It's so bizarre. He tries to have it both ways. He says "no one should have that power", but then says he did it literally earlier that day. He says CloudFlare isn't changing their "content-neutral" policy... but clearly they did change that policy.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
What gets me is - I don't think Daily Stormer was even important, was it? I mean it's not like this is a giant propaganda machine with millions of visits a day run by Hitler. It seems to me to be pretty much a pissant little blog.
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
> I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
You sound pretty privileged to only be asking for all of us to get along when so many people are asking not to be shot or subjugated by systems built to work against them.
You sound pretty privileged to be able to respond in such a way.
Sounds like you don't like what they are saying and instead of allowing it you want to stop them. Shame shame.
Entitled to your privilege of doing so though.
Cloudflare is pushing its pretend free speech PR too hard. But make no mistake, it's still just PR, no company like that actually cares about free speech.
It's not black and white, or even shades of gray. Different entities make different decisions about what they'll allow, along multiple dimensions.
That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms.
Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
> That's a fallacy because "free speech" is not unlimited - every civilization recognizes its existence is the result of limiting specific freedoms in order to guarantee everyone other freedoms.
Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however.
> Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content
Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply.
> Perhaps the US should learn from them.
Why should it?
Discriminatory hateful speech absolutely limits the freedom of the discriminated group. If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave? Not freely.
The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.
> If a Jewish person encounters an energized gaggle of Nazis, how do you think they will behave?
Today? Counter-demonstrate, or walk away. Actual Nazis haven't been a serious threat to Jews for 70 years. By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
> By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
lol, what the fuck are you talking about?
I can translate:
'progressive' people are pro immigration.
Many immigrants are muslim.
Some muslim hate jews, therefore 'progressive' people support antisemitism.
Simple, isn't it?
What a load of bullshit.
I support marriage equality and the right for gays to get married, but I don't enjoy the sexual activities that gay people do themselves.
sigh
You apparently also don't enjoy someone just translating?
(hint, translating doesn't mean the translator has the same opinion as the source, I thought that is obvious)
He's talking about muslims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism#Hadith
The following hadith which forms a part of these Sahih Muslim hadiths has been quoted many times, and it became a part of the charter of Hamas.[79]
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)
> Discriminatory hateful speech absolutely limits the freedom of the discriminated group
How so? Speech is just speech.
They have learned why following the same path is not the best approach. Trying to censor and hide the past is easier than facing it:
If you'd ever been to Germany you'd realise they have faced it, they just don't want anyone celebrating it
"Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand."
so you are saying, that we germans ended up in a total dictatorship, because things were too liberal before?
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" - US Officer, talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
Am I correct that you are equating a private company terminating its business relationship with an avowed neo-Nazi website with the U.S. military killing civilians?
As far as I can see, you are not correct.
Parallel is not equals.
edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.
He addresses this in his email to staff, which quoted in the article:
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
I am conflicted. On one hand, I totally agree with what you say, on the other hand, the reason I am agreeing is that I fear what a nazi would do with that kind of power.
You should fear this. And you should acknowledge that owners always have this power and the precedence here isn't going to be what enables them to wield it.
Yes, fear this, yes, give them more power over your life.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
...and then everything was fine–because "slippery slope" isn't actually an argument.
Why not? I've seen it with youtube and reddits censorship on Syria.
Not untill you are the one getting censored, then its a slippery slope again, right?
The double standards you guys have. Just fuck my society up fam.
My comment was intended as a joke mostly, but then I recalled this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_tactics
> The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]
I would want them to do this to ISIS and other terrorists.
And ISIS would want them to do it to the US government and a bunch of other sites.
Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side.
What happens when they're not?
That's the point. That's why it's so important to be careful when you screw with free speech on your own without legal means behind it.
Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare.
"That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected).
And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
> Exactly, what happens if the CEO becomes a born-again Christian and decides that LGBT, abortion and bunch of other sites are no longer suitable for hosting on Cloudfare?
They'll switch to one of dozens of alternatives?
At what cost, and with how much downtime?
And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?
When ISIS or Nazis are in power, you will not have the right to free speech without being subjected to state violence, regardless of how you kowtow to them now.
The paradox of tolerance applies directly to free speech.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be Nazis or ISIS in control. It just has to be people with a different ideological and moral framework from your own.
