I know too many people attacked by these terrorists. Burn them off the internet and salt the servers.
I’m an old queer furry living in a very old and public furry house. I have had absolute fear of them turning their attention on us. I’ve had furry articles I’ve been interviewed in show up there and I freak out inside. Ive seen roomates doxed on there and thankfully didn’t rise to enough attention to harm him. There is no debate here.
IMHO, this is a lot more nuanced than it first appears and explains why Cloudflare is treading so carefully here.
Cloudflare is 100% correct to be very diligent and careful about these decisions. I’m glad they’ve made this one, I hope they make more, but every time they do, the situation gets a little more fragile. Ever wonder why we have a zero-tolerance policy against encouraging violence on this site? Aside from the fact that it encourages respectful, thoughtful conversation, it also prevents Boing Boing and the BBS from becoming deplatforming targets ourselves.
I’m sure Cloudflare would really prefer a nice, easy, clean, bright line that they could point to people being on one side of or another - legally enshrined - that would cover their asses for actions they take, but also enable them to take more action. When this line doesn’t exist, every decision risks unintended consequences. Each one of these decisions creates a precedent that could, for example, unintentionally require Cloudflare to take action against a pro-LGBTQ+ site because some contributor made death threats against bad actors, or was associated in some way with activity that Cloudflare had called out in their reasoning for taking a hate site offline. This would put Cloudflare in an untenable position - do they take it offline? Or more likely, do they try to carve out an exception, and will that exception then be exploited by bad actors to keep bad sites online?
This isn’t hypothetical. This is precisely what’s happened to the Twitters and Reddits and other significant social sites on the internet. It’s how those fighting the good fight sometimes get deplatformed! Their policies have become so complex and so scrutinized by bad actors that they’ve figured out how to make those very policies nearly impotent as a result. And so you see hate everywhere as a result.
I spend a lot of time thinking about moderation and censorship, as you might well imagine. Part of the reason the BBS remains civil is that our moderation isn’t codified or automated. Humans try and do the right thing. But here’s the rub, as evidenced by the evidence provided earlier in this thread: every large org has MAGA bigots or Libertarians who care more about the ideals of free speech than protecting people. Every one. Statistically, it must be this way, and so when you rely on people, sometimes those people will be involved.
So, your next step is to try and boycott the companies that hire these folks. Except they’re everywhere, right? And worse, it means you really can’t vote with your wallet. Boing Boing uses Project Galileo at Cloudflare, a project sponsored by some of the biggest names in online rights specifically designed to allow sites like ours, frequent targets of attack, to be protected. Before we used Cloudflare for this, we used Google’s similar Project Shield for the same service. These are critical programs that keep smaller vulnerable sites like this one (and even smaller but more targeted sites like BB contributor Andrea James’ Transgender resources) online despite continuous and relentless attacks. But, they also host or provide services to hate sites, and they also employ hateful people.
For me personally, the metric is one of how these corporations deal with this reality. Do they have programs specifically designed to minimize harm, such as what Cloudflare does with its profits-to-donations regime? When these corporations do take action, do they do it over the protests of even some of their own bad actors? It looks like the answer here is yes, yes, they do in Cloudflare’s case, and as long as that keeps happening, IMHO, there’s hope.
As an aside, for individuals, there’s pretty much no way to be online and not give money to those that support hate groups. Your internet provider, cell provider, and undoubtedly intermediate backhaul connectivity providers also provide connectivity to evil people. As do the cloud providers of the world and the security providers like Cloudflare. Most of it is done through layers of abstraction, which means that support isn’t direct, but it’s still there. The fix here is something we are collectively very, very bad at - careful, well-thought-out regulation and enforcement from the top. Cory Doctorow (of course) has a great article on this topic from the perspective of individuals being against the actions of the Amazon’s of the world while still using their services:
…and his conclusion is the same as mine. I strongly support initiatives that take the ability to make these sorts of decisions away from individual corporations (or people) and instead codify them in law, as an ongoing process that will hopefully stop the hate and protect the vulnerable. Because unless every site stops growing at the Boing Boing size, humans can’t do this alone, and hiding behind corporate algorithms doesn’t work either. But well thought out, enforceable regulation that makes spewing hate onto the internet much more difficult may well get us there one day. As long as we keep trying to make it happen. Cloudflare is right - they can’t get us there independently and shouldn’t. But they absolutely should draw attention to each, and every time they’re forced to take action so that people other than the Cory Doctorow’s of the world sit up and take notice. IMHO, that’s how you get change.
