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One is denying service based on a protected class , the other is denying service based on a risk of violence.
How can you consider them equivalent?
How is that not holding them as equivalent for the purposes of your argument?
The larger point is that I don't think these folks are being honest in their defense and that they are defending sites like KF specifically because of the type of people who are being "censored" and not because of fundamental principles. Conservatives get banned from Twitter? "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND CENSORSHIP!" Leftists get banned from Twitter? Not a fucking peep.
So has Instagram (by far!), FB, Discord, Twitter and site or program where people can type.
Doxxing and harassment are the stated goals of KF.
There is censorship even if there are no Romans anymore. It is a concept, not a very complex one at that. A bit of abstraction is the daily bread of many users probably...
Just because a private company does it, doesn't mean it isn't censorship. Of course, you may argue that it's in a good cause, but nonetheless, it's still censorship.
I feel XKCD 1357 has greatly contributed to the degradation of the discourse on this topic. The concept of free speech is not synonymous with the legal protections provided by American law.
June 27th, 2021, in Japan
Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.
I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
Comparing the removal of 3 sites, all associated with terrorism and lone wolves, from one commercial provider to the atrocity that is imperial US might is an absurd juxtaposition.
The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.
The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.
Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.
Because they don't like that otherwise it is a balance, and are afraid of what happens to that balance and who does it.
Meanwhile, all things that make societies successful are a balance (as are most things that succeed in nature).
Sure but is it dangerous? A threat to life?
Do these sites need to be offline too? https://www.lifewire.com/free-people-search-sites-the-best-o...
- Cloudflare provides a service
- some "unsavory" people buy this service
- Cloudflare decides that they do not want to provide this service anymore so they terminate it.
The specifics of how exactly they terminated this service are really unsubstantial to the question of censorship. You might be right for kiwifarm to have a case here,
They did not terminate them for "being" a particular way, they terminated them for "doing" a particular thing. In other words, they were not judged for the color if their skin, but for the content of their character.
If anything, cloudflare should do this more often - they protect way too many people and gargabe contentewho do not and which does not deserve this kind of protection.
If people want to be an asshole on the internet - or in real life - that is their perogative, but they cannot reasonable expect to have the enthusiatic support of society in doing so.
The way you are wrong comes up here:
"Surely, we will see many more websites go down"
I would go as far as saying that beyond the allocation of IP address space and to a certain extent domain names - nobody is owed anything to participate on the internet. These are the building blocks. Go build things with them,
And if you have built them and someone ask you to share these things you have built, but then decides to use them to do shitty things, just tell them
"Hey this doesn't work for me, if you wanna say these things, please do so from your own space."
That is not censorship.
They can keep trying all they want. There are surely people who are willing to work with them.
But no one is REQUIRED to help them.
CF is not the internet, nor is it a government. you can always found or find a provider for your hate speech, just like KF did with an .RU domain.
your viewpoint is the terrifying one, and quite frankly one that has been used over the decades to allow hateful bullshit in the name of "tolerance" and has caused undue harm and death.
your philosophical pure idea of freedom of speech is just that-- it does not work in the real world.