Agreed. IMO, people encouraging Cloudflare and other corporations to take political stances are very short-sighted. With the amount of Saudi Arabian and Chinese investment and influence continuing to grow in major corporations, you have to imagine that large tech corporations being aligned with west-coast US Democrat politics isn't going to last forever.

As the article says, "... [not providing services based on moral character] is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."

Very similar to the short-sightedness of encouraging and celebrating creative circumventions of typical government checks and balances (Executive orders and judicial rulings used instead of legislature, etc.), only to be shocked and appalled when the game is flipped back on them when the 'other team' gets the ball.

I just don't want to live in a world where my trans friends get relentlessly harassed and cyber bullied until they kill themselves. Can I have that?

Call the cops, file restraining orders, and get a good therapist.

Assholes and trolls are still going to exist regardless of what any platform does.

You can’t have what you want by trying to pressure cloudflare, it won’t make a positive difference. Do something real instead of advocating for something toothless and symbolic.

How exactly do you file a restraining order against an unknown group of unnamed people? It seems like a very privileged victim-blaming POV.

The FBI, and increasingly police departments, have fairly large cyber forensics capabilities. If someone is doing something illegal, report it.

Do you actually think there is any chance they would investigate?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you implying that the police will decline to investigate death threats and the like for political reasons?

I am implying that police don't care about internet death threats. As long as they're not against the president or something.

Attack other users like you did in those first two sentences will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Harassment is already a crime. No need for companies like cloudflare to implement their own bespoke judicial system

Selling drugs is already a crime, no need for eBay or Facebook to implement their own bespoke judicial system. Something being illegal doesn't mean people won't do it.

I agree, eBay and Facebook should not be policing drugs beyond what they are legally required.

Yes you can, convince your friends to deactivate their social media accounts where\when they're harrassed or aggressively block those who harrass them. Teach them tips and tricks to bully back (bullying is really easy). Find them mental health professionals and services, and possibly help them financially with those services.

Harassment isn't something that Just Happens and it's not something that's impossible to stop or prevent. If a group of people is shooting others, would you only teach people what to do if they've been shot or would you find and take action against the people shooting others?

Great analogy, too bad it's hyperbolic and doesn't actually say anything about the situations it's supposed to help us think about.

People need to get it through their head that speech is not violence, words are not weapons. Your Exquisite Analogy about how speech laws should Akshually reflect gun laws or martial laws doesn't work, never worked, and never will.

Every single argument against free speech is a general argument against living in any kind of large networked society. Your problem is not the tools the harrasser uses, your problem is the harrasser themself, the tools they use is the same tools used by dissidents and freedom fighters to "harrass" the oppressive governments they are rebelling against.

We went through this entire tiresome arguments before with the debates around cryptography and anonymity, people just keep Missing The Point. Yes, building backdoors into encryption standards and harvesting data without users' permission will allow you to catch The Big Bad Pedos, but it will also allow Putin and Ibn Salman unprecedented power to catch their own type of enemies. "Oh, we just want to do bad things to the bad guys only" no, you can't, believe me, you can't and you won't, every single thing you advocate for can and will be used against you.

This reeks of "both-siding" which is insanely frustrating for me. Look, I get opening a can of worms and "stay out of my business" but at the same time, we need to be able as a society be able to and be unafraid to say when things are clearly bad.

"Nazism is bad" EOM

That wasn't so hard, was it?

It is not "both siding".

I do not want corporations acting as government regardless of whose side they are on.

I do not want to normalize or encourage such regulation by corporation.

If some behavior is so bad, advocate for a law against it or for the enforcement of that law.

If it is not so bad, let it exist even if you don't like it.

The whole thing about rule by the people is that having individuals or small groups that get to arbitrarily make rules and enforce them is bad. Monarchy and despotism is bad, whether or not you like what they're doing.

Despotism by corporation is just as bad and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not different because you're trying to get them to arbitrarily create rules that agree with you.

How about social media mobs unfairly categorizes people and corporations that listen to mobs or committees are untrustworthy.

we need to be able as a society be able to and be unafraid to say when things are clearly bad.

Sadly, "disagrees with me" is considered bad and called vile insults these days.

