16 ms·

‘Daily Stormer’ Termination Haunts Cloudflare in Online Piracy Case

159 points by vespian 9y ago

dawnbreez 9y ago
Regardless of the political causes in question, it's nice to see that the CEO is being held accountable. And he seems to be a responsible person, judging by the concern he expressed over his own actions. It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. It's much harder to explain why we really should stop and think before trying to enact vigilante justice. This is one of the reasons why; vigilante justice is hard to enforce equally and fairly, and raises the question of how impartial and fair the vigilante is.
- gragas 9y ago
  >It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. That seems to be the meme of the decade. Do you think all republicans are Nazis too? You're living in a bubble. Think for yourself.
- icebraining 9y ago
  This doesn't seem to be the CEO being held accountable, seems to be another group who wants to razzle-dazzle the court by taking his words out of context.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".
      - Tech-Noir 9y ago
        Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism. Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.
      - 21 9y ago
        The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them. https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assisting-pirate-sites-160823/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...
        icebraining 9y ago
        Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.
- Clubber 9y ago
  >It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. We fought the Nazis in 1941-1945. These guys aren't Nazis, they're angry, misguided white people trying to look tough. Why is this an important distinction? If we as a society are going to upend core values and norms, we need to have a damn good reason. If I were a cynic (which I sometimes am), I would say this guy was trying to ride a political wave and it is now biting him (and us) in the ass. DCMA takedown without a warrant is bad for everybody. It sounds like there is a decent chance he just squandered that to score a political point that no one will remember 6 months from now. Politics and business don't mix, regardless of how much of a "slam dunk" it seems.
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    I'm a german who spent 6+ years of his school life continuously learning about nazis, lived for the first 25 years of his life in a town where i saw people in nazi attire on my way home or shopping every single day and always kept a key ring at the read, and is from a voting district that voted 20%+ for a party whose leadership explicitly hires neo nazis as security for demonstrations, a town where the lamp posts on the 200m way from my apartment to the shopping centers call for violence against foreigners. And i have to say: Those guys are nazis. They believe in fascism being the good and right way of the world. They hate people who're unlike them. Don't try to sugarcoat them.
    - olivermarks 9y ago
      The central issue here is 'content neutrality'. Prince the Cloudflare CEO is an attorney so he knew what he was saying when he disabled the dns. There are huge numbers of people with strong political beliefs of all persuasions out there, including the racist isolationist nationalists you have to co exist alongside. In the US society where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, it is a very slippery slope to suppress that right to speech. I grew up alongside lots of violent skinheads in the UK (and got knocked about by them unless I ran very fast). I am absolutely for protecting free speech, because for every apparently clear cut case of reprehensible online behavior - racism, child abuse, snuff videos etc - there is someone else with a legitamate voice who will be suppressed. Here is an example - syriangirl, who has been removed from Facebook. https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g Speking via youtube on a channel called russianinsider' The lifeblood of democracy is free speech. We've ignored extremist dialog for decades, if we suppress it we glamorize it and it goes underground, not away. Allowing free speech means the ability to argue with people about their views as 'rock against racism' in the UK during the 70's proved before the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism That popular movement was inclusive to all and celebrated the anomaly that English skins loved jamaican ska and reggae. It pulled people to together and humiliated the far right fringe...
tryingagainbro 9y ago
“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,” He should be FIRED by the board. Decisions on what speech to ban should be decided by an ethics committee not by a guy that awoke up on the wrong side of the bed. Because such decisions have consequences, major ones. edit: "Ban" was supposed to be keep off their network...and I understand the difference between state and private actions. State can't but private companies can.
- eugeniub 9y ago
  He's not banning the speech lol he's not the government.
  - tryingagainbro 9y ago
    Good thing you lol-d at least. Now the lawsuit isn't it because they chose what to keep in their network ad what to boot? In other words, they editorialized. he's not the government. I know, I guess he can legally ban the, say, the Democratic point of view out of his network. But it a wise move?
nebabyte 9y ago
> “By his own admissions, Mr. Prince’s decision to terminate certain users’ accounts was ‘arbitrary,’ the result of him waking up ‘in a bad mood,’ and a decision he made unilaterally as ‘CEO of a major Internet infrastructure corporation’ I'm actually amazed that's from the press release they put out.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I'm actually amazed that's from the press release they put out. It's not, though. It's from an internal email that was leaked.
alecco 9y ago
Besides the politics, this was a very stupid move by Cloudflare. Cloudflare set up a limit to what they allow or not so now they will have to fight where that limit is. It can become death by a thousand papercuts. It'll start from the most controversial ones like child stuff and revenge porn. Then will keep moving, scandal by scandal. Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant (e.g. nazis/terrorists), but who decides what belongs in that category is a huge problem that shouldn't be in the hands of a private tech company. See how Google/YouTube/Twitter did mass bans and ended up including people like Jordan Peterson.
- hacking_again 9y ago
  > It'll start... keep moving... ended up slippery slope
- slg 9y ago
