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Terminating Service for 8Chan

• whatshisface 7y ago
  Another way to view this would be, "Cloudflare ends support for mass shooting early warning system."
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    This. Having this content out in the open means we can monitor it. I totally get why Cloudflare would not want to do business with 8Chan, but every step towards pushing 8Chan and it's members underground is less visibility into the kind of people who operate on the site.
    • barryhoodlum 7y ago
      Having it out in the open also attracts the users in the first place.
      • dmix 7y ago
        How exactly is this stopping them? They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
        • sagichmal 7y ago
          > How exactly is this stopping them? It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
          • dmix 7y ago
            So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? And not instead just pushing them further and further into their ideological bubbles (complete with a new self-fulfilled victim complex) on platforms where they are the only ones and they get to police their own wrongthink? Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too. I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
            • deleted 7y ago
              [deleted]
            • sagichmal 7y ago
              > So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? Yep! And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
              • dmix 7y ago
                This is assuming it's not still on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and whatever other chans are left.
                • sagichmal 7y ago
                  This is allowing perfection to be the enemy of the good. It's not necessary for an action to completely solve a problem to make it worth doing, it's OK if the action just helps.
            • anigbrowl 7y ago
              Yeah, absolutely. It's a numbers game, just the same as bombing your opponent's barracks or airfields in a conventional war. It doesn't wipe out their capacity but it degrades their infrastructure and communications. I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum. They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
        • madamelic 7y ago
          >There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough. 8chan totally still exists. All CloudFlare did was essentially erase the link between their IP and "8chan.org". It took them probably 15 minutes to "go back up", if they hadn't already been abandoning CF anyway.
        • anigbrowl 7y ago
          It was all over Twitter yesterday because it was short enough to render as 4 image files.
    • Untit1ed 7y ago
      Less visibility for those not already on it looking to join in too though. If it gets forced so far underground that law enforcement can't figure out a way in I don't see how some disaffected youth somewhere could either.
      • whatshisface 7y ago
        It's not that it would go too underground for law enforcement to find it, it's that it would be limited to terrorist cell networks that mass shooters don't even post in.
      • madamelic 7y ago
        >If it gets forced so far underground that law enforcement can't figure out a way in I don't see how some disaffected youth somewhere could either. You massively overestimate law enforcement interest and ability, and massively underestimate the technical abilities of teenagers.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      Yes, but 8ch users have been expecting this since Christchurch, and in any case chan culture has a long history of people on one site raiding an other and causing it to collapse with DDOS or contraband or whatever. It's not hard for people who regularly monitor it to figure out where people will move to.
  • jrockway 7y ago
    Yeah, the NSA reads all of our internet traffic but they don't pick up on this?
    • cromwellian 7y ago
      Did you read the killer's message? It amounted to "Tomorrows the day!" With no actionable information otherwise.
      • briantakita 7y ago
        Perhaps the authorities will closely monitor people who make obscure & dramatic claims online. There's probably an effective scoring system & NLP in place anyways. We think "social credit" only applies to China...
        • wallace_f 7y ago
          I don't get it, either. Even New Zealand deep-state spy bureaucrats followed around a pro-democracy protestor just to win some favor with the Fijian government. These systems are already abused like this. The Intercept runs a series called Trial and Terror where they pick up on people like this so we know they are doing it. How is NZ following around a pro-democracy protestor and not the NZ shooter? Let's hope it is incompetence. Source, btw: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveillance-fullman-fiji/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...
          • briantakita 7y ago
            > Let's hope it is incompetence Indeed. The scary proposition is that it's competence.
    • fl0wenol 7y ago
      It's not their job? And you really, _really_, don't want it to be.
  • bitlax 7y ago
    They state in the notice that 8Chan will likely just use a Cloudflare competitor, so you're in luck I suppose.
  • arkitaip 7y ago
    Has a mass shooting ever been prevented due to 8chan?
    • rdl 7y ago
      At least one. On balance it would be hard to argue 8chan being easily accessible reduces violence, though.
    • UnpossibleJim 7y ago
      They don't tend to advertise the means by which they stop terrorist activities that are still in use, to be honest. If you had the best honey trap in the world, would you go on the television and announce it?
  • IvyMike 7y ago
    This sounds flippant, but in all seriousness: Has that been working out?
  • VikingCoder 7y ago
    Warnings are only effective if people act on them.
    • moate 7y ago
      Right, and in order for that to happen they have to be actionable. If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a very pro-big government belief structure). 8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.
  • bentona 7y ago
    Seems like Cloudflare CEO can't decide whether he wants to truly be content-neutral. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-has-a-plan-to-never-censor-hate-speech-again/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-... Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
    • libria 7y ago
      > The problem was that other Cloudflare customers started calling and threatening to cancel their service if Cloudflare didn't cut the Daily Stormer off. "The pressure to take it down just kept building and building," [the CEO] told Ars. [...] "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet," So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
      • ivl 7y ago
        > Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
        • jstreicher 7y ago
          > named after Storm troopers. Actually it's named after this publication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stürmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stürmer
      • yesco 7y ago
        >So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" _aside_ _from_... So not a "free speech absolutist"
  • cromwellian 7y ago
    Except the warnings are anonymous, and don't mention who, when, or where. What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people. When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology. It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds. I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
    • ivl 7y ago
      > What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people. This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
      • 7y ago
  • mythz 7y ago
    That's a pretty warped view, 8chan is the support system for radicals which in all likelyhood gives them the motivation to commit mass murder since they have an audience to play to and support for their demented views. As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      Motivation is part of it, but there's also an extensive practical support system that provides advice on technique, target selection, troubleshooting and so on. That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
  • Kaveren 7y ago
    Political *chan culture drives mass shootings in the first place by radicalizing antisocial people more. You'd likely have fewer mass shootings you'd need early warning about in the first place.
  • taneq 7y ago
    “Trying to destroy an ant nest with a leaf blower”, like when Reddit shut down some of their more cesspooly subs.
    • acdha 7y ago
      There was a study on that which suggests that pithy quips might not be the best source of advice: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
• krackers 7y ago
  I thought they had just stated they weren't going to end suport: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607945
  • jrockway 7y ago
    People can change their minds. Looks like they did.
  • r721 7y ago
    Thread: https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1158188641946165248 https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1158188641946165248
  • doctorpangloss 7y ago
    Yes, but Cloudflare needs talented engineers, and talented engineers don’t sign up to serve clients like 8chan. Software doesn’t run on one person’s contrarian politics.
    • ng12 7y ago
      I think you'd find a great many talented engineers don't share the same politics you do, and an even greater number who are far too apolitical for it to factor into their job search.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Most of us work for whomever pays top dollar, regardless of politics.
      • zorpner 7y ago
        I think more engineers are realizing that if you've been working for Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe now (or depending on how they act, maybe not) Cloudflare it severely curtails your future opportunities, both as an employee and socially.
        • deleted 7y ago
• thinkingkong 7y ago
  Its important that a company distances themselves from this type of behaviour but even slightly spinning it as action against something is disingenuous at best. So much more needs to happen to really address these problems and Im fairly confident a cdn isnt the make or break for shootings in America.
• Lazare 7y ago
  On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or discussed. As the great John Gilmore said, more aspirationally than accurately even then: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit. Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
  • sysbin 7y ago
    >Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for. Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed. I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means. Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
    • untog 7y ago
      > Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions Maybe it won't! I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
• futureastronaut 7y ago
  > we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design What does "lawless by design" mean?
  • Jerry2 7y ago
    > What does "lawless by design" mean? It's a euphemism for sites that are not censored and still allow free speech. Matthew Prince used to support freedom of speech but he's abandoned that concept a while back.
  • ufo 7y ago
    4chan banned some of its more disgusting users, and they migrated to 8chan. By design it is a hate-speech echo chamber (aka "free speech zone")
  • NikkiA 7y ago
    8chan claims not to be able to ban content because of the way they are set up, as such they have no real control even over people running pedo boards. That is pretty obviously 'lawless by design'.
    • 55555 7y ago
      > 8chan claims not to be able to ban content because of the way they are set up How is this implemented?
      • NikkiA 7y ago
        The only people that can ban content are the board owners. Sure I imagine they could go db diving and ban content manually, but they don't want to.
      • duskwuff 7y ago
        > How is this implemented? By throwing up their hands and claiming that it's too hard to implement. 8ch is not running a highly sophisticated software stack. (Quite honestly, their code [1] is pretty terrible -- it's a bunch of frameworkless, hacked-together PHP.) Nothing about their setup is especially elaborate or unusual; at best, "we can't ban content" is an admission of their incompetence. [1]: https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB
• sagichmal 7y ago
  > Removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”. They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.
  • wbl 7y ago
    Cloudflare wasn't hosting them. NT technologies was, and still is.
    • selectodude 7y ago
      Yeah but now they can be DDoS’d.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Punishable as a federal crime (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or 18 U.S.C. §1030).
        • cududa 7y ago
          Yeah a prosecutor is definitely going to try that case lol
          • toomuchtodo 7y ago
            Prosecutors plea bargain slam dunk cases all the time.
            • tedivm 7y ago
              DDoSes are rarely prosecuted as the perpetrators are rarely caught. This is even more true when the DDoS is done by large groups of people (such as the scientology attacks a decade or so ago). Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution
• icpmacdo 7y ago
  "the speed with which tech cos change after a bad PR cycle seems like solid proof that none of this is abt principles but abt trying to keep from making hard choices as long as possible. earlier today they argued that keeping 8chan within its network is a “moral obligation”" https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1158193462459506693 https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1158193462459506693
  • Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Cloudflare in the past was a staunch defender of free speech when people tried to get them to take down a website that was an outlet for pro-ISIS propaganda (I think the quote from the CEO was "A website is speech. It is not a bomb"). When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
    • 420codebro 7y ago
      I think it is funny (inconsistent) how one Jew-hating crowd is cool in their eyes, while another Jew-hating crowd is totally unacceptable.
  • deogeo 7y ago
    That they abandoned those principles due to PR pressure does not mean it was not about principles. I dislike such motivated, deceitful arguments.
    • nitwit005 7y ago
      You're arguing that their abandonment of their principles, was due to principles.
      • deogeo 7y ago
        Not even close. I am arguing that they have principles, but compromised on them due to too high a cost. What kind of tortured logic do you need to employ where one can only claim to have principles if they hold on to them no matter the cost?
• rollinDyno 7y ago
  Why does Cloudflare feel the need to take action here? Only a minority believe that 8chan is the culprit in creating these gunmen, and fewer people have called for Cloudflare specifically to shutdown 8chan. By staying idle the conversation would've moved onto gun control, but now they're going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.
