> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?
It could be argued that the mere presence of a Nazi flag as expression is incitement. Not ordinary speech. Naziism is nothing if not clear about violence to people about things that they cannot change about themselves. Skin color. Lineage. It's not like "if you don't do this we have no problem with you" (the Antifa fall into this category. Nazis fall into the former).
To be clear this is not my position. I'm not sure what I think on this subject. But this is the reason why Nazi symbols are illegal in some other countries.
I don't think that's fair because defamation of character could be applied here. What would you prefer they do, sue the Daily Stormer while continuing to distribute their content? Cutting off their services seems a far more rational approach.
At the end of the day Cloudflare are just exercising their own freedoms to accept the business they choose to. The Daily Stormer will (if they haven't already) just switch to another provider so it's not like they're being censored (well, not in any effective way) and everyone is now clear where Cloudflare's position is with regards to The Daily Stormer while very little time was wasted with expensive lawyers. On balance I think this seems a pretty fair outcome for all parties involved.
> In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
Imho his example illustrates his well. Snapchat was fairly disruptive and lost a lot of value when facebook just ripped it off. If we allow giant companies to engage in anti-competitive practices it will hurt us in the long run as people won't even try to innovate. The snapchat story is pretty demotivating. Why bother when one of the largest 5-6 companies in your space will just shut you down or steal your ideas?
My point is that Snapchat isn't a good example of a company pushed out by anti-competitive practices. Their core product is technically trivial and uninteresting. The fact that there is a market demand for it and being first to do it at large scale doesn't in my mind meet any minimal standard for protection from anti-competitive practices as you imply.
That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.
I think the point is, if you make a site forgo any sort of DDOS protection it effectively does not exist, especially if DDOSers want to take your site offline. Some website running on a VPS on a small hosting company likely won't be able to have the resources to keep their site running... which in my opinion is fine. If people want to shout you down in public because they don't want others to hear what you have to say, well then find somewhere else to express your views.
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
His point is that with the amount of DDoS power available out there to various parties, without a major ISP or CDN hosting your content you can trivially be booted off the internet. Once you accept that as a given, if one of the major ISP or CDN networks won't host your content, then you're open to censorship from anyone who doesn't like your message, which if your controversial enough that the ISPs and CDNs won't host you it's probably a given that someone is going to want to DDoS you out of existence. To further complicate things, most small ISPs when faced with a substantial and prolonged DDoS of one of the clients, will terminate that client in order to preserve service to their other clients, which means once again if you aren't being fronted by a major ISP or CDN will likely mean you'll be hoping from ISP to ISP until eventually nobody will be willing to host your content.
I'm really confused, have all the grown-ups returned to HN? Suddenly after several years of self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, HN realizes that self-righteousness censorship is not risk-free, and has long-term consequences? I'm glad I started coming back to HN. Maybe the long recess from reason is over.
> For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Something you'll be painfully aware once you try to browse the web through Tor and realise you have to waste your time with Cloudfare captchas every 10 minutes.
We are going to have to have regulation to reign in these companies.
FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.
The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.
FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.
>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.”
(from internal email)
>Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter.
From today:
>Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
>“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky.
The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we find palatable.
That's just hyperbolic. An ideology that has as few individuals as white supremacy does is hardly an existential crisis. Unless, of course, there is reason to believe more people will be pushed to white supremacy in the future, which is proposterous. For what reason would more and more people be pushed to extreme ends of identity politics? Truly a mystery.
This is where the analogy breaks down though. If we reach a place where the internet itself is fragmented, then I will no longer be able to access trash like the Daily Stormer, and the child of a radical will no longer be able to access the content that I see.
At this point, the wall will be too high to effectively toss education / ideas over, the internet being the primary form of communication.
So you think we should be debating the nazis about whether or not we should consider genocide?
The problem is that there aren't two sides here. Even engaging, at all, legitimizes the notion that this type of idea is up for debate. It's not.
We can try to stem the flow of people into radicalization and extremism. Guess how that's done? By shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric--ie, ignoring their offered ideas and debate--until it's very clearly not within social bounds to be a nazi. And we're trying to do that.
But to engage with the nazis themselves, no. We need to make it such that espousing those ideas--visibly being a neonazi, running hate sites like the daily stormer--means being lonely, isolated, and powerless. And by showing that when nazis try to pry their way in, they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic. Make it so nobody will join them, ever. and we do that by stamping out their propaganda, by not allowing a single resource to be used by them.
> engaging, at all, legitimizes the notion that this type of idea is up for debate. It's not.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
All ideas are up for debate.
> shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric
I agree
> ignoring their offered ideas and debate
This has no bearing on the people whose ideas you are ignoring, it merely reinforces the notion of an acceptable idea within the already existing good-idea-population. So no.
> they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic
So, espousing violence against a group of people. Here the group of people are defined by the fact that they use violence to achieve their means.
Surely, you are not defining this group by their beliefs of racial superiority, as you would not say the same thing if they were merely writing nonviolent blog posts, would you?
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
You should be very scared of the world you're creating. I know I am.
Great, I can entertain thoughts without accepting them. I am not the person I'm concerned with here. The social signal required in debating actual genocide is, fundamentally, a problem. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Debating actual genocide whatsoever in any what at all lends legitimacy to the idea in the eyes of those with a propensity to entertain it. This is not theoretical. This is happening.
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
I know very very well that the people I wish to remove from society, I wish to remove for their choice to hate people for who they are. The two key things there are 1) choice and 2)people for who they are.
Do you think the violence of slaveholders is equivalent to the violence of slaves rebelling?
Again, this is, ver specifically, a crowd that shouted "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US" during their mob. Again, this is, specifically, a group that is publishing literal neonazi propaganda. Again, this is, specifically, a group that wants non-white people dead because they are not white, that wants non-straight people dead because they are not straight.
The group of people is defined by literal nazis using violence to achieve their goals, the goals themselves being also repugnant and worthy of scorn.
I am done here. You are defending and creating space for nazis, and then further advocating that other people be coerced into using resources to amplify their message. There are not two sides here.
You should be very scared of the world you're creating, in which you suggest that it is permissible to not only be a literal neonazi, but also that moderates will consider the side of the neonazis worthy of having space, to the extent that they will advocate for private entities to be forced to amplify nazi speech. Because that's what you're doing.
>Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky.
Don't use critical internet infrastructure to wage a campaign of hate and to organize rallies that ultimately culminate in a terrorist ramming attack against unarmed demonstrators?
>The worlds gone sideways.
There was a torchlit rally where people shouted "Jews will not replace us" and "Heil Trump." One of those in attendance was Matthew Heimbach, a white nationalist leader who previously assaulted someone at a Trump rally[1]. Heimbach has urged violence before and cheered stabbings[2] by his fellow Nazis as well.
Part of Trump's base is engaging is white nationalist violence in the open. I agree, the world has gone sideways.
Cloudfare used to market itself not too long ago ago as an entity that didn't censor speech. I guess things have changed.
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
In USA, the supreme Court has stated that it is only not protected if it causes an IMMEDIATE risk to life. A website doesn't meet that bar, most likely, at least the way SCOTUS phrased it..
> Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky.
When the internet is no longer privatized and is guaranteed as a public service by law, then this argument will have a leg to stand on.
We've taken it for granted for a long time that the folks at the top of the data food chain are benevolent despots. This is a belief that is ultimately not rational.
Maintaining an internet made of actors who are ultimately private corporations providing a service enables these decisions.
The thing is, I suspect if we made the internet a public service in each country, then its speech laws would actually be substantially more restrictive than what CF, Google and others are doing.
Case in point:
> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Yeah. Although sideways? Let's not forget that an horrific act of fatal violence branded as domestic terrorism that was specifically targeted at suppressing free speech to further a regime of racially motivated violence and hate. Daily Stormer put up 2 distinct articles arguing this was okay. They then defamed a private organization by claiming they too supported that vile sentiment.
I mean, don't get me wrong. DDoS gangs are extortionists. But at the end of the day money is just money. Human rights are fundamental.
I'm cringing at the cognitive dissonance. Every major silicon valley tech company helps China oppress it citizens on an unparalleled scale to allow them to continue to operate in the country, but one "terrorist attack" (unplanned murder with a vehicle, a hate crime) occurs in a state in the US and suddenly the gloves are off.
Edit: This country isn't getting fixed without empathy, understanding, and compromise on a national scale. Without that, we're all just yelling how lovely the moral high ground is when we're all wallowing in the mud.
I'm sorry, is it empathy to agree with folks that, "yes" it is okay to kill? Should we not call that act of violence and act of violence?
This seems to me like a category error that you're making here.
It's possible to be upset about treatment of citizens in China but also strongly disagree with racially motivated violence in the United States. People walking around with torches chanting blood and soil art literal, not figurative, Nazis. They have a very clear agenda. That agenda claimed a life and injured many others. Daily Stormer then supported it. This doesn't seem like a very grey zone to me.
I'm also not entirely sure that I agree with your characterization of the Chinese government has a fascist government. There are degrees of Badness in the world.
> I'm sorry, is it empathy to agree with folks that
I may not be able to understand where White Supremists are coming from, but I fully appreciate their right to free speech. I also don't understand people who prioritize limiting speech, but respect their opinion. That's the empathy I refer to.
I didn't think we're debating? I'm just expressing my views within the HN bubble.
Anyway, I agree with you that the current legal framework allows private companies to discriminate. Ideally, government regulation will fix this; otherwise, as soon as the pendulum swings, I'm sure you'd be displeased with progressive websites being dumped off of internet infrastructure by corporations run or owned by those with conservative leanings.
Maybe, but there is a clear difference in magnitude between the celebration of murder to quash speech and the historical debate about the direction of this country.
Very few folks are confused when they see a group of white men fly Nazi flags, then murder and maim, then cheer it on as an act of heroism.
Which is probably why your "Free speech actually means freedom from any and all consequences" is going over here like a lead balloon.
> I'm just expressing my views within the HN bubble.
And for the most part being treated civily, even though you seem to be trying your best to defend the cause of literal fascists and their literal endorsement of spontaneous and fatal violence.
I'm surprised an advocate of "free" speech devoid of consequence can tolerate and support those who engage in violence against that very principle.
Ignoring the issue about calls for violence which are not always protected, how has their right to free speech been affected? CloudFlare is not the government and the first amendment doesn't generally obligate a private company to provide service. They're still free to speak all they want, run their own servers, etc.
You yourself have called it a position of hatred and spontaneous and fatal violence. A spontaneous violence that is unrepentant upon it's exposure, that claims it has to kill to make it's point and that those who stand against it deserve killing.
And not even the cold, calculated murder of widespread cultural warfare which you yourself demand we awknowledged uniquely. It's the unstable and white hot murder of people so indignant at the existence of opposition that one spontaneously murdered one and injured over a dozen more as his fellows cheered him on.
This is all what you've agreed they are. And it sums up to a picture of danger. I think you understand them quite well.
> but one "terrorist attack" (unplanned murder with a vehicle) occurs in a state in the US and suddenly the gloves are off.
> According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right wing extremists groups.[41][42]
When incident can be defined arbitrarily and possibly include both a gun massacre and a spray painted swastika as equal events, this stat is incredibly deceptive.
What's the ratio when you count deaths? I'm on mobile but iirc it's about 90% killed by Islamic terrorists.
That GAO report for all intents and purposes counts any murder by a person affiliated with a right wing group as an act of terror, including prison beatings, death of a homeless man etc and lumps them in with legitimate acts of terror.
It is unfair if we're talking about terrorism, because prison murders are not terrorism.
If we're going to talk about murders in a more general sense, you have to start looking at populations and then note that whites in the US are far, far more prevalent than Muslims.
> If we're going to talk about murders in a more general sense, you have to start looking at populations and then note that whites in the US are far, far more prevalent than Muslims.
But it's not murder in a general sense, it's murder by white supremacists.
> It is unfair if we're talking about terrorism, because prison murders are not terrorism.
Sure it is, if it's political, ie about white supremacy.
Terrorism:
> the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
We might agree on a few points but trying to clarify that the murder wasn't a terrorist attack, that it was just "unplanned murder with a vehicle", makes me want to re-examine my opinions on the points where we agree.
The murderer may not have woken up that morning and pulled out a binder full of detailed notes on vehicular murder from under his bed, but he did not accidentally drive into that crowd of people. When he got into the car and plowed into that group, he did so because he stopped regarding them as fellow human beings, because he disagreed with their opinions on some issues, and because he hated them.
It was an act of terrorism, identical in purpose and outcome to other acts of terrorism in the UK.
You make it sound like the facts are known and the arrested has already been convicted. I have every suspicion that the events happened as you describe with murderous intent, but will wait on the criminal court's decision.
EDIT: I struggled to figure out how to include that the horrific events happened in less than a minute.
> There's no "unplanned murder". Intent, and (depending on jurisdiction) premeditation are requirements for a murder charge
Generally, the only real requirement for a charge is an affirmative response by a Grand Jury. Intent is certainly not a requirement before levying a charge, which is why it is so common that charges levied do not merit conviction. The prosecution needs to prove intent in order to get the charge to stick.
You seem to have conflated 'charge' and 'conviction' here, and are then using that conflation to prop up your argument that intent has been proven, when it has not.
I have no personal insight (or any insight really) as to whether or not the driver did have an intent, but being charged with a crime for which intent is a requirement to convict does not mean that they will be able to prove intent, or that any such intent was present at the time.
It might just as easily have been a prosecutor who wanted to send a strong message by imposing strong charges that may or may not stick.
So you're saying it was wrong to assume 9/11 to be a terror attack before 2006?
Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
> So you're saying it was wrong to assume 9/11 to be a terror attack before 2006?
Osama Bin Laden claimed credit for 9/11, verbally expressing his intent.
> Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
A crime is something that may be punishable by law. You can know that a crime is committed without knowing who committed it, or what their motivations are.
You appear to be reaching for a way to be right here, but speaking in legal terms, you are plainly wrong. A charge is not proof. An allegation is not proof. You may or may not be right on what his intent was, but the charge doesn't make that case for you, so you can't use it as proof for further arguments.
Paraphrased, your argument is:
* Bobby (a compulsive liar) says that he intended to do it, so we know he intended to do it.
* "unlawful": Intentionally driving a car into a crowd is obviously unlawful
* "violence": yes, equally obvious
* "in the pursuit of political aims": He was a participant in a white supremacist march, and drove into a group of people opposing his politics.
Your second claim fails because intent has not been proven, as it relies on the first claim, which is not provable.
By all accounts, it seems that it indeed was his intent to commit murder by driving into that crowd. I'm not arguing with that. I'm only arguing with the hole in your logic that gets you there, as it is fallacious.
Substantiate your claim, where does it come from, how do you quantify it?
On it's face you seem to be agreeing with the Nazis that he just 'accidentally' gained ramming speed into the demonstrators his group was attacking earlier.
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
Evidently the line that was crossed here was defaming Cloudflare itself?
I tend to agree with CF that they're a bad place to invest with censor power, but I also tend to agree that if you defame a company you do business with you shouldn't be surprised if they decline further business with you.
What about being upfront about a lack of principles and also marketing a the company as critical internet infrastructure?
I've pretty much reached the point where when someone vehemently declares their adherence to a principle I decide they probably haven't thought about it a lot.
Even in the US where there is a strong, fundamental legal protection of speech, it can't be said to be a principle. There's all sorts of places where it is compromised.
> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Yes people whose namesake is derived from a group of people that committed genocide is where I draw my line. Do you even hear yourself right now? What kind of mental gymnastics did you have to perform to equate internet vandalism and theft to hate groups who call for a return to Nazi practices?
Neither the various groups calling themselves "Young Turks". It's like historical atrocities have an expiration date, after which they lose any power to scandalise.
And there is controversy insofar as whether they truly committed a genocide with many scholars saying they didn't. There is no controversy with regard to Nazis. If you did 10 minutes of research you could find as much.
There is no controversy. The genocide happened. I've met the survivors. They were brought to my school and I saw the tattoos with numbers on them. I saw the sadness in their eyes. The Holocaust denial statements you've spewed would be illegal and banned in Germany, too.
In the US, "hate speech" is not a recognized category of speech and therefore protected, and even incitement has to meet a high bar, including immediacy.
Hate speech is a fake category, recently invented (in the historical time scope of US speech debate) as a means to instigate tighter speech controls by the government. The definition of hate speech is entirely arbitrary, you'll notice it has approximately as many definitions as there are people discussing it. That's by design, it's meant to have any definition desired at any time, to be of maximum use in destroying freedom of speech in the US. The effort is succeeding and accelerating rapidly. Freedom of speech in the US has less than a decade left, the vise grip will start with things that are very hard to defend, and move down the ladder often varying by who is in power.
By the time speech is brought under tighter government regulation, the people pushing for 'hate speech' controls today will be terrified as they watch what a worse version of Trump does with the new power (a serious theocrat for example). That outcome is inevitable, it's what happens every time people don't think through the consequences of handing massive new powers to a very aggressive government.
"The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways."
Are you implying that The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are worse than actual, literal Nazis? Because that's the only way I can see to read it, but that can't possibly be what you meant.
You don't see why someone might be more opposed to actual literal swastika-carrying roman-saluting Hitler-worshipping Nazis who would be out exterminating inferior races right now if they had more followers, than to a web site that helps you download movies without paying for them?
Criminality isn't the only thing people look at for this stuff.
Anyone who wants to sue (or prosecute, if a prosecuter feels it's warranted) Cloudflare in the future when they're providing services to a site breaking the law. Common carrier doesn't apply to them, as they're not an ISP, but they've shown they make the choice, which doesn't help in front of a jury or judge.
Since 2012 I've been dealing with right wingers coming onto the subject of Syria to denigrate victims of SyAAF bombing runs, justify the bombing of civilian clinics and hospitals, claim desperately that victims of Sarin attacks were dolls.
Many of them were coming from right wing circles, white nationalists. They have a thing for Assad[1], this is white nationalist group leader Matthew Heimbach promoting Assad. Many of them from different nations have been making pilgrimage to Damascus to meet with the regime[2].
Then one of these Nazi Assad fanboys runs down people in my own nation in a terrorist ramming attack.. I'm heartbroken. Many of us have been detailing this lot in great length for years but no one seems to of listened until we had a martyr in the US.
Not really. Why isn't it enough to have destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? If you destroyed Syria tomorrow, for whose blood would you thirst next?
If not in order to foment war in Syria, why do you repeat the "fake news" about supposed abuses by Assad? As for this "white nationalists love Assad" thing, that's just goofy. Did weev tweet something? Did you believe him?
> I guess they draw the line at "people who actually want to kill other people."
Well, no, actually, they don't draw the line there. They provide DDoS protection for ISIS content and Al-Qaeda content and host that content through their caching.
Maybe we should claim for them censor all those bad actors too, then. Again, intending to kill people sounds like a solid line.
To be honest, I feel they probably don't want to change their TOS regarding free speech because it creates a new headache for them (now they have to hire people to deal with the claims, make sure a lawyer checks each time they cancel a contract, etc.) In that sense, a "tactical" cancellation of the service like they did with Daily Stormer is probably the most reasonable way to go about it.
Maybe a press release saying "Hey, we're not nazis, but we also have this policy that says we won't shut off service to people with whom we disagree politically" would have done the trick?
You think appealing to principles and fairness is enough to quell the mob mentality that's consumed America the past few days? Have you not been watching/reading the news? I've been learning all week that Trump and everyone who voted for Trump is no different than a Nazi.
He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline.
“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
There was a post on twitter earlier that said "Take your first name and your last name, that's your Nazi-fighting name".
I asked "Actual Nazi's like National Socialists with a Eugenics campaign, or people we just don't like".
Did not go well.
We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi and thereby dilute the effect b) call people are actual Nazi's whatever the fuck you want, they can all go die quietly for all I care.
Point A is something people don't realize they need to be careful with. The terms "racist" and "sexist" have been so overused and reduced to meaninglessness in the past few years, that true sexism and racism have been allowed to grow and become publicly visible. People can just brush off or even proudly own up to accusations because it's been so wrongly applied so often.
"Nazi" used to be a thing that people used to call politicians they didn't like online. Now everyone is calling everybody a nazi everywhere. It'll get to a "Who cares if they're a nazi?" point pretty quickly.
Yep and you lose (in a general sense) a convenient way of summarising a narrow and dangerous political ideology for a moments gratification in saying "Don't listen them, they are a Nazi".
I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch.
The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views.
If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's".
There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument.
Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later.
My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it".
I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).
> I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi
What's a "literal Nazi" to you then? A member of the historical NSDAP?
edit: Also, note while you're all talking to each other and patting yourself on the back about how you're so great at discussing ideas, none of you even tried answer my question: what more due process do you require? Do you disagree with the assessment?
This reminds me of a comment on HN I read recently, where someone said they had to insert a delay into a website so customers would think they're doing some really serious data crunching (which they did, but just too quickly for it to "feel" that way -- for people who don't know what's going on, at all).
Nothing about being German in there? Nothing about hating Jews? Or any of the other things that the Nazis espoused just because they were handy, and which had nothing to do with "the ideology" because there isn't one?
This is people talking to me about grammar who don't even know what a letter is. Read "Origins of Totalitarianism". Read Sebastian Haffner. Everybody is so interested in the subject, so knowledgeable about it, and so against Nazis.
The proof is in the pudding. You cannot disprove my with your straw men and having no clue about the nature of Nazism and related diseases, you can strike yourself from my phone book is all.
So, essentially there's no definition outside of "participated in the German SS during World War 2" that you will accept? Even if the people called themselves "neo-Nazis" and talked about "the JQ" openly?
Since no one answered your question about how much due process is needed, let me take a stab at it. To paraphrase the article, due process requires that the rules be known in advance, and that they be applied non-arbitrarily to each accused violator. I would also add that the rules should be as specific as possible, since vague terms like "hateful ideology" can be applied to almost anything controversial.
So for example, if an organization was going to censor certain political websites, they should specify precisely what is not allowed: Advocating socialism? The killing of non-combatants? etc.
If the rules are only going to be applied at the whims of the Twitter mob, then that should be posted in advance: "You will be in violation if you advocate for race-based killing AND there are at least 10,000 tweets in a single day condemning you."
> I would also add that the rules should be as specific as possible, since vague terms like "hateful ideology" can be applied to almost anything controversial.
I didn't say "Yup, hateful ideology", I said "Yup, Nazis."