As an example, the CEO of Cloudfare stated the removal of Daily Stormer was an arbitrary decision made by him, because he "woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" and as CEO he had the power to do so [0], so what happens if the CEO of a Cloudflare-like service is a staunch Christian and starts removing sites based on that?
Or as more realistic example, the Republicans control the house, the senate and the presidency.
They came quite close to having a super-majority in the Senate, and who knows what will happen in the 2018 mid-terms.
For many Republicans, things like abortion and LGBT rights are moral issues and if they get a super majority it's not unthinkable that they will push to remove or criminalize things that they are morally opposed to.
From the ACLU's post on why they are defending Milo Yiannopoulos [1]
"But the sad reality is that many people think that speech about sexuality, gender identity, or abortion is over the line as well. They’ll say that abortion is murder, civil rights advocates are criminals, or LGBT advocates are trying to recruit children into deviant and perverse lifestyles. If First Amendment protections are eroded at any level, it's not hard to imagine the government successfully pushing one or more of those arguments in court. "
I know Cloudfare is a private company and so from a legal perspective this is not a freedom of speech issue, but beyond the law, freedom of speech as a general principle is something that needs to exist in the hearts and minds of those making the law, and actions that erode that, especially from entities that wield enormous power over communications infrastructure, set dangerous precedent.
0: http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
1: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/how-could-you-represe...
Well, there's no need for pointless hypothesizing about what might happen, because this is actual Nazis. It's not "[just] people with a different moral or ideological framework" -- it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Freedom of speech does not apply to those who would take away your freedom of speech with what they are advocating (in this case, killing us). This is the nature of the paradox of tolerance. We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
> because this is actual Nazis.
Yes they are, but look at how the term 'Nazi' is being thrown about with abandon these days [0].
Once you have established that it's ok to ban/silence Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
That is not hypothetical, and is something that is actively happening right now.
> it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Where do we draw the line? Do we kick people off the Internet if they declare allegiance to communists - a group that literally killed millions in the name of ideological purity?
> We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Actually, we must. The only speech worth defending is offensive speech or speech you don't like.
No-one tries to stop you from saying nice things that they already agree with.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWFMUIP3lHo
Once you have established that it's ok to ban Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
No, that would require everyone to be a credulous idiot -- people have thrown Nazi around as a pejorative for as long as there have been Nazis. Fortunately it's easy to tell who the actual Nazis are -- they're the ones with Nazi flags doing Nazi salutes saying they're Nazis, and advocating genocide.
Again, this is the paradox of tolerance -- tolerating the intolerant decreases the total amount of tolerance in the world. You are spending time and effort arguing with me that Nazis should be allowed to speak while they threaten those that speak out against them directly with violence.
Perhaps you should go and speak to the Nazis to tell them about how they should defend speech they don't like.
> No, that would require everyone to be a credulous idiot
Of which there appear to be plenty of these days:
https://twitter.com/markos/status/896760610242912260
History is replete with examples of how this happens. For a recent example see the Cultural Revolution in China. It involved public shaming for wrongthink, destruction of statues and other artifacts, desecration of graves (e.g. of Confucius and others) and worse. The parallels going on today are worrying.
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/15/16150176/watch-protesters-topp...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3173456/Vigilante-pr...
Sorry, where in any of your examples are the people waving Nazi flags saying they're Nazis? I'm unclear on why you keep bringing up red herrings when the issue is actual Nazis marching together here, in America, right now. These are all slippery slope arguments that don't appear to have any aim other than justifying not confronting real Nazis.
> where in any of your examples are the people waving Nazi flags saying they're Nazis?
Nowhere, because I'm not worried about the Nazis.
500 people showed up in support of that rally. Even if you think that real-life support for Nazis is a thousand times that amount (unlikely to be anywhere near that high) that still only represents a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population (0.15%). That is literally a rounding-error away from zero, and the real figure of Nazi support is likely to be orders of magnitude less.
If the Internet hadn't been popularising for months that it's ok to punch Nazis (drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight), if the police had kept the protesters and counter-protesters apart, if attendees hadn't been able to play the victim due to getting banned from Airbnb, and if the media hadn't given the rally such prominence it would have been a total non-issue. 500 people would have come, spouted off offensive, but protected speech and then fizzled out.
