I think it would be intellectually dishonest to imply that there is no objective “bad”. At some point it goes beyond yelling fire in a theater, into the realm of certain and immediate harm to the whole.
We seem capable of recognizing certain actions and behaviors as universally abhorrent. Nobody can say “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are CSAM”, or “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are a live video feed of a mass murder event”, and call it an odd definition of neutrality.
There are a lot of sick individuals out there, an unfortunate number of people unable to discern trolling from legitimate discourse, people who may be convinced to commit abhorrent acts or think that they found like minded supporters of their abhorrent behavior. It is not neutral to actively defend and support the ability of a platform to take advantage of those people and or to allow the promotion of such abhorrent behaviors.
It seems like Cloudflare finds themselves walking a tightrope across a bottomless chasm. Any misstep will have dire consequences for the future of Cloudflare and the precedence it sets for the internet as a whole. It seems at this point they have taken a path of extreme caution and attempted to weigh that against collective voice of reason.
Cloudflare’s line seems to be where bodily harm comes into play (e.g. Kiwifarms people enabling SWATing via doxxing, stalking by mobs, etc) which is above and beyond just normal criminal activity. The situations really are not very similar.
Cloudflare is still hosting other sites that let you search for people's public information. The line to me seems to be whenever a mob of people starts complaining loudly that a site should be removed. Misinformation is used by the mob to make sites look as bad as possible to try and get them removed. Since these are small sites there are not many people who know it's false. The public check wikipedia and see a biased article that reaffirms the narrative.
We seem capable of recognizing certain actions and behaviors as universally abhorrent. Nobody can say “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are CSAM”, or “Cloudflare is neutral… Unless you are a live video feed of a mass murder event”, and call it an odd definition of neutrality.
There are a lot of sick individuals out there, an unfortunate number of people unable to discern trolling from legitimate discourse, people who may be convinced to commit abhorrent acts or think that they found like minded supporters of their abhorrent behavior. It is not neutral to actively defend and support the ability of a platform to take advantage of those people and or to allow the promotion of such abhorrent behaviors.
It seems like Cloudflare finds themselves walking a tightrope across a bottomless chasm. Any misstep will have dire consequences for the future of Cloudflare and the precedence it sets for the internet as a whole. It seems at this point they have taken a path of extreme caution and attempted to weigh that against collective voice of reason.