Terminating Service for 8Chan

Does this start to open CloudFlare up to legal issues for all the sites they host? I was under the impression they were more of an infrastructure&#x2F;utility type service, and weren&#x27;t liable for what took place, the same way gun manufacturers aren&#x27;t liable for shootings or gas stations for car crashes.<p>But if now they&#x27;re manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn&#x27;t, it seems like they&#x27;re more responsible for everything else that&#x27;s on it that they allow.<p>They&#x27;re a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?

On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or discussed. As the great John Gilmore said, more aspirationally than accurately even then: &quot;The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.&quot;<p>On the other hand, we don&#x27;t live in that world, and I don&#x27;t know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it <i>will</i> use it as it sees fit.<p>Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that&#x27;s about the best we can hope for.

&quot;the speed with which tech cos change after a bad PR cycle seems like solid proof that none of this is abt principles but abt trying to keep from making hard choices as long as possible. earlier today they argued that keeping 8chan within its network is a “moral obligation”&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;cwarzel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158193462459506693" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;cwarzel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158193462459506693</a>

When I was younger I thought I was a few speech absolutist. Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. Now I favor moderation.

CloudFlare is not a notice board. They are practically a utility. PG&amp;E aren’t a government, and they can’t cut off your electricity because you’re an extremist.<p>What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you <i>can’t</i>

That pseudointellectual appeal to &quot;rule of law&quot; was painful to read. If a website really engages in illegal activities, then the FBI gets a court order, raids its servers and that&#x27;s the end of it.<p>What really happened: Cloudfare came under PR fire from the Washington Post, made a quick cost&#x2F;benefit analysis and dropped 8Chan.

Tor&#x27;s onion service will always there to provide hosting to the less popular ideas. The censorship-resistant network is there. Make sure to give it some love.<p>Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit.<p>Don&#x27;t get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it only depends on a fistful of people who will transmit their power to their biological offspring, no matter how fucked up they are.

Good reasoning in the article. Acknowledges that refusing them service won&#x27;t take the site offline but makes a good argument for doing so.<p>&quot;They are no longer Cloudflare&#x27;s problem, but they remain the Internet&#x27;s problem.&quot;<p>These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn&#x27;t been a net positive.

Free speech is a cultural value. It sometimes manifests itself in the form of codified laws like the first amendment to the US Constitution. However, free speech is not limited to the USA.<p>The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that no entity has a monopoly on truth and if you want to propagate your ideas, make your arguments persuasive and refute your opponents&#x27; arguments.<p>Free speech is ultimately a bet on human capacity for reason and goodness. The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers.<p>Sometimes, governments are the most powerful enemy of free speech while sometimes other entities can be.<p>I am not saying free speech is a good thing, but there is no &quot;exclusive to government&quot; limiting principle to free speech.

This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people. I do believe that so-called manifesto is mind-numbingly dumb, fact-free and it is dangerous in the sense it will inspire more violence against innocent people. But that precisely what makes it a good test case for asking some fundamental questions. Can commercial businesses with deep reach, pricing power and critical function deny services based on their ideology and beliefs? The legal answer is yes and that only looks troublesome when you think of how tables could turn in future. As someone has mentioned what if Comcast started permanently black listed you if you visited a website that didn&#x27;t aligned with their ideology? What if airlines refused to fly you because you said something on Twitter that didn&#x27;t aligned with their beliefs?

&gt; Removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online.<p>It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”.<p>They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.

It&#x27;s concerning that Cloudflare is monetizing on these disasters by publishing this article and promoting it on HN; in a way, they&#x27;re using these crimes as an opportunity to improve their brand image. Cloudflare should have dealt with this privately; this matter is between Cloudflare and 8chan - They were always able to choose who they want and don&#x27;t want to do business with. They were very happy to take the money when it was convenient. If you want to do the right thing according to your values, you should do it quietly; if you brag about your action publicly and you stand to gain something out of it then it completely undermines the intent of the action.<p>I&#x27;d love to see companies actually do the right thing and not talk about it; just like how they don&#x27;t talk about it when they do the wrong thing. That would be a step forward.

If you build a system that is technically possible for someone to censor, particularly if you make it easy to do (and in fact where not doing so would cost them potentially billions of dollars in market cap in an upcoming IPO, recruiting, sales, vendors, etc), you shouldn’t be at all surprised when they do censor. It is interesting that Cloudflare has only really censored two sites (dailystormer and 8chan) outside of a fairly clearly articulated terms of service. There are clearly a large number of sites on Cloudflare which are a net liability to them and always will be, so the “free speech” stance is genuine.

I thought they had just stated they weren&#x27;t going to end suport:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20607945" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20607945</a>

I don&#x27;t like 8chan as a website, but I&#x27;m still not a fan of this move. Feels like no one online wants to just provide a &#x27;dumb pipe&#x27;, and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what&#x27;s allowed and what isn&#x27;t.<p>Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it&#x27;s exactly the situation we&#x27;re in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.<p>I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.

