The yuri (Japanese lesbian art) in question is obviously not CSAM as you can see in the Bluesky thread, as both women depicted in the artwork are fully clothed and don't look like children at all.
The fediverse instance being talked about (woem.men) is currently down right now due to a hasty emergency relocation, because Hetzner only gave them 24 hours to respond satisfactorily.
It's clearly not. And it's not Cloudflare's job to be playing morality police when the content is legal in its state of operation, and legal in the state of the owner. I will not be using Cloudflare in the future.
Loli porn is disgusting and the people who view it are unequivocally pedophiles, but this is not that. It's weird, but it shouldn't be in the realm of such a takedown.
> not Cloudflare's job to be playing morality police
It is almost certainly cloudflares policy that they will not make judgements like this. They will just take down any content if someone complains about it.
Think about it - if they paid an employee to look at the content to decide legal/not legal, they would be exposing that employee to CSAM. That's illegal and they'd get sued for it.
Which is why they probably have no human involvement in the decision-making, and lots of legal things are taken down as a result.
This is an EXTREMELY weird line to take this discussion in, considering we're talking about the same company who's response to a number of people asking them to drop KiwiFarms as a customer was 3 several-paragraph-long blog posts, endless hand-wringing and promises to donate all revenue from KF to charity.
Meanwhile a cartoon illustration of two girls kissing is posted on a Fediverse instance with less than a hundred users, dedicated as a safe space for trans women, and it's immediately Threatening E-Mail O'clock.
Their "out" is that they got complaints, which is honestly even more hilarious, because are we going to pretend they got more complaints about a teeny-tiny Sharkey instance than Kiwi fucking Farms?
They appear to be in high school style uniforms. Thus their ages is likely 15 to 17. Certainly under age by definition of 18. Clearly depicting underage people in situation with at least sexual tension if not nudity.
According this argument, any porn/erotica platform serving results for "school girl" has been hosting CSAM/underage teen pornography at least since early 2000.
When we at Hetzner receive an abuse report from Cloudflare, our abuse team then asks the affected customer for a statement or we ask them to remove the content in question.
The picture in question leaves some room for interpretation, so we asked the customer for more details about it. It was a misjudgement on our part to ask the customer in this case to take down the entire website; it was unjustified.
We very much regret this and have apologized to that customer.
We strive to process the large number of abuse requests we receive while making as few errors as possible. But we are human, and made a mistake this time. For that we apologize. --Katie (Hetzner Online)
Ah, just saw this right now. The apologies is much appreciated, thanks for that.
It seems though AFAICS, that the customer in question is not fully convinced[1] that this incident will not happen again. Are there going to be any concrete steps taken by Hetzner for this kind of error to not be repeated? While I doubt the customer is ever going to return back to your hosting at this point (and it looks like Hetzner was just going to be temporary for them either way anyway while they find a more permanent hosting service that is surely friendly to them and their kind of content, this incident just seemed to accelerated that eventual transition), it's definitely still worth considering it for others who haven't moved away and are now wary about false reports effectively taking down their sites (drawn SFW yuri/lesbian content is pretty common to be stored, whether knowingly or not, on fediverse instances hosted by your service).
The overton window keeps shifting. Fiction is fiction, you don't have to like it to accept that it should always be ungovernable. But society has regressed so much, we're way past having that legal and social understanding.
Hetzner can do whatever they want, but cloudflare proxies much much worse.
This is of course only if drawings are deemed illegal, which has been picking up speed recently it seems. It is where hetzner resides, but not where cloudflare does, but it can effect proxy locations I guess.
If cloudflare starts deciding they need to judge legality they have even more issues than artwork as well. It feels like half the piracy sites out there or more use them nowadays.
Hetzner obviously got complaints, and I fully understand they have no interest in trying to defend images depicting pre-18 girls in suggestive situations. It's a minefield, with possibility of less favorable content not yet discovered in that fediverse.
What is sad that so many are oblivious to the corporate world and what it takes to run a company, especially against giants like Azure and AWS.
23 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadThe fediverse instance being talked about (woem.men) is currently down right now due to a hasty emergency relocation, because Hetzner only gave them 24 hours to respond satisfactorily.
Wouldn't go as far as "obviously". I mean, I get it's not meant to be, but I hope you're able to see it's... playing with the threshold?
But after reviewing your link, I would say even more questionable.
Mid teens?
Loli porn is disgusting and the people who view it are unequivocally pedophiles, but this is not that. It's weird, but it shouldn't be in the realm of such a takedown.
It is almost certainly cloudflares policy that they will not make judgements like this. They will just take down any content if someone complains about it.
Think about it - if they paid an employee to look at the content to decide legal/not legal, they would be exposing that employee to CSAM. That's illegal and they'd get sued for it.
Which is why they probably have no human involvement in the decision-making, and lots of legal things are taken down as a result.
Meanwhile a cartoon illustration of two girls kissing is posted on a Fediverse instance with less than a hundred users, dedicated as a safe space for trans women, and it's immediately Threatening E-Mail O'clock.
Their "out" is that they got complaints, which is honestly even more hilarious, because are we going to pretend they got more complaints about a teeny-tiny Sharkey instance than Kiwi fucking Farms?
The picture in question leaves some room for interpretation, so we asked the customer for more details about it. It was a misjudgement on our part to ask the customer in this case to take down the entire website; it was unjustified.
We very much regret this and have apologized to that customer.
We strive to process the large number of abuse requests we receive while making as few errors as possible. But we are human, and made a mistake this time. For that we apologize. --Katie (Hetzner Online)
It seems though AFAICS, that the customer in question is not fully convinced[1] that this incident will not happen again. Are there going to be any concrete steps taken by Hetzner for this kind of error to not be repeated? While I doubt the customer is ever going to return back to your hosting at this point (and it looks like Hetzner was just going to be temporary for them either way anyway while they find a more permanent hosting service that is surely friendly to them and their kind of content, this incident just seemed to accelerated that eventual transition), it's definitely still worth considering it for others who haven't moved away and are now wary about false reports effectively taking down their sites (drawn SFW yuri/lesbian content is pretty common to be stored, whether knowingly or not, on fediverse instances hosted by your service).
[1] - https://woem.men/notes/9rdj6cc1ku7g05xy
This is of course only if drawings are deemed illegal, which has been picking up speed recently it seems. It is where hetzner resides, but not where cloudflare does, but it can effect proxy locations I guess.
If cloudflare starts deciding they need to judge legality they have even more issues than artwork as well. It feels like half the piracy sites out there or more use them nowadays.
What is sad that so many are oblivious to the corporate world and what it takes to run a company, especially against giants like Azure and AWS.