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Comment by phantom_of_cato | Hacker News Reader

They have no obligation, legally or otherwise, to host content they don't agree with. That isn't censoring. Are you censoring them for telling them what they can or can't do with their servers? You choose who you let in your house and if they say things which demean yourself, family, ie, associates, then like anyone I'm sure you might tell them you don't want to host them. If you're a store owner you have a right to tell someone to leave if they're denigrating other customers, ie, their desire, perhaps some might say right, to shop without harassment. I don't know why the obvious keeps having to be explained here.

> That isn't censoring.

Of course it is. It's just not government censorship. Corporate censorship is a widely recognized concept. [1]

> I don't know why the obvious keeps having to be explained here.

Your claim is neither obvious, nor even true.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

Is their DDOS service censored?

They have terminated service for 8chan, The Daily Stormer, and KiwiFarms. I'll leave it up to you to determine how fair of a description "censored" is.

Even though those three website are filth, they have objectively been censored by Cloudflare. What's the confusion here? Just be honest about it and say Cloudflare censors content they don't agree with. Why the tiptoeing around this fact?

I think you are making statements that are stronger than reality.

Cloudflare censors content they don't agree with? I would guess they actually protect a huge volume of content they don't agree with.

And I don't think they have suppressed those sites or gone out of their way to take action against those sites beyond terminating Cloudflare protections. So, to me at least, that doesn't rise to the definition of "censorship".

Just because you state it is a fact doesn't actually make it factual.

Sure, you can roll with this definition of 'censored', but it makes the term almost meaningless.

Would you describe HN as a "censored" forum because they engage in moderation? Even 4chan doesn't allow child porn, would it also be accurately described as censored?

Generally, when we refer to a platform as 'censored' we do so for much stronger reasons than "they've banned a few users/customers in the past".

I'm not that worried since those sites received tons of bad press (for good reason) and were hives of scum and villainy. My main reason is they don't hide your source IP in all cases or provide actual region hiding either. It's a false sense of security.

They're bent about kiwi-farms.

There was a recent controversy where an activist named "Keffals" posted something violent and threatening on KiwiFarms about herself, screenshotted and deleted it (it's not clear to me whether she deleted the post or if it was removed, however I know her account was banned), and then used the screenshot to lobby CloudFlare to take down the site. After this became known CloudFlare has held steady in their commitment to not allow the site back up.

That said it's not an especially nice site, however where CloudFlare has removed sites in the past they've slowly been censoring less and less radical sites, which has people concerned since it's a "backbone of the internet" type service. Ironically CloudFlare made a blog post a few days before banning KiwiFarms expressing this exact sentiment before doubling back on it https://archive.ph/gJXgF

>There was a recent controversy where an activist named "Keffals" posted something violent and threatening on KiwiFarms about herself, screenshotted and deleted it

There is not a citation big enough for this holy shit

>That said it's not an especially nice site

It's a site that encourages people to literally commit suicide. But you seem to have an agenda in your comment

With all due respect I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about

None of that sounds like censorship though?

Unfortunately not.

>people who disagree with me shouldn’t get to use the internet

Ok.

People who spread hatred and intentionally cause real-world harm to others shouldn't be supported and enabled by private companies I deal with. If they continue to do so, they'll lose me as a customer.

This isn't Reddit or 4chan. Please don't try to start fights

People committing several crimes are subject to denial of service. But yours is not a surprising position from someone trying to greentext here.

Sounds like what you want is some regulation for content hosts, isn't it?

I don’t want infrastructure providers to play law enforcement. If they would have had received a court order and acted afterwards, I’d be okay with their decision. But kicking customers for marketing? Meh.

So, they did it due to commercial reasons, not legal reasons? I assume they judged the commercial repercussions and decided keeping the content was a negative. Why do you think they should host it anyway?

They didn't host the content, though. They were only providing DDoS protection

Tomato, tomato. And in this case, Cloudflare does proxy and cache traffic through its infrastructure, that's their whole business model.

Tomato, tomato? There's a very big difference between a hosting provider and a caching service

In terms of political, public and commercial repercussions, which is what the discussion is about? Not much difference at all.

I'm glad you'll keep that in mind so you can describe these entities correctly in the future

When it's a site trying to get people to kill people over the color of their skin and suicide themselves over being LGBQT, I don't have a problem with a private business saying they won't do business with you. There are plenty of other providers that will. I would be bothered by the government making a company do it however.

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