[eru]

They might take that stance, to avoid liability and complication.

At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.

[LudwigNagasena]

Cloudflare dropped the Daily Stormer. The ship of pretense of no judgement has sailed.

[Litost]

To anyone else who's curious links for the above:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer

[sneak]

This may have had something to do with the fact that the daily stormer was claiming prior to that that their lack of suspension was an implicit endorsement by CloudFlare of their site and content.

Misuse of trademarks is a thing.

I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.

[iratewizard]

And 8chan, the 4chan alternative where anyone can make and moderate their own board.

[hnbad]

Better known for being linked to the Christchurch and El Paso shootings, being the origin of the QAnon movement and having a history of hosting child pornography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan

[iratewizard]

Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter have all been linked to mass shootings and child pornography. None of these sites condone, enable or remotely desire such content.

[hnbad]

> None of these sites condone, enable or remotely desire such content.

Yeah, and that's the difference, isn't it? 8kun might not condone any of these things, officially, but it very much enables and desires them.

This kind of discourse is seen as the "price of freedom", its presence a demonstration of absolute tolerance and blind faith in freedom of speech. Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter are more strictly moderated and impose actual terms of service on their users' freedom of expression.

But of course this also means the people most motivated to join networks that offer guarantees of free speech absolutism are those whose discourse is not tolerated by these mainstream alternatives. And their presence will almost guarantee an absence of "normies" who don't run into the limits of their freedom of speech on the moderated networks much and feel uncomfortable around the former group.

Heck, the only reason 8chan ever became large enough to be widely known was because 4chan evicted Gamergate. And 4chan isn't exactly known for its strict moderation and suppression of political views.

[iratewizard]

Do you know why 4chan evicted Gamergate?

[avian]

How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used".

It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.

[studentrob]

Presumably if illegal content is not taken down by the customer then the host cancels the service, right? Otherwise the host risks liability. That's different from revealing the IP of a customer which requires a court order.

[eru]

You have a point, but I assume those businesses' lawyers understand this better than our armchair speculation here.

[lelanthran]

> How is that different from a hosting provider

If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").

In other words, a common carrier.

Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.

[breakingcups]

But in a way, they actively host the content. The fact that their server periodically retrieves new content from a different backend makes no difference. The page sits on their hard drives and is server by their servers when I visit that domain. It's always been a very, very thin argument and it has gotten even thinner with the likes of Cloudflare Pages and Workers.

Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.

They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.

I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

This logic doesn’t make sense. Nobody is under the illusion that CF is somehow incapable of denying service to individual customers.