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It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFla

It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy. I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.

jquery 9y ago
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
  - abiox 9y ago
    As far as I can see, you are not correct.
    - wcummings 9y ago
      You must need glasses.
      - sctb 9y ago
        We just asked you to stop violating the guidelines, so we've banned this account.
  - pharrington 9y ago
    Parallel is not equals. edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.
yahna 9y ago
Gee, I hope my site doesn't happen to anger him in some way.
- jay-saint 9y ago
  There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
  - larsiusprime 9y ago
    How about ISIS? http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses-block-service-pro-isis-websites-1495758 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
    - ryan-allen 9y ago
      Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot? They killed _millions_ for arbitrary reasons. What about them?
      - thinkfurther 9y ago
        What about them? How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes?
        ryan-allen 9y ago
        I guess not all murderers and murderous philosophies are created equal, huh?
        rdtsc 9y ago
        > How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes? What does fascists even mean these days? Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend. It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.
mc32 9y ago
Aside from the net neutrality or freedom of expression concerns, I wonder if it just became too costly to host them because of ddoses
- fixermark 9y ago
  That doesn't seem to be the case. It could be hypothetically (Cloudflare certainly has no interest in admitting that there's an upper bound to the DDOS they can mitigate and hackers have found it), but I think the "I remembered I'm a CEO in a country where there is not much restrictive policy on who a company chooses to do business with, and I think even my customers will agree 'Nazis suck and don't deserve a platform'" explanation holds here.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I guess I'm saying that claiming it's taking a moral stand could act as cover for an altogether different motive --because most people would not think of the move as a precedent for what the limits are for speech from an 'inet infra co' but rather as a conscientious CEO who takes a moral stand. I may also be simple coincidence.
zzzcpan 9y ago
Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
- skybrian 9y ago
  It's not black and white, or even shades of gray. Different entities make different decisions about what they'll allow, along multiple dimensions.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- losteric 9y ago
  That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms. Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
  - snakeanus 9y ago
    > That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms. Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however. > Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply. > Perhaps the US should learn from them. Why should it?
    - losteric 9y ago
      Discriminatory hateful speech absolutely limits the freedom of the discriminated group. If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave? Not freely. The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.
baldfat 9y ago
I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.
- imron 9y ago
  And ISIS would want them to do it to the US government and a bunch of other sites. Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side. What happens when they're not?
  - e9 9y ago
    That's the point. That's why it's so important to be careful when you screw with free speech on your own without legal means behind it.
    - imron 9y ago
      Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare. "That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected). And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
      - matt4077 9y ago
        > Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare? They'll switch to one of dozens of alternatives?
        imron 9y ago
        At what cost, and with how much downtime? And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
travmatt 9y ago
Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.
ratsmack 9y ago
I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.
davidreiss 9y ago
> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated. It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move. What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship. The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc". Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
- imron 9y ago
  > The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-dodge-responsibility-facilitating-human-rights-abuses-export https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
- icebraining 9y ago
  Tech companies have been banning and censoring since the start of the commercial Internet. This is not a precedent for anyone except Cloudflare itself.
Iv 9y ago
I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.
- ixtli 9y ago
  You should fear this. And you should acknowledge that owners always have this power and the precedence here isn't going to be what enables them to wield it.
  - graphememes 9y ago
    Yes, fear this, yes, give them more power over your life.
jackmott 9y ago
If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.
- gasof 9y ago
  Boycott, divest and sanction Cloudflare!
drowaway 9y ago
Yeah, at least he should take down also the credit card fraud boards, they are doing real harm. Since the argument is gone, i see no reason not to do that.
gritzko 9y ago
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
- matt4077 9y ago
  ...and then everything was fine–because "slippery slope" isn't actually an argument.
  - Zahreddine 9y ago
    Why not? I've seen it with youtube and reddits censorship on Syria.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - EJTH 9y ago
    Not untill you are the one getting censored, then its a slippery slope again, right? The double standards you guys have. Just fuck my society up fam.
  - gritzko 9y ago
    My comment was intended as a joke mostly, but then I recalled this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_tactics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_tactics > The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]
ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago
no one should have that power, but fuck nazis
sqldba 9y ago
What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to me to be pretty much a pissant little blog. To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended). There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court. But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them? I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either. But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time. I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug. Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down. But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down. So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said. (Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended). I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
- dclowd9901 9y ago
ouid 9y ago
It's not that bizarre. He isn't trying to have it both ways, he'd rather have it the other way, but until that's law, he's forced to have it this way.
Waterluvian 9y ago
Condemn the message, but protect the medium.
axonic 9y ago
Agreed, wholeheartedly
mk89 9y ago
He is a human being after all with his ideas and opinions...
sjellis 9y ago
He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article: "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can." If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
tinus_hn 9y ago
Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.

