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Comment by elAhmo | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, and please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents of flamewar tangents.

You may not owe $CEO better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

All of this should be clear if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html recently.

I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.

> And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.

Read the tweet a 3rd time. Free Speech is mentioned in Paragraph 4 when he's thanking Vance and Musk. It's highlighted in Blue. It's a Hashtag.

seems perfectly reasonable for a country of any size to exercise this sort of power within their own borders

the US constitution doesn't apply worldwide

if Petulant Prince doesn't like it: he can leave

Emphasis on global blocks. Meaning everywhere in the world.

He is mentioning Vance and Musk as beacons of democracy and free speech.

Did you and I read different tweets?

"While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" and "in this case @ElonMusk is right" are not how you talk about beacons.

Please read the entire tweet. Free speech is mentioned at character number 1779.

I cannot believe this is the first time that Cloudflare has been confronted by a local government which asked to perform "global" filtering of content. It is clear for anyone who has worked with bureaucrats that their "global" means "within our jurisdiction". It is extremely weird that he feels emboldened to publicly lash out like this and pull in people who are extremely unpopular in Europe.

You keep saying this, but 'global' has never meant 'in my jurisdiction' in any conversation or document I've ever read. What additional information can you provide the confirms your interpretation is correct?

> obviously an idiot praising Vance's and Elon's actions

He praised their opinions on free speech. You should be able to differentiate a single opinion objectively from the people holding them.

He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.

His idea of free speech does not include critical reporting. The wider US government is trying to shut down the BBC with a lawsuit or has public officials threaten individual journalists to their face, basically nothing is too large or too small.

> He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.

Horrible stuff. I agree. His statement about free speech in the EU, when removed from him as a person, is still true. Progressive media sources agree [1]. If both aisles, as well as European free speech activists, think something is going horribly wrong in Europe, we should listen.

[1]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...

In Spain the LaLiga CEO, Tebas (Soccer association, they are legally fighting against Cloudflare and doing MITM's everwhere) isn't very different in that case (Francoist far right supporter).

Oof, Cloudflare has been one of the most interesting tech companies for me, and one I would have worked for in a heartbeat. But the MAGA pandering in this tweet is quite disappointing. I get it, running a large business in the US these days requires a certain amount of bootlicking, but still. And I say this while generally agreeing with Matthew's stance.

The "haters" who long ago have warned about the risk of Cloudflare MITM'ing global website traffic have been proven right. In the end, Cloudflare is another mass surveillance tool next to Meta/Google/Apple which will be weaponized in the interests of the current US administration.

I hope people go take a look at previous statements by MP/JGC (to be fair, no longer affiliated) with this in mind - I have always found them to be just as degrading and whiny as this announcement reads.

Every time any of these CEOs see even the mildest of pushback, the mask just fully falls off and you see them immediately run to the worst people on the planet.

I feel for his chief legal counsel who must be crying in their office right now. In the US, courts have been deactivated for MAGA-aligned rich people, but Cloudflare CEO is so stupid to assume that the same has happened in Italy. The arrogance and ignorance is astounding.

Nobody gets to these positions unless they're a complete sociopath who've long lost touch with reality. Just listen to anything thiel, musk, altman, vance and other degenerates have to say, some animals display more humanity than these golems

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