while i agree that law would provide the best and most consistent method, if it’s possible to codify an anti hate policy into law - why would it be impractical for a company to have their own policy before we reach that point?
i think law sometimes follows from common practice, so wouldn’t it makes sense to be pushing for that common practice first?
it feels like a company could try to take these steps even if their attempts - everyone’s attempts - will always be imperfect. what cloudflare has done is good. maybe they could still do better.
… don’t lawyers call that, um, “extortion” 
This is a … disproof of the hypothesis that they’re simply no good at distinguishing good from evil and that it shouldn’t be their job
They clearly know who the bad guys are, they’re maintaining a list and affirmatively choosing to continue doing business with them anyway
It does feel a lot like Cloudflare know exactly who the bad guys are, clearly have done all along, and now want a cookie for chucking the odd tenner every now and again at the victims.
US: You have a program for dealing with Nazis?
CLOUDFLARE: Yes, we donate all the profits we make from serving Nazis to victims’ groups.
US: … and thus you’re not even making any money doing all this business with the Nazis?
CLOUDFLARE: No.
US: So basically, you’re providing security services, for Nazis, as a form of charity work?
As always, it’s not a double standard if you treat different things differently.
The more I read, holy shit:
And apparently Kiwif*rms getting taken down caused an unrelated neo-Nazi website to go down as well, as the owner of Kiwi was also hosting it on their servers…
Well, yeah.
[quote=“Lion, post:36, topic:229711”]
Worth noting, ON kiwifarms, they’ve advocated DDOSing other people and used their site as a base of operations for that. When Cloudflare has had that brought up to them, they routinely have come back with “Well, we prefer to let legal options be used for illegal activities.” They do this while knowing full well that legal options have not worked with Kiwifarms because Kiwifarms simply ignores the law.
Holy fucking shit, cloudflare were encouraging this violent crap.
Free Speech does not entitle anyone to a platform or an audience. You should not feel any reservations at all about deplatforming Nazis. This is not censorship, it is consequences. Nobody has a right to speech free of consequences.
If you live in a remote village and there’s that one guy who is a giant dick to everyone, when the village has had enough and other measures have failed, they ask him to leave. That’s deplatforming. It’s how humans have set social norms and moderated each others’ behaviour since the beginning of time.
This idea that we have to be forced to listen to all opinions no matter how shitty, is alt-right propaganda. Don’t fall for it.
They are fascists, so anything other than vanilla cis-het is unacceptable to them,
Kiwifarms believes in removing the right of expression from those they disagree with, using intimidation and violence. I don’t think that is protected under freedom of expression.
It’s that simple.
It is not. It’s not like they are disagreeing about tax policy, but they are pushing for violence against marginalized groups. People HAVE gotten hurt already because of their actions.
Also nobody’s talking about them not having the right to expression (which is a silly, bullshit right that isn’t necessarily as cut and dry or as available as people make it out to be and definitely shouldn’t be absolute, especially when they believe the right to expression includes being allowed to harass trans people until they kill themselves BUT ANYWAY I DIGRESS.)
We’re just talking about taking away the megaphone, the security guards, and their ability to broadcast this to the entire planet. If they want to continue doing this, they’re free to host a website on whatever provider will host them, or to host their own services.