> "Nazism is bad"

Yes, it pretty much is. Over here it's against the law to futher it. What's wrong with enshrining this principle in the actual law, that 1) affects the whole society, not just users of one particular corporation, 2) it's enforcement is dispensed by an actual court, not a PR department pushed by a twitter mob?

Whose law? US law? KF operates outside the US. Are you ok with the US government deciding what's allowed on the internet and what isn't? What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people? Do we have to keep waiting for a law in that case too?

Is it reachable within the US? Are people interacting with US persons? Are you doing business with US companies (i.e. Cloudflare)? Then you're crossing the border and operating in the US.

>What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people?

It doesn't. You don't need an adjective between murder and people.

Also, harassing someone to the point of suicide isn't murder, it can be manslaughter.

No new laws are needed. Go bother your local DA or US attorney or legislative representatives to get charges filed for the actual harassment and the conspiracy to harass that lead to what should probably be manslaughter charges.

Make actual differences and actually hold the people who do these things accountable.

Don't go cheerleading for Cloudflare to do something meaningless that wouldn't and won't stop any of this in the future.

Have you ever heard of Godwin's law?

Why do you think the generation who actually fought and died against Nazis nevertheless held that displaying a Nazi flag is protected speech in America?

Do you think you understand something they didn't? Were they naive? Are you perhaps more intimately connected to the evils of Nazism than they were? Maybe they didn't understand that an entire country could fall to the evils of Nazism if they were not stamped out aggressively?

Or. Maybe they understood these things even better than you. And maybe they believed freedom of speech is even more anti-Nazi than banning Nazis.

I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do - Gavin B

> I just don't want to live in a world where society is governed and censored by big corporations.

You already do. And that's actually a good thing. It means that in free societies like the USA, these companies are free to choose to do (or not do) business with whomever they choose. They are not free from the market reacting to those decisions, though.

Which is effectively mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. I don't want dominating corporations to be run by people afraid of offending a vocal minority.

Everything is mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. Most companies have principles on how they do business, and they adjust those principles based on how people (internally and externally) react to them. That's why Google shut down its search engine for the CCP - it's mob rule at Google, and if you decide to do something that enough people find unethical, you won't hear the end of it until you stop. Why do you think this is a bad thing, or that it's somehow not the way the world works?

Who decides what's a minority?

By "vocal minority" I mean a small but loud group, the literal definition of minority not the social justice sense of some oppressed group.

Oh, so like a forum full of people addicted to internet stalking?

I understand your point and largely agree with the idea that corporations shouldn't become de-facto governments with regard to morality/free-speech/etc. However I think it's important to acknowledge that there's a really difficult problem to solve here with regards to spam, astroturfing and harassment/trolling (if not more areas) where allowing everything that is technically legal would make most online spaces unbearable to participate in for the vast majority of people (e.g. 4chan and its ilk). And the line between moderating those things and censorship is incredibly blurry

It is not Cloudflare's job to moderate a website they provide network services to.

This is a different issue than a social network doing moderation and spam prevention on its own platform.

It is not Cloudflare's job to protect Twitter or wherever else from a forum of assholes.

It's not Cloudflare's job to do anything. They can just stop DDoS protection for everyone BUT nazi sites if they want to. That's called freedom!

...but they're not free from public reactions to their choices.

Although I'd agree there is a difference I think these issues are closer than you think, for example if Cloudflare was providing network services to a website dedicated to spam, trolling or harrassment. These things in many jurisdictions are not illegal but many companies will refuse to support them because they are actively bad for business (driving existing or potential customers away, making their own products worse, etc.). Ideals can be great but trying to apply them without considering the effects, intended or not, can lead to poor results

Cloudflare choosing to continue to provide their security services to Kiwifarms won't do anything about the fact that they're unregulated, and can offer or revoke services from whoever they choose and whatever time they wish. If you want to turn Cloudflare into a regulated monopoly, or utility company, then I would be open to that argument, but if you leave them as an unregulated, profit-seeking enterprise then you have to be critical about where that profit is coming from and what moral tactics you're okay with them to further that profit.

I don't want to hear cloudflare's opinions on social matters. If kiwifarms or whatever is doing something illegal, let the law go after them and encourage that.

I don't want to force cloudflare to be a public utility, but it is probably bigger and more dominant than any company needs to be, like many others it should be broken up into smaller pieces.