They run around with torches and swastikas and celebrate murder. What's controversial about that, and what does Twitter have to do with anything? I don't use Twitter. It's very telling how people constantly drag in shit like that to bloat and pad. Face Hannah Arendt, face Sebastian Haffner, face Erich Fromm; but your ignorance and shallowness will not keep me from shaking you and any other comers off.
> My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it".
Sure, but what happens when people thinking whatever they want are able to affect national policy, even if they aren't a majority? You get the Trump administration... or worse.
I guess you haven't had a chance to go check their website. Maybe you should, before you spend too much time trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. These people are self-declared Nazis, and they do fantasize about killing all kinds of minorities.
I'm not saying it, I'm asking it. What more do you need than swastikas and glorification of the holocaust and so on? I love how the bar there seems to be raised so high that even Adolf Hitler might not qualify as Nazi to some people here, but I simply ask a question, and that's being like a Nazi.
I can do and am things a Nazi cannot do and isn't. I also can be brutal and hateful, like when I get sick of all these snakes on this motherfucking plane. I can do everything they can, but also so much more. That is the difference.
Well Adolf would need to be pro and against abortion, pro and against LGBT rights, since that was the usage for Nazi before this started. A political slur. If everyone is Nazi, no one is.
I was more warning of general, "He is a Nazi he doesn't have any rights", sentiment. Any bad actor can devise an identity that isn't Nazi, and prey on vulnerable by making them look like Nazis. I mean it wouldn't be hard to make ACLU look like Nazis for defending neo-Nazis.
No. The 1st amendment is specific to the government, but free speech is a much broader normative concept. It is about cordoning off the market place of ideas from reprisals in meatspace. A canonical defense is John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (available free online).
Indeed. The law does not completely protect free speech; the first amendment prevents the federal government from infringing it, but it's up to us to defend it when it's threatened by other private citizens or organizations.
Due process? For what? It's a private company, deciding to terminate the contract with a shitty customer that is ruining their image. Worst case scenario the Nazis might have a case for breach of contract, but they won't get much out of it. Also, I'd love to see them show up in court to try to defend this as a "freedom of speech" case, and get told what a bunch of abhorrent human beings they are and to GTFO.
The CEO's explanation includes a section titled "freedom of speech < due process." But he defines "due process" as, roughly, predictable decision making. Legally speaking, due process involves a lot more than that.
The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light.
For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
Gotcha, when he said "due process" he didn't mean it in the legal sense, but in the "we have to follow the right procedures internally to make sure what we are doing is right" sense.
Right. But I don't see where he describes those internal procedures. Basically, the post amounts to "we were upset that these guys claimed we supported them, so we canceled their account." There's a discussion about how important it is to not make decisions on a whim, but no discussion about how this decision wasn't made on a whim.
I think private companies serving public with ability to control visibility, especially those with majority marketshare should be subject to similar laws as anti-trust.
Sometimes we yield idealism for the sake of pragmatism. Yes, the definition of "hate group" is subjective and also political, but most people recognize that self-described nazis and members of the KKK meet that definition.
It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
> How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes?
What does fascists even mean these days?
Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend.
It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.
How about literal neonazis waving swastikas, calling for violence to exterminate Jews and blacks? Ones literally identify with Nazi facists.
Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
"Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? "
I don't.
I rather have people saying out loud, that they want to kill me, than saying it it in private and then just doing it ... so I - and others (like police) know whats going on, and can prepare for them.
If you forbid things to be said out loud, they will just boil hiddenly, until they explode.
To dashundchen and others who feel nazism is the absolute threshold beyond which speech ceases to be free.
> How about literal neonazis waving swastikas, calling for violence to exterminate Jews and blacks? Ones literally identify with Nazi facists.
> Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
So how about jihadists who mutilate genitals at music concerts and behead little children? And who are very clear about their intent to kill millions more?
There are few things I hate more than muslim extremists, yet I am strongly in favor of not obstructing these people's ability to put their stuff online. We can even learn a thing or two from it that helps us defeat them, same goes for nazis.
Isn't it obvious that everything besides radical freedom of speech is bound to descend into a quagmire of arbitrarily constructed and enforced rules?
It is really a little embarrassing to see that "the vaguely Marxist but comfortably bourgeoisie hacker community" as James Mickens beautifully put it is split on an issue around free speech.
I'm pretty OK with saying the marketplace of ideas has evaluated the ideals of Nazism and found no need remaining to preserve or protect them. We have, after all, tried the experiment of negotiating with Nazis, appeasing Nazis, and seeking peaceful coëxistence with Nazis, and we've learned what the resulting body count is.
People like to say "never again", but it's important to actually mean it.
The marketplace of ideas evaluated the ideals of Nazism, and rejected them by itself the first time. The fact we even call them Nazis is testament to that - it's an insulting reference to the fact National Socialists were uneducated country bumpkins. In battles of wits and words, Nazis lost every single time. So the idea we need to violate our ideals about freedom of speech, to defeat an enemy who never did stand a chance against us in that way, makes no sense. Do you really think our society's beliefs are truly so weak? That we are truly that vulnerable to pernicious memes?
Now, if you want to talk "never again" - it is not words that should frighten us, but violence. It was the brown shirts working the streets and savaging anyone who dared speak contrary to the Nazis that allowed them to obtain real power in the elections. It was the night of the long knives that saw the Nazi's staunchest critics in the Reichstag assassinated, and Hitler's control finally secured. It was the night of broken glass that normalized widespread violence against Jews, and set the stage for what was to come. It was violence that gave strength to Nazism, that let it rise to prominence, that let it overcome the Prussian elite who despised it and let it seize control of the country.
Nazism only succeeds by first putting its boot to the throat of the public, and threatening to crush the windpipe of any critic. Without that, it is just incoherent, anti-intellectual gibberish concocted by brutish thugs - and is torn apart in the market of ideas as a result. I fear a non-violent Nazi about as much as I fear a toothless wolf.
I fear a non-violent Nazi about as much as I fear a toothless wolf.
Once you tolerate the "non-violent" Nazi, the violent ones won't be far behind. Nazism has proven that it cannot be tolerated, period. Not a little bit here and there. Not for a short time while we try to reason with them. Not anywhere, not ever, not in any way. If an amendment to the US Constitution came up to exempt Nazis from first-amendment protection I'd be for it in a heartbeat, because there is no longer any need to be hemming and hawing and talking about how on principle we need to let them have their little march and their website and... no. There is no such thing as a "safe" amount of Nazism.
>Once you tolerate the "non-violent" Nazi, the violent ones won't be far behind.
Alright so...where are they? We've let them preach for 75 years after the war, and we're not exactly being overrun with Nazi murderers.
>Nazism has proven that it cannot be tolerated, period.
Nazism has proven it is a self-defeating ideology. There is no serious threat of it becoming a mainstream force anymore.
>If an amendment to the US Constitution came up to exempt Nazis from first-amendment protection I'd be for it in a heartbeat, because there is no longer any need to be hemming and hawing and talking about how on principle we need to let them have their little march and their website and... no.
Remember those times you denounced the NSA or TSA sacrificing our rights in the name of 'security'? I do, I've been reading your post history.
Yet here you are. Does the hypocrisy not sting you, even a little?
> There is no such thing as a "safe" amount of Nazism.
Yes, yes, you really, really like to virtue signal. I get it.
The problem is not them beeing clearly nazis, its there opponents never stopping with the censor-ship and persecution once they get going.
Having a professor who finds intellectual differences by race in his social studys? Definatly a nazi.
Not even worth studying, to search for a remedy, better to ignore a problem forever.
And this goes on and and on and on.
So we concluded, that if your limitation tendencies of free speach are unlimited, they must be limited at the root.
Thus the speech is free. They are not free to act. They are not free to maim, free to violate others rights.
One is free to ignore them- (as large parts of the country have) until the sjw circus visited theire town and gave them attention and manpiulated a large neutral crowd into supporting them with the usual passiv-agressive discourse controll speach.
> The problem is not them beeing clearly nazis, its there opponents never stopping with the censor-ship and persecution once they get going.
And if it wasn't this excuse to not denazify, it would be another.
> your limitation tendencies
That's like saying someone suggests cutting out cancer just because they like mutilating bodies.
But of course, I can't call that a tendency for mental masturbation, and warn of the consequences of it remaining unchecked, right? Right.
> until the sjw circus visited theire town
As someone who thinks the BLM chicks screaming at Sanders would be in jail if they had been white guys screaming at Hillary, as someone who things Google shit the bed with the "memo guy", as someone who doesn't even like Bill Maher anymore but like him wishes he could have Camille Paglia -- even that "circus" deserves more respect than those who think people marching with swastikas and torches are expressing an idea. I still have so much beef with "SJW", but still, there's priorities.
Yeah, they came to their town and "gave them attention". And shame on those who did not.
> manpiulated a large neutral crowd into supporting them
The fuck? So the SWJ manipulated people into liking Nazis? If ANYTHING IN THE WORLD can make you side with Nazis, you already have it in you, and the next set of questions I'd have for you would be about your childhood and adolescence.
Wow, yeah, this article should be higher up. Choice quotes, from the same guy, regarding taking down ISIS sites:
Speaking with IBTimes UK, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule".
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
...
"We're the plumbers of the internet," Prince said. "We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China."
They can die in a gutter, for all I care. They made their line, with the political dissenters, the quiet, and the the hidden. But you know, blame the "bad people" and the "abusers".
Very few of those folks held up torches in public chanting an English version of a Nazi slogan. Even fewer still walk in public rallies waving Nazi flags, or hop in cars and run down counter-protesters.
So maybe I this case the general public can distinguish between literal and figurative fascism. The Daily Stormer supported acts of violence committed by the former, not the later.
As a member of neither continent, I find it beyond bizarre that in Europe, they're perfectly capable of determining from context whether someone called a 'nazi' is just having a slur thrown against them, or is actually a follower of the ideology, whereas in America they can't seem to tell the difference. Some yobbo calling a senator a nazi doesn't literally mean the senator is one, whereas people that wave nazi flags, openly promote nazi policies, and wander around giving the nazi salute are a different kettle of fish.
It's like that in America, what things are called is more important than what they are. Obviously there are plenty of Americans perfectly capable of understanding context, but they don't seem to be in control of the political narrative.
You know, I was going to spit venom back, discussing the European in fighting and greed post WWI for putting those goose stepping morons in a place where normal people thought they held the answers. But, if you can't be trusted to listen to why the Nazis were put into power and not skip to the atrocities, why would I think you'd understand why our politic and society is the way it is.
I find that when discussing politics with an American, I want to say "you know what I fucking mean" more than when discussing with a European. Americans tend to attack the surface meaning of what you say rather than the actual meaning.
A clear example of this is if you take fringe idiot politicians who say populist stuff and have zero workable policies. In the UK, they're a fringe political group like UKIP. In the US, one was just voted president. Here was a guy with a famous history of scamming (indeed, he was the poster child for it), making obvious and contradictory promises he couldn't keep even if he wanted to, and with no detail as to how. His whole platform was telling people the superficial stuff they wanted to hear. How did he do? Almost half of the voters individually voted for him, in a strong voter turnout. The only thing missing from his obvious scam was twirling a waxed moustache, and still nearly half of American voters went out voluntarily and voted for him.
Weird, that doesn't sound like the events of Brexit, at all. Oh well. Have fun being superior, I think I'm done with this pissing contest. You can win. I don't care..... Cheers, I guess =)
Yea I agree. It's really weird that white supremacists are 'literally nazis' in the eyes of many Americans. Did the meaning of that word change recently?
Indeed it has; even the OED recognises this sense:
"c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.
Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)."
I don't really think semantics of literally matter in this case. In Charlottesville people were attending a "Unite the Right" event with actual Nazis .... If you are uniting with Nazis you're becoming a Nazi.
Here in the USA, calling someone a Nazi does not at all suggest they are a member of some well-organized noveau-NSDAP. Even the swastika-waving type are understood to be trying to upset and frighten folks.
In fact, given the American love for sarcasm and hyperbole, and lack of an actual historical Nazi party of any note, it seems to me less likely for one to interpret the label literally.
The Daily Stormer is literally named after a Nazi propaganda newspaper[1]. Describing the web site's viewpoint as "Nazi" or "fascist" isn't even an insult -- it's a plain fact.
While I agree Nazi is an reasonable label to apply to these guys, the way the word is thrown around these days makes this argument worrying to me personally. I have seen people called Nazis simply because they are pro life. Considering cloudflare allegedly hosts Islamic extremist content I really wonder where the line is.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content, Prince said. Some hosting companies exercise tight control about what can be served, but his firm doesn't want that kind of power."
Do you have a source for this? I've seen it claimed on this tread but I haven't seen evidence of it actually happening. Did they have a cloudflare logo on their homepage or something?
The difference is that they thought they were the "good guys" and that other, lower humans, were ruining mankind's gene pool. They pushed for separating those classes of people, and then to kill a portion of them since segregation/"concentration" camps weren't enough.
That's not at all equivalent to other types of discussions we are having today about the economy, the environment, and education.
I guess completely out of context your comment may mean something else to you. In the context of this thread it seems like you're saying that there are other "social revolutions" that could be squashed because of content restrictions that are defended based on this incident.
If you're just saying that some company could be controlled by a "Nazi" and they may restrict their services, I get that. I don't think it's a "slippery slope" type of argument though.
I'm saying that it's often hard to tell the difference between a positive social revolution and a repugnant one. Every social revolution is repugnant to someone, otherwise it wouldn't be a revolution. I am willing to defend your right to say things I find repugnant in order to preserve my right to say things you -- or more to the point, the CEO of my ISP -- may find repugnant.
Just for the record, I find the nazis and the neo-nazis repugnant. I'm a descendant of holocaust survivors, so seeing swastikas being paraded down the street in America hits very close to home for me. And I have no problem shutting down incitements to violence. But that's not what happened here. The Daily Stormer was taken off the air because of an alleged false claim that they made about their CDN. That is a very dangerous precedent.
I think you have: it's pretty fucking clear what information should and shouldn't need help to be distributed. These hosts of this site could throw their page up on a home computer right now and it would be widely accessible to whomever wanted to see it. Nobody's under any obligation to make it safe (SSL certs), convenient (domain registrars) or available (bombardment security), especially when it's something so abhorrent.
If you want to be a hateful little shit, go right ahead, but don't expect a helpful hand. That's the "plot" here, friend.
Then 1. Don't be a nazi 2. Don't have Google and GoDaddy boot you off their services already leaving you looking like you support nazis. But mainly just 1.
That doesn't seem to be the case. It could be hypothetically (Cloudflare certainly has no interest in admitting that there's an upper bound to the DDOS they can mitigate and hackers have found it), but I think the "I remembered I'm a CEO in a country where there is not much restrictive policy on who a company chooses to do business with, and I think even my customers will agree 'Nazis suck and don't deserve a platform'" explanation holds here.
I guess I'm saying that claiming it's taking a moral stand could act as cover for an altogether different motive --because most people would not think of the move as a precedent for what the limits are for speech from an 'inet infra co' but rather as a conscientious CEO who takes a moral stand.
Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms.
Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
> That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms.
Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however.
> Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content
Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply.
Discriminatory hateful speech absolutely limits the freedom of the discriminated group. If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave? Not freely.
The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.
> If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave?
Today? Counter-demonstrate, or walk away. Actual Nazis haven't been a serious threat to Jews for 70 years. By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
> By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
The following hadith which forms a part of these Sahih Muslim hadiths has been quoted many times, and it became a part of the charter of Hamas.[79]
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)
Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare.
"That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected).
And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
> Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare?
And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?
When ISIS or Nazis are in power, you will not have the right to free speech without being subjected to state violence, regardless of how you kowtow to them now.
The paradox of tolerance applies directly to free speech.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be Nazis or ISIS in control. It just has to be people with a different ideological and moral framework from your own.
As an example, the CEO of Cloudfare stated the removal of Daily Stormer was an arbitrary decision made by him, because he "woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" and as CEO he had the power to do so [0], so what happens if the CEO of a Cloudflare-like service is a staunch Christian and starts removing sites based on that?
Or as more realistic example, the Republicans control the house, the senate and the presidency.
They came quite close to having a super-majority in the Senate, and who knows what will happen in the 2018 mid-terms.
For many Republicans, things like abortion and LGBT rights are moral issues and if they get a super majority it's not unthinkable that they will push to remove or criminalize things that they are morally opposed to.
From the ACLU's post on why they are defending Milo Yiannopoulos [1]
"But the sad reality is that many people think that speech about sexuality, gender identity, or abortion is over the line as well. They’ll say that abortion is murder, civil rights advocates are criminals, or LGBT advocates are trying to recruit children into deviant and perverse lifestyles. If First Amendment protections are eroded at any level, it's not hard to imagine the government successfully pushing one or more of those arguments in court. "
I know Cloudfare is a private company and so from a legal perspective this is not a freedom of speech issue, but beyond the law, freedom of speech as a general principle is something that needs to exist in the hearts and minds of those making the law, and actions that erode that, especially from entities that wield enormous power over communications infrastructure, set dangerous precedent.
Well, there's no need for pointless hypothesizing about what might happen, because this is actual Nazis. It's not "[just] people with a different moral or ideological framework" -- it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Freedom of speech does not apply to those who would take away your freedom of speech with what they are advocating (in this case, killing us). This is the nature of the paradox of tolerance. We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Yes they are, but look at how the term 'Nazi' is being thrown about with abandon these days [0].
Once you have established that it's ok to ban/silence Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
That is not hypothetical, and is something that is actively happening right now.
> it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Where do we draw the line? Do we kick people off the Internet if they declare allegiance to communists - a group that literally killed millions in the name of ideological purity?
> We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Actually, we must. The only speech worth defending is offensive speech or speech you don't like.
No-one tries to stop you from saying nice things that they already agree with.
Once you have established that it's ok to ban Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
No, that would require everyone to be a credulous idiot -- people have thrown Nazi around as a pejorative for as long as there have been Nazis. Fortunately it's easy to tell who the actual Nazis are -- they're the ones with Nazi flags doing Nazi salutes saying they're Nazis, and advocating genocide.
Again, this is the paradox of tolerance -- tolerating the intolerant decreases the total amount of tolerance in the world. You are spending time and effort arguing with me that Nazis should be allowed to speak while they threaten those that speak out against them directly with violence.
Perhaps you should go and speak to the Nazis to tell them about how they should defend speech they don't like.
History is replete with examples of how this happens. For a recent example see the Cultural Revolution in China. It involved public shaming for wrongthink, destruction of statues and other artifacts, desecration of graves (e.g. of Confucius and others) and worse. The parallels going on today are worrying.
Sorry, where in any of your examples are the people waving Nazi flags saying they're Nazis? I'm unclear on why you keep bringing up red herrings when the issue is actual Nazis marching together here, in America, right now. These are all slippery slope arguments that don't appear to have any aim other than justifying not confronting real Nazis.
> where in any of your examples are the people waving Nazi flags saying they're Nazis?
Nowhere, because I'm not worried about the Nazis.
500 people showed up in support of that rally. Even if you think that real-life support for Nazis is a thousand times that amount (unlikely to be anywhere near that high) that still only represents a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population (0.15%). That is literally a rounding-error away from zero, and the real figure of Nazi support is likely to be orders of magnitude less.
If the Internet hadn't been popularising for months that it's ok to punch Nazis (drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight), if the police had kept the protesters and counter-protesters apart, if attendees hadn't been able to play the victim due to getting banned from Airbnb, and if the media hadn't given the rally such prominence it would have been a total non-issue. 500 people would have come, spouted off offensive, but protected speech and then fizzled out.
Instead, we were left with loss of life and a ratcheting up of tensions along racial and ideological grounds.
That concerns me far more, especially as significant sections of the population seem to be willing (and in some cases actively trying) to conflate right-wing politics with Nazis and white supremacism.
'Slippery slope fallacy' you cry, but it's not, because this is actually happening. Take for example the recent 'March on Google' that is being organised by various right-wing figures. The organisers are right-wing and regularly classified as alt right (a classification they refute), but they are also vocally anti-Nazi and anti white-supremacism (banning Nazis and Nazi symbolism from previous events they've held), and yet in the wake of Charlottesville, several major news outlets were claiming that the March on Google rally was also being organised by 'Nazi sympathizers' and the organisers started getting threats that they treated seriously enough to postpone the rally (http://www.marchongoogle.com/peaceful-march-on-google-postpo...).
The conflation of 'people with politics we don't like' to Nazis, along with the normalisation of violence against Nazis leading to threats of violence, has me far more concerned than any actual Nazis, and the parallels with very recent, very ugly history are close enough that more people really should be worried.
Yes, on the side of freedom of association and freedom of speech, even for unsavoury characters.
Pointing out that some counter protesters were spoiling for a fight (dressed in black, masked, and armed with baseball bats and pepper spray) shouldn't in any way be construed as supporting Nazis.
Pointing out that the March on Google has been postponed due to threats of violence, shouldn't be construed as support for the March on Google.
And pointing out that violence against Nazis is being normalised shouldn't be taken as support for Nazis, rather it's the worry that it's all too easy to expand the scope of Nazis to then include 'other people with views I disagree with' (see above about March on Google being postponed due to threats of violence).
For where I actually stand, I used to consider myself left-leaning, but I'm not really sure I like where the left is heading these days so following Dave Rubin's lead, I'd go with classically liberal.
I'm also not entirely sure how you square this comment with your one above about credulous idiots, but the idea that I'm somehow siding with Nazis is ridiculous.
Anyway, I think we can both agree that there's not much more fruitful discussion to be had between us on this particular topic, so this will be my last reply.
He didn't pick Nazi's, he just wants them to be free to speak. Consider please that your ideas on freedom of speech have the opposite effect to what you intend.
I posit that speech is a pressure release valve, and that you should not muzzle people you don't agree with. This creates resentment and anger in those people whose only other outlet might be violence and revolution. There are odious characters on the right and the left who are already spoiling for a fight, and I think your notion of how we deal with that just escalates the conflict. Smarter people than you or I set freedom of speech as the first freedom, and one reason I think it's highest is because we need free speech in order to live with one another.
Which do you prefer, diplomacy or war? Part of diplomacy is dialogue.
Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.
I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.
> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
Tech companies have been banning and censoring since the start of the commercial Internet. This is not a precedent for anyone except Cloudflare itself.
I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.
You should fear this. And you should acknowledge that owners always have this power and the precedence here isn't going to be what enables them to wield it.
Yeah, at least he should take down also the credit card fraud boards, they are doing real harm.
Since the argument is gone, i see no reason not to do that.
> The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]
What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to
me to be pretty much a pissant little blog.
