Cloudflare Tries to Ignore the World(protocol.com)
protocol.com
Cloudflare Tries to Ignore the World
https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-microsoft-licensing?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1?rebelltitem=1
6 comments
I can understand why Cloudflare is under the fire. However, I think it's bold of them to be an agnostic service-provider.
Not sure if it's the right thing, that's debatable on what you value more.
Not sure if it's the right thing, that's debatable on what you value more.
The problem is that the US has outsourced hate speech laws to "the market". Instead of the government deciding what can be said, it is now corporations subject to the forces of capitalism.
To have any kind of reach to exercise your freedom of speech, you need social media. Your own site or any of the free speech absolutists options wouldn't get you too far (and they also contribute to radical bubbles, but that aside). This has always been true, but before it was TV Networks and other big media corporations deciding what to platform. Free speech with reach has always been an illusion.
But also, even the social media giants have issues enforcing their rules consistently.
The same hole on the law exists for Kiwi Farms. It's a website so vile, most corporations that aren't under obligation to provide services wouldn't - because it makes them look really bad. Cloudflare has been getting away with ignoring these forces for a while, but the heat's on. (Though interestingly, when it was about sex work, Cloudflare did not fight on their customer's behalf.)
I would really rather the US figures out a way to capture websites like Kiwi Farms in their legal framework, like most other countries in the world would.
To have any kind of reach to exercise your freedom of speech, you need social media. Your own site or any of the free speech absolutists options wouldn't get you too far (and they also contribute to radical bubbles, but that aside). This has always been true, but before it was TV Networks and other big media corporations deciding what to platform. Free speech with reach has always been an illusion.
But also, even the social media giants have issues enforcing their rules consistently.
The same hole on the law exists for Kiwi Farms. It's a website so vile, most corporations that aren't under obligation to provide services wouldn't - because it makes them look really bad. Cloudflare has been getting away with ignoring these forces for a while, but the heat's on. (Though interestingly, when it was about sex work, Cloudflare did not fight on their customer's behalf.)
I would really rather the US figures out a way to capture websites like Kiwi Farms in their legal framework, like most other countries in the world would.
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> It only dropped support for the Daily Stormer after Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 during a white supremacist rally.
When someone calls for censorship because speech leads to violence, ask yourself: Is the list of violent incidents used to justify censorship representative, or cherry-picked to include only the author's political opponents? Hint:
The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white. Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters. Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind. - https://www.wsj.com/articles/waukesha-killings-make-the-medi...
How many sites with hateful rhetoric were deplatformed due to the Waukesha killings? How many were deplatformed when Xavier Johnson killed 5 white cops and injured nine, saying he "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers" [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
When someone calls for censorship because speech leads to violence, ask yourself: Is the list of violent incidents used to justify censorship representative, or cherry-picked to include only the author's political opponents? Hint:
The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white. Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters. Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind. - https://www.wsj.com/articles/waukesha-killings-make-the-medi...
How many sites with hateful rhetoric were deplatformed due to the Waukesha killings? How many were deplatformed when Xavier Johnson killed 5 white cops and injured nine, saying he "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers" [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
If you want to get me to like cloudflare, you're doing a good job.