Sorry but continuing to host Daily Stormer is not neutral either.
There is no neutral and apolitical option on this issue.
There is no neutral and apolitical option on this issue.
In this case, they broke ToS and got removed from CF.
Also: I don’t really agree. Enforcement of ToS is inherently political too.
If you really want to argue on this, then go with "ToS are complicated for mortals to understand".
> Isn’t the operative question here, what should the ToS include in the first place?
No? It's a private company. You can choose to agree or not to agree with ToS and therefore make a choice of using or not using service because of its ToS.
Another thing that you can complain about: CF clearly wanted to boot them off the service (see CEO's interview) and found a clause in their ToS to do so.
That’s neutral. You host sites, regardless of their content.
Granted, that is a political stance.
What if Kamala Harris used cloudflare in front of her website? Is cloudflare now supporting the Democratic party? What if Trump did? Same thing?
By your logic, it seems like cloudflare would have to review the content of every page on every site and only host it if they agree with it. That's going to mean a pretty big chunk of websites don't get hosted.
You really don't think a neutral position would be to just not care what the content is, and just host everybody regardless who they are, what they believe, etc?
> It was pretty simple really - all they had to do was not lie about Cloudflare endorsing them
If Kamala Harris used Cloudflare, not an issue. If Kamala Harris went on to very publicly falsely state on her website that Cloudflare supported her and the Democratic Party to the hilt .. then that's another thing and something that breaks the Terms of Service .. apparently that was what tripped The Daily Stormer .. claiming they had Cloudflare "in their corner".
Hosting content isn't the same as endorsing every word of it. Newspapers print op-eds that run counter to what the editorial board believes. But providing a platform to someone is still a choice, yes.
> By your logic, it seems like cloudflare would have to review the content of every page on every site and only host it if they agree with it.
Nah, what is allowed vs how you enforce it are two different things. Believe it or not, the decision of how to enforce the rules is political too. Nothing about having a ToS that bans certain content necessarily requires pre-review of content any more than the rule that bans phishing sites or pirated movies does.
> You really don't think a neutral position would be to just not care what the content is, and just host everybody regardless who they are, what they believe, etc?
Absolutely it isn't. Declaring that you don't care about offensive hate speech and will not remove it when made aware of it is a choice. It's a deeply political choice. (Also, this is a bit of a straw man: surely you can't "not care what the content is" when something potentially illegal)
I agree that there's always at least some politics in choice/policy/enforcement because for any given value there are going to be people that oppose that value, but I don't think that means we should just embrace the political nature of it all and not try to be as "neutral" as possible. (To be clear I'm not suggesting that you are advocating for this, but I think it is the logical conclusion of accepting that everything is equally political). Some people's politics include free speech absolutism, and others include significant speech limitations, so a largely "we allow all legal speech" is a political stance when viewed that way, though it also strikes me as also the most "neutral" a platform can be, and I think that is mostly coincidental. There are plenty of political parties that disagree on many things for example, yet mostly agree that free speech and ability to express oneself is a good thing.
To be clear, I despise hate speech and I hate when people say offensive things. But trying to define hate speech is a recipe for sadness. The Israel/Palestine conflict has really shown that recently where some people consider it "hate speech" to criticize the government of either side. When it's a company or a newspaper or something, the cost of getting it wrong (either too tight or too loose) is much lower than when it's a platform that controls vast swathes of the public square.
Also, at what level does/should this matter? For example, should ISPs be pulling the plug if the customer has or shares content that they deem to be hate speech? Should power companies cut off electricity to those people?
I fully agree btw that Daily Stormer really messed up by claiming that CF supported them, but CF could have left their website in place and C&D'ed or sued for libel. I don't know what I would have done in their position though. There's a pretty good chance I would have done the same thing they did. It's hard to really know when you aren't in the soup.
(* Though of course that's not really the policy anyway. You probably mean more like, "speech that, in our opinion, is likely to be ruled illegal" right? You're not waiting for someone to bring charges and a court to issue a final ruling. Making that determination isn't so easy. Whose laws are we following on a global internet anyway? Content moderation has no easy answers)