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by Karunamon 3193 days ago
And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody.

If you read the blog[1] regarding that incident, it provides a lot more evidence than the datapoint of the removal. It also completely undermines Cloudflare's claims of being content-neutral. Given that content neutrality is a binary state...

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Also hosted by cloudflare: ISIS sites, which are a lot more of a clear and present danger to real people than a bunch of racists. That means the standard has gone from content neutrality - to content neutrality so long as you don't imply things the CEO doesn't like. I.e. not neutral.

From the blog:

>And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.

Anything I can say about this will be ridiculously snarky, but this is the hill you chose to sacrifice your principles on, Matthew? Really?

2 comments

I was going off my memory of stormfront situation. Apologies if I incorrectly cited number of data points. I still am not concerned about the GP’s issue given the CEO expressed remorse and created a debate. It’s hard to imagine neo-nazis doing such a thing themselves should they create a cloud front competitor.

I agree they should remove ISIS sites. It’s marginally harder given you could argue it’s about religion/politics, but I’m happy to lump them in with neo-nazis inciting violence.

It’d be nice if you could create some perfect set of clear rules that you could cleanly apply to 100% of sites. Unfortunately the world is squishy and gray, which is why we have judges despite countless laws written in legalese that build on top of each other’s precedent. I don’t expect judging content to be the same. I appreciate the CEO thinking they should just defer to when gov forces them to shut something down. I also appreciate the perspective of removing extremist sites — you got one life to live so why not make a difference creating barriers to _EXTREME_ hate/violence around the world.

If you think that there’s a risk of Clouflare pulling your site down I’d choose not to use their service?

Seems an easy choice.