  It is naive to think this battle wasn't going to eventually come to Cloudfare or the Internet as a whole. The US has some of the most extreme laws on allowing free speech and there is still plenty of stuff that we don't allow. Humanity has decided there are just some things that shouldn't be said or shared. Child porn is the most obvious example. Once you go from 100% free speech in which anyone can say anything to disallowing a single thing, you have to start defending where that line is. I don't think that is bad. I also think it may be a dangerous thing for the technolibertarians in our community to continue pushing for 100% free speech as if it is an ideal state because it doesn't account for how negative speech can silence the speech and infringe on the rights of others.
  - pfortuny 9y ago
    That is what the judicial branch of the State is for: if someone has a problem with some kind of content, he can go and denounce it. The other possibility is just chaos and vigilante justice. Which is what the CEO of Cloudflare did.
    - slg 9y ago
      The idea that the owner of a business can not set any rules above the bare minimum legally is a little silly. Do you think an expensive restaurant should be able to deny service to a guy who comes in shirtless even though it is completely legal for him to walk around like that? Is that vigilante justice? Both the legal system and businesses need to draw lines. We can't pretend those lines don't exist or that 100% free speech is some ideal natural state. Once those line are drawn it is only natural for there to be debate about them. I think frequently debating and reassessing those lines is healthy.
moomin 9y ago
Booting Daily Stormer has definitely caused problems in their case, but let's be real here: 1) DS hasn't in fact been kicked off the Internet. 2) There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi. 3) DS hasn't engaged in the kind of identity-cloaking whack-a-mole so beloved of copyright infringers. I'm sure any competent lawyer could add another 20 points off the top of their head. In short, yeah it complicates the case, but the fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.
- cm2187 9y ago
  I think the main impact is that I had never heard of that website before cloudlfare took that decision. Massive publicity.
- tomp 9y ago
  > There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi. There is indeed. One is illegal.
  - whyever 9y ago
    Possibly infringing, is not illegal, infringing is.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - na85 9y ago
    Correct. Nazism is illegal in some jurisdictions.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- blfr 9y ago
  DS has in fact been kicked off the Internet although not by Cloudflare (replaced with BitMitigate[1]) but by registrars/registries. They are currently on their nth domain name and these keep getting yanked. What I wonder about is why they're not using a .us domain. Its operators should be bound by the US first amendment since they derive their monopoly from the USG. Maybe it's an elaborate troll. Especially since they're now on .cat. Either way, the abandonment of free speech on the Internet by the companies which benefited the most from it is very worrisome. [1] https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html
aaron695 9y ago
I really like the fact he said I'm being a dick and it's a dick move but it still was at the end of the day a dick move. Cred for saying it, it's better than most companies but still he kowtowed on such a important decision, freedom of speech and will the Valley uphold it and failed. Little sympathy really should be given. Just cred for calling it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kevmo 9y ago
This isn't that haunting. It's just another iteration of well-funded standard lawyer games. CEO foresaw this kind of stuff before he undertook the action. If you're looking for a sympathetic plaintiff, Nazis aren't a good place to hang your hat.
- cabaalis 9y ago
  > If you're looking for a sympathetic plaintiff, Nazis aren't a good place to hang your hat. Perhaps not a popular choice, but the constitution and bill of rights did not have an "unless you're a nazi" clause.
  - rs999gti 9y ago
    Don't know why you're downvoted. But you're right, the First Amendment protects all speech even vile and hateful speech. If people don't like that type of speech, then just pay it no mind. It doesn't really affect you unless you go looking for it.
  - kevmo 9y ago
    I agree, but you're still gonna have better odds with someone the judge doesn't feel like shit for siding with. A good example of this concept is Rosa Parks. She was not the first person arrested on the bus seat charge by any means, but the NAACP had been hunting for a likable lead plaintiff simply because convincing judges/public relations are a lot easier with somebody people should like. So while I personally agree with free speech, judges are generally not going to want to hang their logic's hat on defending Nazis. Empowering Nazis doesn't feel like good policy. The justice system is a messy place and lacks the exactitude of computer code. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is. FWIW, sources are personal experience: Law school, clerked for two federal judges, run a legal tech nonprofit. Interesting additional reading on this subject is Karl Llewellyn's "Dueling Canons" article. Basically, it argues that judges decide what they wanna do, THEN figure out their logic to get there. http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/files/llewellyn_on_canons.pdf http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/files/llewellyn_on_...
    - 9y ago
toomuchtodo 9y ago
Called it in the Daily Stormer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
baby 9y ago
Props to Cloudflare for evicting DS and dealing with subsequent bullshit. Some people might think it's a bad move, I'll just say I'm glad you guys acted.
refurb 9y ago
This is one of those unintended consequences that highlight the value of good legal representation. CEO shuts down website lickity split, but then claims in court he can't stop a piracy site. I've had this happen before at work where legal has told me "if you ask that question it will come back to bite us since if something bad comes up, it will show we knew nefarious behavior was happening. Better to not ask at all."
lern_too_spel 9y ago
Where were these "free speech" activists when ISIS recruiters' online accounts were shut down? It's different when the lives endangered by violence-inciting speech include your own. Germany learned a lesson on violent speech after the Holocaust, but many in the US keep their heads in the sand despite the violent oppression of blacks and gays in recent history. I blame it on the religion of Libertarianism, which promotes the nonsensical belief that the invisible hand is benevolent.

