Cloudflare Stops Supporting Neo-Nazi Site The Daily Stormer (arstechnica.com)

Timothy B. Lee reports via Ars Technica: All week, the infamous hate site Daily Stormer has been battling to stay online in the face of a concerted social media campaign to shut it down. The site lost its "dailystormer.com" domain on Monday after first GoDaddy and then Google Domains blacklisted it from their domain registration services. The site re-appeared online on Wednesday morning at a new domain name, dailystormer.ru. But within hours, the site had gone offline again after it was dropped by Cloudflare, an intermediary that defends customers against denial-of-service attacks. Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin reported Cloudflare's decision to drop the site in a post on the social media site Gab. His post was first spotted by journalist Matthew Sheffield.

Comments

While these guys are nutters..

[thesupraman]

Sadly we can chalk up another 'win' to groupthink, oppression of minorities, and censorship.

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?
Isn't censoring such people just making them feel more targeted, and therefore strengthening their solidarity?

All this has done is give a bunch of disenfranchised idiots more reason to hate..

Shine a light on them, don't chase them away to skulk in the dark, where they will do what they will do without anyone watching.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[gravewax]

Their is no censorship here. They originally made a business decision to support them, now they have made another to drop them. Really they should have avoided making any public statement in the first place and then they probably could have gotten away with the original business decision. Businesses have no responsibility to provide services to such a group and it isn't oppression or censorship to refuse them service, in fact it would be oppression and censorship to force them to support them.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[computational super]

Oh, it's even better than that. See, you and I have been told that "The Daily Stormer" has been censored and must be removed from our view because it was hateful. Although in this case I have no reason to believe otherwise, there's no way for you or I to verify whether or not it really was - or, if it was, just _how_ hateful and whether it really deserved its fate. This time it probably was, and did. But since we can't tell for sure, next time it may not, and we'll have no way to tell - it's been removed to protect us, see, and we have no business looking at it.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[Ol Olsoc]

Sadly we can chalk up another 'win' to groupthink, oppression of minorities, and censorship.

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?

Explain. This is not keeping people from putting their Blood and Soil and the Holocaust was a liberal Jewish hoax and Lets go here because there are some liberals gathering" websites on the internet, it is telling them that "we" aren't going to host it.

The Brave young Aryans are completely free to sign up with any service that will have them. Or even better, start one of their own, where they can spread their messages without having to worry about Liberals. In fact, they can deny those liberals access to their servers then, an obvious win.

Isn't censoring such people just making them feel more targeted, and therefore strengthening their solidarity?

First, it isn't censorship, and second, many of the people in these organizations are drawn to them because they feel disenfranchised, or have a deep seated need for hatred.

All this has done is give a bunch of disenfranchised idiots more reason to hate..

Shine a light on them, don't chase them away to skulk in the dark, where they will do what they will do without anyone watching.

Sounds like a demand for support of any group that feels marginalized. Sometimes groups are marginalized for a reason. Both of these groups have committed some serious crimes, either on a semi local level for the White Supremacists, or on a global scale, such as Nazis. And people who provide services for other people are allowed to deny service to others, except in certain narrowly defined circumstances. Good luck in the real world trying to convince most of America that they have to support either of those groups. You have a President who supports them - what more could you ask for?

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[dslauson]

Shine a light on them, don't chase them away to skulk in the dark, where they will do what they will do without anyone watching.

Do you really think their site continuing unabated as-is would be "shining a light on them"? It would just continue to give them their dark corner of the web to flourish in, while the rest of us blissfully ignore whatever racist bullshit propaganda was being spread over there.

Now, I wouldn't advocate for a government crackdown, because I'm a big believer in the first amendment, but GoDaddy and Google and Cloudfare have no obligation to provide service these hateful monsters, as they've made clear in their terms of service, so if they want to pull the plug, I have no problem with that.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[werepants]

There's "censorship", and then there's "you're an asshole, and association with you will hurt my reputation, so I won't do business with you".

It's not like an ISP is proactively blocking people who want to read this site's content, or the government is forcing people to abandon him. The free market is acting.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[thegarbz]

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?
Isn't censoring such people just making them feel more targeted, and therefore strengthening their solidarity?
All this has done is give a bunch of disenfranchised idiots more reason to hate..

No it's not. Leaving them happily in the open gives them legitimacy and a way to spread their message. They are already disenfranchised, and they already hate. But cutting them off they won't hate any more. What it will do is separate the actual haters and neo-nazi from the part time weekend warriors who have nothing better to do than join the angry rant of the day.

These groups will always exist. But it's quite important that they stay in the minority and in the underground rather than allowing them to mass-market their presence.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[ScentCone]

by "antifa" you mean "everyone who is not a nazi"

No, by "antifa" you mean, "People who deliberately plan and carry out violence and destruction to intimidate and silence those who don't share the ideological groupthink of their masters and defenders on the left." And, "People who are applauded in campus newspaper editorials for beating other people bloody and unconscious for wanting to attend an event featuring a speaker that isn't slavishly obeying every SJW edict and requirement."

