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Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com)
"Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince hated cutting off service to the infamous neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer in August," reports Ars Technica. "And he's determined not to do it again. 'I'm almost a free-speech absolutist.' Prince said at an event at the New America Foundation last Wednesday. But in a subsequent interview with Ars, Prince argued that in the case of the Daily Stormer, the company didn't have much choice." From the report: Prince's response was to cut Daily Stormer off while laying the groundwork to make sure he'd never have to make a decision like that again. In a remarkable company-wide email sent shortly after the decision, Prince described his own actions as "arbitrary" and "dangerous." "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet," Prince wrote in August. "It was a decision I could make because I'm the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company." He argued that "it's important that what we did today not set a precedent." Prior to August, Cloudflare had consistently refused to police content published by its customers. Last week, Prince made a swing through DC to help ensure that the Daily Stormer decision does not, in fact, set a precedent. He met with officials from the Federal Communications Commission and with researchers at the libertarian Cato Institute and the left-of-center New America Foundation -- all in an effort to ensure that he'd have the political cover he needed to say no next time he came under pressure to take down controversial content.
The law is strongly on Cloudflare's side here. Internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare have broad legal immunity for content created by their customers. But legal rights may not matter if Cloudflare comes under pressure from customers to take down content. And that's why Prince is working to cultivate a social consensus that infrastructure providers like Cloudflare should not be in the censorship business -- no matter how offensive its customers' content might be.
The law is strongly on Cloudflare's side here. Internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare have broad legal immunity for content created by their customers. But legal rights may not matter if Cloudflare comes under pressure from customers to take down content. And that's why Prince is working to cultivate a social consensus that infrastructure providers like Cloudflare should not be in the censorship business -- no matter how offensive its customers' content might be.
If it's a "good" website lots of people want to access, any private entity that stands in the way of freely accessing that site = evil.
If it's a "bad" website lots of people don't want to access, any private entity that supports freely accessing that site = evil.
Any questions?
Yep, and what happened back then? They moved the culture until all anti fascist voices in Germany were outside the realm of 'acceptable discourse', just like pro Nazi comments are on Cloudflare. The best defense against totalitarian ideals is free speech, where all discourse is acceptable.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
"The people I don't like are all bad and deserve to die!"
Signed
All Nazis and Weirdly Rabid 'AntiNazis' Who Never Understand How Nazi-ish They Are
It's retard shaming.
I can't say that I agree with or support neo-nazi beliefs in any way. But I do believe in free speech. If they are so retarded, then why do you think they need to be removed from the internet? If they are so stupid that anyone can easily see it, what's the need to remove them from a place that you have to go look for them to even hear/read what they have to say? Why allow them to even try to claim some kind of victimhood?
As much as I can't stand the content, the content should be there so that people can see for themselves how bad it is.
--
It's a bird, it's a plane!
It's EASY to say "that offends me, ban it!"
It's harder to say "that offends me, but I need to stand against it on its merits, not just because I have the power to ban it."
-Styopa
When private companies own and operate the internet, it seems like a very slippery slope to curbing free speech. Who is to say that Google or the like, won't be told by the shareholders to not host content because it offends their advertisers.
This seems like a very real consequence of allowing private companies to be gate keepers of the information on the internet, who can choose what content to offer without impunity.
--
"Bad boys, bad boys, what you going to do? What you going to do when they come for you?" -- Inner Circle
Because I'm not an *anything* absolutist. Things like absolutism and zero tolerance are attractive because they make decision making easy in a complex world -- too easy. Sometimes you ought to be forced to wrestle with tough calls; to choose the lesser of two evils or between alternative goods when you can't have both.
And for that reason the way Daily Stormer was forced off the Internet disturbed me, even though I *despise* those people. It's the easy call: here's a problem that's attracting a lot of negative attention, so let's make it go away, and by "go away" we mean sweep it under the rug so someone else has to deal with it. Does anyone think that will make those people disappear? That it will stop others from becoming radicalized? I for one think it will work in their favor. Authoritarians love to view themselves as victims just as much as they love to be victimizers; those are two halves of the same coin for them. They adore being wronged, because in their very tiny minds that gives them permission to wrong others.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think he was being informative, actually. Because the socialists are the ones with the really big death toll on their hands, and they're still given places of privilege in places like US institutions of higher education.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Actual history. The idiotic tiki-torch-carrying wannabes have nothing on socialists when it comes to death. And the socialists are getting coddled, right now, in schools around you.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Kicking speech I don't like off the internet isn't a bad thing. If he applied that to speech I DO like, that would eventually become a bad thing, but it would take a while.
FTFY.
Yep, and what happened back then? They moved the culture until all anti fascist voices in Germany were outside the realm of 'acceptable discourse', just like pro Nazi comments are on Cloudflare. The best defense against totalitarian ideals is free speech, where all discourse is acceptable.
It also gives law enforcement a much easier task of keeping an eye on them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Granted, in the USA the concern is perhaps that people or the government might not actually be able to really determine fairly and objectively what is evil and what is good in speech. That hence one should just allow all of it.
In the US the stance (among people with at least half a brain) is that all speech is free speech, the laws apply especially for things you personally detest. It is meant to give the most hated minorities of society the chance to get their ideas out, the good bits to grow and the bad bits to be reasoned out instead of festering until the people holding those ideas snap. All governments want to remove free speech, all major corporations want to control free speech and argue it is within their right to do so (nevermind their existence is predicated on the government saying they are entities and the government doesn't have that right, yet they have somehow been granted such a right which is illegal for the government to grant.) In the short term free speech can cause a bit of chaos, in the long term free speech increases stability by a huge factor, politicians, shareholders, and bureaucrats only think in the short term and hence they mostly despise free speech and will latch on to whichever jackass has the most revolting opinion of the day to call for banning it.
Being placed in prison/forced labor (in a konzentrationslager - sometimes in a vernichtungslager) or killed without a trial is now the same as not being allowed to spread hate on a specific platform?
(German used to differentiate from concentration camp which is a large camp or group of camps)
Repeat after me:
"Free speech encompasses the 1st Amendment, not the other way"
"Free speech encompasses the 1st Amendment, not the other way"
"Free speech encompasses the 1st Amendment, not the other way"
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.
Cloudflare didn't care if the world called them Nazi supporters, so long as they weren't using Cloudflare to do so. The Daily Stormer used Cloudflare to call Cloudflare Nazi supporters, so Cloudflare gave them the boot.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
A lot less than you think. Eventually people will just use the excuse in order to silence somebody else’s view. By then people will just willingly accept that they were taken out due to “offensive comments“. It run similar to the argument about gun control. Nobody wants to give a crazy person a gun. But having a law that says that people that arereported by their doctor are revoked of their Second Amendment rights Has already resulted in false reports by doctors who were simply anti-gun. Unfortunately, there was no oversight or proper due process to get yourself off of the list if you were put in there for political reasons. These type of infringement a really a very small step from imprisoning political opponents. I think the CEO woke up scared shitless that he created a president of a police state.
Think of it like somebody that you only marginally know comes forward and accuses you of rape. Within a day 80% of people you interact with on a daily basis have already convicted you as a rapist before the first piece of evidence is even examined. 100% of the people that don’t know you already convinced you’re guilty. Violating somebody’s due process is probably the single most egregious crime we can can commit against the Constitution. If you take away due process, people can invent mini “acceptable“ reasons for denying you every other liberty.