it?
I do not want corporations acting as government regardless of whose side they are on.
I do not want to normalize or encourage such regulation by corporation.
If some behavior is so bad, advocate for a law against it or for the enforcement of that law.
If it is not so bad, let it exist even if you don't like it.
The whole thing about rule by the people is that having individuals or small groups that get to arbitrarily make rules and enforce them is bad. Monarchy and despotism is bad, whether or not you like what they're doing.
Despotism by corporation is just as bad and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not different because you're trying to get them to arbitrarily create rules that agree with you.
we need to be able as a society be able to and be unafraid to say when things are clearly bad.
Sadly, "disagrees with me" is considered bad and called vile insults these days.
Do you think you understand something they didn't? Were they naive? Are you perhaps more intimately connected to the evils of Nazism than they were? Maybe they didn't understand that an entire country could fall to the evils of Nazism if they were not stamped out aggressively?
Or. Maybe they understood these things even better than you. And maybe they believed freedom of speech is even more anti-Nazi than banning Nazis.
Yes, it pretty much is. Over here it's against the law to futher it. What's wrong with enshrining this principle in the actual law, that 1) affects the whole society, not just users of one particular corporation, 2) it's enforcement is dispensed by an actual court, not a PR department pushed by a twitter mob?
>What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people?
It doesn't. You don't need an adjective between murder and people.
Also, harassing someone to the point of suicide isn't murder, it can be manslaughter.
No new laws are needed. Go bother your local DA or US attorney or legislative representatives to get charges filed for the actual harassment and the conspiracy to harass that lead to what should probably be manslaughter charges.
Make actual differences and actually hold the people who do these things accountable.
Don't go cheerleading for Cloudflare to do something meaningless that wouldn't and won't stop any of this in the future.
You already do. And that's actually a good thing. It means that in free societies like the USA, these companies are free to choose to do (or not do) business with whomever they choose. They are not free from the market reacting to those decisions, though.
This is a different issue than a social network doing moderation and spam prevention on its own platform.
It is not Cloudflare's job to protect Twitter or wherever else from a forum of assholes.
...but they're not free from public reactions to their choices.
I don't want to force cloudflare to be a public utility, but it is probably bigger and more dominant than any company needs to be, like many others it should be broken up into smaller pieces.