CloudFlare Forced to Censor Anti-Censorship Site | Hacker News Reader

CloudFlare Forced to Censor Anti-Censorship Site

torrentfreak.com

50 pointsparalelogram5 comments

The United States has a threat intelligence system with patterns of malicious activity including malware and cyber attacks.

This threat intelligence system is also used to specify patterns of foreign propaganda. However, similar to the story above, patterns that are too broad can silence legitimate speech by citizens.

An example of this is stopfasttrack.com. Their domain name was similar to Russian propaganda, so then the switch was flipped to censor the Russian domain from Facebook, Twitter and popular email providers, their site was caught in the net as well.

They posted to Reddit about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/duplicates/38pmg8/hey_re...

(The US government and NATO use the terms 'troll' and 'spam' as synonyms for foreign online propaganda)

SPAM has a clear definition, and I don't think you will find anyone anywhere who disagrees that it needs to be blocked.

But "troll" is hard to put an objective lid on. If I try to argue science to antivaxxers I may be labeled a troll. If I try to oppose HTML DRM because I believe it's bad for the internet, some people will label me a troll for that.

If I enter a Muslim internet forum and insist that Muhammed was a pedophile, I may have my facts straight, but it will be hard to argue that I'm anything but trolling.

So where do you draw the line on troll? Who decides what troll can be censored? This sounds extremely shady, and if I may raise the conspiracy flag, intentionally open to interpretation.

It's a good question, but I think there's a pretty clear distinction between propaganda and trolling that is not just intent but has to do with the 'spin' of the information. The same vagaries that would allow the US to block a 'troll' from Russia - if they could not tell that it was propaganda - would cause them to block similar misgivings from the American population. This isn't the case. They can attribute propaganda to its progenitor. They use the label 'troll' and 'spam' for political reasons and reasons of civil affairs. However these terms are dishonest.

Any lawyers help me out here - if there is a legitimate concern of censorship of parties that clearly shouldn't be affected - and CloudFlare refused to comply - wouldn't someone have to take them to court where they could argue their case?

I don't think you can refuse to comply with an injunction unless you're willing to go to jail. You can challenge it, probably, but in the meantime you have to comply. IANAL

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