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 They originally made a business decision to support them, now they have made another to drop them.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..

[Anonymous Coward]

Someones never been on the daily stormer, or browsed comments on far-right websites. Did you know that an internet archive exists?

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..

[PopeRatzo]

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

Do you have an historical example of this working? I mean, there may well be some, but none come to mind.

If you shine a light on some bugs and they scurry under a rock, you can then blow up the rock and problem solved. You don't beat the bugs by inviting them into your house.

Nazis are cockroaches. When you promote genocide by idolizing genocide that already happened you forfeit your right to be part of civil society.

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:So much for common carrier status

[mhkohne]

Actually, and especially with CloudFlare, I don't think anyone has much of a leg to stand on to take them on. First amendment is a thing that limits the government, not business - they are free to do business (or not) with whoever they choose.

Whether it's a good idea or not, is a separate thing.

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

[Quirkz]

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

Are you sure it's the *only* thing? A gal I know got spit on by a stranger in a coffee shop in Denver today, because she was Jewish. Now maybe *that* guy isn't like these other guys with the same ideology, and as long as they're only talking about things, and it's just this guy who's working his way up through assault, there's a line there. But it's hard to believe anyone who self-identifies as a Nazi isn't hoping to have a chance to do at least that much.

Re:Huh?

[Motherfucking Shit]

They put up a blog post explaining their decision a little while ago.

I take some umbrage at Cloudflare's rationale. Their position regarding this site, as well as various other sites, seems to be "we're just a proxy." The issue with that defense is that by proxying for a site, the Cloudflare service hides and obfuscates whatever provider is actually hosting the content. This is a) by design, and b) necessary in order to make the DDoS protection effective. That doesn't make it any less problematic.

Cloudflare wants to pass the buck somewhere else in the "infrastructure stack," as they call it, and I don't necessarily disagree that what amounts to a glorified transit provider is the wrong place to be implementing blocks. But given the very nature of Cloudflare's service, how does one figure out where else to complain? When a site is using Cloudflare, all roads dead end in Cloudflare's network. The site's name servers are in the cloudflare.com domain. The site's A records are inside Cloudflare IP space. Cloudflare is the primary visible service provider in these scenarios, whether they host any content or not.

Case in point, I've watched this story play out with some interest over the past couple of days. I still have no idea where Daily Stormer's content was actually being hosted. It almost certainly would have violated the AUP/TOS of that hosting provider, and they probably would have terminated the site directly. But with Cloudflare in the way, no one knows who to complain to.

When your business model is being a black-box opaque front for all comers, don't be surprised when the world directs its anger at you.

Re:Nazi

[Pfhorrest]

So those college kids proudly waving around the flag of the people who tortured you, chanting the slogans of the people who tortured you, and espousing the ideology of the people who tortured you, doesn't bother you? They're not "real Nazis" despite adopting all the symbols of the real Nazis and standing for what real Nazis stood for? Why, because this generation of them haven't tortured you yet?