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
You sound pretty privileged to only be asking for all of us to get along when so many people are asking not to be shot or subjugated by systems built to work against them.
He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article:
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.
The site could, in theory, sue Cloudflare for failing to provide the services they paid for.
That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't).
And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit.
> There's no need to be pedantic here. When a layperson talks about the ability of one person to sue another they mean the high likelihood of winning said suit.
well, I'm a layperson and I would not interpret it that way. Suing someone is taking a gamble, and that gamble does not necessarily pay off. In this particular case the 'high likeihood of winning said suit' is not all that high.
> We all know what the parent meant.
You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
I, like (hopefully) most people who comment here, am well aware that you can sue anyone for any reason, with zero evidence or support for your assertion. When someone asks "couldn't X be sued for Y?", I always read that as a question of someone asking about the likelihood of winning that particular suit.
Because if you take the question literally, then the answer is -- literally -- always yes, so it'd never be a useful question, ever.
But sure, maybe someone with a radically different legal system is asking. In that case, still, a simple, non-pedantic-sounding "sure, they could, but they'd be unlikely to win because A and B" would suffice.
So, in what world do you see a judge awarding damages to a Neo Nazi outfit that decided to sue a provider of an optional internet service for damages incurred because the internet service provider withdraw their service in explicit agreement with their terms of service?
Sure you can sue for that but I do not see any chance of winning such a suit, and I'm pretty sure that that Cloudflare would be more than happy to litigate their right to deny service.
Never said I did see that world. Just that it was a reasonably question that didn't deserve a flippant, pedantic answer.
But let's say I did, as maybe the original poster you replied to did. The answer you just gave that I'm replying to (perhaps with a bit of a more patient tone) would have been way more useful than your original answer.
> You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
So you reflexively see the words "X can sue" as a truism, a meaningless statement? It doesn't occur to you that the person saying those words actually wanted to convey some information with them?
Fine by me if you disagree with whether the odds of some suit getting anywhere are better than nil. But to not even realize that such a statement is being made, that must suck.
There's more to suing than the likelihood of winning. War of attrition is a big one. If you have a lot of resources you can sue just to cause financial damage, emotional distress etc to the defendant without having to actually eventually win the case.
So it's completely fair that when a layperson talks about the ability of suing, they're talking about net losses from that process and not necessarily about the final verdict.
thats the complete rebuttal? I could see a judge granting summary judgement in favor of Daily Stormer before Cloudflare even gets around to responding.
> I could see a judge granting summary judgement in favor of Daily Stormer before Cloudflare even gets around to responding.
Yes, you wrote the same thing upthread. But you are not a judge so what you see or do not see isn't all that important here, what is important is how judges have found in other cases and it is typically quite hard to force a company to do business with any entity they do not wish to serve unless that entity is part of a protected class, which Neo Nazis are not. So on what grounds do you feel that Cloudflare would absolutely have to accept every customer that wishes their service? They're not a common carrier.
Can you give me several reasons why a judge wouldn't merely grant summary judgement in favor of Daily Stormer? Or why their arguments would fail?
"Cloudflare unexpectedly revoked our traffic mitigating service in the middle of our highest costly traffic, our costs went up this much. Cloudflare caused this, these are the damages, and here are the punitive damages to deter this behavior in the future, the CEO even said this is not company policy."
Because it is pretty rare for a judge to side with a consumer who states they would like the judge to force the company to do business with them.
Neo Nazis are not a protected class in the sense of the word so they'd have to pull some kind of legal rabbit out of their head to make that work.
The fact that there are damages does not immediately imply that some outside party is liable for those damages. It merely means that you are back where you would have been without that outside party.
So even if Cloudflare caused this that does not immediately imply liability. So if the Daily Stormer wishes to sue Cloudflare they obviously can but I really doubt they will make it stick.
Sure, but that all starts with you claiming you have a right to the service to begin with. And that's the hard part to prove here, especially since Cloudflare fairly explicitly reserves the right not to do business with anybody they don't feel like serving.
Because of this sentence from Cloudflare's Terms of Service:
"You further agree that if...Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you" [1].
If you don't want that kind of a service relationship, you negotiate a fixed-term contract up front.
> that doesn't mean a judge wouldn't put the monetary damages square on cloudflare
Section 10 (Termination) says "you expressly agree that in the case of a termination for cause you will not have any opportunity to cure." Sections 25 and 26 require arbitration under the AAA's rules and California law. I'd put the odds of remedy at close to nil. These (mandatory arbitration and contractually-agreed upon indemnification for termination of services) are well-set areas of law.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is also worrying.
It's better than if they had reverse engineered the policy. Do it or don't do it, but either way, stand by your actions and get outta here with the mealy mouthed BS. IMHO.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
Is it corruption when a governor issues a pardon, or a president vetoes a bill? The point of an Executive is to be able to do act-utilitarian evaluations of context, while the organization itself is stuck following rule-utilitarianism.
How do you know it's a choice? Do you know if people choose what ideologies to align with? Is it a choice to become an addict?
Moreover, a notable contingent of the supporters of the current ruling party believe "being gay" to be a choice - would you be comfortable with a law change?
I find this distinction to be wholly unconvincing. The reason to carve out exceptions for discrimination against gay people is because they've suffered as a minority - it's a practical matter, not a matter of principle. If you try to apply your "choice" principle, you quickly get into logical trouble - for example, does a child groomed by Nazi parents, who has always supported Nazism, have a "choice" to be a Nazi shithead? What if, a few years from now, we discover a chemical that changes your sexual preferences? Should gays stop being a protected class then? What about religion and political affiliation, also protected classes?
Edit: To your point, if I must: YES. Looking at someone, or a group of people and choosing hatred is 100.00000% a choice. Just like you choosing to defend Nazi shitheads was a choice.
I don't think there's anything in the tech consciousness alone, that conveys the sheer individual and global damage WW2 did. Upwards of 80 million dead? I don't think people have any grasp at all what a struggle it was, how totally uncertain it was that Axis powers would be defeated, or the extent of human suffering enacted.
I see it as an extreme form of bullying where literally nothing else works other than murder or be murdered, it was law of the jungle, it was might makes right. And fortunately, the Nazis lost.
Equivocating on fascism? That's inherently dangerous. The reaction to equivocation isn't rational. It has a high chance of leading to an irrational, violent response: "sugar coating Nazis is going to get you lost teeth, as a courtesy, for not gutting you here and now".
I think it's worth being very careful about falling into a trap. It is possible to overreact to fake Nazi crap, there are a lot of stupid people. In an overreaction, it might give permission for a weak autocrat to declare martial law, and that's when the real ones come in. There is a nuance, and that isn't equivocating.
Wait the argument you are making seems to be "one chooses to be a nazi and hate, so we should stigmatize that" therefore "one chooses to get married, so we should stigmatize that"
Do you not see how the actual content of the choice matters? The fact that one is hate and one is love? It is not the fact that they are both choices, it is the fact that one chooses to be a nazi and advocate genocide
Well, when a president convicts someone to a prison sentence because they said the president is a nazi, I'm pretty sure most people would call that corruption (if he bypasses the courts and written laws).
I agree not all principles can be effectively codified into rules, and sometimes exceptions are needed, but I do think the exceptions need to be in line with the bigger principles and ethical standards themselves. However I do not think this is the case here. It seems like a clear case of content policing, because the CEO did not like what the Daily Stormer had to say about him or his company.
If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW.
If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
I'm no lawyer, but I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract (the legal term is "illusory promise" or "illusory contract").
Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
> I seem to recall that a contract that allows one side to unilaterally withdraw for unspecified reasons is not a real contract
I certainly hope you're wrong. Because I've "unilaterally withdrawn from" (i. e. "canceled") literally hundreds of contracts, and I don't remember ever giving a reason.
If Cloudflare can cancel the contract at the CEO's whim without needing to prove that the customer has somehow violated some terms of use, then Cloudflare isn't "bound to perform" using Cornell's terminology.
In ordinary contracts that's true, but this case is different because it's more of a continuing contract
It is not a one time performance like washing a car or shoveling a driveway or buying grocheries. It is a continual term contract where each party agrees to continue going. In these cases, it would be legal to have a clause allowing either party to terminate the contract at any time. Certainly daily stormer was free to stop using cloud flare at any time. And similarly, cloudflare is free to terminate the stormer's account at any time provided they refund the cash. So the contract is not really illusory because both parties still have the obligation to perform, they just don't have the obligation to continue performing.
The point here is that if you have an account with Cloudflare, but Cloudflare's terms of use allow it to cancel your account for any reason--which is how I understand the CEO's explanation, regardless of whether I think the stated reason is good or bad--then you may be relying on something that you shouldn't rely on.
I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11.
The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate.
The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread.
The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech.
How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration.
The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
People don't "understand" because you're wrong (or at least, have no evidence of being right). Infact, what you argue for is a worse outcome than your conclusion, an outcome where individuals and businesses are forced to support speech they don't agree with, thus robbing them of their freedoms.
Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.
The issue is: once all the big platforms are aggressively enforcing speech controls, supported by a wider shift in the culture that backs that, how likely is it that the government will take the opportunity to become a speech regulator as it pertains to the Internet just as they are with broadcast & radio today.
I say: it's guaranteed as an inevitable outcome, if the platforms & wider culture keep moving the direction things are going now.
The consequence: the next Trump will do horrific things with those new speech control powers. It's extremely obvious this is where we're heading. The fear people are using as an excuse to argue in favor of controlled speech today, is identical to the fear that was taken advantage of by the government to implement dozens of new abusive post 9/11 powers on the basis of a constantly terrified (eg the Bush terror color codes) citizenship.
The platforms are putting the levers into place, that a future government will use at their pleasure to silence opposition. We have a very, very aggressive, power hungry government; we have a very consolidated power base politically, with only two major parties. You can't see what's going to come out of that?
Every country in the world has more stringent free speech laws as the US, and the democracies among them have not devolved into dictatorships. So I'd be careful with any certainty approaching a "guarantee of an inevitable outcome:.
People seem to be missing the entire substance of what he's getting at. That's why he mentions "no one should have that power". He even follows up about this in the blog.
> Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
Exactly! Extremely frustrating that the rest of the quote wasn't included.
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well:
“We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
I think what the subtext is is that he values free speech, but if he gets enough political pressure and threats he'll do what he has to to protect the company's bottom line on a case by case basis.
I think arbitrary is the wrong word, the correct word is subjective. The decision wasn't random, or capricious as is the denotation of arbitrary. But the decision was subjective in that it's based more on instinct, bias, opinion, feeling, than it is on something objective that can be articulated in a way that it's a reproducible judgement with different particulars.
Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter:
These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose.
1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve...
1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068...
2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof.
And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists.
"White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence."
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
> I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content
how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?
Interesting read.
The consequences of this will be important.
I always thought the balkanization of the internet would occur because of world governments not because of tech leaders personal feelings or corporate influence.
I expect tech leaders to be dragged in front of the senate real soon.
It did. They're completely offline now. Since their .com got taken down, they had a .onion domain, which now simply says that they've moved to .ru, which is currently down thanks to Cloudflare. They'll probably return to that .onion domain shortly, but, as I'm writing this, they're completely off of the Internet.
The site of the nature and reputation such as Daily Stormer will remain offline in perpetuity without DDoS protection. It wouldn't even take botnets - you could easily sign up enough volunteers to run the client.
>The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I support free speech, even when the speech is hateful and malignant, because I honestly believe the best way to combat vile ideas is out in the open where people can see them, hear them, discuss them and repudiate them. Cultures can't innoculate themselves against ideas without an intellectual herd immunity, and that is impossible without mass exposure.
On the other hand, fuck Nazis.
I think I'm quite willing to let them come for the Nazis then start caring when they come for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, etc. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
Of course, on the third hand, I have no real power over anyone else's speech, and I'm just some rando on the internet, so it doesn't really matter what I think.
Right -- for some reason or another, there is A Bright Line around Nazis that makes this a brain-dead decision. It might be that the name has become a by-word for "evil," but as someone who is _very much_ a free speech advocate, I have no sympathy for Naziism, or any kind of "speech" (however people try to bend that word) that advocates the ill physical will toward others. It's that simple. Any attempts to give a heady definition only result in convolution.
I mean, he just has the authority over the company and can deny service to them, he can't effectively shut them down. Just give them downtime. I would compare this to a DoS more than a shut down.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content,"
...unless the press tells them what their philosophy needs to be? The lesson is that no capitalist company can remain neutral, today. Which has good and bad consequences. It's amazing how the small number of media conglomerates have solidified their political power alongside their commercial power. A true locus of control in Western society.
It's my fear this locus of control or suppression of voices is part of the reason we have an increase in violent rhetoric.
I learned an important lesson in 2016, my worldviews are not shared in America outside of big cities. It forced me to realize that I didn't even know people disagreed so fiercely because of media conglomerate created echo bubbles.
Don't for a moment think it is just a city/rural thing (with a bunch of conservative country bumkins).
Many people having non-leftwing ideas simply hide it. Since most workplaces have become politicised and hostile to conservative/right/slightly right of center views, people just hide it. Some people (including me) even engage in fake virtue signalling.
I said "just" a rural urban thing. No doubt there are more leftwingers/liberals in cities. But it is not nearly as uniform as your experience would suggest.
Polling also said that Hillary would win the election, and brexit won't happen. People, including me, lie to pollsters.
Arguably they shouldn't. But just because both X and Y should be done, it's not wrong to do only X, or only Y.
I can also sorta understand how the groups in question create a strong(er) emotional reaction. These are hate groups from "our" society. And in the same way that the death of someone close saddens more than a stranger's, seeing a swastika-bearing mob of people who could have gone to school with you may stir more anger than the hate and atrocities committed by strangers–especially if you don't understand their language, and have gotten used to it.
If we interpret Cloudflare's action as a symbol, it may also be more effective when used in this case than with ISIS: coming from (in general terms) the same society, such a signal of disapproval is more meaningful. People are social animals, and they are hardwired to seek approval from their peers. No matter how much someone tries to convince themselves that they don't care, it stings when their neighbour stops inviting them to his parties.
The same isn't true for ISIS, to whom the people at Cloudflare would have always been "the other side".
Plus, obviously, the fact that stormtrooper monthly apparently said that Cloudflare were sympathisers. That statement made it impossible to continue working for them.
Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included.
The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.
You're confusing free speech with the first amendment. Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored, rather it should be debated, condemned, or ignored.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
> For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Yep, and at that point the only recourse you would have would be the government, right?
> Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Your smugness suggests that you think this is surprising to me, rather than being my entire point. Businesses will do whatever they want, in their own self-interest. If we want them to do something else because we as a society value something like free speech, your options are to ignore it or to pass a law. If you're concerned about CloudFlare's ability to censor the internet, take it up with the government, because CloudFlare's commitment to free speech is good only as long as it makes business sense for them.
But at this point I think that it be better to just have a free market retaliatory war of "social consequences". IE, the pro censorship people get named and shamed and fired from their jobs (starting with the most extreme first)
Then the pro censorship people would try to fix the problem with laws, ect.
Hey if that's what gets you going go for it. I think you'll find that most people will be way less willing to fire an employee for being a nazi than for being pro nazi social consequences. Wonder why that is.
Edit: I had it backwards, obviously. I meant to say that most employers would find it much easier to fire a Nazi than someone who thinks Nazi's should be censored...
Uhh, no. What you do is go after the Anarchists/hard core leftists/communists, who have beliefs that are equivalent to nazi beliefs.
IE, the revolutionary leftists who have publicly stated things like "The liberals get the bullet too".
Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
Again... it's pretty obvious that being a black block protester or antifa can get you fired. That's the entire point of dressing in black and evading the police. They're perfectly aware that they're taking extra legal measures...
> who have beliefs that are equivalent to nazi beliefs
That's an interesting equivalence you've drawn there. Which races do they believe in exterminating again? I forgot.
> publicly stated
Where?
> "The liberals get the bullet too".
> Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?
I had never actually heard that phrase before so I googled it. I can't seem to find anything about it from before 2017, so it seems like it got famous due to a piece of graffiti from earlier this year. While I don't doubt that there are people on the far left that say this kind of thing, I think they're pretty fringe and are more bark than bite. In reality these people actually vote for people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
> Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
No offense, but your exposure to "leftism" seems pretty new and based on social media. Please do share what you're reading though...
> Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
Do people with their real names do that on twitter (I assume you're talking about twitter)? Or just eggs, like on the far right?
What's really concerning to me is that the white nationalists and neo nazis are out without hoods or masks. They are not afraid of having their pictures taken. They think they can be weekend nazis.
" Which races do they believe in exterminating again? I forgot."
I'd put it in the 10s of millions of people is the amount of people that they want exterminated.
It would include all bourgeois, petite bourgeois (ie small business owners), as well as anyone else that would oppose them in an attempted overthrowing of the capitalist system as their attempted "dictatorship of the proletariat", as well as anyone who supported the current "imperialist regime" of our capitalist system. IE, probably most police officers, soldiers, and politicians.
So yes, in terms of total number of people that they want to kill, I'd say it is about equivalent in badness to literal Nazis.
"Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?"
Ah, see, here is the confusion. You don't spend much time listening to leftists. (Otherwise you'd get the "liberal" reference)
In communist and anarchist circles, a "liberal" is not in reference to an american leftist. They are talking about classical "liberals" as in someone who support civil rights and civil liberties, and the capitalist system. The "liberals" are the enemy.
Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are not socialists to these people. Neither is Norway, or Sweden or European social democracies. You are only a socialist if you believe in the violent confiscation of the means of production, and the overthrowing of the imperial capitalist system.
Modern day Venezuela is the kind country that they support, but they don't even think that Venezuela went far enough, and don't even think it is correct to call Venezuela socialist.
Go read reddit /r/socialism and /r/Anarchism and read the comments to understand what leftists believe.
> Ah, see, here is the confusion. You don't spend much time listening to leftists.
No I understand I was making fun of your typo. You meant to say that "leftists say that liberals get the bullet to"
Honestly I think you go meet with some actual American socialists you'll find that they're a lot more moderate than the teenagers and shut ins who post on political subreddits. It's like turning to Twitter for an an "average American opinion." Small communities on places like Reddit and Twitter are not proxies for entire groups of people. Just like /r/The_Donald hardly actually represents all Trump supporters, just a vocal subset that gets the most attention.
OK, I'm usually the last to complain about downvoting, but this is ridiculous. That our government routinely fails to uphold the principle of free speech is not even remotely a controversial position... so perhaps some of you folks would like to explain what your argument is?
Remember, a "first amendment" in and of itself has absolutely zero power to guarantee anything. Our government violates many of the provisions of the Constitution on a daily basis. "Free speech zones" anybody? Warrantless wiretapping? Civil asset forfeiture? Etc, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, the old line "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" really is true. It's actually down to us, "We The People" to hold our government accountable and make sure it upholds the principles we value. We can't just abdicate our responsibility and say "Oh, it's in the 1st amendment, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
> Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
Wow! What's up is down and down is up. I assume you are vehemently on the side those wedding cake bakers who refused to make a gay wedding cake, then?
Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter. If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake," you can argue, much more easily, that Cloudflare has no business deciding what content it offers its services to.
> What's up is down and down is up. I assume you are vehemently on the side those wedding cake bakers who refused to make a gay wedding cake, then?
The issue of limited discrimination protections on specified axes for public accommodations is a thorny one especially when it comes to expressive acts; there's plenty of room for debate on what axes should be protected, but a general non-discrimination rule for political ideology has never been seriously suggested, and would arguably run afoul of the first amendment.
> If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake,"
That's not the legal basis; a specific protection from sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations (in state law in the state in question) is.
> Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure.
Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this extent, right?
That suit is filed against a government agency. Free speech protections in the US constitution are focused on preventing the government from stifling speech. These protections do not apply to private citizens or corporations.
It depends on where the line in the sand is, or if that kind of discrimination is legal or not.
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
> But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public setvice.
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
Nazi's aren't a protected class. I don't have to sell you server space. But I also don't have the right to knock down your own server, should you set one up on the public internet.
A protected class is what we decide should be one. There weren't any protected classes at all, until one day there were, and we added things to that list since then.
Nazis specifically aren't a protected class, of course. Neither are white people. But (any) race is a protected class. And (any) political opinion could be a protected class, as well.
IIRC, this is already the case in California, with respect to employment - i.e. you cannot be fired for expressing a political opinion.
> A protected class is what we decide should be one. There weren't any protected classes at all, until one day there were, and we added things to that list since then.
Yes, we advanced to being a more civilized society.
Adding "politics" to the list of protected classes is akin to removing all the other ones, since someone's "idea" can be that their race/sex/age/nationality makes them superior to all others.
I'd never support a politician who promoted the idea of rolling back Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
> Adding "politics" to the list of protected classes is akin to removing all the other ones, since someone's "idea" can be that their race/sex/age/nationality makes them superior to all others.
Not at all. Adding the expression of some idea to the protected list does not, in any way, limit protection for other things on that list. It's the implementation of those ideas that would be a reversal.
So if an anti-abortion doctor wants to go work at an abortion clinic and express his or her views in the workplace, then you feel he or she shouldn't be allowed to be fired for expressing those views? Surely that would impact the business.
What if a nazi wants to go work with a black rights group? Or a male sexist wants to work in a women's shelter?
Adding politics to the list of protected classes would be the end of protected classes.
CloudFlare terminating their account in no way kicks them off the web. They have plenty of other options[1]. CF has just decided they don't want to help them promote their speech.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
In fact, free speech means that no private entity is compelled to help spread ideas they don't want to spread, outside of situations (mostly regulated monopolies) where a “private” entity acts as a quasi-public one.
This response always strikes me as a huge cop-out. The phrase "free speech" can refer not just to the legal first amendment right but also to the more general societal principle. Nobody has claimed or will claim that Cloudflare's actions here violate the first amendment.
The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should.
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.
It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value.
Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
What you and a lot of us are experiencing right now is what Karl Popper called "The Paradox of Tolerance".
Total free speech as an ideal (not as a legal framework) creates a paradox where it implores people to tolerate the speech of groups that actively intend to destroy free speech (both legally and ideally), such as fascist groups.
Your opinion of the paradox put aside - Karl Popper was a well-regarded 20th century philosopher, not some flimsy rando-streamer with 20 subs on Youtube.
> Karl Popper was a well-regarded 20th century philosopher
I'm aware and don't see why an appeal to authority is necessary. Also OP didn't link Karl Popper. They linked a rando-streamer who's opinions on censorship probably have Popper rolling in his grave.