159 points by vespian 9y ago

Regardless of the political causes in question, it's nice to see that the CEO is being held accountable. And he seems to be a responsible person, judging by the concern he expressed over his own actions. It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. It's much harder to explain why we really should stop and think before trying to enact vigilante justice. This is one of the reasons why; vigilante justice is hard to enforce equally and fairly, and raises the question of how impartial and fair the vigilante is.

gragas 9y ago
>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. That seems to be the meme of the decade. Do you think all republicans are Nazis too? You're living in a bubble. Think for yourself.
icebraining 9y ago
This doesn't seem to be the CEO being held accountable, seems to be another group who wants to razzle-dazzle the court by taking his words out of context.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".
    - Tech-Noir 9y ago
      Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism. Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.
    - 21 9y ago
      The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them. https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assisting-pirate-sites-160823/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.
Clubber 9y ago
>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. We fought the Nazis in 1941-1945. These guys aren't Nazis, they're angry, misguided white people trying to look tough. Why is this an important distinction? If we as a society are going to upend core values and norms, we need to have a damn good reason. If I were a cynic (which I sometimes am), I would say this guy was trying to ride a political wave and it is now biting him (and us) in the ass. DCMA takedown without a warrant is bad for everybody. It sounds like there is a decent chance he just squandered that to score a political point that no one will remember 6 months from now. Politics and business don't mix, regardless of how much of a "slam dunk" it seems.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  I'm a german who spent 6+ years of his school life continuously learning about nazis, lived for the first 25 years of his life in a town where i saw people in nazi attire on my way home or shopping every single day and always kept a key ring at the read, and is from a voting district that voted 20%+ for a party whose leadership explicitly hires neo nazis as security for demonstrations, a town where the lamp posts on the 200m way from my apartment to the shopping centers call for violence against foreigners. And i have to say: Those guys are nazis. They believe in fascism being the good and right way of the world. They hate people who're unlike them. Don't try to sugarcoat them.
  - olivermarks 9y ago
    The central issue here is 'content neutrality'. Prince the Cloudflare CEO is an attorney so he knew what he was saying when he disabled the dns. There are huge numbers of people with strong political beliefs of all persuasions out there, including the racist isolationist nationalists you have to co exist alongside. In the US society where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, it is a very slippery slope to suppress that right to speech. I grew up alongside lots of violent skinheads in the UK (and got knocked about by them unless I ran very fast). I am absolutely for protecting free speech, because for every apparently clear cut case of reprehensible online behavior - racism, child abuse, snuff videos etc - there is someone else with a legitamate voice who will be suppressed. Here is an example - syriangirl, who has been removed from Facebook. https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g Speking via youtube on a channel called russianinsider' The lifeblood of democracy is free speech. We've ignored extremist dialog for decades, if we suppress it we glamorize it and it goes underground, not away. Allowing free speech means the ability to argue with people about their views as 'rock against racism' in the UK during the 70's proved before the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism That popular movement was inclusive to all and celebrated the anomaly that English skins loved jamaican ska and reggae. It pulled people to together and humiliated the far right fringe...

