[Kalium]

An excellent, wise, and cogent question! In fact I do have data. You can find it here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

> On the other hand, anonymity is also something that provides value to online attackers. Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network.

The obvious caveats apply, of course. It's completely possible what Cloudflare saw at the time is no longer true and TOR is no longer mostly spam. It's equally fully possible that the traffic Cloudflare sees is wildly unrepresentative of what TOR traffic actually looks like, and it's mostly people worried about their privacy. This is just the data we have at the moment.

[jcoffland]

A small percentage of bad actors using automaton can produce a lot of traffic. So although it may be true that a large portion of the requests coming from TOR exit nodes is malicious, it would be unwise to conclude that most users of TOR have bad intentions.

[kelnos]

True, but from the perspective of an org like CloudFlare, that doesn't matter. They don't know (or care) about the user breakdown coming from Tor; they just know that the vast majority of traffic coming from it is malicious. And since part of the point of Tor is to make it hard to determine who's who, the good traffic gets binned with the bad.

[thfuran]

I don't think anyone is concluding that.

[jcoffland]

I think a lot of people come to exactly that conclusion.

[ChrisLomont]

Why would they? Most people cognizant of these terms knows a bot generates more traffic than a human; that’s the point of most bots.

[sjwright]

Cloudflare's documented experience aligns closely with mine; I've been limiting or blocking TOR ever since 2008 because over 90% of the traffic was malicious bots, and the majority of the remainder was malicious humans.

And when you have malicious traffic swimming in an anonymous pool, there's no practical alternative but to block all of it.

[crankylinuxuser]

Isn't cloudflare the org that "Doesnt censor under any circumstances", and then turned around and censored white supremacists? Not that I agree with them (I DONT!), but it was a full 180.

And also, isn't cloudflare also the one to allow booters and stressers to be online behind CF - and they used stolen CC's to boot?

The Tor decisions to screw users over is just the cherry on top. Especially is egregious is when a captcha is demanded on even a simple static page. Seems pretty obvious what's going on here.

[Frondo]

Everyone should censor and shun white supremacists. They have no place in modern society. When they shed their noxious views, we can all welcome them back with open arms.

[mamon]

Ok, so you've decided that being white supremacist is bad. I can agree with you on that, but still the question remains: who get's do decide what has a place in modern society? Who decides what "modern society" even is? Today Google might decide to censor white supremacists, tomorrow it can be human rights advocates. I think that allowing any type of censorship, even for such a noble cause as fighing racism is a slippery slope. Especially when done by a private company that is outside of our control (and governments are only marginally better).

[Frondo]

You're trying to generalize a useful rule ("shun white supremacists") but it doesn't work in this case. I don't think we need to, either.

We're not robots. We can shun white supremacists and leave everyone else alone. This isn't a slippery slope, it's just good sense (no more white supremacists, hey!). Humankind will get along just fine if we tack on that one extra rule and all follow it.

[sincerely]

Good thing the definition of white supremacist is commonly agreed upon and noncontroversial and absolutely isnt subject to definition creep :)

[krapp]

> Good thing the definition of white supremacist is commonly agreed upon and noncontroversial and absolutely isnt subject to definition creep :)

The definition is commonly agreed upon, and what "white supremacist" means is not at all controversial to most people. It certainly isn't so arbitrary as to be meaningless.

Now, the term may be misapplied at times, as may any term, but for it to be misapplied, it has to have an accepted application to begin with. A term without a definition can't be subject to definition creep, and the possible creep of a term like "white supremacist" is that wide to begin with.

[Frondo]

What isn't subject to definition creep?

Murder now, for some, includes abortion.

Censorship now includes, for some, private companies removing bad actors from their private systems.

Come on, that's lazy to dismiss it that way when society literally changes all the time.