  • latch 7y ago
    > Why does Cloudflare feel the need to take action here? The linked article gives their reason.
  • Kaveren 7y ago
    Political discussion happens all the time on Hacker News, but you don't see many mass shooters from HN. Culture of the online communities matters a lot (and moderation). I don't think chans create gunmen per se, but they assist to radicalize antisocial young men. I don't think anything is gained from political discussion on *chans. Free speech is important, and no company should be legally punished for providing these spaces, but that doesn't mean discouraging them from existing is wrong.
  • Lazare 7y ago
    See here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-mass-shootings-this-year-began-with-hateful-screed-chan-its-founder-calls-it-terrorist-refuge-plain-sight/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-m... There is an article in the Washington Post about how they're not taking action, and quotes from activists about how they need to take action. Their general counsel had to answer questions from a journalist (on a weekend!) about whether they were taking action. That constitutes significant pressure. Further, as the article helpfully mentions, they took action before. After you take action once, a failure to take action a second time stops being a principled "we never take action", and starts being, at least partially, a defence of the target. If you drop the Daily Stormer but not 8chan, you're saying, implicitly, that 8chan is not as bad as the Daily Stormer. This may or may not be true, but it's absolutely not a discussion a company wants to have in the national media in the context of the aftermath of a mass shooting. > By staying idle Arguably that was never an option. Today, it's absolutely not an option.
• ratsmack 7y ago
  Like I stated here[1], it seems a bit hypocritical for them to cancel service to 8chan when some of the large sites have been complicit also. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607635
• umvi 7y ago
  It would be better if cloudflare terminated service for all media outlets. Every time you turn a mass shooting into a national spectacle, it inspires copycats in rapid succession as we've just seen. Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines. By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
  • duxup 7y ago
    I believe the research is more nuanced. The murderers like the idea of their face on TV and their words read to the world. And content that shows chaos. They don't like stories about the victims portrayed as people with lives, scenes of community comming together, and etc. NPR did some stories about that research and shortly after you saw more stories about the victims lives.
  • mhh__ 7y ago
    > you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention. As pointed out by an ever prescient Charlie Brooker almost ten fucking years ago. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4). On a similar subject, The Samaritans publish very specific and thorough guidelines as to how to report and publish suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/ https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...) which are still ignored by many even if unknowingly.
  • tomlockwood 7y ago
    All around the world people listen to and see the same news stories. I woke up yesterday thinking that the media was reporting on the same mass shooting, but I figured out it was another new and predictably American assault rifle massacre pretty quickly.
    • cyberferret 7y ago
      I don't know why you are getting downvoted. It is the same here. Every time I see a US city name in my Twitter sidebar here in Australia, I just know that it is another mass shooting without having to click. I hate that it has become so common now that I have just stopped clicking to find out more about them. This sort of thing used to horrify me, but nowadays I just feel so numb about it, and that scares me because I feel that I am becoming less empathetic and more cynical.
• n1231231231234 7y ago
  "Some" will condemn this ban by appealing to freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not absolute. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, as per the Guardian: "I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0] As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/katie-hopkins-cockroach-migrants-denounced-united-nations-human-rights-commissioner https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k... Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
  • cgag 7y ago
    That swerve doesn't apply to the US's actual unswerving protection of freedom of expression, it was ratified with the following reservation (the first among others): > (1) That Article 20 does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
• cgag 7y ago
  Wow, protection from ddos attacks and from unsavory opinions? What more could one ask for?
• Endy 7y ago
  Well, they're at least making their position clear here. They are not a government or a public forum. As such, they can decide who and what they will support on the internet. Can't argue with their decision on that point.
  • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Does CF enjoy publisher protections for the content that moves through their servers? Because if they do, and they “curate” opinions they don’t like, that’s an issue.
• rdl 7y ago
  If you build a system that is technically possible for someone to censor, particularly if you make it easy to do (and in fact where not doing so would cost them potentially billions of dollars in market cap in an upcoming IPO, recruiting, sales, vendors, etc), you shouldn’t be at all surprised when they do censor. It is interesting that Cloudflare has only really censored two sites (dailystormer and 8chan) outside of a fairly clearly articulated terms of service. There are clearly a large number of sites on Cloudflare which are a net liability to them and always will be, so the “free speech” stance is genuine.
  • abtinf 7y ago
    Only governments can censor; it is not a concept that applies to private parties. Cloudflare's decision to not continue a business relationship with someone is not censorship in any meaningful sense of the word.
    • zaroth 7y ago
      Of course it’s censorship. It’s just not government censorship.
      • abtinf 7y ago
        That is like saying a grocery store that prohibits customers without shirts and shoes is the same thing as the forced famines of communist regimes: they are both starving people.
        • chillacy 7y ago
          You seem to have very interesting definitions of "starving" and "censorship".
  • scrollaway 7y ago
    Kicking out and not providing service isn't the same thing as censoring. One is customer-driven, the other is content-driven. You can kick a customer out because they espouse certain views or whatever, and it's fine to call it discriminatory, but it's not censorship. This isn't usually a relevant distinction, but here it is because Cloudflare hasn't built "a system that is technically possible for someone to censor". They could, and thank fuck they don't, because that would absolutely be the day I'm getting off Cloudflare.
• ReptileMan 7y ago
  He should fire his PR. Terrible writing and hard to read. And probably 4-5 times longer than needed. Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years. And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke. Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.
• dmix 7y ago
  > the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?
• FemmeAndroid 7y ago
  This is great news. There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone. But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do. That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?" In this case, they said "No." Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave. But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way. Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision. You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
  • madamelic 7y ago
    >That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. Unfortunately obligatory "I don't support 8chan". I dislike this idea that people can stomp their feet and demand CloudFlare kick off "bad actors". Who is to say the bad actor of tomorrow won't be the "good actor" of today. CloudFlare and other internet utilities should remain apolitical tools that leave law enforcement to law enforcement (even that is a slippery slope, but I'd much prefer an open internet that isn't open to individual whims of what is right and wrong)
• patientplatypus 7y ago
  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
• nickpsecurity 7y ago
  " they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths." What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that. I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
  • internet_user 7y ago
    That's an unstable equilibrium. Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists, each of them has an incentive to defect and get more eye balls that competition, and make more money and name for themselves. Never going to happen, until we have full blown censorship and you only read double-plus good happy time stories. Is that what you really want?
    • nickpsecurity 7y ago
      "Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists" Except you're ignoring the fact that the corporate media already does that. It seems to work well enough, too. It helps that "journalists" are mostly a thing of the past with today's reporters often just doing the minimum to check things when they're not just repeating whatever the current fad is. That's extremely popular, too. Most stories are whatever people in target demographic are either what people want to say yes to or hate on. We're already there.
      • internet_user 7y ago
        Except they seem to be fanning the fire instead of supressing. It's all about eyeballs.
• King-Aaron 7y ago
  A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread. Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently. If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
  • ng12 7y ago
    The problem is we live in a digital society, and comparing Cloudflare to a notice board is wildly reductionist.
  • ReptileMan 7y ago
    They are utility though. Have you thought about that people support neutrality/common carrier style behavior with 8chan existing being the acceptable price to pay and not 8 chan itself?
    • King-Aaron 7y ago
      They are not a utility. At all. They are not comparable to your water or your electricity in any way. They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
    • ridgeguy 7y ago
      At some point, the price is unacceptable in light of the benefits conferred. And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
    • roywiggins 7y ago
      A common carrier is a specific thing. They're not one.
    • rsynnott 7y ago
      Generally, utilities have a regional pseudo-monopoly. It’s unlikely more than one entity runs electric or phone lines to your house, say. CDNs aren’t really utilities, and most of them have long been pretty picky (most won’t deal in porn, say).
• thatoneuser 7y ago
  "It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate." To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy. Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor. I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
• peterhadlaw 7y ago
  "I promise I wont' do it again" - Guy who does it again.
• jkells 7y ago
  Good reasoning in the article. Acknowledges that refusing them service won't take the site offline but makes a good argument for doing so. "They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem." These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn't been a net positive.
• cambalache 7y ago
  Who is going to deplatform Facebook and Twitter? After all plenty of shooters have used them too. Before the usual: " But 8chan is a cesspool of bla bla" Probably it is, but, either the users are doing something ilegal in the site and you close it if the owners refuse to comply with a legal request, or they are not doing anything illegal so they have to be left alone. For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
  • mcny 7y ago
    > For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where color people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dude who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing. > Nothing illegal I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech. There are more fundamental fish to fry. 1 Violation of terms of service should categorically be NOT a criminal matter. 2 I strongly believe possession (given we meet safe storage provisions) should never be illegal. ... I also agree with you that people blabber all the time but when multiple unrelated people take the next step seemingly after reading...
    • cambalache 7y ago
      I see your point, but violation of TOS has to be a very clearly defined situation and it is rarely is, at the end it can be ambiguously interpreted to kick anyone if you have the right lawyers, so we are back to step 1.
      • elliekelly 7y ago
• losvedir 7y ago
  Does this start to open CloudFlare up to legal issues for all the sites they host? I was under the impression they were more of an infrastructure/utility type service, and weren't liable for what took place, the same way gun manufacturers aren't liable for shootings or gas stations for car crashes. But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow. They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
  • Lazare 7y ago
    They've kicked people off their service before for content based reasons (eg, Daily Stormer), so this changes nothing. In any case: > I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different. From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
    • tedivm 7y ago
      They've also removed sex worker websites (including a forum that was just sex workers talking to each other), but for some reason no one complains about it.
      • roywiggins 7y ago
        Congress recently added sex work as an exception to CDA 230 protections, and every provider scrambled to nuke everything remotely related.
      • mikeash 7y ago
        That’s always the way. Censorship/moderation isn’t given a second thought when it’s just sex-related.
• manigandham 7y ago
  This decision is yet another distraction. It's attempting to treat an ephemeral symptom in a rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity and communications. Things are only getting faster, easier, more connected, more distributed, and more encrypted. There is no going back. Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS/CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.
  • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    >Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them Surely this has no downsides at all. For example, you can rest easy because YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line. ... how is it people in tech can’t see past their own noses on things like this?
    • procgen 7y ago
      >YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line Perhaps they will, but there should still be a line. There will continue to be political mechanisms in place to shift it.
      • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
        That line is already in the legal system, and the ISP, and probably a couple other places along the way. It shouldn’t be at a content middleman too. CF needs to stay out of it because they are no setting a precedent to be the gatekeepers of “what is good”.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      I'm definitely not on the "approved" line, but that's not what I'm talking about though. Politics have little to do with it. Any base ideology can be extrapolated to a violent end and the signs are all the same. Recognizing those signs is where attention should be placed. Unfortunately the media and general consensus will be on political hysteria and surface outrage instead of investigating the root causes.
• mehrdadn 7y ago
  Why is CloudFlare having to deal with this rather than their ISP?
  • p0rkbelly 7y ago
    I think because CloudFlare is a US company and the other is not...
  • seanieb 7y ago
    Also the argument that Cloudflare is just a network provider is bunk. It works on people who think server less computing doesn't use servers. CF uses servers that store files, for minutes hours, days weeks at a time and serves them directly to the browser. The same as any web server.
• s_Hogg 7y ago
  Seems to me like a lot of the arguments against why this shouldn't happen or isn't effective basically amount to some sort of whatabouttery. Well done Cloudflare, I hope their next host takes the same attitude or can be induced to.
  • smithproxy 7y ago
    Don't be fooled. It's not a virtuous move. It's a business decision. If they wanted to be virtuous, they'd start working with groups to solve the problem--counteracting radicalization.
    • s_Hogg 7y ago
      I'm aware of that but nonetheless believe it's a step in the right direction and that they should be congratulated. I don't think this means anyone should give them an easier time as a result. Countering radicalisation involves the use of both carrot and stick where services like Cloudflare and others are involved.
      • smithproxy 7y ago
        > it's a step in the right direction How? It does nothing to solve the problem. It simply kicks the can down the road.
        • s_Hogg 7y ago
          I agree that the racists on 8chan who are in favour of mass shootings are still racists on 8chan in favour of mass shootings. That needs to stop, and this alone doesn't achieve it. But society drawing boundaries about their behaviour is an obviously good step in my view. Companies can be part of that. I don't get how it's desirable that this shouldn't be called out. Even if cloudflare is clearly looking at its bank balance when doing so.
          • smithproxy 7y ago
• Iv 7y ago
  Tor's onion service will always there to provide hosting to the less popular ideas. The censorship-resistant network is there. Make sure to give it some love. Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit. Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it only depends on a fistful of people who will transmit their power to their biological offspring, no matter how fucked up they are.
  • tenpies 7y ago
    > I actually ended up having these on reddit I am actually quite surprised how complicit the media is in not reporting what goes on Reddit. It's the one place on the "mainstream" internet I run into where you can see calls for political assassinations in default subs, sub-reddits devoted to theft, ethno-nationalism, terrorism, and all sorts of content that makes 4chan seem tame in comparison. Then there is the huge cross-polination of moderators with radical ideas, who just happen to moderate radical sub-reddits and some prominent default/mainstream sub-reddits. If advertisers only paid attention. If journalists only cared.
    • ViViDboarder 7y ago
      If reported, Reddit (the company) will usually moderate or shut down subs like those. Recent example being what they just did with /r/T_D.
      • anigbrowl 7y ago
        True, but it's a lot of work with no reward for the reporters.
        • hutzlibu 7y ago
          How much work is it? You don't just click "report"? Or send a screenshot of such a forum? (I do not know) And what kind of reward do you expect?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ALittleLight 7y ago
  When I was younger I thought I was a few speech absolutist. Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. Now I favor moderation.
  • madamelic 7y ago
    >When I was younger I thought I was a few speech absolutist. Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. Now I favor moderation. How do you determine what speech is "good" and what speech is "bad"? I feel like there is no absolute way to determine this. (I am being genuine in asking, I want to know what caused this change and how you see "free speech") All speech is good in my opinion. Some actions are bad. 8chan is supporting these actions, they've crossed the line.
    • devmunchies 7y ago
      >8chan is supporting these actions You don’t know anything about the chans if you think 8chan collectively supports shootings.
      • ViViDboarder 7y ago
        I don’t think they are referring to the people on it collectively. The site owners are implicitly supporting it by not moderating that type of content.
        • the8472 7y ago
          That seems like "if you're not with us you're against us" reasoning to me, it excludes the middle ground. Not banning something is not the same as endorsement.
          • bobfromhuddle 7y ago
            Yes. Reasonable people "exclude the middle ground" on support for domestic terrorism.
• shapiro92 7y ago
  Very unpopular opinion. The internet should be free for everyone and no provider should have the ability to cut off services. The problem is not the platform but the people, hate the player not the game.
  • roywiggins 7y ago
    How do you filter spam if you can't moderate at all? HN only exists as a service because it's quite carefully moderated.
    • busymom0 7y ago
      By treating it fairly. Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 allowed platforms to not be held liable for user generated content. But it did not allow publishers to have the same freedom. Notice the very important distinction between "platforms" vs "publishers". A publisher like a newspaper can be sued for content they put out. A platform cannot be sued for the same. When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230. We should be allowed to sue them for content they carry. Right now, they are enjoying the benefits of both - platform and publisher.
      • markbnj 7y ago
        You posted this exact thing above, there was no need to copy/paste it a second time.
      • roywiggins 7y ago
        That is not what CDA 230 does. It even allows a website that mostly publishes its own content (like a paper) also publish user comments, without being held liable for them. > This "publisher" v. "platform" concept is a totally artificial distinction that has no basis in the law. News publishers are also protected by Section 230 of the CDA. All CDA 230 does is protect a website from being held liable for user content or moderation choices. It does not cover content created by the company itself. In short, the distinction is not "platform" or "publisher" it's "content creator" or "content intermediary." Contrary to Coaston's claims, Section 230 equally protects the NY Times and the Washington Post if it chooses to host and/or moderate user comments. It does not protect content produced by those companies itself, but similarly, Section 230 does not protect content produced by Facebook itself. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-thing-trolls-grandstanding-politicians-to-get-cda-230-wrong-press-shouldnt-help-them.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t... The section is actually quite clear if you take the time to read it: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected". An interactive computer service means anything that smells like a website, and here it says they may block or filter anything at all they find objectionable. It's quite explicit. It does not restrict its protections to "platforms", but to any provider of internet services that host third-party content. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
• jimbob45 7y ago
  Bullying people is the worst way to get them to agree with you.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Who's being bullied here, and what are they being forced to agree with?
• Causality1 7y ago
  Cloudflare happily provides hosting for al-Shabab, Hamas, the Taliban, the PLF, the PKK, al-Quds Brigades, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. They don't give one good God-damn about hatred or murder; they care about negative media attention affecting their bottom line. Not that they're not entitled to only care about that, but pretending it's any other reason makes them liars and hypocrites.
• colejohnson66 7y ago
  CloudFlare is not a notice board. They are practically a utility. PG&E aren’t a government, and they can’t cut off your electricity because you’re an extremist. What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you can’t
  • King-Aaron 7y ago
    > They are practically a utility. LOL. They are not.
    • colejohnson66 7y ago
      Then when would they become one?
      • King-Aaron 7y ago
        I dunno, when you need cloud storage to live. In the same way you need water, power, gas, and these days communication (ISP, etc). But hosting your files is not crucial to your survival I don't believe.
        • busymom0 7y ago
          You don't need ISP to be able to live. Also CloudFlare is NOT hosting them. They were the CDN, content delivery network. They are the messenger which carries the message. They shouldn't be deciding whose message they want to carry. They are forgetting the "don't shoot the messenger" saying.
          • ebg13 7y ago
            > They shouldn't be deciding whose message they want to carry Being a messenger doesn't require being amoral.
          • 7y ago
• abtinf 7y ago
  > Cloudflare is not a government... [we do not have] the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad... Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions. We will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in their countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set. This is a horrifying and immoral position to take. Governments are the entities that have no legitimacy to restrict speech or "make determinations on what content is good and bad". Man requires free speech because the freedom to think is essential to man's existence. The role of government is to protect man's rights so that he may think, evaluate ideas, and live a productive life.
  • sailfast 7y ago
    I don’t disagree in principle, but historically speaking that has not typically been the role of governments.
• patientplatypus 7y ago
  This is terrible. The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual free expression. Here, if you post something that someone doesn't like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion. Case in point, I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I'm pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I'm sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes. The /pol/ board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists. This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    > I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Not a particularly insightful comment :/
  • moate 7y ago
    Hi there. Registered socialist here. the `chans all suck. Not just any specific /`/ either. They're all hot garbage. They have been for years. I post and respond to tons of pro-union, anti-capitalist, socialist stuff on here. Sometimes I get grayed because I'm being a dick and not playing by the rules. Other times I'm rolling in that klout with stacks on stacks of upvotes. I'm sure any communication system with enough users has people who use it professionally for financial gain. That's just the nature of life? If there's money to be lost by something happening, there's in effect money to be gained by preventing it from happening. C'est la vie. Platforms are always going to have owners. Owners mean an agenda. "The Internet" as we now know it usually consists of layers and layers of platforms, so that means lots of (sometimes conflicting) agendas. You want free speech: it only exists when you control your platform. Anything else is just a rented hall.
• denkmoon 7y ago
  That'll fix'er.
• anonu 7y ago
  Very well written and cogent post. But as they point out, the internet is designed to be open and free. And this type of hateful content will still have a platform. There's sadly nothing that can be done about that. You can always suppress and control speech, but the people who want to hear it will also always find a way to seek it out.
  • devmunchies 7y ago
    Why should we censor hateful speech? Do you mean violent speech? Whenever I come across hateful speech I usually chuckle, roll my eyes, and move on.
    • i_am_nomad 7y ago
      Which is the response that is arguably the most mature and best for society. Unfortunately, not everyone reacts that way.
• kyledrake 7y ago
  I'm sure this comment section is going to be a dumping ground for the poorly thought out MuH FrEeDoM oF SpEeCh arguments, but for the people actually caught up on this topic, this is the beginning of the end of tolerance for stochastic terrorism and it's about time.
• droithomme 7y ago
  The Christchurch madman livestreamed his vile murders using Facebook. Isn't it long past time we removed that hate site, a nest of debauchery, from the internet as well? Of course there will be evil persons that will disagree and support the existence of hate sites, but it is not necessary for sane individuals to listen to anything they say.
• quietthrow 7y ago
  How come Twitter is not is trouble for enabling (or being A loudspeaker for) people that riles up other people, fuels their fire and so on. Trying to understand this from a ethics and philosophical perspective. Appreciate your comments.
  • tedivm 7y ago
    People are constantly calling out Twitter and Jack Dorsey for the horrible aspects of the platform.