tryingagainbro 9y ago

“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,” He should be FIRED by the board. Decisions on what speech to ban should be decided by an ethics committee not by a guy that awoke up on the wrong side of the bed. Because such decisions have consequences, major ones. edit: "Ban" was supposed to be keep off their network...and I understand the difference between state and private actions. State can't but private companies can.

eugeniub 9y ago
He's not banning the speech lol he's not the government.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago
  Good thing you lol-d at least. Now the lawsuit isn't it because they chose what to keep in their network ad what to boot? In other words, they editorialized. he's not the government. I know, I guess he can legally ban the, say, the Democratic point of view out of his network. But it a wise move?

nebabyte 9y ago

> “By his own admissions, Mr. Prince’s decision to terminate certain users’ accounts was ‘arbitrary,’ the result of him waking up ‘in a bad mood,’ and a decision he made unilaterally as ‘CEO of a major Internet infrastructure corporation’ I'm actually amazed that's from the press release they put out.

icebraining 9y ago
I'm actually amazed that's from the press release they put out. It's not, though. It's from an internal email that was leaked.

alecco 9y ago

Besides the politics, this was a very stupid move by Cloudflare. Cloudflare set up a limit to what they allow or not so now they will have to fight where that limit is. It can become death by a thousand papercuts. It'll start from the most controversial ones like child stuff and revenge porn. Then will keep moving, scandal by scandal. Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant (e.g. nazis/terrorists), but who decides what belongs in that category is a huge problem that shouldn't be in the hands of a private tech company. See how Google/YouTube/Twitter did mass bans and ended up including people like Jordan Peterson.

hacking_again 9y ago
> It'll start... keep moving... ended up slippery slope
slg 9y ago
It is naive to think this battle wasn't going to eventually come to Cloudfare or the Internet as a whole. The US has some of the most extreme laws on allowing free speech and there is still plenty of stuff that we don't allow. Humanity has decided there are just some things that shouldn't be said or shared. Child porn is the most obvious example. Once you go from 100% free speech in which anyone can say anything to disallowing a single thing, you have to start defending where that line is. I don't think that is bad. I also think it may be a dangerous thing for the technolibertarians in our community to continue pushing for 100% free speech as if it is an ideal state because it doesn't account for how negative speech can silence the speech and infringe on the rights of others.
- pfortuny 9y ago
  That is what the judicial branch of the State is for: if someone has a problem with some kind of content, he can go and denounce it. The other possibility is just chaos and vigilante justice. Which is what the CEO of Cloudflare did.
  - slg 9y ago
    The idea that the owner of a business can not set any rules above the bare minimum legally is a little silly. Do you think an expensive restaurant should be able to deny service to a guy who comes in shirtless even though it is completely legal for him to walk around like that? Is that vigilante justice? Both the legal system and businesses need to draw lines. We can't pretend those lines don't exist or that 100% free speech is some ideal natural state. Once those line are drawn it is only natural for there to be debate about them. I think frequently debating and reassessing those lines is healthy.

