Originally published at: Cloudflare Admits it Was Wrong to Ban Daily Stormer and 8chan | Infostormer.com
After a tranny streamer named keffals went on a campaign demanding Cloudflare ban the web forum site Kiwi Farms, the company responded by issuing a statement in support of free speech. In the statement, they admit that they were wrong to terminate services to the Daily Stormer in 2017 and 8chan in 2019.
After banning those websites, they said that they were flooded with requests from around the world to have all sorts of other websites banned. This was an expected response because once you decide to ban even just one site, you are effectively endorsing everything else that uses your service. It opens you up to all sorts of pressure campaigns.
The arguments they made in support of free speech in their statement are generally the same arguments I have been making since all of these bans dropped. They even compared their service to that of a phone company or a public utility. They also mentioned how it is immoral to ban somebody from an important utility just because you find their personal views to be offensive.
Avoiding an abuse of power
Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldnât respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.
Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflareâs security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.
Refining our policy based on what weâve learned
This isnât hypothetical. Thousands of times per day we receive calls that we terminate security services based on content that someone reports as offensive. Most of these donât make news. Most of the time these decisions donât conflict with our moral views. Yet two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.
In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations â often citing the language from our own justification back to us.
Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasnât abhorrent â it was â but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.
Just as the telephone company doesnât terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesnât mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.
Itâs basically an apology or at least as close to one as you will get from a major corporation.
Hereâs some reactions to the news that I thought were worth reposting.
Phase 2 failed so miserably, it even got Cloudflare to apologize for banning The Daily Stormer and 8chan. No wonder Kef is "too busy" to comment on the statement. đ pic.twitter.com/w9KhJbDquj
â MĂślesterson CrĂźe (@DickMolesterson) August 31, 2022
Cloudflare told Keffals to fuck off and the QRTs is pure salt. https://t.co/XODCtpM1cV
â âď¸ (@SaddenedAnon) August 31, 2022
Wow. Strong move by @Cloudflare in its newly announced policy saying they will not exercise discretion to terminate security services to sites like the Daily Stormer going forward.
The post by @eastdakota and Alissa Starzak is very thoughtful. https://t.co/VkIl1MS8wW
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â Daphne Keller (@daphnehk) August 31, 2022
Clearly, this campaign to get Kiwi Farms thrown off of Cloudflare has failed. Cloudflare has made the right decision and sided with free speech and thatâs the way it should be.
They did say that they would potentially terminate services to sites that are hosting illegal content based on the laws of individual countries. This is a sound and reasonable policy. Nobody was asking Cloudflare to break laws. The only thing we were asking is that they allow speech that is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
This is good news, and at least for now, it represents an important victory for free speech on the Internet.
The Jewish censorship machine appears to be running into some major snags. People are just generally sick of the censorship and cancel culture garbage. Itâs become extremely uncool and lame. You also have individuals like Sam Hyde and Andrew Tate who were supposedly cancelled and are more popular than ever in part because they were cancelled.