  • FemmeAndroid 7y ago
    I think they are and have been for quite some time. It seems to come up a lot. They've made some Terms of Service changes, and banned some people. I saw an article just today or yesterday criticizing them for their decision to handle right wing extremists differently from other terrorist groups.
  • cambalache 7y ago
    You know the answer, for the same reason Facebook wont be accountable or if you want to get political , the strident members of both parties, or some of the lunatics of the press. Yes, some people shit on them, but I dont see a deplatforming along the corner for the truly powerful. I understand why Cloudflare wants to get rid of this hot potato right now, but it comes across as opportunistic and hypocritical.
  • thinkingemote 7y ago
    Twitter does not have a single point of failure, a person who has done this kind of thing before.
• bouncycastle 7y ago
  It's like the paper mill refusing to sell paper!
• illuminati1911 7y ago
  "Hate online is a real issue. Here are some organizations that have active work to help address it: - Anti-Defamation League ... ..." Wikipedia: "The ADL has faced criticism for its support for Israel, charges of defamation, spying allegations, its former stance on the Armenian Genocide, and possible conflation of opposition to Israel with antisemitism." Thanks a lot Cloudflare. First you are complaining about hate and online discussion and then you share shit like this. It seems there is nothing but lies ja propaganda these days. Either far-right or far-left or some other far-shit.
• abootstrapper 7y ago
  It's ridiculous that this is remotely controversial. "Freedom of speech?" How about the freedom to not obligatorily aid the organizing of white supremacist hate groups? Slippery slope's ass.
• jquery 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure more Twitter and Facebook users have become mass killers than 8ch users. The first comment to the guy on 8ch who posted the manifesto was "hello FBI". Not a 8ch user but they don't appear to support shootings. I'm more familiar with 4chan shenanigans and they definitely don't support it, with any threat of real-life violence being met with something along the lines of "[alphabet agency] fuck off". Not saying they don't have crazies but every "social media" (and 8ch is social media, just an old fashioned version of it) site has crazies.
  • madamelic 7y ago
    >I'm more familiar with 4chan shenanigans and they definitely don't support it The origin story of 8chan from what I understand is that it is all of the people who had too extreme of views for 4chan... which created an echo chamber to further radicalize and ferment.
    • jquery 7y ago
      Sort of, not exactly how I remember it. 8ch appeared because 4chan’s boards are dedicated to certain topics and some subjects fell through the gaps between boards. I remember 8ch getting popular when incessant gamergate spam was banned from /v/. 8ch also has a “popular” leftypol board which is the left wing counterpart to 4chan’s pol (there’s no good place on 4chan to discuss Bernie Sanders, for example, without getting mobbed). Raids were also banned from 4chan and some other things which brought unwanted attention to the site, I think those people also went to 8ch. A final group of people left to 8ch when Moot (the person who used to run 4chan) scrambled /pol/ for a week (?), making the topic board unusable for regulars. Any other growth of 8ch is beyond my knowledge of the site.
    • sarcasmOrTears 7y ago
      8ch gained popularity because gamergate discussions were censored on 4chan.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• mopsi 7y ago
  That pseudointellectual appeal to "rule of law" was painful to read. If a website really engages in illegal activities, then the FBI gets a court order, raids its servers and that's the end of it. What really happened: Cloudfare came under PR fire from the Washington Post, made a quick cost/benefit analysis and dropped 8Chan.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• 55555 7y ago
  Why do they keep mentioning the shooting in Dayton, Ohio? At this point in time, the Dayton shooting seems to be a completely unrelated incident with no ties to politics.
• HNthrow22 7y ago
  Worth noting cloudflare leadership has been fighting this war for years and this is just a small battle. Can you tell us when @Cloudflare will be holding its next "How to Protect Nazi Extremists" workshop? You guys seem to be the experts. 10:25 AM - 14 Aug 2017 The recent string of violence has forced their hand here. https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1124091916520497153 https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1124091916520497153 https://twitter.com/klarajk/status/1122625367490146304 https://twitter.com/klarajk/status/1122625367490146304 https://twitter.com/Riverseeker/status/1122612031234945024 https://twitter.com/Riverseeker/status/1122612031234945024 https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1123592717341200384 https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1123592717341200384 https://twitter.com/NathanBLawrence/status/10562868097418199.. https://twitter.com/NathanBLawrence/status/10562868097418199.... https://twitter.com/NJDemocrat/status/897147112273608705 https://twitter.com/NJDemocrat/status/897147112273608705 https://twitter.com/InvestMib/status/1123308004873515015 https://twitter.com/InvestMib/status/1123308004873515015 https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1124415034610860033 https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1124415034610860033
• word-reader 7y ago
  This post repeatedly refers to 8chan as "lawless" and "unmoderated" but it is neither. As a whole, it is a public website subject to US law, complete with DMCA and search warrant contact forms. The sitewide rule is that all content must comply with US law. The media also keeps saying 8chan, 8chan, 8chan over and over, when it is really just the one most popular board ("pol") that is being discussed. But there are hundreds of boards on the site for different topics, which are moderated separately and according to their own rules. It seems like most of the outrageous incitement to violence people have posted on 8chan would be illegal under Brandenburg v. Ohio (speech is illegal if it will lead to imminent lawless action), given the mostly-valid assumption there will be readers of the post who are both radicalized and armed. This seems like the way to take down most of the violent content on 8chan if anyone would think about it for more than 5 seconds. This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to moral panic and bad PR, not a solution to anything. Cloudflare would have been in a better position to actually change 8chan if they had kept them on and pressured them.
  • fortran77 7y ago
    A man, spreading a false rumor about a restaurant called "Meat", told people on Twitter to burn down that restaurant. He thought his restaurant was responsible for removing a graffiti mural on a building across the street. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/nyregion/crown-heights-riots-brooklyn-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/nyregion/crown-heights-ri... > “If that mural goes down, the restaurant gonna go down next,” read one comment on Ms. Price’s post [ on twitter ] , accompanied by flame emojis. > turns out that about 10 days before the meeting, Apolinar Severino, the owner of the building housing the mural, had told Mr. Caldwell that he claimed full responsibility for attempting to paint over the image of Mr. Price. Mr. Severino had been advised by a real estate agent to whitewash the entire wall while trying to refinance his mortgage on the property, he said. It turns out the owner of the building was responsible for painting over part of the graffiti and not the restaurant across the street. I reported the tweet that called for burning the restaurant across the street down to Twitter, and Twitter did remove that tweet, but didn't ban the user. There's a better article covering the story with links to the false rumors being spread on Twitter -- many with threats -- in the Brooklyn eagle https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/07/25/sean-price-mural-crown-heights/ https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/07/25/sean-price-mur... Maybe I'll go to Twitter's hosting providers and Cloudflare to get all of twitter removed, or at least made a lot slower.
• jrochkind1 7y ago
  > The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law? That's closer to the situation we have seen with the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They are lawless platforms. This doesn't make a lot of sense. They are suggesting that it's the fact that 8chan is unmoderated that is a problem, and they'll similarly refuse service to any unmoderated discussion platform? I actually totally approve of them refusing 8chan as a customer. I don't think this is really the reason, or a good reason. Articulating the real/good reason is hard. I'm not sure I can do it either. But when they say "The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent" -- that obligation is actually incumbent upon THEM, cloudflare. What is their own transparent and consistent policy that led to this? The implication is that... any unmoderated discussion forum would be banned, but they don't go out and say it, which isn't quite "transparent". And I don't think they really mean that (so it's not "consistent" either). An unmoderated discussion forum that wasn't being used to egg on mass murder, they probably wouldn't ban. I think the possible "consistent" approach here would be simply admitting that they dont' want as customers sites whose owners seem to have no problem with them being used to egg on mass murder. As they said in another statement quoted by media, a site that has "repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate." This is more honest, and really no less vague, than dancing around talking about "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (I really don't know what that means; I'm not sure you can really "actively thwart the rule of law" without being in the government). And I personally agree it is a fine reason to refuse someone as a customer, that they've repeatedly proven themselves to be a cesspool of hate. They are correct that the first ammendment in fact gives them the right to refuse as customers entities whose actions they find abhorent and whose business they don't wish to aid. The principle of "transparent and consistent" requires them to try harder than they are to explain what their standards are in an honest way. (It can be a process, I'm not totally sure what they should be either, even though I totally support refusing 8chan as a customer). I think calling an unmoderated discussion forum "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (in all caps nonetheless!), then calling for government discipline of such, is something you gotta back up with more reasoning than they did here, and is not in fact necessary for them to justify denying service to 8chan. They're trying to get out of actually explaining their reasoning/motivation (what is required for THEM to be "consistent and transparent") by hand-waving about all-capitals Rule of Law.
• sytelus 7y ago
  This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people. I do believe that so-called manifesto is mind-numbingly dumb, fact-free and it is dangerous in the sense it will inspire more violence against innocent people. But that precisely what makes it a good test case for asking some fundamental questions. Can commercial businesses with deep reach, pricing power and critical function deny services based on their ideology and beliefs? The legal answer is yes and that only looks troublesome when you think of how tables could turn in future. As someone has mentioned what if Comcast started permanently black listed you if you visited a website that didn't aligned with their ideology? What if airlines refused to fly you because you said something on Twitter that didn't aligned with their beliefs?
  • mort96 7y ago
    Taking orders from gay people and hosting services for sites which support far-right terrorism aren't exactly the same though. We can be against suppressing gay people and for suppressing far-right terrorism even if the means by which the suppression happens is similar.
    • FourScore 7y ago
      But don't you see how the lines blue very quickly? It's not always as clear where morality lies as when some lunatic posts terroristic threats. Arbitrary value judgements must be made when enforcing censorship so censorship always leads to conflict between groups that disagree on what should be censored. That's why the best course of action is to not censor at all and allow the system to work itself out.
      • mort96 7y ago
        What system are you talking about if not the system where people and companies can choose who they wish to associate with? I should clarify, I'm not advocating complete freedom in this regard. We don't want a society where it's hard to be a gay person because lots of companies deny service to homosexuals. However, we also can't claim that every company should always have to serve everyone. There is certainly some nuance and ambiguity here, but not hosting services for groups which support far-right terror seems to be fairly reasonable.
• fortran77 7y ago
  I'm not a fan of 8chan, but if the person posted his manifesto to Hacker News, would hacker news have been shut down?
• gok 7y ago
  Good. Next step: CAs should revoke and stop issuing certificates for these sites.
• freedomben 7y ago
  Looks like "the competitor" mentioned in the article is "BitMitigate": https://bitmitigate.com https://bitmitigate.com [1] [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattles-bitmitigate-now-protecting-pro-nazi-site-daily-stormer-web-attacks/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattles-bitmitigate-now-prote...