---
Just for the sake of this thread here's Popper's conclusion from `The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato`:
> . . . 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 most 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 . . .
This may seem like a logical conclusion, but it's based on a paradox and therefore inherently illogical. A paradox is usually useful for showing issues with a conclusion and not supporting one.
Consider who decides what is tolerant or not. Do the Karl Poppers (who was very opposed to totalitarism) decide? How about the linked youtuber, who blocks everyone with slightly opposing opinions? What if I consider the youtuber intolerant?
By not tolerating the intolerant, that person person should therefore not be tolerated. How could such a thing possibly be realized?
In similar fashion to the capacitor switch paradox, [1] it stems from an inaccurate model. Toleration is an abstract idea modeling a much more complex social trait. Abstraction models may make reasoning as humans easier but we should always be careful when applying them.
don't see why an appeal to authority is necessary.
If you didn't want to discuss their authority, then don't bring it up- "youtube faux philosophers". You made an attack on their authority and the other person just defended it.
My apologies for providing a brief introduction and believing in you enough to think you could further research the source material yourself. Next time I'll link directly to a PDF of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".
Popper was talking about tolerance in general. Tolerance of hateful actions, in general, is counter-productive. Tolerance of speech in particular is not, as speech alone does not and cannot "destroy free speech".
> Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.
The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.
If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.
> It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value.
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
>Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society.
That is the familiar way. But when lies travel faster than corrections, and bots can automate the Gish gallop, it's hard to imagine truth actually winning.
All the misinformation and crud out there is troubling, but I think we just fall victim to sampling bias. Don't let the seas of crap dissuade you from your civic duty of making sound arguments!
>Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose
Why should anybody deserve to lose because they fall victim to the masses? How is that in any way justifiable? This is tyranny of the masses, nothing else.
And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
>To deny free speech is to oppress.
And how does this constitute an argument? We oppress the Marburg virus, why are we supposed to turn the other cheek when our society and our values are threatened by destructive forces?
It is called democracy. It has brought more success/improved living conditions than any other model (tyranny of the elite) in history.
> And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
Let's see some citations. Who are these beacons of civil rights? China? India? Colonel England?
It is also worth noting that free speech is considered a human right by the UN. [1]
> And how does this constitute an argument?
It's a circular arguement. I oppress you, you oppress me, we are all one big opressive family.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
>Let's see some citations. Who are these beacons of civil rights? China? India? Colonel England?
The United Kingdom and France for starters, two countries that were relatively egalitarian while the US was still busy enslaving its African-American population. Of course while free speech was already a thing in the United States.
Free speech were very popular ideas in France/England/USA in that time period. [1,2] France even had free speech protections before the USA did. [2] The USA's notion of free speech was directly influenced by/spawned from Europian ideals and legislation. [3,4] It is ignorant of history to suggest otherwise.
While they may not have made it into law has solidly as in the USA, free speech ideals were very present and popular ideal in France/England at those time periods.
Europe's "hate speech" laws and censorship of speech/press are from more recent times.
> Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) were written to address the prohibitive nature of the government in preventing the freedom of speech, religion, and the press.
Everything you wrote is why we have freedom of speech protection.
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
Every time someone says that, I just hear "I'm defending censorship." Is that what you are doing, or am I just overly sensitive?
I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.
This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
If you label "not amplifying someone" as censorship, then there is obviously no such thing as uncensored free speech for everyone. The question then becomes who you step up to defend, and who you quietly ignore, when someone gets amplified over them.
It's not about amplifying someone. There is a difference between ignoring someone and silencing them. Cloudflare's move seems more like silencing than ignoring to me. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think everyone should be able to put their (sometimes terrible) opinions on the internet, and we'll trust society to decide which ideas are terrible and should be ignored.
Cloudflare is refusing to help someone spread their message. Again, if you call that censorship, then I'm not sure where you draw the line, as almost every speech act involves taking space away from other speech acts. Particularly when you're talking about sites like Daily Stormer, which are explicitly used to organize acts of censorship against voices they don't like.
I don't think one can coherently take a neutral stance at that level. If not helping Daily Stormer disseminate their message is branded as censorship, but Daily Stormers acts of bullying and threads of violence are not, then I would say that that definition of censorship needs to be re-evaluated.
CF terminating their service absolutely does not silence them. They have many other ways to get their message out, even ways that look identical to what CF was providing.
If they end up actually getting turned away everywhere, and have no avenue to get their message out, then perhaps that's saying something about what everyone else things of the quality of their message.
And yes, this sort of thing needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If every internet company decided to disallow accounts held by people of a particular ethnic group, then that would be a problem. But I don't see an issue with every internet company deciding they don't want to participate in spreading hate speech and giving a hate group a platform to spread their propaganda. We wouldn't be arguing about this if we were talking about shutting down a website distributing ISIS recruitment videos, would we?
For what it's worth, yes, I would still argue that ISIS recruitment videos should be allowed on the internet. (But I could see my future self renouncing this as immature and un-nuanced.) Because in general, I am more afraid of overreaction to terrorism than terrorism itself.
That's true that there are alternatives to CF. As long as there is at least one anti-DDoS provider with an "everyone is welcome" attitude, I suppose CF can do whatever they want. So I'll concede that point.
Censorship is merely deciding what ideas you will or will not participate in promoting; protecting the right to do that is the heart of the ideal of free speech.
Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free speech” stands against.
If you think government censorship is bad then you think this is bad, or you don't understand why it's bad at all. I don't understand where you come from arguing against such a cornerstone of our society.
Personally, I think that anyone who supports censorship should be fired from their jobs, have their internet accounts banned, and be refused service at every business where it is legal to refuse service to you.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
I'm really playing devil's advocate here but if the CEO of Cloudflare wakes up and thinks to himself "man I hate that site, I'm going to remove it from my service", and the Internet says "no you can't", is that another form of censorship? In this situation we're either limiting what Daily Stormer can do, or limiting what Cloudflare can do.
It's not censorship either way. The private corporation should be able to regulate its network as it pleases on the content it allows. People are free to use, or not use, that service in consequence.
If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.
Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.
Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.
Yes, without a third option, the question is, which is more important, freedom of speech and expression, or the freedom for business to choose who they serve?
If it were a protected group like LGBTQ, Cloudflare could not discriminate against them (the gay wedding cake is an example of this). So we've already decided, as a society (or rather our politicians have), that businesses must service protected groups. How far of a slippery slope is it to extend that protection to everyone?
The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery. With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region, and SV's bias towards liberalism (in a capitalist sort of way), it makes it harder to just find another bakery.
I can see the frustration. Imagine if the roles were reversed and the US internet was controlled by a conservative group in Texas (as it almost was) and those companies decided they didn't want to host packets or register LGBTQ type websites; we'd be livid. I mean we have to treat all speech equally, don't we?
That's not a protected class. In some (a minority) states, sexual orientation is. Gender identity is in some also, but not the same set.
> The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery.
Outside of a major urban area, that's far from clear. OTOH, there are many domain registrars and web hosts, and they tend not to have very limited geographic service areas. I definitely have more viable choices for either of those than I would for a wedding cake baker.
> With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region
This is absolutely not the case, especially for domain registration or web hosting.
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services.
Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
Perhaps I'm missing that, but that portion of your post isn't really correct either. Most companies can suppress speech. Some -- which are few, in relative terms -- are regulated and barred from doing so, sure. So you may be "technically correct", but that's not particularly useful here. Most companies (including CF) can, and IMO should, suppress speech that they find reprehensible. It's a difficult line to walk, but ignoring the problem is cowardly, and tacitly condones bad behavior.
This always sounded so silly to me. Are they legally allowed to refuse service to them? According to the law: absolutely. But that has no bearing on whether or not we are allowed to criticize them.
>Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue. You could have net neutrality ("free circulation for bits" if you will) and as long as no hosting providers want to take your content, you won't be able to publish them.
Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility?
My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
(Yes, you absolutely need to remove the bullet point now.)
>I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.
When governments ban printing presses, which I think actually has happened in the past in Europe, would you consider that preventing people's right to free speech? I would. The difference here is it isn't necessarily governments, but rather corporations that control access to the internet (printing press).
I think in the printing press example, people ended up stealing them to print. I'm not sure you can steal the internet.
> When governments ban printing presses, which I think actually has happened in the past in Europe, would you consider that preventing people's right to free speech?
Yes, because it prevents people from free using their own resources and those gained through mutually consensual trade to spread their ideas.
> The difference here is it isn't necessarily governments, but rather corporations that control access to the internet (printing press).
No, the difference is that nothing is being banned; people are choosing not to let other people use their digital “printing press”, which is no different than the NYT choosing not to print your opinion piece.
No one is preventing the Stormer from self-hosting. And there are a very large set of domain registrars; the fact that a handful have refused their business doesn't mean that they can't get a domain name (which is certainly a convenience that affects reach, but also not a necessity, to publishing via the internet.)
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
Yes, you're one tough maverick for repeating something stated only about 20x in just this thread.
But you're indeed quite brave to pretend not to have seen the 25 answers pointing out that it's also this CEO (and everyone else's) right not to participate in the spreading of hate speech and nazi propaganda.
Also:
"slippery slope" is not an argument, it's a fallacy. Observe: "now, they're only imprisoning the murderers. It's only a matter of time until they'll throw you in jail for walking funny"
> you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so ...
Why? Does eating one apple pie obligate you to eat all the apple pie?
When I first clicked on the discussion link, there were two comments. I also took a break to go to the restroom before I submitted my comment. I'm sorry that I wasn't quick enough for you.
> unilaterally
Happy now?
Did you actually want to discuss/argue with my comment or just criticize the way I worded it?
> My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
You may want to read this comment of mine I put in a thread that probably won't get seen much because it's not intellectually stimulating enough, or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
I'll add a quote from a White Rose leaflet:
> Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness!
The issue extends beyond the moral. They've set a precedential behavior and now it can be used against them. "You took down X, but you won't take down Z?" This could be persuasive upon a judge or jury. By starting down this path, they've set up a standard of behavior that they will be judged against, for better or worse, moving forward.
That's a bad thing for us overall because now it won't just be something the CEO finds offensive; rather, it will be anything that could, through any potential legalistic contortion, result in legal liability.
We should all be very concerned about these low-level infrastructure components like GoDaddy, Google DNS, and CloudFlare beginning to adopt a policy of content moderation.
I'm shocked that something as simple as "they're nazis" is actually being accepted by people here; it is pretty much the stock anti-speech argument that we've all rehearsed forever. Sad to see that many aren't living up to it now that the cards are on the table.
Domains should only be seized when the government issues a binding legal order, not when the registrar or CDN's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
This is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine it's not coordinated specifically to weaken/undermine any form of anti-establishment or politically incorrect speech online. These attacks on core infrastructure delivery components need to be denounced loudly.
"The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers"
Good reference, another thing to go on my Not-A-Lawyer reading list.
However, this doesn't seem to indicate that such editorial activity can't have a legal effect in some areas. It is limited only to cases where the service provider would otherwise be implicated as the publisher/speaker instead of a neutral mechanism used in the delivery of others' publications and speech. There are many other relevant circumstances where such behavior creates at least a non-legal precedent (Not A Lawyer, so can't and don't want to get into the nitty-gritty) and expectation that CloudFlare will act in a specific manner that violates the content policy they claim to want to keep.
The simple fact is that even if the law unequivocally allowed such activity, that doesn't mean that Cloudflare hasn't set a standard of behavior that they will be expected to live up to, inside and outside of the coutroom. That's especially true in the case of a jury trial, but there are certainly no shortage of politically-aware judges who don't want to let their 15 minutes be wasted in falsely associating them as "pro-white-supremacist". And if Cloudflare is at all PR-sensitive, they are now in for a long, slow beating.
This is all a large can of worms that everyone should regret ever having opened. How hard would it have been to say "Sorry, that's not how DNS works" when some random person on Twitter said "You're supporting a white supremacist! Undo it!"?
IMO the evidence here indicates a coordinated takedown and censorship campaign by organized political forces, and this operation has undeniably been a resounding success for them. So much so that they have fundamentally undermined the core institutions of the internet itself, hardly realizing the sacrosanct barrier they've pierced.
And I know that the HN that recognizes this with near unanimity is lying around here somewhere. I'm just not sure why they're not showing up to these threads. Maybe the votes are being artificially manipulated? Maybe everyone has slowly earned themselves bans/account censures for touching a topic that the mods are sensitive about? Maybe employers are becoming extra vigilant about catching those who express heresy on HN in hopes of catching a Damore-esque figure before it becomes a national press story? I dunno. But this type of non-neutrality on the part of core online infrastructure providers should be a much bigger deal than it is.
> How hard would it have been to say "Sorry, that's not how DNS works" when some random person on Twitter said "You're supporting a white supremacist! Undo it!"?
I don't understand? Are you saying that lying would have been morally superior? Because, as we've just seen, that's exactly how DNS works.
As for the other legal consequences, I don't see how this changes anything. Did anybody ever doubt Cloudflare's technical ability to stop serving individual sites?
I also don't see how consistency can be an argument in any such case: Being consistently wrong doesn't seem like a strong excuse for being wrong.
I feel you're also operating from a view of the court system that is vastly more cynical than the courts deserve. This is, unfortunately, a point that I cannot adequately put into words. But if you ever have the time, maybe find some decision that interests you (or, actually, pick anything at random) and read the decision, or maybe watch the oral arguments. I often read both the majority and the dissenting opinion of cases, and come away agreeing with both of them! That should be impossible because they contradict each other, but even opinions I disagree with often have an undeniably forceful argument.
(I just thought of a good example, which is a transcript from the Waymo vs Uber lawsuit. You may be surprised to see the forceful stand the judge takes to make the proceedings open to the general public. Quote:
if you want all this stuff to be so secret,
you should be in arbitration. You shouldn't be
trying to do this in court and constantly [insisting
on closed procedures].
The public has a right to see what we do.
And I feel that so strongly. I am not --
the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned
subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster
or these two big companies. We belong to the public.
With regard to your expectation of HN's opinion: I believe you're mostly just underestimating how dramatic many people consider the current political situation to be. This is somewhat beyond the usual partisan divide, as can be seen by the almost unanimous decision by CEOs (generally not suspected to secretly harbour leftwing believes) to quit their advisory roles, by the increasing willingness of republicans in congress to criticise their president, or even in the Fox News moderator's spontaneous reaction to Trump's press conference, calling it "disgusting" and "surreal".
Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" [1] . Scary to delegate such powers to a person who "literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet"
I think that calling every decision unilaterally the same no matter the variables involved is pretty rash. Lots of discussions on HN devolve into this way of thinking and I really can't stand it.
An entity that puts child porn on the Internet isn't protected by freedom of speech. Soliciting hate, violence and prejudice is obviously not identical but it's a lot different from just having a different opinion than someone else.
Shitty people should be treated shitty by companies. I don't really see a democratic way of banning folks like this from Cloudflare besides Cloudflare deciding to do so.
"paid" as in you have to pay per DDoS to the booter. CF business is not in getting money directly from the booters, but in acquiring many paid CF subscriptions from the sites that the booters can attack. Some of these booters can generate 100+Gbps UDP attacks.
>acquiring many paid CF subscriptions from the sites that the booters can attack
Still doesn't make sense. CF alone doesn't effectively defend against DDoS attacks without somewhat complicated setup, CF is completely worthless when your backend is getting attacked.
I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of people pushed to use CF because of these booters.
Besides, do you feel that the situation would be any different if the booters weren't allowed on CF? CF is by no means important to their operations.
Cloudflare has also been crucial to malware vendors who are pushing out their exploit kits. When I worked at Malwarebytes we had the worst possible time working with the Cloudflare abuse team to take down active exploit kits.
They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.
It is very important to distinguish something like Facebook blocking an account / Medium taking down a blog from a domain registrar refusing to cooperate.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet, cutting off all communication.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
Sunlight in this case would be doing for Nazis what they themselves won't do because they're unable -- recognize them for who they are and act accordingly.
> In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought
I completely agree for the need for boundaries, but I think we've done a most excellent job of setting them!
The current boundary is speech that immediately incites violence, I believe the supreme court interpretation has been very generous towards the notion of free speech, including hate speech, as it should be!
Here's why:
We should let the radicals be racist and make radical statements as much as they want. At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
A blanket militant action against the whole ideology will no doubt show better results on shutting down the movement on a short term.
But the notion of freedom of speech is not meant to protect these radicals, it is meant to protect ourselves and the integrity of society! We cannot make exceptions to these rules just because it's more convenient to us now, because this weakens the principle. This is the whole slippery slope argument.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
If you wish to change the lines on which we use force, you must make a coherent case based on principle, not on convenience or anecdotes, as the principles themselves already account for, in a deep way, the history to which you allude.
> The current boundary is speech that immediately incites violence
Well good luck then. Just like Hitler famously wanted people to not wait for his orders, but distill his wishes and creatively go beyond in doing things in his spirit to get official support later, the guy who drove his car full speed into people didn't need anyone to specifically tell them to do that.
> At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
Oh, so the second the car approaches the crowd, time just stops and it gets "shut down"? No wait, that's totally not what happened and also what will happen as this shit repeats under a president who implicitly supports it and a populace that would rather berate those who DO want to shut it down than those who need shutting down.
Only very few will call for "specific acts of violence", I won't join you in holding your breath for that. Read Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner or don't. These aren't anecdotes, these are your betters, casting pearls before pigs. Pearls that were bought with suffering the likes of which neither you or I can even begin to imagine. But if you offer yourself as hostage to the Nazis, then you're out of what I consider polite society, too.
If they are specifically inciting this kind of violence, then yes, I think it is entirely correct to persecute all of them.
If they're talking about violence in abstract, then no. However, it should be sufficient reason for our security services to track the people expressing such ideas very closely, basically assuming that they're up to something, and ready to crack down on them as soon as those abstract ideas transform into any kind of concrete plan.
It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.
> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.
Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
Sure, fire is good when you're dealing with them roaches, but kill them as you will, does nothing for the ideas, which sunlight is good for.
Yes, the US actually does have excellent lines on what's acceptable speech. In my not-professional judgement, it's speech that is the proximate cause of violence and incites it, and the daily stormer is outside of that. If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
> If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
In the US, you let corporations decide how to exercise their right of free expression just as much as anyone else.
Freedom of speech means you are permitted to seek collaborators to help you spread your speech, not that others are obligated to disregard their own views to help promote yours. That kind of entitlement would violate the free speech rights of the forced collaborators.
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
> "Isolation only promotes extremism"
Is it? Several wars have been fought over this particular ideology. Massive amounts of resources were expended with the sole goal of stamping it out. The goal then was to eradicate it, because this sort of ideology is the stuff that eats civilizations. We don't have an obligation to amplify it. There is no reasoning with it.
In the hypothetical there's a potential censorship issue which we can address when we get to it. But where's the line? The site called for and celebrated murder and terrorism. On a daily basis they spew actual neo-nazi propaganda. Why, exactly, should we let that be echoed unchecked? We're not even talking about a public entity/government stifling the nazi speech, but rather we're asking whether we should without thinking allowing them to use someone else's private resources to spread their message.
I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
Reading this it sounds like you missed the intent of the post. Cloudflare would have not done this had there not been circumstances in which it was indicated that cloudflare supports the organization.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
There will always be companies that care more about making a buck than anything else. For years spammers and malware authors have been able to find hosting without issue, and taking them down has been a serious pain in the ass. All these nazis need to do is rent a server in russia (where they've moved their name server) and they will be fine.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
>The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
> As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
Angry mobs aren't thinking about "long-term consequences." Unfortunately, the media loves angry mobs because it generates viewership and clicks.
AT&T had common carrier status which indemnifies them against what subscribers did but that came at the cost of a lot of government oversight on what they could do in return.
Lots of private companies wouldn't want that (and AT&T butted heads over it).
Personally I think Facebook is already over that line, when you have the eyeballs of about 1/7th of the planet you are already a potential threat that should have government level oversight, in a democracy, you control the eyeballs you control the politicians.
That's an awful analogy. No one is telling cloudflare to monitor things- what's happening is that people are reporting the issue to cloudflare directly. A better analogy would be AT&T shutting down an account that was using to threaten or harass people.
> Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
I'm agreed that they shouldn't need to, but not that they shouldn't at all. Making these sorts of companies on the hook for things their customers do would make it impossible to run a company like this at all.
But remember, companies are made up of people. Those people have values and, with those values, make moral judgments -- and it is entirely within their right to do so. In the majority of cases I would hope that most people would choose to be content-neutral, but I absolutely expect and support that some people will eventually hit a threshold where they cannot look the other way anymore. And, in general, I think that's _absolutely ok_.
> The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
It's not a false equivalence because I wasn't trying to compare the two. My entire point was that the illegal content, and stuff that we all know is bad, is still online- anyone can access it with a small amount of effort (or not), and even though big companies are already blocking it and refuse to host it the content is still readily available.
If we can't even get that content offline, the idea that cloudflare refusing to host this website means this website won't be able to find hosting is absolutely absurd.
That case had to do with whether page rank itself is anticompetitive. Their page wasn't arbitrary "deranked", the company just didn't like the algorithm. As the judge noted, Kinderstart failed to even identify the market Google was competing with them in. I was responding to the assertions that Google removes pages from their search results without reason or method.
> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
"Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions."
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
The larger point about trying to censor people out of having opinions instead of ignoring or condemning them is valid. This has raised their profile far beyond simply ignoring or condemning them and treating them like any other repulsive website (of which there are PLENTY that Google/GoDaddy/Cloudflare now "officially endorse").
Maybe when you get in the business of providing speech as a service. For example, imagine you went into the wedding cake business, and someone came in and wanted you to make a gay wedding cake (note: not a wedding cake for gay people, but a wedding cake that normalized gay marriage). Now imagine you're a very old-school traditionalist about that sort of thing. Should you be compelled to make that cake with two women on the top?
Given that the Supreme Court has already decided that "wedding cake makers" are part of critical speech infrastructure, I think that Cloudflare, a service that hosts ISIS, pirates, and others, should be subject to the same restrictions as wedding cake makers.
That's the joke. If the government can force a cake baker to make a cake for a gay couple, why not force (excuse me, regulate) internet companies to provide services to those they don't want to provide service for? Surely, if your sexual orientation is a protected class as a consumer, your first amendment rights are moreso protected.
"No federal law requires businesses to serve all customers without regard to their sexual orientation, but 21 states have “public accommodations” laws that prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians.