jquery 9y ago

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
- abiox 9y ago
  As far as I can see, you are not correct.
  - wcummings 9y ago
    You must need glasses.
    - sctb 9y ago
      We just asked you to stop violating the guidelines, so we've banned this account.
- pharrington 9y ago
  Parallel is not equals. edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.

yahna 9y ago

Gee, I hope my site doesn't happen to anger him in some way.

jay-saint 9y ago
There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
- larsiusprime 9y ago
  How about ISIS? http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses-block-service-pro-isis-websites-1495758 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
  - ryan-allen 9y ago
    Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot? They killed _millions_ for arbitrary reasons. What about them?
    - thinkfurther 9y ago
      What about them? How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes?
      - ryan-allen 9y ago
        I guess not all murderers and murderous philosophies are created equal, huh?
      - rdtsc 9y ago
        > How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes? What does fascists even mean these days? Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend. It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.

mc32 9y ago

Aside from the net neutrality or freedom of expression concerns, I wonder if it just became too costly to host them because of ddoses

fixermark 9y ago
That doesn't seem to be the case. It could be hypothetically (Cloudflare certainly has no interest in admitting that there's an upper bound to the DDOS they can mitigate and hackers have found it), but I think the "I remembered I'm a CEO in a country where there is not much restrictive policy on who a company chooses to do business with, and I think even my customers will agree 'Nazis suck and don't deserve a platform'" explanation holds here.
- mc32 9y ago
  I guess I'm saying that claiming it's taking a moral stand could act as cover for an altogether different motive --because most people would not think of the move as a precedent for what the limits are for speech from an 'inet infra co' but rather as a conscientious CEO who takes a moral stand. I may also be simple coincidence.

zzzcpan 9y ago

Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.

skybrian 9y ago
It's not black and white, or even shades of gray. Different entities make different decisions about what they'll allow, along multiple dimensions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
losteric 9y ago
That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms. Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
- snakeanus 9y ago
  > That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms. Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however. > Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply. > Perhaps the US should learn from them. Why should it?
  - losteric 9y ago
    Discriminatory hateful speech absolutely limits the freedom of the discriminated group. If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave? Not freely. The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.

baldfat 9y ago

I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.

imron 9y ago
And ISIS would want them to do it to the US government and a bunch of other sites. Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side. What happens when they're not?
- e9 9y ago
  That's the point. That's why it's so important to be careful when you screw with free speech on your own without legal means behind it.
  - imron 9y ago
    Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare. "That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected). And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
    - matt4077 9y ago
      > Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare? They'll switch to one of dozens of alternatives?
      - imron 9y ago
        At what cost, and with how much downtime? And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

travmatt 9y ago

Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.

ratsmack 9y ago

I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.

davidreiss 9y ago

> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated. It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move. What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship. The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc". Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.

imron 9y ago
> The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-dodge-responsibility-facilitating-human-rights-abuses-export https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
icebraining 9y ago
Tech companies have been banning and censoring since the start of the commercial Internet. This is not a precedent for anyone except Cloudflare itself.

Iv 9y ago

I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.

ixtli 9y ago
You should fear this. And you should acknowledge that owners always have this power and the precedence here isn't going to be what enables them to wield it.
- graphememes 9y ago
  Yes, fear this, yes, give them more power over your life.

jackmott 9y ago

If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.

gasof 9y ago
Boycott, divest and sanction Cloudflare!

drowaway 9y ago

Yeah, at least he should take down also the credit card fraud boards, they are doing real harm. Since the argument is gone, i see no reason not to do that.

gritzko 9y ago

First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.

matt4077 9y ago
...and then everything was fine–because "slippery slope" isn't actually an argument.
- Zahreddine 9y ago
  Why not? I've seen it with youtube and reddits censorship on Syria.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- EJTH 9y ago
  Not untill you are the one getting censored, then its a slippery slope again, right? The double standards you guys have. Just fuck my society up fam.
- gritzko 9y ago
  My comment was intended as a joke mostly, but then I recalled this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_tactics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_tactics > The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]

ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago

no one should have that power, but fuck nazis

sqldba 9y ago

What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to me to be pretty much a pissant little blog. To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended). There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court. But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them? I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either. But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time. I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug. Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down. But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down. So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said. (Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
madeofpalk 9y ago
> I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended). I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
dclowd9901 9y ago

ouid 9y ago

It's not that bizarre. He isn't trying to have it both ways, he'd rather have it the other way, but until that's law, he's forced to have it this way.

Waterluvian 9y ago

Condemn the message, but protect the medium.

axonic 9y ago

Agreed, wholeheartedly

mk89 9y ago

He is a human being after all with his ideas and opinions...

sjellis 9y ago

He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article: "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can." If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.

tinus_hn 9y ago

Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.