moomin 9y ago

Booting Daily Stormer has definitely caused problems in their case, but let's be real here: 1) DS hasn't in fact been kicked off the Internet. 2) There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi. 3) DS hasn't engaged in the kind of identity-cloaking whack-a-mole so beloved of copyright infringers. I'm sure any competent lawyer could add another 20 points off the top of their head. In short, yeah it complicates the case, but the fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.

cm2187 9y ago
I think the main impact is that I had never heard of that website before cloudlfare took that decision. Massive publicity.
tomp 9y ago
> There's a huge difference between being a _possible_ copyright infringer and a _declared_ Nazi. There is indeed. One is illegal.
- whyever 9y ago
  Possibly infringing, is not illegal, infringing is.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- na85 9y ago
  Correct. Nazism is illegal in some jurisdictions.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
blfr 9y ago
DS has in fact been kicked off the Internet although not by Cloudflare (replaced with BitMitigate[1]) but by registrars/registries. They are currently on their nth domain name and these keep getting yanked. What I wonder about is why they're not using a .us domain. Its operators should be bound by the US first amendment since they derive their monopoly from the USG. Maybe it's an elaborate troll. Especially since they're now on .cat. Either way, the abandonment of free speech on the Internet by the companies which benefited the most from it is very worrisome. [1] https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html

aaron695 9y ago

I really like the fact he said I'm being a dick and it's a dick move but it still was at the end of the day a dick move. Cred for saying it, it's better than most companies but still he kowtowed on such a important decision, freedom of speech and will the Valley uphold it and failed. Little sympathy really should be given. Just cred for calling it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kevmo 9y ago

This isn't that haunting. It's just another iteration of well-funded standard lawyer games. CEO foresaw this kind of stuff before he undertook the action. If you're looking for a sympathetic plaintiff, Nazis aren't a good place to hang your hat.

cabaalis 9y ago
> If you're looking for a sympathetic plaintiff, Nazis aren't a good place to hang your hat. Perhaps not a popular choice, but the constitution and bill of rights did not have an "unless you're a nazi" clause.
- rs999gti 9y ago
  Don't know why you're downvoted. But you're right, the First Amendment protects all speech even vile and hateful speech. If people don't like that type of speech, then just pay it no mind. It doesn't really affect you unless you go looking for it.
- kevmo 9y ago
  I agree, but you're still gonna have better odds with someone the judge doesn't feel like shit for siding with. A good example of this concept is Rosa Parks. She was not the first person arrested on the bus seat charge by any means, but the NAACP had been hunting for a likable lead plaintiff simply because convincing judges/public relations are a lot easier with somebody people should like. So while I personally agree with free speech, judges are generally not going to want to hang their logic's hat on defending Nazis. Empowering Nazis doesn't feel like good policy. The justice system is a messy place and lacks the exactitude of computer code. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is. FWIW, sources are personal experience: Law school, clerked for two federal judges, run a legal tech nonprofit. Interesting additional reading on this subject is Karl Llewellyn's "Dueling Canons" article. Basically, it argues that judges decide what they wanna do, THEN figure out their logic to get there. http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/files/llewellyn_on_canons.pdf http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/files/llewellyn_on_...
  - 9y ago

toomuchtodo 9y ago

Called it in the Daily Stormer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

baby 9y ago

Props to Cloudflare for evicting DS and dealing with subsequent bullshit. Some people might think it's a bad move, I'll just say I'm glad you guys acted.

refurb 9y ago

This is one of those unintended consequences that highlight the value of good legal representation. CEO shuts down website lickity split, but then claims in court he can't stop a piracy site. I've had this happen before at work where legal has told me "if you ask that question it will come back to bite us since if something bad comes up, it will show we knew nefarious behavior was happening. Better to not ask at all."

lern_too_spel 9y ago

Where were these "free speech" activists when ISIS recruiters' online accounts were shut down? It's different when the lives endangered by violence-inciting speech include your own. Germany learned a lesson on violent speech after the Holocaust, but many in the US keep their heads in the sand despite the violent oppression of blacks and gays in recent history. I blame it on the religion of Libertarianism, which promotes the nonsensical belief that the invisible hand is benevolent.