In 2012, he said he politely declined to make a wedding cake for Charles Craig and David Mullins, who had planned to marry in Massachusetts but then have a reception in their home state of Colorado. They lodged a complaint with the state civil rights commission.
The commission ruled that Phillips’ refusal to make the wedding cake violated the provision in the state’s anti-discrimination law that says businesses open to the public may not deny service to customers based on their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The panel ordered him to provide wedding cakes on an equal basis for same-sex couples.
Phillips appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing he deserved a religious exemption based on the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion. His lawyers say he refused to comply with the commission ruling while his appeal proceeded."
> If the government can force a cake baker to make a cake for a gay couple, why not force (excuse me, regulate) internet companies to provide services to those they don't want to provide service for?
The government absolutely could, but there is currently no law banning discrimination of service against racists or ideology in general.
The notion of protected classes with regards to private (not government) discrimination is not defined in the Constitution, but rather federal and state law. The Civil Rights Act defines race, religion, and sex as a protected class. If you want the government to prevent private companies from refusing to serve racists, you'd need a federal law passed, so I guess call your local congressman.
On the flip side of that you can only run your cake making business because you benefit from access to a stable monetary system (hah, I live in the UK), a safe and civil society and an educated populace with money to buy over priced sugar.
Given that does society not have a right to say that "If you want to earn money providing a service then you should do so by providing that service equally to all people who aren't breaking the law"?
Not saying which side I fall, I'm not sure but I think the question is interesting.
Far to often we focus on our rights and forget that other people have rights and that society has a duty to us and we have a duty to society.
Wow, thanks. I still think it's an interesting case, because the people celebrating GoDaddy/Google/Cloudflare's decision largely seem to be against the right of the cake makers to refuse to make a gay wedding cake. "Wooo go GoDaddy! Hey wait a minute cake bakers!" This inconsistency is really concerning, because it betrays a simple tribalism instead of principles. I understand there are principled reasons to be for one and against the other, but that's not what I've been seeing lately. Mostly lots of celebration that corporations are censoring the speech they disapprove of.
Personally, I worry about ingroup vs. outgroup tribalism, whatever the ingroup or the outgroup is. Specifically, I very sincerely worry about its effect on the political landscape. I understand that this is not an issue of government action, but given how many responses of "They're nazis, fuck 'em" (paraphrased) I see, I honestly doubt it would matter significantly if it were in fact the government shutting the site down vs. a private entity.
To head off the obvious criticism: Yes, I understand the distinct difference between first amendment protections vis a vis the government versus the absence of those protections when dealing with other individuals and companies.
That said, I'm not a Nazi, nor am I a neo-Nazi, nor am I in any way sympathetic to their causes, but up to the point that their words specifically incite violence, I'll defend their rights to speak them.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
beyond the fact that the wedding cake hasn't been decided, the point of that case isn't about free speech but about protected classes.
You don't want to let (for example) landlords to deny lending to people because they're gay, black, etc. Not as much of a free speech thing as a 14th ammendment thing
That reminds me a joke that someone made during a family meeting. It was something along the lines of "What? You are going to marry a COMMUNIST?" and "I don't want loyalists in my house!", both of which are outdated concepts nowadays.
While you are free to refuse entry to your house to anyone that you want, it doesn't change the fact that refusing access to someone who would otherwise be allowed in just for their political beliefs is a jerk thing to do.
Agreed in this specific case: Daily Stormer is a hate group that promotes horrible things, and there probably isn't a better solution than to just forcibly shut them down.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
This is an argument over which companies should be designated as "common carriers". If ISPs are common carriers, they can't shut you off just because they don't like what you're hosting. The argument I hear is often that ISPs should be classified as common carriers. The difference between an ISP and a search engine is material. The search engine is, by its very nature, interpreting and ranking content. The ISP is what gets you online so you can use search engines or host pages.
>'If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting.'
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
According to Blind, at least 40% of Silicon Valley workers support what Trump said regarding this incident. Probably less than 1% support the ideas of Neo-nazis or the Daily Stormer. You're making a false assumption and dehumanizing those who disagree with you.
Do you see the problem with that sampling method? Blind is a pretty self-selecting audience, and I wouldn't say it represents the average tech industry at all.
It's the best data available until people start offering up, in real life, their true opinions on sensitive issues in Silicon Valley, which I'm sure will happen any day now.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
If you think Nazism, a racist, hateful ideology opposed to the existence of many groups of people, is equivalent to being black in America, we have nothing to discuss.
To add to this, race is a protected class [1]. We carefully and conservatively enumerate the classes a business holding itself out to the public may not discriminate based on. Political ideology is not a protected class almost anywhere in America.
Of course, but you're ignoring that protected class status is usually granted when discrimination be so pervasive that it is a burden its recipients.
If it becomes commonplace to discriminate against people based on their political ideology then we may very well see the 'political party' protection broadened.
There are two discussions encapsulated in your comment. One, should political ideology be a protected class? And two, if so, how would you delineate protected "political ideology," something inherently more difficult to observe than ethnicity or sex, from unprotected views?
The same way we deal with sexuality as a protected class, which is to say poorly but better than nothing.
> Should political ideology be a protected class?
I think it should, I wouldn't have said it was necessary in years past but it really seems like we're heading down a road where people are going to have to signal the 'right' political values in order to get hired.
I don't. I'm trying to explain that there are limits to 'private businesses can choose not to do businesses with anyone' with a historical example.
In small doses businesses can refuse service to classes of people, but when the discrimination is so commonplace that it becomes a burden to those being discriminated against then you may see the creation of a new protected class (or realistically the broadening of an existing one) to make sure they aren't starved or unable to find employment.
The way I look at it is, assuming you don't hold a monopoly on a particular service, you can choose not to do business with certain people, for whatever (legal) reason.
However, it cuts both ways: your other customers also have the option to boycott you and encourage other people to do the same.
And if every business decides to stop doing business with certain people, then either a) those people really need to rethink what they want to do, because maybe everyone else thinks they're reprehensible, or b) we actually do have a case of a civil rights violation in a new way that we haven't considered making a law for.
Every business deciding not to serve black people would be a case of (b) (though retrograde, as we already have laws around that), and refusing to provide service to hate groups is, IMO, clearly (a).
Most of the more serious ones, I'd imagine. A hospital can't refuse someone because of their political beliefs. A public school can't refuse to teach their children.
The root of the problem is really the botnets. If it weren't for the DDOS attacks anyone could put a server online cheaply and communicate with their relatively small and fringe audience. But because we are incapable of enforcing laws against DDOS attacks you need to be a big a player to stay online.
> and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
In practice the web can't prevent you from voicing your opinion. Even the worst of criminals manage to chat on the dark web. Companies can choose not to promote it though - Google has no obligation to put nasty stuff high in their search and the NYT has no obligation to put it on their front page. I'm not sure there's a problem there.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
If there's a real free market, then people are going to find someone willing to host anything for money. The real problem is when the law prevents companies from hosting them.
I'm glad to see CloudFlare do this, I think it's going to hard to defend themselves against attacks from the MPAA, RIAA, and other troll organizations now :/ I guess no good deed will go unpunished
Unless the site was directly breaking the law, I see this move as troubling. It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground, and I think most HN readers figure why this is. The problem I see is that in the current political climate the general population won't understand that or is unwilling to.
It's always better to appease Nazis. Society should take a long hard look at itself for not allowing Hitler free speech and to fully express his views.
> It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground
Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
The Daily Stormer is pretty radical, but afaik still operates within the law. Taking their platform will put them out of sight and into areas where respecting the law isn't necessary. The enemy you don't know is the enemy you have to fear the most. Unfortunately I feel like most people today are more comfortable with hiding and banning bad ideas than to confront them.
For all the people who are warning of a slippery slope or a chilling effect, where do we draw a line? This site along with others like it likely helped spur a person on to murder a few days ago. This site along with other like it celebrated that murder. This site along with other like are organizing protests at that murder victim's funeral. How in good conscience can you be an accomplice in spreading that message?
I mean, the networking infrastructure carried that message. The people who manufactured the murder weapon assisted the murder goals.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.
It seems pretty obvious that all this hand-wringing over a little known site called The Daily Stormer has raised its profile worldwide far beyond their wildest dreams. This is likely causing the opposite effect of what activists want.
If you honestly think that the rest of the world is only now hearing about the Daily Stormer, then you must have a very plush rock that you've been living under. I assure you that many, many others have not had that particular luxury.
My wording was excessively, and for that I apologize. However, my point was more that not everyone has the same freedom to be unaware of Daily Stormer. In much the same way that childless people have the luxury to be unaware of which schools in their neighborhood are good ones, populations regularly targeted by Daily Stormer have been aware of their rising influence for years.
I can assure you many people had no idea what the Daily Stormer was before they were "kicked out" of the US internet. So no, not knowing about it doesn't mean living under a rock.
Unless I have a reason to seek out The Daily Stormer or similar sites, why/how would I know about them? Some of us just want to go about our lives without having to be stressed about all of this.
Also on sort of related note, this is why I disparage the "cake baking" and "wedding flowers" lawsuits... While I don't care what two adults do in the bedroom, I do care that a private business could be forced to render services. What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law? I think these issues are better left unturned; in this case, CloudFlare was able to take the right action and terminate their account without having to think about a lot of legal precedent.
Do you think I should have a sign on my business door that says "no blacks allowed," too? Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
No, of course not! I think the line is pretty clear there, a person can't choose to be black or white, but a marriage is an "opt in" event, two people are freely choosing to be married.
There have been a lot of these sorts of incidents; I didn't hear about the DOXing incident, that's quite sad, and of course, inexcusable, for any reason.
However, there was an incident [http://bit.ly/1MxG5S8] where a lady was good friends with a man and was a regular customer for years. She did not want her company's name associated with his wedding (sounds oddly similar to the OP), so she politely declined.
This all being said, I'm very curious how you reconcile the two situations, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint.
This discussion would be getting pretty far off-topic, but a lot of thoughtful people would argue that the line isn't clear at all. At the least, marriage confers legal benefits to a couple, including rights during medical emergencies and upon death, and if anyone really "chooses" their sexuality, they do so long before they are at an age to make that choice consciously, and yet long after they can change their mind about it.
I don't think you can justify allowing a business to refuse service on the basis of sexuality using the logic that prevents businesses from refusing service to different skin colors.
I do understand your point about choosing vs not-choosing. A marriage doesn't require the flowers to receive the named benefits above, just a visit to the courthouse though.
In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
The only honest answer I have right now is, I don't know. I posted a comment elsethread essentially asking for opinions on this.
I have my personal ideals -- gay marriage is fine, racism is not -- but those aren't perfectly congruent with what I think a society should codify as law, especially where free speech is concerned.
I think a lot of the debate people are having is over whether they want a nice society or a free one. A completely free society isn't very nice; a perfectly nice society isn't free. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us want to be, but we keep getting hung up on hypotheticals and the ideals behind rallying cries like "free speech!" and so no actual progress is being made.
In this particular case, CloudFlare isn't claiming to be developing a new policy -- they aren't refusing service to all neo-Nazi groups -- and I would support any florist's right to refuse service to a couple if they showed up and went out of their way to piss off the florist, regardless of their sexuality.
But there's an awfully big gray area in there and frankly I support CloudFlare's position a lot more because I like lgbtq people a hell of a lot more than I like neo-Nazis.
I think we would both agree our views on Nazis are summed up by a scene from the Blues Brothers haha. I appreciate your honesty, that's incredible to admit, and I completely agree.
Being nice but not free works for today, but has no guarantee of working for tomorrow. Being free means that we have the ability to evolve our ideas and work towards niceness for all of the future as well.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
An unfree society gives up the ability to evolve and dies, even if it buys us convenient niceness on a short term. An unfree society lowers our chances of being nice tomorrow.
> In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
I think there are at least two distinctions.
The first and most important distinction is that it's actually very feasible to write laws that protect LGBT people. You can't discriminate on that basis, and it's very clear what discriminating on that basis means (well actually all discrimination is thorny and hard to prove/disprove, but LGBT and race exhibit the same set of issues, and we seem to be in agreement that we should figure out how to make racial discrimination illegal.)
Conversely, political belief is an almost impossibly fuzzy line, since at the end of the day pretty much everything is political.
For example, I think we can all agree that I should be allowed to refuse to serve customers who are being completely unreasonable and hostile assholes to me. This happens every Friday night at bars across the country.
But what if those people are being assholes by coming into my Jewish-owned-and-operated pharmacy and loudly talking about exterminating the Jews while buying a bar of soap? Clearly they are being assholes, but they're being assholes by being political. So, can I discriminate and tell them to leave? And if not, is it the case that now any asshole can talk about raunchy sex is a family restaurant or be a complete dick to the bar keep as long as they find a way to weave politics into their speech?
(BTW, apparently the turning point in this case was Daily Stormer or whatever claiming that CloudFlare secretly supports them. So in my mind this was closer to kicking someone out of the bar for being an asshole to management, rather than political discrimination. "You can be a nazi in my bar, but if you go around telling people that just because I let you talk about killing jews in my bar I'm somehow in on the neo-nazi movement, then you need to never come back here.")
So, the first distinction is that protecting LGBT is about as difficult as protecting racial classes but protecting political speech seems pretty intractable, form a legal perspective, without turning public spaces into unusable cesspools.
The second distinction -- and I do think this is a distinction that a free and just society is capable of making -- is the obvious difference between being gay and being a Nazi. E.g., Germany doesn't tolerate public support of Nazis and it's a fairly free and open society -- in some ways more free than the USA, even with respect to certain forms of speech. So for me the jury is out on whether that's a good or a bad idea, but we should at least stop treating "silencing Nazis leads to a terrible unfree society" like an axiom, since there are clear and obvious empirical counter-examples. This assertion without qualification is just false, end of story.
You're conflating an act, getting married, with a state of being, being gay. You could use the same justification of marriage being an "opt in" event to justify refusing to serve an interracial couple or literally any protected class.
Similarly, eating at a restaurant is an "opt in" event. Should you be able to discriminate at will in that circumstance?
I am by no means an advocate of Mill's liberalism, but according to that philosophy espoused everywhere else but the case of a business refusing access to black customers seems to me inconsistent.
> Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
Wait a minute... where did you see that? This is the first time I have heard this part of the story. I thought the owners simply said "no", and then got sued for several hundred thousand dollars.
> Aaron Klein had posted a copy of Laurel's complaint on his Facebook page. The complaint included Rachel and Laurel's home address and phone number. Rachel and Laurel received hundreds of angry and threatening messages in response to Klein's post, including death threats. Klein later testified he was unaware that the women's personal information was on the complaint when he posted it. The BOLI decision found his denial was not credible.
> What if Mike Pence becomes president and uses the precedent set by these lawsuits to justify the passage of his version of Christianity into law?
Wait, how exactly would the precedent set by lawsuits under state laws forbidding certain private discrimination in public accommodations enable federal establishment of religion?
I hope a civil lawsuit advances this conversation much faster than the Cloudflare CEO can.
Yes, speech and expression has consequences. The reactionary service provider likely faces consequences too.
A court could easily side with the "abhorrent neo-nazis" if DDOSing raises their bills and Cloudflare's adhoc policy was the culprit, no matter what arbitration clause was written in their contract, and put the damages on Cloudflare.
yeah, no. Because among those great freedoms is the freedom of contract. Just as you can, in the absence of an agreed-upon fixed term, cancel your subscription to "Armchair Paralegal Monthly" any day you want, CF is free to fire any of their customers.
It's easy to defend the speech of those which you agree or, at the very least, don't vehemently disagree with.
With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.
Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.
If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?
It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.
I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:
In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
Weev is a well known troll that seems to have made trolling his life's calling. He's despicable but his crimes are pretty low on the general scale of lawlessness.
To see him involved in yet another controversy stirring the pot isn't all that surprising, it's what he lives for. As far as I'm any judge of this the man is mentally not 100%.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
1,640 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 440 ms ] threadSo CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?
At the end of the day Cloudflare are just exercising their own freedoms to accept the business they choose to. The Daily Stormer will (if they haven't already) just switch to another provider so it's not like they're being censored (well, not in any effective way) and everyone is now clear where Cloudflare's position is with regards to The Daily Stormer while very little time was wasted with expensive lawyers. On balance I think this seems a pretty fair outcome for all parties involved.
> In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
Something you'll be painfully aware once you try to browse the web through Tor and realise you have to waste your time with Cloudfare captchas every 10 minutes.
FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.
The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.
FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.
(from internal email)
>Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
From today:
>Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.
>“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we find palatable.
I'd think that isolating this group is a poor strategy.
Look at terrorist camps in Pakistan where children are indoctrinated from a young age with radical ideas.
Is the solution here to build a wall or to improve education and spread new ideas?
The truth is that you can never build a high enough wall.
"We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it."
At this point, the wall will be too high to effectively toss education / ideas over, the internet being the primary form of communication.
The problem is that there aren't two sides here. Even engaging, at all, legitimizes the notion that this type of idea is up for debate. It's not.
We can try to stem the flow of people into radicalization and extremism. Guess how that's done? By shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric--ie, ignoring their offered ideas and debate--until it's very clearly not within social bounds to be a nazi. And we're trying to do that.
But to engage with the nazis themselves, no. We need to make it such that espousing those ideas--visibly being a neonazi, running hate sites like the daily stormer--means being lonely, isolated, and powerless. And by showing that when nazis try to pry their way in, they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic. Make it so nobody will join them, ever. and we do that by stamping out their propaganda, by not allowing a single resource to be used by them.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
All ideas are up for debate.
> shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric
I agree
> ignoring their offered ideas and debate
This has no bearing on the people whose ideas you are ignoring, it merely reinforces the notion of an acceptable idea within the already existing good-idea-population. So no.
> they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic
So, espousing violence against a group of people. Here the group of people are defined by the fact that they use violence to achieve their means.
Surely, you are not defining this group by their beliefs of racial superiority, as you would not say the same thing if they were merely writing nonviolent blog posts, would you?
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
You should be very scared of the world you're creating. I know I am.
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
No, this false equivalency, which happens over and over and over again ad nauseam, is just that: false. https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/12/16138982/trump-char...
I know very very well that the people I wish to remove from society, I wish to remove for their choice to hate people for who they are. The two key things there are 1) choice and 2)people for who they are.
Do you think the violence of slaveholders is equivalent to the violence of slaves rebelling?
Again, this is, ver specifically, a crowd that shouted "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US" during their mob. Again, this is, specifically, a group that is publishing literal neonazi propaganda. Again, this is, specifically, a group that wants non-white people dead because they are not white, that wants non-straight people dead because they are not straight.
The group of people is defined by literal nazis using violence to achieve their goals, the goals themselves being also repugnant and worthy of scorn.
I am done here. You are defending and creating space for nazis, and then further advocating that other people be coerced into using resources to amplify their message. There are not two sides here.
You should be very scared of the world you're creating, in which you suggest that it is permissible to not only be a literal neonazi, but also that moderates will consider the side of the neonazis worthy of having space, to the extent that they will advocate for private entities to be forced to amplify nazi speech. Because that's what you're doing.
Don't use critical internet infrastructure to wage a campaign of hate and to organize rallies that ultimately culminate in a terrorist ramming attack against unarmed demonstrators?
>The worlds gone sideways.
There was a torchlit rally where people shouted "Jews will not replace us" and "Heil Trump." One of those in attendance was Matthew Heimbach, a white nationalist leader who previously assaulted someone at a Trump rally[1]. Heimbach has urged violence before and cheered stabbings[2] by his fellow Nazis as well.
Part of Trump's base is engaging is white nationalist violence in the open. I agree, the world has gone sideways.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-nationalist-leader-pleads-...
[2] http://archive.is/ZBOOa
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/service-provider-boots-ha...
Speech that the majority agrees with has no need to be protected. Even North Korea will let you agree as much as you want with the party line.
When the internet is no longer privatized and is guaranteed as a public service by law, then this argument will have a leg to stand on.
We've taken it for granted for a long time that the folks at the top of the data food chain are benevolent despots. This is a belief that is ultimately not rational.
Maintaining an internet made of actors who are ultimately private corporations providing a service enables these decisions.
The thing is, I suspect if we made the internet a public service in each country, then its speech laws would actually be substantially more restrictive than what CF, Google and others are doing.
Case in point:
> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Yeah. Although sideways? Let's not forget that an horrific act of fatal violence branded as domestic terrorism that was specifically targeted at suppressing free speech to further a regime of racially motivated violence and hate. Daily Stormer put up 2 distinct articles arguing this was okay. They then defamed a private organization by claiming they too supported that vile sentiment.
I mean, don't get me wrong. DDoS gangs are extortionists. But at the end of the day money is just money. Human rights are fundamental.
Edit: This country isn't getting fixed without empathy, understanding, and compromise on a national scale. Without that, we're all just yelling how lovely the moral high ground is when we're all wallowing in the mud.
This seems to me like a category error that you're making here.
It's possible to be upset about treatment of citizens in China but also strongly disagree with racially motivated violence in the United States. People walking around with torches chanting blood and soil art literal, not figurative, Nazis. They have a very clear agenda. That agenda claimed a life and injured many others. Daily Stormer then supported it. This doesn't seem like a very grey zone to me.
I'm also not entirely sure that I agree with your characterization of the Chinese government has a fascist government. There are degrees of Badness in the world.
I may not be able to understand where White Supremists are coming from, but I fully appreciate their right to free speech. I also don't understand people who prioritize limiting speech, but respect their opinion. That's the empathy I refer to.
These two facts are connected. Another example would be not being fully sure what bleach exactly is, but being all for drinking it.
I'll take the world where that exists before I live in a world with thought police.
It seems difficult to have it both ways.
Edit: it seems my debate partner deleted a telling comment. Too bad.
Anyway, I agree with you that the current legal framework allows private companies to discriminate. Ideally, government regulation will fix this; otherwise, as soon as the pendulum swings, I'm sure you'd be displeased with progressive websites being dumped off of internet infrastructure by corporations run or owned by those with conservative leanings.
Very few folks are confused when they see a group of white men fly Nazi flags, then murder and maim, then cheer it on as an act of heroism.
Which is probably why your "Free speech actually means freedom from any and all consequences" is going over here like a lead balloon.
> I'm just expressing my views within the HN bubble.
And for the most part being treated civily, even though you seem to be trying your best to defend the cause of literal fascists and their literal endorsement of spontaneous and fatal violence.
I'm surprised an advocate of "free" speech devoid of consequence can tolerate and support those who engage in violence against that very principle.