Instead, we were left with loss of life and a ratcheting up of tensions along racial and ideological grounds.
That concerns me far more, especially as significant sections of the population seem to be willing (and in some cases actively trying) to conflate right-wing politics with Nazis and white supremacism.
'Slippery slope fallacy' you cry, but it's not, because this is actually happening. Take for example the recent 'March on Google' that is being organised by various right-wing figures. The organisers are right-wing and regularly classified as alt right (a classification they refute), but they are also vocally anti-Nazi and anti white-supremacism (banning Nazis and Nazi symbolism from previous events they've held), and yet in the wake of Charlottesville, several major news outlets were claiming that the March on Google rally was also being organised by 'Nazi sympathizers' and the organisers started getting threats that they treated seriously enough to postpone the rally (http://www.marchongoogle.com/peaceful-march-on-google-postpo...).
The conflation of 'people with politics we don't like' to Nazis, along with the normalisation of violence against Nazis leading to threats of violence, has me far more concerned than any actual Nazis, and the parallels with very recent, very ugly history are close enough that more people really should be worried.
I'm not worried about the Nazis.
(drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight)
Take for example the recent 'March on Google'
the normalisation of violence against Nazis
Ah. Well, it's now quite clear where you stand, and I'm sorry for having wasted time trying to talk to you.
> Ah. Well, it's now quite clear where you stand,
Yes, on the side of freedom of association and freedom of speech, even for unsavoury characters.
Pointing out that some counter protesters were spoiling for a fight (dressed in black, masked, and armed with baseball bats and pepper spray) shouldn't in any way be construed as supporting Nazis.
Pointing out that the March on Google has been postponed due to threats of violence, shouldn't be construed as support for the March on Google.
And pointing out that violence against Nazis is being normalised shouldn't be taken as support for Nazis, rather it's the worry that it's all too easy to expand the scope of Nazis to then include 'other people with views I disagree with' (see above about March on Google being postponed due to threats of violence).
For where I actually stand, I used to consider myself left-leaning, but I'm not really sure I like where the left is heading these days so following Dave Rubin's lead, I'd go with classically liberal.
It's not that bizarre. He isn't trying to have it both ways, he'd rather have it the other way, but until that's law, he's forced to have it this way.
Their account was not terminated because of the websites content. It was terminated because they (explicitly!) claimed Cloudflare was one of their supporters.
Aside from the net neutrality or freedom of expression concerns, I wonder if it just became too costly to host them because of ddoses
That doesn't seem to be the case. It could be hypothetically (Cloudflare certainly has no interest in admitting that there's an upper bound to the DDOS they can mitigate and hackers have found it), but I think the "I remembered I'm a CEO in a country where there is not much restrictive policy on who a company chooses to do business with, and I think even my customers will agree 'Nazis suck and don't deserve a platform'" explanation holds here.
I guess I'm saying that claiming it's taking a moral stand could act as cover for an altogether different motive --because most people would not think of the move as a precedent for what the limits are for speech from an 'inet infra co' but rather as a conscientious CEO who takes a moral stand.
I may also be simple coincidence.
Condemn the message, but protect the medium.
Meh... Reading the article I got more of a Miller test vibe, where apparently using their services with "claims of secret support" wasn't as acceptable as they assumed.
He is a human being after all with his ideas and opinions...
I have to wonder if he really made that decision of his own accord, or did he receive one or more calls from large customers that influenced the decision.
Agreed, wholeheartedly
Gee, I hope my site doesn't happen to anger him in some way.
There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
How about ISIS?
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot?
They killed _millions_ for arbitrary reasons. What about them?
What about them? How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes?
I guess not all murderers and murderous philosophies are created equal, huh?
> How were they not fascists, for all practical purposes?
What does fascists even mean these days?
Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend.
It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.
How about literal neonazis waving swastikas, calling for violence to exterminate Jews and blacks? Ones literally identify with Nazi facists.
Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
"Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? "
I don't.
I rather have people saying out loud, that they want to kill me, than saying it it in private and then just doing it ... so I - and others (like police) know whats going on, and can prepare for them.
If you forbid things to be said out loud, they will just boil hiddenly, until they explode.
how about the purpose of self-identification rather than convenient relabeling that i'm sure has nothing to do with your political allegiances?
