I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to.
This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
Elaborate, please?
"In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
The claim is that a "utility" does not cut off service for users who they disagree with. In the blog post, Cloudfare appears to claim that they will follow this standard in the future:
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again."
Regardless of whether they made the right decision here, this definitely feels like an abrupt 180 turn.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."
I say "mostly" because there is also the interpretation that they believe there were multiple appropriate actions in the earlier cases. I still feel it's a 180 turn from the earlier blog post, though. They set out a clear principle just last week, and already have found an exception that they neglected to mention.
Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean that their revised approach is wrong, just that it's a turnaround.
"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.
I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…
And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.
Law enforcement needs to intervene, period.
ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Cloudflare gave us no warning when they suspended our account.
What makes even less sense is that Cloudflare's Head of Sales emailed us offering their services when we mentioned we were getting DDOSed as an escort directory.
They’re also private infrastructure unlike water/power, which is the position that cloudflare is in.
These services are not typically used in the act of raping or terrorising someone.
No, but it is (or was) used by kiwifarms which seems to be a platform dedicated to terrorising trans people.
Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero.
We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy.
It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
Nazis need to be fought everywhere, otherwise their cancerous ideology just grows.
Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
- Engels, On Authority 1872
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
>>"communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
This might be an apt comparison if the groups in question controlled a government, but I fear you're forgetting how the Nazis got there. The NSDAP spent a good chunk of the 20s holding large rallies in places they weren't welcome and inciting the local populace until fights broke out (there's a particularly famous brawl that happened in the Wedding district of Berlin). Then they used the resulting media coverage to justify building up a large para-military force (the SA and later the SS) in a weird form of political judo.
I worry that actions like the one cloudflare has taken add to the appeal for a certain type of people for fighting giant organizations as the underdog. There are certain organizations and/or events where fighting against them gives them the publicity they need to attract recruits and succeed.
You should also be careful because we seem to be going into a recession and the right generally benefits from such times (and immediately after). Giving them extra publicity might be a very bad idea.
Sci-Hub link about the right thriving during economic recessions/depressions: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.03.006
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
>I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition].
That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed.
One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
This is literally the opposite of neutral.
I don't get this constant need for mental gymnastics. Just say you believe in censorship.
It's not black and white.
Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion.
Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
But this is just business - that is all this is, not a right, not a government, not a monopoly, not even an essential service. CF wants to cast themselves as some principled and righteous defender, but they are just a business that was finding it profitable to provide services to another business, and now they don’t.
“The price is algorithmically guaranteed to go up.” vs “there is always risk involved in investing.” Even “pen flown on the space shuttle” vs. “pen designed by NASA.” Everything else can be identical but they are legally different.
You can commit conspiracy without actually doing the crime. And one criminal acting on his own vs a conspiracy can be a matter of planning and moral comfort, not just material assistance (I think, IANAL).
Plus, Cloudfare isnt the government and is quite explicitly NOT burdened by a legal requirement to protect any users free speech. The fuck are you on about?
Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles?
Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?).
What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group?
You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?