And not even the cold, calculated murder of widespread cultural warfare which you yourself demand we awknowledged uniquely. It's the unstable and white hot murder of people so indignant at the existence of opposition that one spontaneously murdered one and injured over a dozen more as his fellows cheered him on.
This is all what you've agreed they are. And it sums up to a picture of danger. I think you understand them quite well.
> According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right wing extremists groups.[41][42]
This is pure sleight of hand meant to deceive.
When incident can be defined arbitrarily and possibly include both a gun massacre and a spray painted swastika as equal events, this stat is incredibly deceptive.
What's the ratio when you count deaths? I'm on mobile but iirc it's about 90% killed by Islamic terrorists.
53% Islamist, 47% (other, as Islamist actually fit this description too) far-right, 0% other. (So the ratio is closer to 1:1 than the 9:1 you suggest)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/aug/16/...
http://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf
If we're going to talk about murders in a more general sense, you have to start looking at populations and then note that whites in the US are far, far more prevalent than Muslims.
But it's not murder in a general sense, it's murder by white supremacists.
> It is unfair if we're talking about terrorism, because prison murders are not terrorism.
Sure it is, if it's political, ie about white supremacy.
Terrorism:
> the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
The murderer may not have woken up that morning and pulled out a binder full of detailed notes on vehicular murder from under his bed, but he did not accidentally drive into that crowd of people. When he got into the car and plowed into that group, he did so because he stopped regarding them as fellow human beings, because he disagreed with their opinions on some issues, and because he hated them.
It was an act of terrorism, identical in purpose and outcome to other acts of terrorism in the UK.
EDIT: I struggled to figure out how to include that the horrific events happened in less than a minute.
They are nazis. We do not compromise with nazis. The only understanding necessary is that they are nazis.
There's no "unplanned murder". Intent, and (depending on jurisdiction) premeditation are requirements for a murder charge.
Terrorism is defined as "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".
So we have three requirements:
- "unlawful": Intentionally driving a car into a crowd is obviously unlawful
- "violence": yes, equally obvious
- "in the pursuit of political aims": He was a participant in a white supremacist march, and drove into a group of people opposing his politics.
Generally, the only real requirement for a charge is an affirmative response by a Grand Jury. Intent is certainly not a requirement before levying a charge, which is why it is so common that charges levied do not merit conviction. The prosecution needs to prove intent in order to get the charge to stick.
You seem to have conflated 'charge' and 'conviction' here, and are then using that conflation to prop up your argument that intent has been proven, when it has not.
I have no personal insight (or any insight really) as to whether or not the driver did have an intent, but being charged with a crime for which intent is a requirement to convict does not mean that they will be able to prove intent, or that any such intent was present at the time.
It might just as easily have been a prosecutor who wanted to send a strong message by imposing strong charges that may or may not stick.
Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
Osama Bin Laden claimed credit for 9/11, verbally expressing his intent.
> Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
A crime is something that may be punishable by law. You can know that a crime is committed without knowing who committed it, or what their motivations are.
You appear to be reaching for a way to be right here, but speaking in legal terms, you are plainly wrong. A charge is not proof. An allegation is not proof. You may or may not be right on what his intent was, but the charge doesn't make that case for you, so you can't use it as proof for further arguments.
Paraphrased, your argument is:
* Bobby (a compulsive liar) says that he intended to do it, so we know he intended to do it. * "unlawful": Intentionally driving a car into a crowd is obviously unlawful * "violence": yes, equally obvious * "in the pursuit of political aims": He was a participant in a white supremacist march, and drove into a group of people opposing his politics.
Your second claim fails because intent has not been proven, as it relies on the first claim, which is not provable.
By all accounts, it seems that it indeed was his intent to commit murder by driving into that crowd. I'm not arguing with that. I'm only arguing with the hole in your logic that gets you there, as it is fallacious.
Hold up here.
Substantiate your claim, where does it come from, how do you quantify it?
On it's face you seem to be agreeing with the Nazis that he just 'accidentally' gained ramming speed into the demonstrators his group was attacking earlier.
You wouldn't be doing that would you?
Fine, lets talk about that then.
Governments these days aren't terribly friendly to fascism as a protected idea set.
This for me is the only real defense for taking them down.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
I tend to agree with CF that they're a bad place to invest with censor power, but I also tend to agree that if you defame a company you do business with you shouldn't be surprised if they decline further business with you.
I've pretty much reached the point where when someone vehemently declares their adherence to a principle I decide they probably haven't thought about it a lot.
Even in the US where there is a strong, fundamental legal protection of speech, it can't be said to be a principle. There's all sorts of places where it is compromised.
Yes people whose namesake is derived from a group of people that committed genocide is where I draw my line. Do you even hear yourself right now? What kind of mental gymnastics did you have to perform to equate internet vandalism and theft to hate groups who call for a return to Nazi practices?
Jacobinmag has no trouble with its host.
Neither the various groups calling themselves "Young Turks". It's like historical atrocities have an expiration date, after which they lose any power to scandalise.
Man, then you'd have to include all the communists, including Mao's party (that's still in power in China).
Brown guy here in case you feel like calling me a Nazi as well
better tell the Supreme Court
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
By the time speech is brought under tighter government regulation, the people pushing for 'hate speech' controls today will be terrified as they watch what a worse version of Trump does with the new power (a serious theocrat for example). That outcome is inevitable, it's what happens every time people don't think through the consequences of handing massive new powers to a very aggressive government.
Are you implying that The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are worse than actual, literal Nazis? Because that's the only way I can see to read it, but that can't possibly be what you meant.
Your phrasing implies that if they're willing to kick out Nazis, they should be willing to kick out media pirates. That's bizarre!
Cloudflare: "Its okay if you break the law, but say offensive words that don't break the law and you are outta here."
Hence, my surprise. Criminal acts = ok. Offensive legal speech = not okay.
Criminality isn't the only thing people look at for this stuff.
Legally, it is when someone decides to sue or prosecute you for assisting a criminal enterprise.
Many of them were coming from right wing circles, white nationalists. They have a thing for Assad[1], this is white nationalist group leader Matthew Heimbach promoting Assad. Many of them from different nations have been making pilgrimage to Damascus to meet with the regime[2].
Then one of these Nazi Assad fanboys runs down people in my own nation in a terrorist ramming attack.. I'm heartbroken. Many of us have been detailing this lot in great length for years but no one seems to of listened until we had a martyr in the US.
This is 2017, half a decade of this.
[1] http://archive.is/Xb0fk
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/13...
Not really. Why isn't it enough to have destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? If you destroyed Syria tomorrow, for whose blood would you thirst next?
Huh?
>whose blood would you thirst next
What?
Well, no, actually, they don't draw the line there. They provide DDoS protection for ISIS content and Al-Qaeda content and host that content through their caching.
To be honest, I feel they probably don't want to change their TOS regarding free speech because it creates a new headache for them (now they have to hire people to deal with the claims, make sure a lawyer checks each time they cancel a contract, etc.) In that sense, a "tactical" cancellation of the service like they did with Daily Stormer is probably the most reasonable way to go about it.
You might dislike it, but it's their right.
I didn't say anything in support or opposition to what CloudFlare has done here, merely pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.
I did not claim that they did.
> Their involvement is limited to serving the web sites i.e. speech
I guess so.
"Icky"? They provoked this response by using CloudFlare's name in their cause. What would be the appropriate response?
“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
What more due process do you require?
I asked "Actual Nazi's like National Socialists with a Eugenics campaign, or people we just don't like".
Did not go well.
We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi and thereby dilute the effect b) call people are actual Nazi's whatever the fuck you want, they can all go die quietly for all I care.
"Nazi" used to be a thing that people used to call politicians they didn't like online. Now everyone is calling everybody a nazi everywhere. It'll get to a "Who cares if they're a nazi?" point pretty quickly.
I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch.
The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views.
If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's".
There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument.
Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later.
My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it".
I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).
What's a "literal Nazi" to you then? A member of the historical NSDAP?
edit: Also, note while you're all talking to each other and patting yourself on the back about how you're so great at discussing ideas, none of you even tried answer my question: what more due process do you require? Do you disagree with the assessment?
This reminds me of a comment on HN I read recently, where someone said they had to insert a delay into a website so customers would think they're doing some really serious data crunching (which they did, but just too quickly for it to "feel" that way -- for people who don't know what's going on, at all).
While I might suspect the Stormfronters would like to do that I don't know that they would, authoritarian fascists, sure, Nazi's not really.
Maybe it's because I like history and I've read a lot about WWII and the factors that led up to it but I'm careful with the world Nazi.
Been a race supremacist doesn't mean Nazi because logically a Black Panther would also be a Nazi then.
Been hard-right doesn't make you a Nazi because then the Republican party would be Nazi's.
Been pro-eugenics doesn't make you a Nazi because then the government of the UK, US and USSR where Nazi (in the early 20th century).
Been pro-nationalism doesn't make you a Nazi because then well half the governments on the planet would be Nazi's.
Been a race supremacist, hard right and pro-eugenics and nationalist just might.
This is people talking to me about grammar who don't even know what a letter is. Read "Origins of Totalitarianism". Read Sebastian Haffner. Everybody is so interested in the subject, so knowledgeable about it, and so against Nazis.
The proof is in the pudding. You cannot disprove my with your straw men and having no clue about the nature of Nazism and related diseases, you can strike yourself from my phone book is all.
If they think they're following in Nazi footsteps, does that count for anything in your book?
If not, then what would?
https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/896860224971128836
So for example, if an organization was going to censor certain political websites, they should specify precisely what is not allowed: Advocating socialism? The killing of non-combatants? etc.
If the rules are only going to be applied at the whims of the Twitter mob, then that should be posted in advance: "You will be in violation if you advocate for race-based killing AND there are at least 10,000 tweets in a single day condemning you."
I didn't say "Yup, hateful ideology", I said "Yup, Nazis."
They run around with torches and swastikas and celebrate murder. What's controversial about that, and what does Twitter have to do with anything? I don't use Twitter. It's very telling how people constantly drag in shit like that to bloat and pad. Face Hannah Arendt, face Sebastian Haffner, face Erich Fromm; but your ignorance and shallowness will not keep me from shaking you and any other comers off.
Sure, but what happens when people thinking whatever they want are able to affect national policy, even if they aren't a majority? You get the Trump administration... or worse.
How about the test being whether they are waving the Nazi flag? That's pretty unambiguous.
That sounds like something a Nazi would say.
I can do and am things a Nazi cannot do and isn't. I also can be brutal and hateful, like when I get sick of all these snakes on this motherfucking plane. I can do everything they can, but also so much more. That is the difference.
I was more warning of general, "He is a Nazi he doesn't have any rights", sentiment. Any bad actor can devise an identity that isn't Nazi, and prey on vulnerable by making them look like Nazis. I mean it wouldn't be hard to make ACLU look like Nazis for defending neo-Nazis.
Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
I didn't see how it was relevant either.
The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light.
For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
If it were my call, every hate group's content would have inexplicable persistent problems. I'd use the Simple Sabotage Field Manual as my playbook.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
They killed _millions_ for arbitrary reasons. What about them?
What does fascists even mean these days?
Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend.
It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.
Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
I don't.
I rather have people saying out loud, that they want to kill me, than saying it it in private and then just doing it ... so I - and others (like police) know whats going on, and can prepare for them.
If you forbid things to be said out loud, they will just boil hiddenly, until they explode.
> How about literal neonazis waving swastikas, calling for violence to exterminate Jews and blacks? Ones literally identify with Nazi facists.
> Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
So how about jihadists who mutilate genitals at music concerts and behead little children? And who are very clear about their intent to kill millions more?
There are few things I hate more than muslim extremists, yet I am strongly in favor of not obstructing these people's ability to put their stuff online. We can even learn a thing or two from it that helps us defeat them, same goes for nazis.
Isn't it obvious that everything besides radical freedom of speech is bound to descend into a quagmire of arbitrarily constructed and enforced rules?
It is really a little embarrassing to see that "the vaguely Marxist but comfortably bourgeoisie hacker community" as James Mickens beautifully put it is split on an issue around free speech.
People like to say "never again", but it's important to actually mean it.
Now, if you want to talk "never again" - it is not words that should frighten us, but violence. It was the brown shirts working the streets and savaging anyone who dared speak contrary to the Nazis that allowed them to obtain real power in the elections. It was the night of the long knives that saw the Nazi's staunchest critics in the Reichstag assassinated, and Hitler's control finally secured. It was the night of broken glass that normalized widespread violence against Jews, and set the stage for what was to come. It was violence that gave strength to Nazism, that let it rise to prominence, that let it overcome the Prussian elite who despised it and let it seize control of the country.
Nazism only succeeds by first putting its boot to the throat of the public, and threatening to crush the windpipe of any critic. Without that, it is just incoherent, anti-intellectual gibberish concocted by brutish thugs - and is torn apart in the market of ideas as a result. I fear a non-violent Nazi about as much as I fear a toothless wolf.
Once you tolerate the "non-violent" Nazi, the violent ones won't be far behind. Nazism has proven that it cannot be tolerated, period. Not a little bit here and there. Not for a short time while we try to reason with them. Not anywhere, not ever, not in any way. If an amendment to the US Constitution came up to exempt Nazis from first-amendment protection I'd be for it in a heartbeat, because there is no longer any need to be hemming and hawing and talking about how on principle we need to let them have their little march and their website and... no. There is no such thing as a "safe" amount of Nazism.
Alright so...where are they? We've let them preach for 75 years after the war, and we're not exactly being overrun with Nazi murderers.
>Nazism has proven that it cannot be tolerated, period.
Nazism has proven it is a self-defeating ideology. There is no serious threat of it becoming a mainstream force anymore.
>If an amendment to the US Constitution came up to exempt Nazis from first-amendment protection I'd be for it in a heartbeat, because there is no longer any need to be hemming and hawing and talking about how on principle we need to let them have their little march and their website and... no.
Remember those times you denounced the NSA or TSA sacrificing our rights in the name of 'security'? I do, I've been reading your post history.
Yet here you are. Does the hypocrisy not sting you, even a little?
> There is no such thing as a "safe" amount of Nazism.
Yes, yes, you really, really like to virtue signal. I get it.
Having a professor who finds intellectual differences by race in his social studys? Definatly a nazi. Not even worth studying, to search for a remedy, better to ignore a problem forever.
And this goes on and and on and on. So we concluded, that if your limitation tendencies of free speach are unlimited, they must be limited at the root. Thus the speech is free. They are not free to act. They are not free to maim, free to violate others rights. One is free to ignore them- (as large parts of the country have) until the sjw circus visited theire town and gave them attention and manpiulated a large neutral crowd into supporting them with the usual passiv-agressive discourse controll speach.
And if it wasn't this excuse to not denazify, it would be another.
> your limitation tendencies
That's like saying someone suggests cutting out cancer just because they like mutilating bodies.
But of course, I can't call that a tendency for mental masturbation, and warn of the consequences of it remaining unchecked, right? Right.
> until the sjw circus visited theire town
As someone who thinks the BLM chicks screaming at Sanders would be in jail if they had been white guys screaming at Hillary, as someone who things Google shit the bed with the "memo guy", as someone who doesn't even like Bill Maher anymore but like him wishes he could have Camille Paglia -- even that "circus" deserves more respect than those who think people marching with swastikas and torches are expressing an idea. I still have so much beef with "SJW", but still, there's priorities.
Yeah, they came to their town and "gave them attention". And shame on those who did not.
> manpiulated a large neutral crowd into supporting them
The fuck? So the SWJ manipulated people into liking Nazis? If ANYTHING IN THE WORLD can make you side with Nazis, you already have it in you, and the next set of questions I'd have for you would be about your childhood and adolescence.
Speaking with IBTimes UK, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule".
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
...
"We're the plumbers of the internet," Prince said. "We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China."
Must have been in a pretty bad mood.
They can die in a gutter, for all I care. They made their line, with the political dissenters, the quiet, and the the hidden. But you know, blame the "bad people" and the "abusers".
So maybe I this case the general public can distinguish between literal and figurative fascism. The Daily Stormer supported acts of violence committed by the former, not the later.
It's like that in America, what things are called is more important than what they are. Obviously there are plenty of Americans perfectly capable of understanding context, but they don't seem to be in control of the political narrative.
A clear example of this is if you take fringe idiot politicians who say populist stuff and have zero workable policies. In the UK, they're a fringe political group like UKIP. In the US, one was just voted president. Here was a guy with a famous history of scamming (indeed, he was the poster child for it), making obvious and contradictory promises he couldn't keep even if he wanted to, and with no detail as to how. His whole platform was telling people the superficial stuff they wanted to hear. How did he do? Almost half of the voters individually voted for him, in a strong voter turnout. The only thing missing from his obvious scam was twirling a waxed moustache, and still nearly half of American voters went out voluntarily and voted for him.
"c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.
Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)."
(http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061)
The earliest example given, incidentally, is from way back in 1769.
In fact, given the American love for sarcasm and hyperbole, and lack of an actual historical Nazi party of any note, it seems to me less likely for one to interpret the label literally.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content, Prince said. Some hosting companies exercise tight control about what can be served, but his firm doesn't want that kind of power."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
I'd be perfectly fine banning whom calls themselves nazis.
perhaps I'd be bad about running the 'pipes' of the internet.... oh wait. I do.
One man's fascist propaganda is another man's social revolution.
This is the thing everyone forgets about the Nazis: they genuinely thought they were the good guys.
That's not at all equivalent to other types of discussions we are having today about the economy, the environment, and education.
If you're just saying that some company could be controlled by a "Nazi" and they may restrict their services, I get that. I don't think it's a "slippery slope" type of argument though.
Just for the record, I find the nazis and the neo-nazis repugnant. I'm a descendant of holocaust survivors, so seeing swastikas being paraded down the street in America hits very close to home for me. And I have no problem shutting down incitements to violence. But that's not what happened here. The Daily Stormer was taken off the air because of an alleged false claim that they made about their CDN. That is a very dangerous precedent.
If you want to be a hateful little shit, go right ahead, but don't expect a helpful hand. That's the "plot" here, friend.
Unfortunately, no, it's not. And BTW, the CEO of CloudFlare agrees with me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15034304
> If you want to be a hateful little shit
In my opinion that sort of language is inappropriate. Does that mean that if I were in a position to do so, I should be allowed to silence you?
Stalin and Mao killed far more people then the Nazis, but I'll be down voted and banned because my opinion doesn't fit your ideological narrative.
This is assuming I even am allowed to post my view at all.
Still to me blocking nazi comtent is even more obvious since their violence is even closer linked to their ideology.
To me, actual terrorists actually committing terrorism is far worse than bratty idiots throwing the N-word around on an internet forum
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
Don't be a liberal, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a white male, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a female, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
> That would never happen!
That's what you think, that's not what history has proven.
I may also be simple coincidence.
Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however.
> Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content
Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply.
> Perhaps the US should learn from them.
Why should it?
The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.
Today? Counter-demonstrate, or walk away. Actual Nazis haven't been a serious threat to Jews for 70 years. By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
lol, what the fuck are you talking about?
'progressive' people are pro immigration.
Many immigrants are muslim.
Some muslim hate jews, therefore 'progressive' people support antisemitism.
Simple, isn't it?
I support marriage equality and the right for gays to get married, but I don't enjoy the sexual activities that gay people do themselves.
You apparently also don't enjoy someone just translating?
(hint, translating doesn't mean the translator has the same opinion as the source, I thought that is obvious)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism#Hadith
The following hadith which forms a part of these Sahih Muslim hadiths has been quoted many times, and it became a part of the charter of Hamas.[79]
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)
How so? Speech is just speech.
so you are saying, that we germans ended up in a total dictatorship, because things were too liberal before?
Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side.
What happens when they're not?
"That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected).
And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
They'll switch to one of dozens of alternatives?
And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?
The paradox of tolerance applies directly to free speech.
As an example, the CEO of Cloudfare stated the removal of Daily Stormer was an arbitrary decision made by him, because he "woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" and as CEO he had the power to do so [0], so what happens if the CEO of a Cloudflare-like service is a staunch Christian and starts removing sites based on that?
Or as more realistic example, the Republicans control the house, the senate and the presidency.
They came quite close to having a super-majority in the Senate, and who knows what will happen in the 2018 mid-terms.
For many Republicans, things like abortion and LGBT rights are moral issues and if they get a super majority it's not unthinkable that they will push to remove or criminalize things that they are morally opposed to.
From the ACLU's post on why they are defending Milo Yiannopoulos [1]
"But the sad reality is that many people think that speech about sexuality, gender identity, or abortion is over the line as well. They’ll say that abortion is murder, civil rights advocates are criminals, or LGBT advocates are trying to recruit children into deviant and perverse lifestyles. If First Amendment protections are eroded at any level, it's not hard to imagine the government successfully pushing one or more of those arguments in court. "
I know Cloudfare is a private company and so from a legal perspective this is not a freedom of speech issue, but beyond the law, freedom of speech as a general principle is something that needs to exist in the hearts and minds of those making the law, and actions that erode that, especially from entities that wield enormous power over communications infrastructure, set dangerous precedent.
0: http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
1: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/how-could-you-represe...
Freedom of speech does not apply to those who would take away your freedom of speech with what they are advocating (in this case, killing us). This is the nature of the paradox of tolerance. We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Yes they are, but look at how the term 'Nazi' is being thrown about with abandon these days [0].
Once you have established that it's ok to ban/silence Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
That is not hypothetical, and is something that is actively happening right now.
> it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Where do we draw the line? Do we kick people off the Internet if they declare allegiance to communists - a group that literally killed millions in the name of ideological purity?
> We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Actually, we must. The only speech worth defending is offensive speech or speech you don't like.
No-one tries to stop you from saying nice things that they already agree with.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWFMUIP3lHo
No, that would require everyone to be a credulous idiot -- people have thrown Nazi around as a pejorative for as long as there have been Nazis. Fortunately it's easy to tell who the actual Nazis are -- they're the ones with Nazi flags doing Nazi salutes saying they're Nazis, and advocating genocide.
Again, this is the paradox of tolerance -- tolerating the intolerant decreases the total amount of tolerance in the world. You are spending time and effort arguing with me that Nazis should be allowed to speak while they threaten those that speak out against them directly with violence.
Perhaps you should go and speak to the Nazis to tell them about how they should defend speech they don't like.
Of which there appear to be plenty of these days:
https://twitter.com/markos/status/896760610242912260
History is replete with examples of how this happens. For a recent example see the Cultural Revolution in China. It involved public shaming for wrongthink, destruction of statues and other artifacts, desecration of graves (e.g. of Confucius and others) and worse. The parallels going on today are worrying.