• phyzome 7y ago
  My only concern here is that they're giving less than a day's notice, which is really uncalled for, and shows a certain lack of professionalism. (Their service terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ allow them to do this, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.)
• rand_r 7y ago
  The best argument I’ve heard for being a free speech absolutist is that speech is the highest form of thought in Humans. We think via dialogue. We arrive at the truth via dialogue. Criminalizing free speech limits our ability to think and arrive at the truth, and that can’t be good for anyone long term. I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning.
  • ALittleLight 7y ago
    To extend your metaphor, imagine that part of humanity's brain is engaged in thinking about the abduction and exploitation of children. Another part is lionizing mass murderers and advocating for copy cats. A different part of the brain is contemplating the state of the art for financial and cyber crimes etc. If you come to believe that the time humanity's brain spends occupied with these pursuits leads to negative real world consequences then I don't think the argument you've presented is very compelling. Put another way, if I were someone's therapist and my patient confided in me that, the more time he spends thinking about shooting up his school, the more he feels like actually doing it - I might advise him to spend less time thinking about shooting up the school. If I had the power, I might forbid him from thinking about it at all. Really, what, but the amusement of edgy people, does humanity gain from entertaining these dark conversations? Perhaps such conversations play a role in the detection or prevention of bad outcomes. For example, police detectives are sometimes taught to identify with the criminal to understand their behavior, and so maybe having access to dark thoughts would help in that regard. To me, the question of moderation hinges on whether you think permitting speech will be, on net, positive or negative. I don't have data or solid evidence - but I do have intuitions.
    • RaceWon 7y ago
      > Really, what, but the amusement of edgy people, does humanity gain from entertaining these dark conversations I write short stories, some are EXTREMELY dark. None deal with murder but I have done a rape story... well the two were lovers and he thought she wanted to be raped, so he did it. But still very dark no?
      • 7y ago
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  Really disgusted by how the internet is shaping up. Monopolies all over the place and deplatforming free speech websites left and right. This ain't the internet I was promised when I was 11.
• cybersnowflake 7y ago
  why are only 'rightwing' sites subjected to termination for 'causing violence'? Plenty of leftists shooters like just now in Dayton. But I don't see anybody calling nearly as much for Reddit or Twitter or the other places they may frequent to be shutdown.
• lurchpop 7y ago
  Isn’t this all predicated on a manifesto that surfaced before the dust even settled? Also saw reports the manifesto was a hoax. Everyone needs to slow the hell down.
  • spaginal 7y ago
    Essentially. Mass shootings have turned into a political spectacle at this point. It is it’s own version of a left versus right blood sport now, where everyone is quick to keep a score. The media and entertainment industries specifically, since they own the eyes and ears of America, want to desperately pin every shooting on white conservatives. Any iota of evidence, verified or not, will get blasted into the aether as a boastful victory dance. Then they blast it 24/7 and glamorize it, and we get more copycats looking for desperate attention being further fueled by it. Case in point, look how the media handled the shooter that was a Bernie supporter. Violence, compelled by a difference set of hateful ideas and language, but it was given a day or two and buried. No knee jerk reactions, no 24/7 parade of glorification and filth, just buried. It’s rather perverse and grotesque.
• cmurf 7y ago
  FBI's Phoenix field office in May of this year, published a memo that asserts and discusses "anti-government, identity base, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal or violent activity" And in its appendix it lists QAnon as one such fringe political conspiracy theories. https://www.scribd.com/document/420379775/FBI-Conspiracy-Theory-Redacted#fullscreen&from_embed https://www.scribd.com/document/420379775/FBI-Conspiracy-The... (page 8) So what's Twitter going to do when people tweet or retweet anti-government, identity based, fringe conspiracy theories or theorists, given the FBI considers at the very least that such things are very likely to motivate domestic terrorism? And are only heads of state going to be allowed to do that? Q and movement followers, having moved to 8chan because 4chan was compromised, surely will consider the FBI memo, Cloudfare's decision, just move evidence of "deep state" fighting back. In the outlook section of the FBI report, it expects these conspiracy theories to spread, and foster more violence, leading up to the 2020 election. There are other groups listed in the FBI report. 8chan isn't one of them. But the FBI field office in Nevada issued a search warrant for 8chan in Reno regarding the Poway Synagogue shooting.
• jaimex2 7y ago
  I think it would be fitting if 8chan moved to radwareddoscloud.com which is the NRA's cloud protection service.
• lsllc 7y ago
  Given: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p... I believe Cloudflare's action is necessary to try to stem the tide here. Sometimes ... just sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
• tus88 7y ago
  OK, but where does it stop now?
• ilaksh 7y ago
  A big issue is that we are seeing enthusiasm for censorship. So I hope that people will do some research into the history and current use of censorship. The other difficult problem is that people think that their country is an exception to all other countries and history with regards to censorship and everything else. One other issue: corporations that have as much or more centralized power as governments. In line with the rest of my comment, one reason this is problematic is because it is much easier for governments to assert control over individual companies. And those policies (sometimes good or sometimes very bad) affect masses of people. It really seems to me that we are moving towards a more homogeneous global political system that honestly appears to be modeled after the Chinese one and will probably be controlled from there.
• shiado 7y ago
  As bad as the content on 8chan is, it is deeply distressing how Cloudflare has attached itself to the internet as what amounts to a mafia organization collecting protection money. Almost all the non-deep web tools to abuse sites are behind Cloudflare. They really are playing both sides to create a necessary business. I have other theories about them being the most efficient NSA collection site to exist due to TLS MITM and their horrifically insecure 'flexible SSL' but those theories remain unsubstantiated until the next Snowden.
• simula67 7y ago
  Free speech is a cultural value. It sometimes manifests itself in the form of codified laws like the first amendment to the US Constitution. However, free speech is not limited to the USA. The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that no entity has a monopoly on truth and if you want to propagate your ideas, make your arguments persuasive and refute your opponents' arguments. Free speech is ultimately a bet on human capacity for reason and goodness. The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers. Sometimes, governments are the most powerful enemy of free speech while sometimes other entities can be. I am not saying free speech is a good thing, but there is no "exclusive to government" limiting principle to free speech.
  • xxxpupugo 7y ago
    One thing I learned by watching US culture warfare in recent years, is any value have a limit to it. If it has been codified or been treated as absolute and untouchable, then it becomes its own weakness. So does free speech. Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. In which case, if 8chan has popularized itself as the platform to announce when and where to kill innocent people, and broadcast such message to its susceptible audience to follow, then to me it feels like indifference or dysfunction of a community to have it slip through under the umbrella of 'free speech'. When you know you are ill, just take medication, not just set in vain to wait for your immune system to ultimately cure yourself.
    • jquery 7y ago
      >Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. Which speech is that, exactly? Do you have a list of all the problem topics we need to ban?
      • keymone 7y ago
        - inciting violence and/or hatred feel free to add more
• xxxpupugo 7y ago
  This is a reasonable move for cloudflare. I can see how keep hosting this website will bring it trouble in the future.
• cfv 7y ago
  Easy way out literally noone in the US wants or will support: Get a legal definition of well regulated militia, get it to not map to the national guard or some homebred terrorist group via some ritual like the pledge or whatever, and police the crap out of the gun sales to groups outside this definition. By the Constitution's own legitimacy it's the government's choice to forego this control under those terms, and it musts be the government's choice to tighten this control up. Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? For this exact reason: Definitions were established, and strapping guns to drones was deemed a dick move. Same here, define legitimate civillian militias and take all the guns off the hands of every other random guy. Couple years after that maybe we could start having the discussion of why you need armed death squads on your home turf but hey at least the ease of access for the general public is out, and with it a large part of the reason why the US os the only place where this happens day in and day out.
  • ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    >Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? It's not federally illegal to attach firearms to drones, so long as you do so within FAA guidelines for flying self-built vehicles low to the ground on your own property.
• ioerr0r 7y ago
  I'm starting to get tired of the culture war. Does the left realize elite hackers are not on their side?
• jijji 7y ago
  it seems like a marketing message about cloudflare... I'm sure most people don't know what "cloudflare" is, how it relates to a message board like "8chan", and most people don't even know what 8chan is, and some people probably know more about 8chan than cloudflare. It would be like Firestone issuing a report saying they are not going to be selling tires to the guy that drove the car to commit the violence, because if they didnt sell him the tires, he wouldnt be able to drive to the mall to commit the violence... when in reality, this is just a marketing message for Firestone about selling tires.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• pdkl95 7y ago
  > we are terminating 8chan as a customer Probably a good idea, if only to send the message that there is a limit to how much garbage you can allow people to dump on your site before the neighbors decide to do whatever it takes stop the terrible smell. > The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent. That's great! Most tech companies seem to prefer the Rule of Men where they try to fix problems behind the scenes with obscured methods and inconsistent (and often arbitrary) policies. > Cloudflare is not a government. While technically true, as your control of infrastructure approaches monopoly, you tend to acquire more and more government-like traits. At a functional level, "is a government" is not a Boolean value. > that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad That's true, but your success in the market ("a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network") gives you a lot of power to make that kind of determination. If that power isn't managed carefully (e.g. with a consistent and transparent Rule of Law), it is easy to accidentally use that power in dangerous or irresponsible ways. The fact that you're even talking about a Rule of Law means you're already acting far more responsibly than most big tech companies. > We will ... engage with lawmakers ... as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable ... through [their] due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set. (I'm interpreting "[their] due process of law" as referring to the lawmaker's process, not something implemented internal to Cloudflare. If this is incorrect, ignore this section) Engaging with lawmakers (and other relevant organizations) is incredibly important. I would expect any company that wants to act lawfully to comply with legislated regulations. It is also important to realize that governments are often slow. You cannot simply abdicate responsibility to the government when you de facto have significant power over and involvement with a problem. > We ... have an obligation to help propose solutions Yes, proposing solutions is part of that obligation. If you really are concerned with creating Rule of Law, then you also have to act in ways consistent with that goal. If you're going beyond the limits of an uninvolved/neutral "common carrier" and terminating a customer for reasons unrelated to the technical services you provide, you need to make sure you have and follow your own "due process", while the lawmaker's solution is still pending and/or incomplete. > What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. I agree that this is very hard. It's also an obligation you accepted when you decided to take responsibility (and profits) for a large piece of infrastructure that many people now rely on. This is where transparency can help a lot; it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness for a mistake if you have a reputation of openly explaining your reasoning.