Only disingenuous liberal tools consider anyone who isn't a violent antifa thug or their cheering section to be a Nazi. The antifa thugs are the very embodiment of classical Fascist brown shirt enforcement, and they know it. The left LIKES it. Just like they still think they're being cool by wearing their Che t-shirts, since even though he was a mass murderer, he was their mass murderer.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[PopeRatzo]

Oppression, however, should never be the answer.

With the original Nazis, oppression was definitely the answer.

You think those soldiers that landed on Normandy were there to engage in civil discourse with the Nazis?

So much for common carrier status

[WolfWalker545]

I suspect these companies have failed to adequately discuss their moves with their lawyers, by taking actions based on viewpoint, they potentially forfeit their ability to claim legal protections as common carriers.

Re:Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[computational super]

In a way, as an opponent of censorship, I sort of like this - this will almost definitely drive more and better adoption of censorship-resistant media like Tor, I2P and Freenet.

Re: Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[Anonymous Coward]

First they came for the racists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a racist.

Then they came for the sexists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a sexist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me. And nobody was left to speak up for me.

Nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop using that word. I don't think you know what it means.

I was tortured in Auschwitz by real Nazis - ie. German SS soldiers. Nazis aren't 18 year old white males on your college campus you disagree with. Sorry, but that's true.

Re:Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[jedidiah]

Except the only thing that these people are actually doing is saying shit you don't like.

You clearly want license to abuse people you don't like and are too arrogant to see this ever being used against you.

Re:Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[duke_cheetah2003]

Oh boy, there's a lot to unpack here. See this is the problem, you somehow think because they're bigoted assholes no one approves of somehow gives you a permit to be a bigoted asshole no one approves of. You're completely missing the point. You're just feeding the beast with all your own hatred.

You can dislike something without hating it. Hate is something we should not encourage from ANYONE. It never leads to anything good. Ever.

Like I can for example look at these groups and laugh at their idiocy that will never have anything but a very small following. All that adapt and evolution shit you vomited all over the place? That stuff takes a long time. Be patient young padawan. Eventually these people die. There's less and less of them every year.

But suppress them? Shame them openly? Make them feel like second class citizens? WOW, you just became them. Congratulations!

Re: Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, would you have told the Jews to man up when they faced injustice against the Nazi regime?

Careful when cheering against acceptable targets without reflection. Some of the worst things in history occurred because someone else was an acceptable target.

Re: Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[LynnwoodRooster]

Apples and oranges.

If you're running a business of public accommodation (that is, a business open to the public), then you cannot legally refuse service to a customer solely because that customer is in a protected class.

So, Cloudflare does NOT run a business of public accommodation, then? And political speech IS a protected class - it's called the First Amendment. Or are "some animals more equal than others"?

Re:Huh?

[rtb61]

The only group that should censor is the courts, when ever corporations take it up themselves to be above the courts, to rule beyond the courts, it always works out much worse for us. Not happy with 'Daily Stormer' than take it too fucking court, corporations are not the fucking government. Want to take someone down, want to censor them, take it to court.

Chip off Washington and Jefferson from Mt Rushmore

[KayakFun]

In the Netherlands police are trying (and failing) to disband Outlaw Motor Gangs based on the criminal activities of their members. Everybody knows there is a big correlation between OMG membership and crime, but the crimes are not orchestrated by the OMG. You cannot blame an entire organisation because one member committed a crime.

Volkert van der Graaf, who killed the dutch politician Pim Fortuyn 9 days before the 2002 elections, was a vegan and memeber of environmental pressure group Milieudefensie. Should we have pulled the plug on al vegan and milieudefensie websites?

Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was killed by muslim Mohammed Bouyeri after being critical of Islam. Should we ban all islam websites? And close all salafist mosques?

I am not a fan of the far right or the far left. I am peacefully a bit left of the center. This witch-hunt is the end of free speech. If we give in to those social justice warriors you might as well start chipping the heads of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from Mount Rushmore as they were slaveowners. Do you know who else destroys ancient art that does not conform to their ideology? Terrorist group IS.

Re: Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[tbannist]

This is incredible. Their CEO admits he knew he was wrong, but he kicked them off anyway, and double pinky swear he won't do it again.

What a clusterfuck.

Typical lies of the alt-right bubble-brains.

According to the interview with Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO), he felt that he had to boot the Daily Stormer from Cloudflare because the Daily Stormer started claiming that Cloudlfare was run by Neo-nazis, and used Cloudflare's refusal to boot them as evidence to support their claims. So they got booted because they made disparaging claims about Cloudflare and personally insulted Matthew Prince, the CEO, by claiming he was one of them.