Convenient relabeling? I beg your pardon? Aren't you just conveniently making up shit right now?
Wow, yeah, this article should be higher up. Choice quotes, from the same guy, regarding taking down ISIS sites:
Speaking with IBTimes UK, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule".
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
...
"We're the plumbers of the internet," Prince said. "We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China."
Must have been in a pretty bad mood.
They already do, with TOR.
They can die in a gutter, for all I care. They made their line, with the political dissenters, the quiet, and the the hidden. But you know, blame the "bad people" and the "abusers".
What about ISIS are they citizens of the US?
Most right wing politicians in the west have been called Nazis at one time or another.
Very few of those folks held up torches in public chanting an English version of a Nazi slogan. Even fewer still walk in public rallies waving Nazi flags, or hop in cars and run down counter-protesters.
So maybe I this case the general public can distinguish between literal and figurative fascism. The Daily Stormer supported acts of violence committed by the former, not the later.
As a member of neither continent, I find it beyond bizarre that in Europe, they're perfectly capable of determining from context whether someone called a 'nazi' is just having a slur thrown against them, or is actually a follower of the ideology, whereas in America they can't seem to tell the difference. Some yobbo calling a senator a nazi doesn't literally mean the senator is one, whereas people that wave nazi flags, openly promote nazi policies, and wander around giving the nazi salute are a different kettle of fish.
It's like that in America, what things are called is more important than what they are. Obviously there are plenty of Americans perfectly capable of understanding context, but they don't seem to be in control of the political narrative.
You know, I was going to spit venom back, discussing the European in fighting and greed post WWI for putting those goose stepping morons in a place where normal people thought they held the answers. But, if you can't be trusted to listen to why the Nazis were put into power and not skip to the atrocities, why would I think you'd understand why our politic and society is the way it is.
I find that when discussing politics with an American, I want to say "you know what I fucking mean" more than when discussing with a European. Americans tend to attack the surface meaning of what you say rather than the actual meaning.
A clear example of this is if you take fringe idiot politicians who say populist stuff and have zero workable policies. In the UK, they're a fringe political group like UKIP. In the US, one was just voted president. Here was a guy with a famous history of scamming (indeed, he was the poster child for it), making obvious and contradictory promises he couldn't keep even if he wanted to, and with no detail as to how. His whole platform was telling people the superficial stuff they wanted to hear. How did he do? Almost half of the voters individually voted for him, in a strong voter turnout. The only thing missing from his obvious scam was twirling a waxed moustache, and still nearly half of American voters went out voluntarily and voted for him.
Weird, that doesn't sound like the events of Brexit, at all. Oh well. Have fun being superior, I think I'm done with this pissing contest. You can win. I don't care..... Cheers, I guess =)
Yea I agree. It's really weird that white supremacists are 'literally nazis' in the eyes of many Americans. Did the meaning of that word change recently?
I do think that the word "literally" has changed for many people recently and now means "figuratively" to them.
Indeed it has; even the OED recognises this sense:
"c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.
Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)."
(http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061)
The earliest example given, incidentally, is from way back in 1769.
I don't really think semantics of literally matter in this case. In Charlottesville people were attending a "Unite the Right" event with actual Nazis .... If you are uniting with Nazis you're becoming a Nazi.
Here in the USA, calling someone a Nazi does not at all suggest they are a member of some well-organized noveau-NSDAP. Even the swastika-waving type are understood to be trying to upset and frighten folks.
In fact, given the American love for sarcasm and hyperbole, and lack of an actual historical Nazi party of any note, it seems to me less likely for one to interpret the label literally.
The Daily Stormer is literally named after a Nazi propaganda newspaper[1]. Describing the web site's viewpoint as "Nazi" or "fascist" isn't even an insult -- it's a plain fact.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
While I agree Nazi is an reasonable label to apply to these guys, the way the word is thrown around these days makes this argument worrying to me personally. I have seen people called Nazis simply because they are pro life. Considering cloudflare allegedly hosts Islamic extremist content I really wonder where the line is.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content, Prince said. Some hosting companies exercise tight control about what can be served, but his firm doesn't want that kind of power."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
Apparently the line is crossed when the site says Cloudflare literally supports their ideology.
Do you have a source for this? I've seen it claimed on this tread but I haven't seen evidence of it actually happening. Did they have a cloudflare logo on their homepage or something?