• mikedilger 7y ago
  This is a very complex situation and a lot of factors need to be considered. Everyone seems keenly aware that 8chan was a place where hateful ideologies could fester and spread, and nobody wants that. But it seems few people are aware of the fact that cutting people off from society usually results in feelings of social rejection that drive people deeper into isolation, bitterness and hatred. Being socially rejected, or believing such, is fairly strongly coorelated with mass murderer psychology.[1][2] This action could actually have the opposite effect of what was intended. There is also an effect similar to martyrdom where whenever some subgroup of society is mistreated they gain in power. Many see being cut-off as over-the-top and thus a mistreatment, irrespective of the fact that the group has a clearly evil ideology. There is a risk this action will embolden their cause, as a natural instinct to protect the mistreated and come to the defense of the underdog kicks in. Read some of the other comments and you'll see what I mean. This comment itself is admittedly partially motivated by my instinct to come to the defense of the mistreated (granted the obviousness that the murdered and their families are clearly the most mistreated). Like I said, this is complicated. The simple ideological answers are simply not good enough. So the hard question is this: how do you prevent the spread of their ideology without excising them from (online) society? I believe it is possible, but it is going to take a more nuanced approach going forward. We could start by not labelling people as racists or white supremacists. We should reserve these labels for actions, words and ideologies, not people. Attack the ideas, not the people. Deplatform (censor) the posts (if you control the platform), don't ban the accounts. Throttle accounts of repeat abusers as necessary. And always be willing to talk. BTW I always feel queasy posting things like this to HN because I know some people will utterly reject me and downvote me, but I feel this point is just too important. [1] Katherine Newman, https://www.livescience.com/21787-predicting-mass-shootings.html https://www.livescience.com/21787-predicting-mass-shootings.... [2] James Knoll, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201405/the-mind-the-mass-murderer https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201405...
• niknetniko 7y ago
  And yet: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cloudflare-cybersecurity-terrorist-groups_n_5c127778e4b0835fe3277f2f https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cloudflare-cybersecurity-terr...
• cheeky78 7y ago
  8chan didn't cause the incident. The shooter did. If we find out that the shooter played a specific video game that a previous shooter played..should it be banned as well? I'm old enough to remember all of the court cases that involved distressed parents blaming hard rock/metal bands for influencing their children's suicides. These sorts of incidents are starting to remind me of the religious right's censorship crusade in the 90s...this time it's coming from the left. Banning these sites will only push them underground. They aren't going away. The end result will be absolutely no way of knowing when and where a shooting may occur.
• ioerr0r 7y ago
  Does Silicon Valley and the left in this country realize elite hackers aren't on their side? They should thread carefully and slow down the censorship.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  So Cloudflare went from hosting everything that's not illegal, to kicking people out who claim that Cloudflare supports their ideology, to kicking people out with less than a day's notice on a Sunday if a forum attracts user-generated content that Cloudflare doesn't like - and the rules for content that they don't tolerate may change on similarly short notice with no warning before they decide to terminate your account (most likely based on "has enough media outrage happened"). Also, they stated that they were "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network", which makes me wonder what kind of monitoring we're talking about here, and whether and where else they share traffic that they're proxying. Regardless of what you think about 8chan (I'm not familiar with the site but there seems to be consensus that it's a cesspool), these points are interesting to note.
  • robertcope 7y ago
    Definitely a bit of a shock to me. I really like Cloudflare. But I'm not sure I really like this move.
    • yesco 7y ago
      Personally, I'm both shocked and disappointed over the support people in this thread are giving to Cloudflare over this. This is both ridiculous and unprofessional.
  • mnm1 7y ago
    Most companies have similar polices for much milder infractions. Amazon kicks out customers all the time based on random algorithms. So does Google. And Apple. At least cloudflare clearly has human review and even writes a long blog post to explain their decision. And we're talking about a site that incites violence. So I'd say cloudflare has at least a much more transparent policy than most internet companies. As far as timeline, it's about on par. One day you're in, the next you're out. That's the norm these days. I'm not saying it's not fucked up but until we start regulating these companies, this is what we're stuck with.
• ioerr0r 7y ago
  Does Silicon Valley and the left in this country realize elite hackers aren't on their side? They should thread carefully and slow down the censorship.
• burnedouthacker 7y ago
  Silicon Valley and the left in this country should take it a little easier and slow down the censorship.
• lgleason 7y ago
  I do not support 8-chan, but by doing this and what they did with the daily stormer they are no longer a neutral platform. A neutral platform is like a utility, barring illegal activity, users have a right to use the service as long as they pay for it. Once it is curated, it is not. This is why efforts are afoot to have companies that do this to not get section 230 protections for content hosted on the platform. The last thing I want is a large, un-elected, tech company moralizing about content hosted on it. Frankly, they are not good at it. If what 8-chan is doing is illegal this can be addressed through the legal system. Also, as needed, laws to address this can go through democratic processes that have checks and balances instead of this. Yes it may be slower, but due process is important. At some point left un-checked they can and will target other content they disagree with, IE: labeling other fairly main stream right wing stuff as "hate speech". That is ultimately bad for everybody.
• sidcool 7y ago
  Check the Disqus comments on the article. You will quickly realize the problem is way more than what it appears to be. Some of it is here as well...
• Jyaif 7y ago
  What's happening is that 8chan is indirectly costing Cloudflare money by hurting their brand and their employees' morale. Rather than refusing sketchy clients, companies should factor these costs in their pricing. Conversely, universally loved entities (e.g. Greenpeace) should be be offered lower prices. This would create an incentive for companies to be better.
• dumbDumbs 7y ago
  I have opinions on this topic, but they are unconventional and so almost no one is going to align with or find resonance in the ideas I'd express. Anyway, when it comes to online communities, almost no one does it right, and so not only is the consensus wrong, but so are all known examples.
• mrtweetyhack 7y ago
  Stand on some moral high-ground yet doesn't really accomplish anything except lose business. It just so happens the asshole post his manifesto on 8chan. He could have easily posted on on facebook, twitter, reddit, or any number of platforms. Now you got to terminate those too.
• onyva 7y ago
  Twitter and Google (& YouTube) have systematically removed ISIS content and redirected these people to messages/sites that are designed to disrupt and deprogram their ideology. They’ve done this effectively for years. They choose not to apply this approach to white supremacy. https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1158032847560675328 https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1158032847560675328
  • zimpenfish 7y ago
    > They choose not to apply this approach to white supremacy. "[...] the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-t...
    • kingkawn 7y ago
      White supremacist terrorism cannot be directly ideologically challenged by our present political system in America because it is the founding ideology of the country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer
      • raxxorrax 7y ago
        I think this statement is completely wrong and America is on of the most resistant countries against fascism because of its adherence to freedom which fascist really dislike.
        • ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
          Yeah, the current president loves it because he's free to spew complete lies 24/7.
• blacklight86 7y ago
  What kind of free speech are we exactly advocating here? The freedom to spread cheap hate, fake news and bigotry against minorities? I'm sorry but moderating such offenses isn't a limitation to free speech. For the same reason why, if you start shouting nig or monkey to black people in a shopping mall, the police is likely to intervene and take you away - and I don't think that any sane person would argue that they're violating your freedom of speech. Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants, if we really want to protect our tolerant rule of law. You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don't spread - because if those things spread then they leak into the real world as death. 8chan has been shut down not only because it hosted hate communities, but because it refused to apply any moderation there. However, the problem is not 8chan alone. It's good to shut down websites where hate speech proliferates without constraints, but a couple of days or weeks later new *chan websites are likely to pop up to replace them, or maybe they'd make a Telegram group. The root problem is Americans. And I'm honestly not sure of how to fix the problem with a whole population that has become so irrational, polarized, ignorant and sensitive to hate speech.
  • mLuby 7y ago
    I get the gut reaction toward moderation at the corporate level, but United States law already covers these situations: hate speech, criminal conspiracy, and murder. The issue is lack of law enforcement.
    • Lazare 7y ago
      There is no law against hate speech, and any such law would be unconstitutional. Many attempts at passing such laws have been struck down. It's an oddly pervasive delusion that hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.
      • ptah 7y ago
        I found it odd that the US uniquely protects hate speech. it is peculiar
• cybersnowflake 7y ago
  I love how everybody is having a cow over a website where the rhetoric isn't really all that much worse than a 'mainstream' site like twitter. For example in twitter you can find guys who call for children to be fed into wood chippers because they wear Maga hats and hundreds/thousands of people including corporate accounts like Burger King cheering assaulting people. And they almost all receive absolutely no punishment. And not a single one of all the sensitive bearded men pouring their hearts out in righteous fury at 8chan here seem to care. And I'm pretty sure a ton of killers use twitter. When I was a child I used to think the ideals of freedom of expression were ingrained in this society. But apparently all it takes is the MSM running a few hitpieces and the 'intellectuals' are all 'lol 1st Amendment technically applying to government means it is not only permitted but great that all censorship is now offloaded to megacorporate oligarchies! fuck free speech!'
  • voidwtf 7y ago
    You can put together a pointed argument for freedom of expression being tainted, however your username and comment history paint the picture of someone who’s not exactly down with free expression and individuality. I always find it interesting to try to understand a persons viewpoint and put their comments in context of that viewpoint when I see comments like this. Sometimes That little look teaches me something about my own biases, sometimes it just reveals another’s.
    • cybersnowflake 7y ago
      I think I've been ideologically consistent but feel free to continue looking and post any examples where I'm against freedom of speech and individuality. *note when I say freedom of speech and expression I don't necessarily mean unreasonable forced accommodation and celebration and there is a bit of nuance in my opinions IE I might draw a line between megacorp oligarchies making it virtually impossible to have an opinion heard and 1/1000000000000000000000000000x10^graham's number cake shops not necessarily wanting to bake a ssm cake
      • voidwtf 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago
  Now 8ch.net is down.
• _lessthan0 7y ago
  That site supported a Nazi in his efforts to highten his terrorist attack.
• cryptonector 7y ago
  That a crazy person posts a screed somewhere then commits mass murder is not by itself sufficient reason to destroy the forum where they posted their screed. It's not remotely clear to me that 8chan glorified previous mass murders -- of course, I've not looked, but then, Cloudflare doesn't post any evidence of this either. But even 8chan they did, that's essentially what the media is doing every time they give wall-to-wall coverage to any mass murder -- future would be mass murderers may fantasize about being the one the news media talk about next. No one talks about de-platforming CNN. Before we deplatform the 8chans of the world, at the very least we should have some evidence of how they failed to moderate content, and we should give them a chance to fix it.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    What evidence do you have that they were "crazy"? Most people who commit mass murders are not "crazy" - they don't have psychosis, they know what they're doing, they plan the attack.