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/15/16150176/watch-protesters-topp...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3173456/Vigilante-pr...
Nowhere, because I'm not worried about the Nazis.
500 people showed up in support of that rally. Even if you think that real-life support for Nazis is a thousand times that amount (unlikely to be anywhere near that high) that still only represents a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population (0.15%). That is literally a rounding-error away from zero, and the real figure of Nazi support is likely to be orders of magnitude less.
If the Internet hadn't been popularising for months that it's ok to punch Nazis (drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight), if the police had kept the protesters and counter-protesters apart, if attendees hadn't been able to play the victim due to getting banned from Airbnb, and if the media hadn't given the rally such prominence it would have been a total non-issue. 500 people would have come, spouted off offensive, but protected speech and then fizzled out.
Instead, we were left with loss of life and a ratcheting up of tensions along racial and ideological grounds.
That concerns me far more, especially as significant sections of the population seem to be willing (and in some cases actively trying) to conflate right-wing politics with Nazis and white supremacism.
'Slippery slope fallacy' you cry, but it's not, because this is actually happening. Take for example the recent 'March on Google' that is being organised by various right-wing figures. The organisers are right-wing and regularly classified as alt right (a classification they refute), but they are also vocally anti-Nazi and anti white-supremacism (banning Nazis and Nazi symbolism from previous events they've held), and yet in the wake of Charlottesville, several major news outlets were claiming that the March on Google rally was also being organised by 'Nazi sympathizers' and the organisers started getting threats that they treated seriously enough to postpone the rally (http://www.marchongoogle.com/peaceful-march-on-google-postpo...).
The conflation of 'people with politics we don't like' to Nazis, along with the normalisation of violence against Nazis leading to threats of violence, has me far more concerned than any actual Nazis, and the parallels with very recent, very ugly history are close enough that more people really should be worried.
(drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight)
Take for example the recent 'March on Google'
the normalisation of violence against Nazis
Ah. Well, it's now quite clear where you stand, and I'm sorry for having wasted time trying to talk to you.
Yes, on the side of freedom of association and freedom of speech, even for unsavoury characters.
Pointing out that some counter protesters were spoiling for a fight (dressed in black, masked, and armed with baseball bats and pepper spray) shouldn't in any way be construed as supporting Nazis.
Pointing out that the March on Google has been postponed due to threats of violence, shouldn't be construed as support for the March on Google.
And pointing out that violence against Nazis is being normalised shouldn't be taken as support for Nazis, rather it's the worry that it's all too easy to expand the scope of Nazis to then include 'other people with views I disagree with' (see above about March on Google being postponed due to threats of violence).
For where I actually stand, I used to consider myself left-leaning, but I'm not really sure I like where the left is heading these days so following Dave Rubin's lead, I'd go with classically liberal.
I'm also not entirely sure how you square this comment with your one above about credulous idiots, but the idea that I'm somehow siding with Nazis is ridiculous.
Anyway, I think we can both agree that there's not much more fruitful discussion to be had between us on this particular topic, so this will be my last reply.
I posit that speech is a pressure release valve, and that you should not muzzle people you don't agree with. This creates resentment and anger in those people whose only other outlet might be violence and revolution. There are odious characters on the right and the left who are already spoiling for a fight, and I think your notion of how we deal with that just escalates the conflict. Smarter people than you or I set freedom of speech as the first freedom, and one reason I think it's highest is because we need free speech in order to live with one another.
Which do you prefer, diplomacy or war? Part of diplomacy is dialogue.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
The double standards you guys have. Just fuck my society up fam.
> The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
Sounds like you don't like what they are saying and instead of allowing it you want to stop them. Shame shame.
Entitled to your privilege of doing so though.
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't).
And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
We all know what the parent meant.
well, I'm a layperson and I would not interpret it that way. Suing someone is taking a gamble, and that gamble does not necessarily pay off. In this particular case the 'high likeihood of winning said suit' is not all that high.
> We all know what the parent meant.
You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
And for me, as well.
I, like (hopefully) most people who comment here, am well aware that you can sue anyone for any reason, with zero evidence or support for your assertion. When someone asks "couldn't X be sued for Y?", I always read that as a question of someone asking about the likelihood of winning that particular suit.
Because if you take the question literally, then the answer is -- literally -- always yes, so it'd never be a useful question, ever.
But sure, maybe someone with a radically different legal system is asking. In that case, still, a simple, non-pedantic-sounding "sure, they could, but they'd be unlikely to win because A and B" would suffice.
Sure you can sue for that but I do not see any chance of winning such a suit, and I'm pretty sure that that Cloudflare would be more than happy to litigate their right to deny service.
But let's say I did, as maybe the original poster you replied to did. The answer you just gave that I'm replying to (perhaps with a bit of a more patient tone) would have been way more useful than your original answer.
> You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
So you reflexively see the words "X can sue" as a truism, a meaningless statement? It doesn't occur to you that the person saying those words actually wanted to convey some information with them?
Fine by me if you disagree with whether the odds of some suit getting anywhere are better than nil. But to not even realize that such a statement is being made, that must suck.
So it's completely fair that when a layperson talks about the ability of suing, they're talking about net losses from that process and not necessarily about the final verdict.
Yes, you wrote the same thing upthread. But you are not a judge so what you see or do not see isn't all that important here, what is important is how judges have found in other cases and it is typically quite hard to force a company to do business with any entity they do not wish to serve unless that entity is part of a protected class, which Neo Nazis are not. So on what grounds do you feel that Cloudflare would absolutely have to accept every customer that wishes their service? They're not a common carrier.
"Cloudflare unexpectedly revoked our traffic mitigating service in the middle of our highest costly traffic, our costs went up this much. Cloudflare caused this, these are the damages, and here are the punitive damages to deter this behavior in the future, the CEO even said this is not company policy."
Neo Nazis are not a protected class in the sense of the word so they'd have to pull some kind of legal rabbit out of their head to make that work.
The fact that there are damages does not immediately imply that some outside party is liable for those damages. It merely means that you are back where you would have been without that outside party.
So even if Cloudflare caused this that does not immediately imply liability. So if the Daily Stormer wishes to sue Cloudflare they obviously can but I really doubt they will make it stick.
Civil lawsuits only look at damages and the argument on what caused the damages. It is just about proving monetary damages.
"You further agree that if...Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you" [1].
If you don't want that kind of a service relationship, you negotiate a fixed-term contract up front.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ Section 10; also see § 15 (Termination)
Section 10 (Termination) says "you expressly agree that in the case of a termination for cause you will not have any opportunity to cure." Sections 25 and 26 require arbitration under the AAA's rules and California law. I'd put the odds of remedy at close to nil. These (mandatory arbitration and contractually-agreed upon indemnification for termination of services) are well-set areas of law.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
An executive changing policy and then throwing up their hands, "I have no choice, it's the policy!" is dishonest and doesn't fool anybody.
So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
Pretty sure this is the same concept.
Edit: downvote all you want. Parent is making a false equivalency and I'm just calling them on it.
Moreover, a notable contingent of the supporters of the current ruling party believe "being gay" to be a choice - would you be comfortable with a law change?
I find this distinction to be wholly unconvincing. The reason to carve out exceptions for discrimination against gay people is because they've suffered as a minority - it's a practical matter, not a matter of principle. If you try to apply your "choice" principle, you quickly get into logical trouble - for example, does a child groomed by Nazi parents, who has always supported Nazism, have a "choice" to be a Nazi shithead? What if, a few years from now, we discover a chemical that changes your sexual preferences? Should gays stop being a protected class then? What about religion and political affiliation, also protected classes?
Edit: To your point, if I must: YES. Looking at someone, or a group of people and choosing hatred is 100.00000% a choice. Just like you choosing to defend Nazi shitheads was a choice.
I see it as an extreme form of bullying where literally nothing else works other than murder or be murdered, it was law of the jungle, it was might makes right. And fortunately, the Nazis lost.
Equivocating on fascism? That's inherently dangerous. The reaction to equivocation isn't rational. It has a high chance of leading to an irrational, violent response: "sugar coating Nazis is going to get you lost teeth, as a courtesy, for not gutting you here and now".
I think it's worth being very careful about falling into a trap. It is possible to overreact to fake Nazi crap, there are a lot of stupid people. In an overreaction, it might give permission for a weak autocrat to declare martial law, and that's when the real ones come in. There is a nuance, and that isn't equivocating.
If you are employing American Puritan-based philosophy, where neos are resurging, then that answer is a resounding YES, you have 100% agency.
despite the research on addicts at least being more ambiguous.
It would be the ultimate hypocrisy in their(your?) ideology to think otherwise.
What kind of sick, sad world is that?
Do you not see how the actual content of the choice matters? The fact that one is hate and one is love? It is not the fact that they are both choices, it is the fact that one chooses to be a nazi and advocate genocide
I agree not all principles can be effectively codified into rules, and sometimes exceptions are needed, but I do think the exceptions need to be in line with the bigger principles and ethical standards themselves. However I do not think this is the case here. It seems like a clear case of content policing, because the CEO did not like what the Daily Stormer had to say about him or his company.
Well... umm... I've always thought this was a very strange perversion of the separation of powers and the fundamentals of our legal/justice system...
CloudFlare is not the only player in town, and that's far from censorship.
If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
Over time, such capricious terminations could lead to the Board seeking action against the CEO, depending on the impact to the business.
Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
I certainly hope you're wrong. Because I've "unilaterally withdrawn from" (i. e. "canceled") literally hundreds of contracts, and I don't remember ever giving a reason.
If Cloudflare can cancel the contract at the CEO's whim without needing to prove that the customer has somehow violated some terms of use, then Cloudflare isn't "bound to perform" using Cornell's terminology.
It is not a one time performance like washing a car or shoveling a driveway or buying grocheries. It is a continual term contract where each party agrees to continue going. In these cases, it would be legal to have a clause allowing either party to terminate the contract at any time. Certainly daily stormer was free to stop using cloud flare at any time. And similarly, cloudflare is free to terminate the stormer's account at any time provided they refund the cash. So the contract is not really illusory because both parties still have the obligation to perform, they just don't have the obligation to continue performing.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11.
The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate.
The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread.
The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech.
How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration.
The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.
The issue is: once all the big platforms are aggressively enforcing speech controls, supported by a wider shift in the culture that backs that, how likely is it that the government will take the opportunity to become a speech regulator as it pertains to the Internet just as they are with broadcast & radio today.
I say: it's guaranteed as an inevitable outcome, if the platforms & wider culture keep moving the direction things are going now.
The consequence: the next Trump will do horrific things with those new speech control powers. It's extremely obvious this is where we're heading. The fear people are using as an excuse to argue in favor of controlled speech today, is identical to the fear that was taken advantage of by the government to implement dozens of new abusive post 9/11 powers on the basis of a constantly terrified (eg the Bush terror color codes) citizenship.
The platforms are putting the levers into place, that a future government will use at their pleasure to silence opposition. We have a very, very aggressive, power hungry government; we have a very consolidated power base politically, with only two major parties. You can't see what's going to come out of that?
> Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well:
“We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter:
These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose.
1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve...
1934-1936 Nazis at Madison Square Garden http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/
1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068...
2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof.
And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists. "White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence." https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?
I always thought the balkanization of the internet would occur because of world governments not because of tech leaders personal feelings or corporate influence.
I expect tech leaders to be dragged in front of the senate real soon.
I've been jumping back and forth over the fence on this topic, but this stance is where I've ended up.
"No one should have that power"
"I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet"
Seems like a very tricky precedent to set that you can just not allow someone on the internet.
The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I support free speech, even when the speech is hateful and malignant, because I honestly believe the best way to combat vile ideas is out in the open where people can see them, hear them, discuss them and repudiate them. Cultures can't innoculate themselves against ideas without an intellectual herd immunity, and that is impossible without mass exposure.
On the other hand, fuck Nazis.
I think I'm quite willing to let them come for the Nazis then start caring when they come for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, etc. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
Of course, on the third hand, I have no real power over anyone else's speech, and I'm just some rando on the internet, so it doesn't really matter what I think.
They're Nazis. They can fuck themselves.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content,"
...unless the press tells them what their philosophy needs to be? The lesson is that no capitalist company can remain neutral, today. Which has good and bad consequences. It's amazing how the small number of media conglomerates have solidified their political power alongside their commercial power. A true locus of control in Western society.
I learned an important lesson in 2016, my worldviews are not shared in America outside of big cities. It forced me to realize that I didn't even know people disagreed so fiercely because of media conglomerate created echo bubbles.
Many people having non-leftwing ideas simply hide it. Since most workplaces have become politicised and hostile to conservative/right/slightly right of center views, people just hide it. Some people (including me) even engage in fake virtue signalling.
Polling (both opinion polling and actual elections) show that it is very strongly an urban-vs-other thing.
Polling also said that Hillary would win the election, and brexit won't happen. People, including me, lie to pollsters.
I can also sorta understand how the groups in question create a strong(er) emotional reaction. These are hate groups from "our" society. And in the same way that the death of someone close saddens more than a stranger's, seeing a swastika-bearing mob of people who could have gone to school with you may stir more anger than the hate and atrocities committed by strangers–especially if you don't understand their language, and have gotten used to it.
If we interpret Cloudflare's action as a symbol, it may also be more effective when used in this case than with ISIS: coming from (in general terms) the same society, such a signal of disapproval is more meaningful. People are social animals, and they are hardwired to seek approval from their peers. No matter how much someone tries to convince themselves that they don't care, it stings when their neighbour stops inviting them to his parties.
The same isn't true for ISIS, to whom the people at Cloudflare would have always been "the other side".
Plus, obviously, the fact that stormtrooper monthly apparently said that Cloudflare were sympathisers. That statement made it impossible to continue working for them.
enuf said
Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included.
The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Yep, and at that point the only recourse you would have would be the government, right?
> Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Your smugness suggests that you think this is surprising to me, rather than being my entire point. Businesses will do whatever they want, in their own self-interest. If we want them to do something else because we as a society value something like free speech, your options are to ignore it or to pass a law. If you're concerned about CloudFlare's ability to censor the internet, take it up with the government, because CloudFlare's commitment to free speech is good only as long as it makes business sense for them.
But at this point I think that it be better to just have a free market retaliatory war of "social consequences". IE, the pro censorship people get named and shamed and fired from their jobs (starting with the most extreme first)
Then the pro censorship people would try to fix the problem with laws, ect.
Edit: I had it backwards, obviously. I meant to say that most employers would find it much easier to fire a Nazi than someone who thinks Nazi's should be censored...
IE, the revolutionary leftists who have publicly stated things like "The liberals get the bullet too".
Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
> who have beliefs that are equivalent to nazi beliefs
That's an interesting equivalence you've drawn there. Which races do they believe in exterminating again? I forgot.
> publicly stated
Where?
> "The liberals get the bullet too". > Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?
I had never actually heard that phrase before so I googled it. I can't seem to find anything about it from before 2017, so it seems like it got famous due to a piece of graffiti from earlier this year. While I don't doubt that there are people on the far left that say this kind of thing, I think they're pretty fringe and are more bark than bite. In reality these people actually vote for people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
> Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
No offense, but your exposure to "leftism" seems pretty new and based on social media. Please do share what you're reading though...
> Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
Do people with their real names do that on twitter (I assume you're talking about twitter)? Or just eggs, like on the far right?
What's really concerning to me is that the white nationalists and neo nazis are out without hoods or masks. They are not afraid of having their pictures taken. They think they can be weekend nazis.
I'd put it in the 10s of millions of people is the amount of people that they want exterminated.
It would include all bourgeois, petite bourgeois (ie small business owners), as well as anyone else that would oppose them in an attempted overthrowing of the capitalist system as their attempted "dictatorship of the proletariat", as well as anyone who supported the current "imperialist regime" of our capitalist system. IE, probably most police officers, soldiers, and politicians.
So yes, in terms of total number of people that they want to kill, I'd say it is about equivalent in badness to literal Nazis.
"Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?"
Ah, see, here is the confusion. You don't spend much time listening to leftists. (Otherwise you'd get the "liberal" reference)
In communist and anarchist circles, a "liberal" is not in reference to an american leftist. They are talking about classical "liberals" as in someone who support civil rights and civil liberties, and the capitalist system. The "liberals" are the enemy.
Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are not socialists to these people. Neither is Norway, or Sweden or European social democracies. You are only a socialist if you believe in the violent confiscation of the means of production, and the overthrowing of the imperial capitalist system.
Modern day Venezuela is the kind country that they support, but they don't even think that Venezuela went far enough, and don't even think it is correct to call Venezuela socialist.
Go read reddit /r/socialism and /r/Anarchism and read the comments to understand what leftists believe.
I read them every day. It is enlightening.
No I understand I was making fun of your typo. You meant to say that "leftists say that liberals get the bullet to"
Honestly I think you go meet with some actual American socialists you'll find that they're a lot more moderate than the teenagers and shut ins who post on political subreddits. It's like turning to Twitter for an an "average American opinion." Small communities on places like Reddit and Twitter are not proxies for entire groups of people. Just like /r/The_Donald hardly actually represents all Trump supporters, just a vocal subset that gets the most attention.
More like "The first amendment purports to guarantee that the government will uphold this value."
Remember, a "first amendment" in and of itself has absolutely zero power to guarantee anything. Our government violates many of the provisions of the Constitution on a daily basis. "Free speech zones" anybody? Warrantless wiretapping? Civil asset forfeiture? Etc, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, the old line "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" really is true. It's actually down to us, "We The People" to hold our government accountable and make sure it upholds the principles we value. We can't just abdicate our responsibility and say "Oh, it's in the 1st amendment, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter. If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake," you can argue, much more easily, that Cloudflare has no business deciding what content it offers its services to.
The issue of limited discrimination protections on specified axes for public accommodations is a thorny one especially when it comes to expressive acts; there's plenty of room for debate on what axes should be protected, but a general non-discrimination rule for political ideology has never been seriously suggested, and would arguably run afoul of the first amendment.
> If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake,"
That's not the legal basis; a specific protection from sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations (in state law in the state in question) is.
Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this extent, right?
I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
What counts as "spreading"? Do cell phone companies kick off customers with views they disagree with? Where is the line?
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
Nazis specifically aren't a protected class, of course. Neither are white people. But (any) race is a protected class. And (any) political opinion could be a protected class, as well.
IIRC, this is already the case in California, with respect to employment - i.e. you cannot be fired for expressing a political opinion.
Yes, we advanced to being a more civilized society.
Adding "politics" to the list of protected classes is akin to removing all the other ones, since someone's "idea" can be that their race/sex/age/nationality makes them superior to all others.
I'd never support a politician who promoted the idea of rolling back Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Not at all. Adding the expression of some idea to the protected list does not, in any way, limit protection for other things on that list. It's the implementation of those ideas that would be a reversal.
What if a nazi wants to go work with a black rights group? Or a male sexist wants to work in a women's shelter?
Adding politics to the list of protected classes would be the end of protected classes.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should.
Wiki:
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
Total free speech as an ideal (not as a legal framework) creates a paradox where it implores people to tolerate the speech of groups that actively intend to destroy free speech (both legally and ideally), such as fascist groups.
There's a decent video explanation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH_JRcatCTk
You do not have to tolerate all speech in an ideological sense (the only sense that matters) just a physical sense.
Be careful when letting youtube faux philosophers feed you ideas.
EDIT: I apologize if this comment was busque. See my follow up below if you want more supporting arguements.
I'm aware and don't see why an appeal to authority is necessary. Also OP didn't link Karl Popper. They linked a rando-streamer who's opinions on censorship probably have Popper rolling in his grave.
---
Just for the sake of this thread here's Popper's conclusion from `The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato`:
> . . . 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 most 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 . . .
This may seem like a logical conclusion, but it's based on a paradox and therefore inherently illogical. A paradox is usually useful for showing issues with a conclusion and not supporting one.
Consider who decides what is tolerant or not. Do the Karl Poppers (who was very opposed to totalitarism) decide? How about the linked youtuber, who blocks everyone with slightly opposing opinions? What if I consider the youtuber intolerant?
By not tolerating the intolerant, that person person should therefore not be tolerated. How could such a thing possibly be realized?
In similar fashion to the capacitor switch paradox, [1] it stems from an inaccurate model. Toleration is an abstract idea modeling a much more complex social trait. Abstraction models may make reasoning as humans easier but we should always be careful when applying them.
[1]: http://www.users.on.net/~ithilien/tam/electronics/CapacitorP...
If you didn't want to discuss their authority, then don't bring it up- "youtube faux philosophers". You made an attack on their authority and the other person just defended it.
Thank you. I always appreciate some good sarcasm and condescension.
> Next time I'll link directly to a PDF of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".
Or better yet: include Popper's conculsion directly instead of inserting someone else's interpretation.
Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.
The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.
If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
That is the familiar way. But when lies travel faster than corrections, and bots can automate the Gish gallop, it's hard to imagine truth actually winning.
Why should anybody deserve to lose because they fall victim to the masses? How is that in any way justifiable? This is tyranny of the masses, nothing else.
And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
>To deny free speech is to oppress.
And how does this constitute an argument? We oppress the Marburg virus, why are we supposed to turn the other cheek when our society and our values are threatened by destructive forces?
It is called democracy. It has brought more success/improved living conditions than any other model (tyranny of the elite) in history.
> And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
Let's see some citations. Who are these beacons of civil rights? China? India? Colonel England?
It is also worth noting that free speech is considered a human right by the UN. [1]
> And how does this constitute an argument?
It's a circular arguement. I oppress you, you oppress me, we are all one big opressive family.
[1]: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/043/8...
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The United Kingdom and France for starters, two countries that were relatively egalitarian while the US was still busy enslaving its African-American population. Of course while free speech was already a thing in the United States.
While they may not have made it into law has solidly as in the USA, free speech ideals were very present and popular ideal in France/England at those time periods.
Europe's "hate speech" laws and censorship of speech/press are from more recent times.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Freedom_of_sp...
[3]: http://constitution.laws.com/declaration-of-the-rights-of-ma...
> Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) were written to address the prohibitive nature of the government in preventing the freedom of speech, religion, and the press.
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_privilege
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.
This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
I don't think one can coherently take a neutral stance at that level. If not helping Daily Stormer disseminate their message is branded as censorship, but Daily Stormers acts of bullying and threads of violence are not, then I would say that that definition of censorship needs to be re-evaluated.
If they end up actually getting turned away everywhere, and have no avenue to get their message out, then perhaps that's saying something about what everyone else things of the quality of their message.
