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Cloudflare Helps Serve Up Hate Online: Report (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you've been wondering how hate has proliferated online, especially since the 2016 election, ProPublica has some answers. According to ProPublica, Cloudflare -- a major San Francisco-based internet company -- enables extremist web sites to stay in business by providing them with internet data delivery services. Cloudflare reportedly also keeps to a policy of turning over contact information of anyone who complains to operators of the offending sites, thus exposing the complainants to personal harassment.
TCP/IP enables extremist web sites to stay in business by providing them with internet data delivery services
I experienced this first hand. I was working for a client who was attacked by having hundreds of thousands of links pointed to their website with anchor text like "child porn" in attempt to ruin their brand. The spammers were effective and they had to change company names. I was able to track down a site that was owned by the spammer after the spammer also created a duplicate copy of the website with a porn related domain name. Cloudflare was able to reveal to us the IP behind them, but by the time we received this information, the spammer had taken to the web and posted hundreds of thousands of new comments with my first and last name accusing me of all sorts of stuff (although not CP). Ultimately we were able to scare the spammers off their game, but the issue was quite clear. Services like Cloudflare (which I think are great) do create an additional veil of anonymity for unscrupulous individuals and their abuse policies pass the names of the complainant on to the unscrupulous individuals, allowing retaliation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For some reason the link was to the CNET article. The actual propublica article is here: https://www.propublica.org/art...
Quote:
"Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer [the neo-Nazi web site]. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining....
“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content. “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
You personally may not have... but I know more than a few Bernie fans who were so disillusioned that they voted for Trump in the end.
During the primaries I honestly could not believe the Clinton supporters and how arrogant they acted. "We don't need you or your vote!" was a common sentiment I saw.
I participated in both primary parties for Ron Paul (2012) and Bernie Sanders (2016) and while the GOP did do some messed up shit that bit them in the ass to ignore the delegates Ron Paul won during 2012, nothing compared to the #BernieBro resentment from the Clinton camp. It was incredible to me that there was such animosity for a different opinion in the same party. For all the faults of the GOP, they do have a fairly diverse range of ideas the party represent while the Democrats wanted to limit what is an acceptable opinion by shaming those that strayed from the party mantra.
Correct. This is not news. it is political propaganda.
These stories, like the "extremism on Youtube" stories, are designed to put pressure on companies to abandon their free speech principals and submit to the will of the media and the political class.
Let us be frank: The article mentions the "Daily Stormer", but the actual websites which will be banned are almost certain to resemble the Prop or Not list of alleged "Russian Propaganda" sites. A list promoted heavily be the Washington Post and other MSM sites which ultimately included many independent bloggers and even left-wing progressive sites like nakedcapitalism.com.
The Propornot list was a list of doubters. Sites which would not tow the propaganda line, on war, on the banks, on the economy, on the election. These are the sites which the political class has been scheming to proscribe since the election. I would hope that people can put aside their political preferences in that election long enough to acknowledge that it was a shocking defeat for the Media and the increasingly corrupt political establishment. Regardless of your opinions on him, someone the political class did not want got in, and they are making moves and exerting political pressure -- usually through their lapdogs in the media-- to prevent ANY such repeat occurrence.
Regardless of whether you'd prefer vote for Trump or Sanders or any other disruptive candidate come 2020, if this censorship drive continues, the MSM will dominate the internet as well, and you'll be stuck with the political equivalents of Hillary and Jeb Bush.