    • cryptonector 7y ago
      In my book anyone who would commit a mass murder is "crazy". I did not call the shooter a schizophrenic, or a psychopath, did I? "Crazy" is a colloquial term, not a medical one. That said, anyone who would kill random innocent people qualifies as a sociopath at the very least.
    • runeks 7y ago
      > What evidence do you have that they were "crazy"? They murdered dozens of innocent people. No one’s saying they were psychotic, necessarily.
  • dangxiaopin 7y ago
    According to Cloudflare's logic, ISPs should have stopped peering with Facebook after NZ shooter livestreamed there.
    • cryptonector 7y ago
• thinkingemote 7y ago
  I'd like to see eastdakotas many comments on HN saying "this will never happen again" next to whatever he will be saying to justify this one.
• keymone 7y ago
  Good riddance. Everybody who willingly or not provides platform for hate speech is an accomplice. I hope to see the day they will be punished same as the guy that pulled the trigger.
• ronanyeah 7y ago
  For the sake of posterity I would like to point out that 8chan is also the website that Qanon posts on.
• stevenicr 7y ago
  This is one of the most disturbing things I've read this year. Now I definitely do not feel like any of my sites are safe on cloudflare. I would appreciate even more transparency details to be published. When talking about cloudflare following the rule of law - will you all be more specific about which countries and which locales? There are rules in the UK I have read about that people wanted to bust through cloudflare to get to people. Will the countries that have anti-gay laws be included in this rule of law thing? What about ones that have laws about sex info? How about religions? How many people need to be up in arms about something before cloudflare ejects something? If we get enough of religion A to be angry about the lawless killing espoused in Religion B's texts - can we get all of the various religious sites ejected? To read that this is all going on with cloudflare is terrible - but I am glad you all decided to share that you have also monitoring web site content and sending information to multiple law enforcement agencies as well. I'm shocked, but not surprised at this point. As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. It's been rolling down that hill ever since it seems. Cloudflare has really opened the floodgates to be used for additional censoring by many other groups and gov agencies at this point. The internet needs more anti-ddos options aside from this has been company. I have personally suffered months of agony from people using 4chan in the past, but I would not ask internet companies to shut them down. Around that time is when I started looking for a service like cloudflare. It was too easy to dox and ddos - cloudflare helped. Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well. There will likely be an 18chan dot com and a 818chan dot com and a blackerhatter dot net and a... I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.
  • mschuster91 7y ago
    > As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. You're defending the Daily Stormer, do I read that correctly? > I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places. Cloudflare is not "the Internet". If Stormer or 8chan get kicked off of them, you can still access them if they find an upstream provider - which Stormer managed to do and 8chan likely will, too. > Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well. I would seriously hope that this happens rather sooner than later.
• vernie 7y ago
  Tech people seem to get the most worked up when someone shushes them.
• raxxorrax 7y ago
  Really bad on you cloudflare. I did't visit the chans since what feels like a lifetime and probably don't approve of the content at hand (getting worse since 200x...), but that isn't the topic here. Are you dropping Facebook as a customer if you find objectionable content? Probably not. And while I believe you wouldn't do that randomly to other customers, I won't recommend your sevice again. It is just not your decision to make and pretty much the exact opposite that I require from a service like yours.
• Diti 7y ago
  Seeing a service censoring a morally-bad community makes me feel sad. How is the executive power (police, intelligence) supposed to monitor extremists if they become forced to move to encrypted, censorship-resistant chats outside of the internet?
• oikos 7y ago
  You can't ban language because some use it to lie. The censorship idea has eerie cumulative logic built in. Today we ban a site, tomorrow a race. I'd also like to point out that in the context of declining economies the structures that have ensured democratic processes are inevitably declining with it.
• theshadowknows 7y ago
  Sorry but a company saying they won’t put up with your bullshit is not in any way censorship. If a company hates puppies and they stop hosting sites with puppies that’s also not censorship. Go learn how to build your own service and put your bullshit there. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. 8chan exorcised their freedom of speech, and now there are albeit small consequences. That’s how the system is supposed to work. People inevitably trot out counter examples that they believe will “own” my “libtard” views like the whole bakery thing. Should the bakery have had to make the cake for the gay customers? Nope. Their a business and can refuse service for whatever reason. Turns out there were some legal things involved. Guess what. Consequences. We have a tenuous and often brittle social contract. The social contract decides what is and what isn’t ok. And once you break the contract there are often consequences. That’s not censorship. That’s existing in a society. Companies and people that don’t like those consequences are free to exit this society and begin their own at any time. But guess what. There’s consequences to that, too. The only real question is if they can be adults about it and accept those consequences. And in most cases they can’t.
  • singularity2001 7y ago
    Once a service becomes a commodity it should be treated as public service an be subjected to free speech laws. There are even interesting cases in the US promoting this ruling: Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it." "sooner than later they will change their definition of morality and we all gonna pay with our freedom"
• romanovcode 7y ago
  Nice PR
• pecom1991 7y ago
  Rice Purity Test is one of its time enduring survey that incorporates inquiries on different parts of life, for example, medications, indecencies, and violations. https://eduflex.info/rice-purity-test/ https://eduflex.info/rice-purity-test/
• cryptica 7y ago
  It's concerning that Cloudflare is monetizing on these disasters by publishing this article and promoting it on HN; in a way, they're using these crimes as an opportunity to improve their brand image. Cloudflare should have dealt with this privately; this matter is between Cloudflare and 8chan - They were always able to choose who they want and don't want to do business with. They were very happy to take the money when it was convenient. If you want to do the right thing according to your values, you should do it quietly; if you brag about your action publicly and you stand to gain something out of it then it completely undermines the intent of the action. I'd love to see companies actually do the right thing and not talk about it; just like how they don't talk about it when they do the wrong thing. That would be a step forward.
  • y4mi 7y ago
    Doing it privately just means giving them the opportunity to spin the story in a bad light. Not a good idea with today's outage society
  • rocqua 7y ago
    There have been many vocal calls for cloudfare to drop 8chan. This is not a move to get publicity, but cloudfare giving in to public pressure.
    • mieseratte 7y ago
      > This is not a move to get publicity, but cloudfare giving in to public pressure. Well I'm not sure which is worse. Using tragedy for publicity or caving to a mob.
      • sokoloff 7y ago
        Seems they can’t win then.
        • mieseratte 7y ago
          The only winning move is to not play.
• CM30 7y ago
  I don't like 8chan as a website, but I'm still not a fan of this move. Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what's allowed and what isn't. Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility. I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
  • IanCal 7y ago
    > If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. I think it's key that in this case cloudflare are actively between you and 8chan. The phone provider is the most reasonable comparison, were you able to switch provider. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if one phone company out of several options (which when you call the line occasionally puts their branding in your face) dropped you if you were running a line that read out terrorist manifestos. I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened. > Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related. This is, what, the second time cloudflare have done this? That's a far cry from any controversy.
    • nopcode 7y ago
      What’s wrong with hosting a manifesto? Getting insight into the state of mind of such an individual seems valuable, no?
      • r3bl 7y ago
        Maybe to you and me, but we're not its target audience. Its target audience is other 8chan users, some of which might be just a step away from committing such atrocities themselves.
• baki 7y ago
  Cloudflare is censoring comments like hell. I don't trust their "private" DNS service anymore. I will use Quad9. And what about the Las Vegas shooting? Ban CNN, New York Times, MSNBC ...etc..etc.,,Twitter, and thousands of websites, plenty of celebrities....? You people are totalitarian mtfckrs!
• Cakez0r 7y ago
  Why can't law enforcement take a more active role in policing this site rather than leaving it to corporations? It's a known catalyst of terrorism at this point, so they know exactly where to look and surely have the resources to investigate suspicious posters. Disappointingly, the last time an incident like this happened, an FBI agent accidentally revealed himself to be actively fuelling the fire by participating in a smear campaign against Russia (https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/ https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/). Looks like law enforcement are watching, but are just making problems worse? Baffling.
• ai_ja_nai 7y ago
  Total garbage statements: being a huge ISP doesn't mean using that power to moderate the Internet
• tedajax 7y ago
  I'm always prepared for but ultimately annoyed by HN's take on stuff like this. I legitimately get angrier reading this shitty site more than just about anything else. I wish whatever dopamine hit I got from reading this place would go away.
• lone-commenter 7y ago
  I think this paragraph is worth the article: We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States' First Amendment. That is incorrect. First, we are a private company and not bound by the First Amendment. Second, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our revenue, comes from outside the United States where the First Amendment and similarly libertarian freedom of speech protections do not apply. The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.
• huffmsa 7y ago
  So rather than quietly update their language to allow for better analysis and detection of malignant content by 3rd parties, they're pushing the problem into the darker corners of the internet. Not a great plan.
• nikolay 7y ago
  I am disappointed by Cloudflare. They are involving themselves in politics like any other company. Let authorities do their job, don't jump in and get involved. Please!
• jamisteven 7y ago
  Yea, that ought to do it.
• sschueller 7y ago
  However Walmart will keep selling weapons and ammo.
• coldtea 7y ago
  Why is this the concern of Cloudflare? If it does something illegal, the law can close it down. If it doesn't, it's should be absolutely no concern of Cloudlfare to police it. That's more dystopian than a wacko shooter posting their message there. They could have posted it anywhere, or just posted it on their profile, send it to the news, etc.
  • aiyodev 7y ago
    And now they have the responsibility of policing every website that uses their service to avoid tacitly supporting controversial content.
• nl 7y ago
  It's funny, these discussions go around and around in circles on HN. Really, we should all just reference Popper's Paradox of Tolerance[1]. A just, tolerant society should tolerate anything other than intolerance. Yes, this isn't as simple as "freedom of speech", but it makes a lot of sense. Popper's words argue this as well as anyone: Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
• Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago
  8Chan announces downtime on Twitter: https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/1158207781427695616 https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/1158207781427695616 And 8Chan is back online: https://8ch.net/ https://8ch.net/
• codedokode 7y ago
  American logic: let's ban websites, not army-grade weapon.