The source is the linked article. I said "apparently" because I have no other source (nor inclination to search for one).
"Nazi" is a slang term used to refer to a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In that sense it is an insult rather than a fact.
that may be true. But in light of the no true scotsman argument, perhaps we should re-evaluate whom calls themselves nazis.
I'd be perfectly fine banning whom calls themselves nazis.
perhaps I'd be bad about running the 'pipes' of the internet.... oh wait. I do.
Famous last words before you get silenced.
> There are few things worse than nazis. Just make sure your content is better than fascist propaganda and you should be good.
One man's fascist propaganda is another man's social revolution.
This is the thing everyone forgets about the Nazis: they genuinely thought they were the good guys.
The difference is that they thought they were the "good guys" and that other, lower humans, were ruining mankind's gene pool. They pushed for separating those classes of people, and then to kill a portion of them since segregation/"concentration" camps weren't enough.
That's not at all equivalent to other types of discussions we are having today about the economy, the environment, and education.
I think you've lost the plot here. We're talking about who gets to decide what content gets to stay on the internet and what gets booted off.
I guess completely out of context your comment may mean something else to you. In the context of this thread it seems like you're saying that there are other "social revolutions" that could be squashed because of content restrictions that are defended based on this incident.
If you're just saying that some company could be controlled by a "Nazi" and they may restrict their services, I get that. I don't think it's a "slippery slope" type of argument though.
I'm saying that it's often hard to tell the difference between a positive social revolution and a repugnant one. Every social revolution is repugnant to someone, otherwise it wouldn't be a revolution. I am willing to defend your right to say things I find repugnant in order to preserve my right to say things you -- or more to the point, the CEO of my ISP -- may find repugnant.
Just for the record, I find the nazis and the neo-nazis repugnant. I'm a descendant of holocaust survivors, so seeing swastikas being paraded down the street in America hits very close to home for me. And I have no problem shutting down incitements to violence. But that's not what happened here. The Daily Stormer was taken off the air because of an alleged false claim that they made about their CDN. That is a very dangerous precedent.
I think you have: it's pretty fucking clear what information should and shouldn't need help to be distributed. These hosts of this site could throw their page up on a home computer right now and it would be widely accessible to whomever wanted to see it. Nobody's under any obligation to make it safe (SSL certs), convenient (domain registrars) or available (bombardment security), especially when it's something so abhorrent.
If you want to be a hateful little shit, go right ahead, but don't expect a helpful hand. That's the "plot" here, friend.
> it's pretty fucking clear what information should and shouldn't need help to be distributed
Unfortunately, no, it's not. And BTW, the CEO of CloudFlare agrees with me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15034304
> If you want to be a hateful little shit
In my opinion that sort of language is inappropriate. Does that mean that if I were in a position to do so, I should be allowed to silence you?
Everybody always thinks they are the good guys - that's what ideologies are for.
Yeah, like Communists right?
Stalin and Mao killed far more people then the Nazis, but I'll be down voted and banned because my opinion doesn't fit your ideological narrative.
This is assuming I even am allowed to post my view at all.
Fact.
Still to me blocking nazi comtent is even more obvious since their violence is even closer linked to their ideology.
that is not very clear, since "communism" can mean many different rhings. And in the way of Pol porlt and co. it was clearly linked to violence
Well, ISIS has a large internet presence.
To me, actual terrorists actually committing terrorism is far worse than bratty idiots throwing the N-word around on an internet forum
FBI and DHS assess that white supremacist extremists were responsible for more attacks than any other domestic extremist movement, from 2000 to 2016.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
More attacks or more fatalities? This is a silly metric. 9-11 was a single attack.
9/11 was a foreign sourced attack, this assessment is about domestic extremism.
the thing is where does it end, once cencorship started ..
Then 1. Don't be a nazi 2. Don't have Google and GoDaddy boot you off their services already leaving you looking like you support nazis. But mainly just 1.
Don't be a feminist, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a liberal, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a white male, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a female, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
> That would never happen!
That's what you think, that's not what history has proven.
> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
> The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing
The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
Tech companies have been banning and censoring since the start of the commercial Internet. This is not a precedent for anyone except Cloudflare itself.
no one should have that power, but fuck nazis
If you are too reasonable when evil forces are at work, they might win.