I understand the argument by Epik... I'm not sure moderating this content by law is helping anything.
Can the FBI not use sites like these to its advantage in some way?
I also understand the existence of these sorts of sites leaves a sanctuary for hateful ideas to spread and grow. And that even if we certainly can't stop them, the big popular ones are easier for people to fall into than some dark net site.<p>However, I certainly don't agree that Cloudflare should be content arbiter unless they've been instructed to chop 8Chan by the Government. And I believe there is great value in the ability for people to see these extremists ideas and not forget their existence. Not forget our past.
Extremist web sites do seem like awful incubators. I also have to think that a culture that worships celebrity, combined with guaranteed instant fame/notoriety for perpetrators via extensive news coverage ("if it bleeds, it leads") is also part of the incentive for murder. But a free press is essential to democracy - I don't think we want to go back to press censorship.
I don't really understand the reasoning so many people here have behind shutting down 8chan. Twitter, Facebook, and many other mainstream websites are replete with mass murderers. The response presumably will be that those sites are also replete with non-mass murderers - I agree! So is 8chan. Then the response presumably will be that the vast majority of 8chan users aren't mass murderers, but the site doesn't have a legitimate purpose like Facebook and Twitter and is "a breeding ground for hate".<p>Now we're in the business of deciding whether a site has a legitimate purpose because potentially (and I haven't seen any data on this - it sounds true, but would be nice to have before making these big assumptions) an outsized proportion of its users discuss controversial subjects. So, okay, private companies don't have to associate with 8chan...now we're seeing supporters of 8chan creating their own companies and services and choosing to associate with them, who inevitably are accused of creating "havens for online extremism" and hate and often are cut off from payment processors, banks, and other essential services a company needs to get by. I wonder - when this "just build your own website/hosting company/payment processor/undersea cable" free market treadmill reaches its logical conclusion, if people somehow do manage to build their own banks and undersea cables and whatever, won't they all be accused of the same thing and face some fresh shutdown attempt?<p>Let's just be honest, many of you don't like the content of their speech and want it gone. I would rather have an honest debate about whether free speech should exist or not rather than these ancillary discussions that don't really have much to do with the true intentions at play.