And yes, this sort of thing needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If every internet company decided to disallow accounts held by people of a particular ethnic group, then that would be a problem. But I don't see an issue with every internet company deciding they don't want to participate in spreading hate speech and giving a hate group a platform to spread their propaganda. We wouldn't be arguing about this if we were talking about shutting down a website distributing ISIS recruitment videos, would we?
That's true that there are alternatives to CF. As long as there is at least one anti-DDoS provider with an "everyone is welcome" attitude, I suppose CF can do whatever they want. So I'll concede that point.
Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free speech” stands against.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.
Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.
Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.
If it were a protected group like LGBTQ, Cloudflare could not discriminate against them (the gay wedding cake is an example of this). So we've already decided, as a society (or rather our politicians have), that businesses must service protected groups. How far of a slippery slope is it to extend that protection to everyone?
The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery. With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region, and SV's bias towards liberalism (in a capitalist sort of way), it makes it harder to just find another bakery.
I can see the frustration. Imagine if the roles were reversed and the US internet was controlled by a conservative group in Texas (as it almost was) and those companies decided they didn't want to host packets or register LGBTQ type websites; we'd be livid. I mean we have to treat all speech equally, don't we?
It's an interesting dilemma.
That's not a protected class. In some (a minority) states, sexual orientation is. Gender identity is in some also, but not the same set.
> The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery.
Outside of a major urban area, that's far from clear. OTOH, there are many domain registrars and web hosts, and they tend not to have very limited geographic service areas. I definitely have more viable choices for either of those than I would for a wedding cake baker.
> With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region
This is absolutely not the case, especially for domain registration or web hosting.
Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services.
Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
IS false in practice. Some private companies cannot suppress speech.
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility?
My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
(Yes, you absolutely need to remove the bullet point now.)
This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.
Their right to say it.
Their ability to say it is a different thing.
Their ability: do they have the tools they would like to have (and that others might own) to communicate effectively.
I think in the printing press example, people ended up stealing them to print. I'm not sure you can steal the internet.
Yes, because it prevents people from free using their own resources and those gained through mutually consensual trade to spread their ideas.
> The difference here is it isn't necessarily governments, but rather corporations that control access to the internet (printing press).
No, the difference is that nothing is being banned; people are choosing not to let other people use their digital “printing press”, which is no different than the NYT choosing not to print your opinion piece.
No one is preventing the Stormer from self-hosting. And there are a very large set of domain registrars; the fact that a handful have refused their business doesn't mean that they can't get a domain name (which is certainly a convenience that affects reach, but also not a necessity, to publishing via the internet.)
Oh, I totally agree, but the prescient is unsettling to me.
Yes, you're one tough maverick for repeating something stated only about 20x in just this thread.
But you're indeed quite brave to pretend not to have seen the 25 answers pointing out that it's also this CEO (and everyone else's) right not to participate in the spreading of hate speech and nazi propaganda.
Also:
"slippery slope" is not an argument, it's a fallacy. Observe: "now, they're only imprisoning the murderers. It's only a matter of time until they'll throw you in jail for walking funny"
> you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so ...
Why? Does eating one apple pie obligate you to eat all the apple pie?
> ... unilaterally
As opposed to bilateral moderation?
> unilaterally
Happy now?
Did you actually want to discuss/argue with my comment or just criticize the way I worded it?
You may want to read this comment of mine I put in a thread that probably won't get seen much because it's not intellectually stimulating enough, or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
I'll add a quote from a White Rose leaflet:
> Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness!
http://white-rose-studies.org/Leaflet_3.html
That's a bad thing for us overall because now it won't just be something the CEO finds offensive; rather, it will be anything that could, through any potential legalistic contortion, result in legal liability.
We should all be very concerned about these low-level infrastructure components like GoDaddy, Google DNS, and CloudFlare beginning to adopt a policy of content moderation.
I'm shocked that something as simple as "they're nazis" is actually being accepted by people here; it is pretty much the stock anti-speech argument that we've all rehearsed forever. Sad to see that many aren't living up to it now that the cards are on the table.
Domains should only be seized when the government issues a binding legal order, not when the registrar or CDN's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
This is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine it's not coordinated specifically to weaken/undermine any form of anti-establishment or politically incorrect speech online. These attacks on core infrastructure delivery components need to be denounced loudly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
However, this doesn't seem to indicate that such editorial activity can't have a legal effect in some areas. It is limited only to cases where the service provider would otherwise be implicated as the publisher/speaker instead of a neutral mechanism used in the delivery of others' publications and speech. There are many other relevant circumstances where such behavior creates at least a non-legal precedent (Not A Lawyer, so can't and don't want to get into the nitty-gritty) and expectation that CloudFlare will act in a specific manner that violates the content policy they claim to want to keep.
The simple fact is that even if the law unequivocally allowed such activity, that doesn't mean that Cloudflare hasn't set a standard of behavior that they will be expected to live up to, inside and outside of the coutroom. That's especially true in the case of a jury trial, but there are certainly no shortage of politically-aware judges who don't want to let their 15 minutes be wasted in falsely associating them as "pro-white-supremacist". And if Cloudflare is at all PR-sensitive, they are now in for a long, slow beating.
This is all a large can of worms that everyone should regret ever having opened. How hard would it have been to say "Sorry, that's not how DNS works" when some random person on Twitter said "You're supporting a white supremacist! Undo it!"?
IMO the evidence here indicates a coordinated takedown and censorship campaign by organized political forces, and this operation has undeniably been a resounding success for them. So much so that they have fundamentally undermined the core institutions of the internet itself, hardly realizing the sacrosanct barrier they've pierced.
And I know that the HN that recognizes this with near unanimity is lying around here somewhere. I'm just not sure why they're not showing up to these threads. Maybe the votes are being artificially manipulated? Maybe everyone has slowly earned themselves bans/account censures for touching a topic that the mods are sensitive about? Maybe employers are becoming extra vigilant about catching those who express heresy on HN in hopes of catching a Damore-esque figure before it becomes a national press story? I dunno. But this type of non-neutrality on the part of core online infrastructure providers should be a much bigger deal than it is.
I don't understand? Are you saying that lying would have been morally superior? Because, as we've just seen, that's exactly how DNS works.
As for the other legal consequences, I don't see how this changes anything. Did anybody ever doubt Cloudflare's technical ability to stop serving individual sites?
I also don't see how consistency can be an argument in any such case: Being consistently wrong doesn't seem like a strong excuse for being wrong.
I feel you're also operating from a view of the court system that is vastly more cynical than the courts deserve. This is, unfortunately, a point that I cannot adequately put into words. But if you ever have the time, maybe find some decision that interests you (or, actually, pick anything at random) and read the decision, or maybe watch the oral arguments. I often read both the majority and the dissenting opinion of cases, and come away agreeing with both of them! That should be impossible because they contradict each other, but even opinions I disagree with often have an undeniably forceful argument.
(I just thought of a good example, which is a transcript from the Waymo vs Uber lawsuit. You may be surprised to see the forceful stand the judge takes to make the proceedings open to the general public. Quote:
(https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3533784-Waymo-Uber-3...)With regard to your expectation of HN's opinion: I believe you're mostly just underestimating how dramatic many people consider the current political situation to be. This is somewhat beyond the usual partisan divide, as can be seen by the almost unanimous decision by CEOs (generally not suspected to secretly harbour leftwing believes) to quit their advisory roles, by the increasing willingness of republicans in congress to criticise their president, or even in the Fox News moderator's spontaneous reaction to Trump's press conference, calling it "disgusting" and "surreal".
1. https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087295.h...
An entity that puts child porn on the Internet isn't protected by freedom of speech. Soliciting hate, violence and prejudice is obviously not identical but it's a lot different from just having a different opinion than someone else.
Shitty people should be treated shitty by companies. I don't really see a democratic way of banning folks like this from Cloudflare besides Cloudflare deciding to do so.
No it isn't, this is complete nonsense. There's not very many booters and besides a few exceptions they don't have paid CF plans.
Still doesn't make sense. CF alone doesn't effectively defend against DDoS attacks without somewhat complicated setup, CF is completely worthless when your backend is getting attacked.
I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of people pushed to use CF because of these booters.
Besides, do you feel that the situation would be any different if the booters weren't allowed on CF? CF is by no means important to their operations.
They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet, cutting off all communication.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
"Isolation only promotes extremism"
> In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought
This is not how any of this works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
and maybe this for good measure:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15014737
I forgot nothing, I'd rather say I know things you haven't yet understood.
I completely agree for the need for boundaries, but I think we've done a most excellent job of setting them!
The current boundary is speech that immediately incites violence, I believe the supreme court interpretation has been very generous towards the notion of free speech, including hate speech, as it should be!
Here's why:
We should let the radicals be racist and make radical statements as much as they want. At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
A blanket militant action against the whole ideology will no doubt show better results on shutting down the movement on a short term.
But the notion of freedom of speech is not meant to protect these radicals, it is meant to protect ourselves and the integrity of society! We cannot make exceptions to these rules just because it's more convenient to us now, because this weakens the principle. This is the whole slippery slope argument.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
If you wish to change the lines on which we use force, you must make a coherent case based on principle, not on convenience or anecdotes, as the principles themselves already account for, in a deep way, the history to which you allude.
Well good luck then. Just like Hitler famously wanted people to not wait for his orders, but distill his wishes and creatively go beyond in doing things in his spirit to get official support later, the guy who drove his car full speed into people didn't need anyone to specifically tell them to do that.
> At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
Oh, so the second the car approaches the crowd, time just stops and it gets "shut down"? No wait, that's totally not what happened and also what will happen as this shit repeats under a president who implicitly supports it and a populace that would rather berate those who DO want to shut it down than those who need shutting down.
Only very few will call for "specific acts of violence", I won't join you in holding your breath for that. Read Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner or don't. These aren't anecdotes, these are your betters, casting pearls before pigs. Pearls that were bought with suffering the likes of which neither you or I can even begin to imagine. But if you offer yourself as hostage to the Nazis, then you're out of what I consider polite society, too.
If ten people standing in a row have an idea, you cannot destroy the idea by shooting all of them in the head.
If one of them causes violence, you should not shoot all of them in retaliation.
What would be your judgement if this radical group was just sitting away in their homes typing out blog posts? Would you still censor them?
If they are specifically inciting this kind of violence, then yes, I think it is entirely correct to persecute all of them.
If they're talking about violence in abstract, then no. However, it should be sufficient reason for our security services to track the people expressing such ideas very closely, basically assuming that they're up to something, and ready to crack down on them as soon as those abstract ideas transform into any kind of concrete plan.
It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.
> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.
Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
Yes, the US actually does have excellent lines on what's acceptable speech. In my not-professional judgement, it's speech that is the proximate cause of violence and incites it, and the daily stormer is outside of that. If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
In the US, you let corporations decide how to exercise their right of free expression just as much as anyone else.
Freedom of speech means you are permitted to seek collaborators to help you spread your speech, not that others are obligated to disregard their own views to help promote yours. That kind of entitlement would violate the free speech rights of the forced collaborators.
You got that upside down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Is it? Several wars have been fought over this particular ideology. Massive amounts of resources were expended with the sole goal of stamping it out. The goal then was to eradicate it, because this sort of ideology is the stuff that eats civilizations. We don't have an obligation to amplify it. There is no reasoning with it.
In the hypothetical there's a potential censorship issue which we can address when we get to it. But where's the line? The site called for and celebrated murder and terrorism. On a daily basis they spew actual neo-nazi propaganda. Why, exactly, should we let that be echoed unchecked? We're not even talking about a public entity/government stifling the nazi speech, but rather we're asking whether we should without thinking allowing them to use someone else's private resources to spread their message.
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
Angry mobs aren't thinking about "long-term consequences." Unfortunately, the media loves angry mobs because it generates viewership and clicks.
Lots of private companies wouldn't want that (and AT&T butted heads over it).
Personally I think Facebook is already over that line, when you have the eyeballs of about 1/7th of the planet you are already a potential threat that should have government level oversight, in a democracy, you control the eyeballs you control the politicians.
I'm agreed that they shouldn't need to, but not that they shouldn't at all. Making these sorts of companies on the hook for things their customers do would make it impossible to run a company like this at all.
But remember, companies are made up of people. Those people have values and, with those values, make moral judgments -- and it is entirely within their right to do so. In the majority of cases I would hope that most people would choose to be content-neutral, but I absolutely expect and support that some people will eventually hit a threshold where they cannot look the other way anymore. And, in general, I think that's _absolutely ok_.
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
If we can't even get that content offline, the idea that cloudflare refusing to host this website means this website won't be able to find hosting is absolutely absurd.
If Google actually does that, they're asking for an anti-trust suit.
Kinderstart v. Google for one of many examples.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
I completely agree with you in this section.
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
The government shouldn't be censoring.
I don't allow white nationalists into my house.
At what point does "I" represent something too big for me to no longer have the moral privilege to refuse to collaborate with white nationalists?
Given that the Supreme Court has already decided that "wedding cake makers" are part of critical speech infrastructure, I think that Cloudflare, a service that hosts ISIS, pirates, and others, should be subject to the same restrictions as wedding cake makers.
They have? Source? And what's "critical speech infrastructure"?
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-court-gays-religio...
> And what's "critical speech infrastructure"?
That's the joke. If the government can force a cake baker to make a cake for a gay couple, why not force (excuse me, regulate) internet companies to provide services to those they don't want to provide service for? Surely, if your sexual orientation is a protected class as a consumer, your first amendment rights are moreso protected.
"No federal law requires businesses to serve all customers without regard to their sexual orientation, but 21 states have “public accommodations” laws that prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians.
In 2012, he said he politely declined to make a wedding cake for Charles Craig and David Mullins, who had planned to marry in Massachusetts but then have a reception in their home state of Colorado. They lodged a complaint with the state civil rights commission.
The commission ruled that Phillips’ refusal to make the wedding cake violated the provision in the state’s anti-discrimination law that says businesses open to the public may not deny service to customers based on their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The panel ordered him to provide wedding cakes on an equal basis for same-sex couples.
Phillips appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing he deserved a religious exemption based on the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion. His lawyers say he refused to comply with the commission ruling while his appeal proceeded."
The government absolutely could, but there is currently no law banning discrimination of service against racists or ideology in general.
The notion of protected classes with regards to private (not government) discrimination is not defined in the Constitution, but rather federal and state law. The Civil Rights Act defines race, religion, and sex as a protected class. If you want the government to prevent private companies from refusing to serve racists, you'd need a federal law passed, so I guess call your local congressman.
Given that does society not have a right to say that "If you want to earn money providing a service then you should do so by providing that service equally to all people who aren't breaking the law"?
Not saying which side I fall, I'm not sure but I think the question is interesting.
Far to often we focus on our rights and forget that other people have rights and that society has a duty to us and we have a duty to society.
The wedding cake case didn't have anything to do with free speech, and a lot to do with discrimination: http://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminate....
Do not conflate a bunch of causes just because you feel they are related. It doesn't do your argument any favors.
They have not decided anything, other than to agree to hear the case:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cakes...
To head off the obvious criticism: Yes, I understand the distinct difference between first amendment protections vis a vis the government versus the absence of those protections when dealing with other individuals and companies.
That said, I'm not a Nazi, nor am I a neo-Nazi, nor am I in any way sympathetic to their causes, but up to the point that their words specifically incite violence, I'll defend their rights to speak them.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
- H. L. Mencken
They have not decided anything, other than to agree to hear the case:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cakes...
You don't want to let (for example) landlords to deny lending to people because they're gay, black, etc. Not as much of a free speech thing as a 14th ammendment thing
That reminds me a joke that someone made during a family meeting. It was something along the lines of "What? You are going to marry a COMMUNIST?" and "I don't want loyalists in my house!", both of which are outdated concepts nowadays.
While you are free to refuse entry to your house to anyone that you want, it doesn't change the fact that refusing access to someone who would otherwise be allowed in just for their political beliefs is a jerk thing to do.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
That's why the distributed web exists, things like Freenet ( https://freenetproject.org/) Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com/ ) and MaidSafe ( https://maidsafe.net/ ) and tons more exist.
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
Related-ish: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-money-20170811...
Do you see the problem with that sampling method? Blind is a pretty self-selecting audience, and I wouldn't say it represents the average tech industry at all.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
If it becomes commonplace to discriminate against people based on their political ideology then we may very well see the 'political party' protection broadened.
The same way we deal with sexuality as a protected class, which is to say poorly but better than nothing.
> Should political ideology be a protected class?
I think it should, I wouldn't have said it was necessary in years past but it really seems like we're heading down a road where people are going to have to signal the 'right' political values in order to get hired.
In small doses businesses can refuse service to classes of people, but when the discrimination is so commonplace that it becomes a burden to those being discriminated against then you may see the creation of a new protected class (or realistically the broadening of an existing one) to make sure they aren't starved or unable to find employment.
However, it cuts both ways: your other customers also have the option to boycott you and encourage other people to do the same.
And if every business decides to stop doing business with certain people, then either a) those people really need to rethink what they want to do, because maybe everyone else thinks they're reprehensible, or b) we actually do have a case of a civil rights violation in a new way that we haven't considered making a law for.
Every business deciding not to serve black people would be a case of (b) (though retrograde, as we already have laws around that), and refusing to provide service to hate groups is, IMO, clearly (a).
That depends. Who are you? Is there a code of ethics that would compel you to interact with someone? Is it damaging to society if there isn't?
Are you sure? Because it doesn't sound like you do.
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
If we're gonna talk about Nazis, let's talk about Nazis.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
That sounds like a much bigger conflict with the 1st amendment than society simply deciding to shun messages we want to suppress.
What he's arguing, though, is to use courts because he knows courts would never do that in the US.
EDIT: on second thought, I wonder if this is what Daily Stormer wanted all along. They have raised their profile enormously now.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
There have been a lot of these sorts of incidents; I didn't hear about the DOXing incident, that's quite sad, and of course, inexcusable, for any reason.
However, there was an incident [http://bit.ly/1MxG5S8] where a lady was good friends with a man and was a regular customer for years. She did not want her company's name associated with his wedding (sounds oddly similar to the OP), so she politely declined.
This all being said, I'm very curious how you reconcile the two situations, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint.
I don't think you can justify allowing a business to refuse service on the basis of sexuality using the logic that prevents businesses from refusing service to different skin colors.
In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
I have my personal ideals -- gay marriage is fine, racism is not -- but those aren't perfectly congruent with what I think a society should codify as law, especially where free speech is concerned.
I think a lot of the debate people are having is over whether they want a nice society or a free one. A completely free society isn't very nice; a perfectly nice society isn't free. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us want to be, but we keep getting hung up on hypotheticals and the ideals behind rallying cries like "free speech!" and so no actual progress is being made.
In this particular case, CloudFlare isn't claiming to be developing a new policy -- they aren't refusing service to all neo-Nazi groups -- and I would support any florist's right to refuse service to a couple if they showed up and went out of their way to piss off the florist, regardless of their sexuality.
But there's an awfully big gray area in there and frankly I support CloudFlare's position a lot more because I like lgbtq people a hell of a lot more than I like neo-Nazis.
"nice" and "free" are not symmetrical concepts.
Being nice but not free works for today, but has no guarantee of working for tomorrow. Being free means that we have the ability to evolve our ideas and work towards niceness for all of the future as well.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
An unfree society gives up the ability to evolve and dies, even if it buys us convenient niceness on a short term. An unfree society lowers our chances of being nice tomorrow.
I think there are at least two distinctions.
The first and most important distinction is that it's actually very feasible to write laws that protect LGBT people. You can't discriminate on that basis, and it's very clear what discriminating on that basis means (well actually all discrimination is thorny and hard to prove/disprove, but LGBT and race exhibit the same set of issues, and we seem to be in agreement that we should figure out how to make racial discrimination illegal.)
Conversely, political belief is an almost impossibly fuzzy line, since at the end of the day pretty much everything is political.
For example, I think we can all agree that I should be allowed to refuse to serve customers who are being completely unreasonable and hostile assholes to me. This happens every Friday night at bars across the country.
But what if those people are being assholes by coming into my Jewish-owned-and-operated pharmacy and loudly talking about exterminating the Jews while buying a bar of soap? Clearly they are being assholes, but they're being assholes by being political. So, can I discriminate and tell them to leave? And if not, is it the case that now any asshole can talk about raunchy sex is a family restaurant or be a complete dick to the bar keep as long as they find a way to weave politics into their speech?
(BTW, apparently the turning point in this case was Daily Stormer or whatever claiming that CloudFlare secretly supports them. So in my mind this was closer to kicking someone out of the bar for being an asshole to management, rather than political discrimination. "You can be a nazi in my bar, but if you go around telling people that just because I let you talk about killing jews in my bar I'm somehow in on the neo-nazi movement, then you need to never come back here.")
So, the first distinction is that protecting LGBT is about as difficult as protecting racial classes but protecting political speech seems pretty intractable, form a legal perspective, without turning public spaces into unusable cesspools.
The second distinction -- and I do think this is a distinction that a free and just society is capable of making -- is the obvious difference between being gay and being a Nazi. E.g., Germany doesn't tolerate public support of Nazis and it's a fairly free and open society -- in some ways more free than the USA, even with respect to certain forms of speech. So for me the jury is out on whether that's a good or a bad idea, but we should at least stop treating "silencing Nazis leads to a terrible unfree society" like an axiom, since there are clear and obvious empirical counter-examples. This assertion without qualification is just false, end of story.
Similarly, eating at a restaurant is an "opt in" event. Should you be able to discriminate at will in that circumstance?
Wait a minute... where did you see that? This is the first time I have heard this part of the story. I thought the owners simply said "no", and then got sued for several hundred thousand dollars.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-25119-bittersweet-cake...
Wait, how exactly would the precedent set by lawsuits under state laws forbidding certain private discrimination in public accommodations enable federal establishment of religion?
Perhaps a statement that you did not support them in their ideals would have suited both the situation and your minds.
I've always felt like Cloudflare was one of the better leading internet companies, especially because of their neutrality towards their customers.
This is kind of a downer.
A court could easily side with the "abhorrent neo-nazis" if DDOSing raises their bills and Cloudflare's adhoc policy was the culprit, no matter what arbitration clause was written in their contract, and put the damages on Cloudflare.
With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.
Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.
What does this have to do with the termination?
If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?
It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.
I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:
In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...
To see him involved in yet another controversy stirring the pot isn't all that surprising, it's what he lives for. As far as I'm any judge of this the man is mentally not 100%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html
Would it have been possible to deal with this problem this way instead: http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defama...