• guhcampos 7y ago
  I'm a strong defendant of Internet freedom, but before attacking Cloudflare on this one, let's please read this one-paragraph Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
• yosamino 7y ago
  I am really sick of the high horse that this company thinks they are on because of their pseudo-neutrality. What should normally happen if you come across some criminal or reprensible content, is that it's possible to figure out who owns the IP space,and if it's not already a criminal organisation decide to aid the ISP in running a reputable business and send them an abuse notice. This has the effect that bad actors need to move to bad networks, which you can quarantine at your own network boundary - I get to make a decision as private citizen on what is allowed on my network. That is a process that works. Cloudflare obfuscates the real IP space, which means that the best outcome I can achieve from them is that they will forward my abuse complaint to possibly the mob, which is not a move I am willing to make. In this way they are not just a DDOS protection service, they are business protection for criminals. And because of their size and because they allow them to hide behind their IPs it makes it impossible for me to make a private decision about what to not allow on my networks. If they are so happy about hosting the vomit that the internet has to offer, why not assign an IP block to the easily identifiable garbage that exists.
• FDSGSG 7y ago
  So uh, why is everyone focusing on cloudflare? If you really want to take down 8chan, why not reach out to their colo provider? https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200-paul-ave-san-francisco-ca https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200...
• kaolti 7y ago
  Quick question for everyone who's on board with this. Do we actually KNOW that banning "hate speech" results in less hateful actions in the short and long term as well? I'll wait.
  • lightbyte 7y ago
    Actually yes, it has been shown effective: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf >We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate andr/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words,other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban,discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly
    • kaolti 7y ago
      You think the platform from which hate is banned is a wide enough context to judge success? I guess if you ban hate speech on reddit you will be successful on reddit. Do we think people who are banned take up religion and become good samaritans?
• kaolti 7y ago
  Hey! You're not allowed to say those magic words! - Brilliant, I completely changed my mind now.
• namelosw 7y ago
  In China, there would be no 8Chan at all because if any post is related to massive shooting (probably not shooting because it's not that achievable in China, you get the idea), the post will be arrested and the website will be taken down immediately, and the website owner will be seriously questioned. But I guess that's not what you want. On one hand, this seems to be a praiseworthy deed, and they took all the credit. On the other hand, it shows corporations are wielding too much power, which probably they can wielding it to other factions they don't like.
• whiteopinions 7y ago
  This forum is a gateway into these conduits of radicalization. Mods have continually allowed the proliferation of perspectives that are civilly, socially, and scientifically illiterate and encourage the usage of these platforms without being able to talk about their downsides and their real world effects they have on society. The blind allegiance to a system of ideals that continually shows that there are negative, consistent symptoms and characteristics of those ideals always immediately gets swept under the rug. Then of course the organization or person that finally stands up to hate communities and its platforms gets bombarded with the most asinine opinions on these threads. Some of the most upvoted posts in this thread involve whataboutism on Twitter, ironically usually lambasted for its content moderation policies but in this instance they don't go far enough. I guess you can have it both ways to fit a techno-libertarian perspective. And as alluded to previously, in some other upvoted posts cloudflare is accused for doing this just as a PR stunt. Fix your forum. >The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law? That's closer to the situation we have seen with the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They are lawless platforms. In cases like these, where platforms have been designed to be lawless and unmoderated, and where the platforms have demonstrated their ability to cause real harm, the law may need additional remedies. We and other technology companies need to work with policy makers in order to help them understand the problem and define these remedies. And, in some cases, it may mean moving enforcement mechanisms further down the technical stack. Take a hint. Technology companies have a civic responsibility to not act as platforms for radicalization and hate. This includes HN.
• bart_spoon 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what those here rallying in defense of "free speech" are arguing. Free speech has not been violated. The government did not mandate this. As an individual citizen, I am allowed to say whatever I want under the protection of free speech. But I am not entitled to others providing me a platform for my speech. Other people/companies can't be coerced to provide me such a platform. And even if every person and company refuses to provide me a platform, my rights still aren't being violated, so long as the government isn't mandating it. Its just tough nuts.
  • Ajedi32 7y ago
    As has been explained in this thread multiple times now, Free Speech is a principle, not a law. If, for example, someone in North Korea spoke against their government and was executed for it, that'd be a violation of Free Speech. Arguing "but North Korea doesn't have a law protecting people who speak against the government" would be ridiculous. Similarly, if a person or organization in the United States is silenced because they were deplatformed by a corporate oligarchy, it's ridiculous to argue "the US doesn't have any law which prevents that, so Free Speech has not been violated". Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision.
    • Traster 7y ago
      This is a very strange idea of what Free Speech is. The reason Free Speech is related to government is that government has a monopoly on violence. Government can turn up with guns at your house and stop you speaking in a way that no other body can. What is happening here is very different. Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like. Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right. What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.
• INTPenis 7y ago
  Same old story. Silence them instead of listening to them, speaking to them, learning from them. You can learn from a baby. Silencing people leads nowhere.
  • ausbah 7y ago
    What could one possibly have to learn from these right wing extremism (and many other such groups)? The ideas, beliefs, and everything else they promote has been consistently been established as nothing but baseless drivel. Some ideas shouldn't be endlessly debated, they should be pushed out of the discussion and prevented from having their toxic ideas spread.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  And what about the websites that Cloudflare's Project Galileo protects against certain governments' Rule of Law? Presumably they aren't shutting that project down, which means they're still making arbitrary judgement calls about which Rules of Law are legitimate and which aren't.
• Fjolsvith 7y ago
  For effective gun control, there needs to be effective border control.
• zzzcpan 7y ago
  So much hypocrisy. When war mongering governments like US, Russia use Cloudflare for war propaganda websites that enable their wars and killings of lots and lots of people it doesn't bother Matthew Prince. Or when websites behind Cloudflare promote and sell lethal weapons that are the actual reason behind mass shootings even being possible, still doesn't bother him. But no, a dissident free speech activist website is somehow necessary to censor and blame for this, how convenient. Gotta love covert government censorship and covert government-corporate partnership.
  • samirm 7y ago
    this should be the top comment
  • dwild 7y ago
    > When war mongering governments like US, Russia use Cloudflare for war propaganda websites that enable their wars and killings of lots and lots of people Do you have a source for that?
    • kobiguru 7y ago
      Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and the website is the New York Times among others.
    • zzzcpan 7y ago
      I do and many. Here's one example I remember off the top of my head of a Russian war propaganda website hosted by Cloudflare https://rusvesna.su/ https://rusvesna.su/ and it's much worse than those mass shootings glorifications. Cloudflare definitely received complaints, but no action. Because why would they actually care about people dying if it doesn't serve their political agenda?
    • dwild 7y ago
      Did I just get downvoted for asking for source? Really? I know political subjects are always controversial on HN but I expected better from here.
  • 7y ago
• kodablah 7y ago
  > 8chan [...] have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths Quite the strong and matter-of-fact opinion, stated as accepted fact, about a direct cause here.
• commandlinefan 7y ago
  Remember when we used to believe that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it?"
• eteos 7y ago
  Right, suddenly CF cares about 'law'. Scam (lots of phishing and fake webshops), spam, piracy, illegal pornography, it's all chilling on CF's network en masse. When they get notified about this, do you think they terminate that client? No, they will just come up with some dogmatic story [1] and ignore every call to action/cooperation. "we are rebuilding the Internet, and we don't believe that we or anyone else should have the right to tell people what content they can and cannot publish online." Yes, ladies and gentleman, he said it. In 2012 Mr Prince was trying to build a proprietary internet. These days he would never say that again. I mean, it's just laughable that you feel zero responsibility over your clients. Hence they publicly deny this now of course. CloudFlare: it would be great if you start actively participating in abuse prevention, instead of behaving like an offshore/bulletproof provider behind red 'n blue curtains. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse/
  • judge2020 7y ago
    You're missing the point brought up in both blog posts: If CF removes these sites, they literally won't go offline. They'll just stop using CF. The content is still there. CF forwards DMCA complaints to the website host so they can deal with the illegal content. CF already uses Safe browsing (or perhaps another system) to flag domains[0] that might be phishing/malware related. Illegal porn is something the sites themselves have to remove since (as said above) removing the site from CF only saves face for CF and doesn't change the content being on the service[1]. 0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/your-domain-has-been-suspected-of-phishing-or-malware/60922?u=judge https://community.cloudflare.com/t/your-domain-has-been-susp... 1: to add, CF doesn't allow video files to be directly proxied on their network (when the main point of your site/service is serving these video files), you either need to use CF stream or have your video files on a separate non-proxied subdomain. If something illegal is stored on CF stream or Workers KV, they can take it down via the abuse form since they're the host of that content.
• dbg31415 7y ago
  I'd rather companies did this, than governments. Like how some companies won't service porn-related ventures. It's fine if a company doesn't want to make their money doing this, but it shouldn't just be, "Oh something bad happened... time to react..." They should take philosophic stances, "I don't want to help with un-moderated user content. Show me your moderation policy and plan, and then we can do business..." What bugs me is that the Cloudflare CEO flip-flopped on this like 8 times. They have no coherent policy, other than, "Don't give us bad press before our IPO." Shitty.
• Proven 7y ago
  And you, Cloudflare? I had some respect for CF, but now it's gone.
• saargrin 7y ago
  why not disconnect facebook too,they've been a platform for quite a number of these
• Taylor_OD 7y ago
  Feels like trying to treat symptoms rather than the illness...
• Pigo 7y ago
  Now if we can only get Antifa resources shutdown, since the Dayton shooter has been using them and was an active member -no one
• cpr 7y ago
  And no one finds it suspicious that these shooters were all posting on 8chan and happened to blow up at once? Folks, you're witnessing false flags designed specifically to censor sites like 8chan, where the deep state can't control the message.
• sarcasmatwork 7y ago
  Coudflare CEO retracts what he said he would not do again: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-has-a-plan-to-never-censor-hate-speech-again/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/technology/8chan-cloudflare-el-paso.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/technology/8chan-cloudfla...
• beer123 7y ago
  And this is why gay people can't get a cake made at the bakery anymore.
• roshanravan 7y ago
  so much for being pro-NetNeutrality
• batat 7y ago
  A lot of the plot, but my guess the main reason is upcoming Cloudflare IPO[1]. Сan't blame them for for doing that. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-september-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-s...
• adultSwim 7y ago
  This should not have taken years, and many deaths. Don't host fascists. Don't do business with nazis.
  • LocalH 7y ago
    Don't also use the words "fascist" and "Nazi" to shut down those who aren't really either, but who you disagree with strongly.
• cpr 7y ago
  Nearly every mass killer in the last 10 years has posted an angry rant on Facebook or Twitter. A couple may have posted on 8chan. Guess which platform is being criticized for allowing hate?
• Fjolsvith 7y ago
  1428 comments and no one points out that the QAnon movement used 8chan for communications.