This is one of the most disturbing things I&#x27;ve read this year. Now I definitely do not feel like any of my sites are safe on cloudflare.<p>I would appreciate even more transparency details to be published. When talking about cloudflare following the rule of law - will you all be more specific about which countries and which locales?<p>There are rules in the UK I have read about that people wanted to bust through cloudflare to get to people.<p>Will the countries that have anti-gay laws be included in this rule of law thing? What about ones that have laws about sex info? How about religions?<p>How many people need to be up in arms about something before cloudflare ejects something? If we get enough of religion A to be angry about the lawless killing espoused in Religion B&#x27;s texts - can we get all of the various religious sites ejected?<p>To read that this is all going on with cloudflare is terrible - but I am glad you all decided to share that you have also monitoring web site content and sending information to multiple law enforcement agencies as well.<p>I&#x27;m shocked, but not surprised at this point. As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. It&#x27;s been rolling down that hill ever since it seems.<p>Cloudflare has really opened the floodgates to be used for additional censoring by many other groups and gov agencies at this point.<p>The internet needs more anti-ddos options aside from this has been company.<p>I have personally suffered months of agony from people using 4chan in the past, but I would not ask internet companies to shut them down. Around that time is when I started looking for a service like cloudflare. It was too easy to dox and ddos - cloudflare helped.<p>Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I&#x27;ve suffered from posts on those as well.<p>There will likely be an 18chan dot com and a 818chan dot com and a blackerhatter dot net and a... I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.

&gt; we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design<p>What does &quot;lawless by design&quot; mean?

The best argument I’ve heard for being a free speech absolutist is that speech is the highest form of thought in Humans. We think via dialogue. We arrive at the truth via dialogue.<p>Criminalizing free speech limits our ability to think and arrive at the truth, and that can’t be good for anyone long term.<p>I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning.

It would be better if cloudflare terminated service for all media outlets. Every time you turn a mass shooting into a national spectacle, it inspires copycats in rapid succession as we&#x27;ve just seen.<p>Mass shootings (generally) don&#x27;t kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don&#x27;t publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.<p>By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that <i>this</i> is how you get attention.

I&#x27;m not sure I understand what those here rallying in defense of &quot;free speech&quot; are arguing. Free speech has not been violated. The government did not mandate this. As an individual citizen, I am allowed to say whatever I want under the protection of free speech. But I am not entitled to others providing me a platform for my speech. Other people&#x2F;companies can&#x27;t be coerced to provide me such a platform. And even if every person and company refuses to provide me a platform, my rights still aren&#x27;t being violated, so long as the government isn&#x27;t mandating it. Its just tough nuts.

That a crazy person posts a screed somewhere then commits mass murder is not by itself sufficient reason to destroy the forum where they posted their screed. It&#x27;s not remotely clear to me that 8chan glorified previous mass murders -- of course, I&#x27;ve not looked, but then, Cloudflare doesn&#x27;t post any evidence of this either. But even 8chan they did, that&#x27;s essentially what the media is doing every time they give wall-to-wall coverage to any mass murder -- future would be mass murderers may fantasize about being the one the news media talk about next. No one talks about de-platforming CNN. Before we deplatform the 8chans of the world, at the very least we should have some evidence of how they failed to moderate content, and we should give them a chance to fix it.

This post repeatedly refers to 8chan as &quot;lawless&quot; and &quot;unmoderated&quot; but it is neither. As a whole, it is a public website subject to US law, complete with DMCA and search warrant contact forms. The sitewide rule is that all content must comply with US law.<p>The media also keeps saying 8chan, 8chan, 8chan over and over, when it is really just the one most popular board (&quot;pol&quot;) that is being discussed. But there are hundreds of boards on the site for different topics, which are moderated separately and according to their own rules.<p>It seems like most of the outrageous incitement to violence people have posted on 8chan would be illegal under Brandenburg v. Ohio (speech is illegal if it will lead to imminent lawless action), given the mostly-valid assumption there will be readers of the post who are both radicalized and armed. This seems like the way to take down most of the violent content on 8chan if anyone would think about it for more than 5 seconds.<p>This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to moral panic and bad PR, not a solution to anything. Cloudflare would have been in a better position to actually <i>change</i> 8chan if they had kept them on and pressured them.

Another way to view this would be, &quot;Cloudflare ends support for mass shooting early warning system.&quot;

Cloudflare is censoring comments like hell. I don&#x27;t trust their &quot;private&quot; DNS service anymore. I will use Quad9. And what about the Las Vegas shooting? Ban CNN, New York Times, MSNBC ...etc..etc.,,Twitter, and thousands of websites, plenty of celebrities....? You people are totalitarian mtfckrs!

This decision is yet another distraction. It&#x27;s attempting to treat an ephemeral symptom in a rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity and communications. Things are only getting faster, easier, more connected, more distributed, and more encrypted. There is no going back.<p>Until we collectively acknowledge that it&#x27;s real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS&#x2F;CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.

It&#x27;s funny, these discussions go around and around in circles on HN.<p>Really, we should all just reference Popper&#x27;s Paradox of Tolerance[1].<p>A just, tolerant society should tolerate anything other than intolerance. Yes, this isn&#x27;t as simple as &quot;freedom of speech&quot;, but it makes a lot of sense.<p>Popper&#x27;s words argue this as well as anyone:<p><i>Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance</a>

Very unpopular opinion. The internet should be free for everyone and no provider should have the ability to cut off services. The problem is not the platform but the people, hate the player not the game.

Twitter and Google (&amp; YouTube) have systematically removed ISIS content and redirected these people to messages&#x2F;sites that are designed to disrupt and deprogram their ideology. They’ve done this effectively for <i>years.</i> They choose not to apply this approach to white supremacy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brianbeutler&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158032847560675328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brianbeutler&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158032847560675328</a>

Why is this the concern of Cloudflare?<p>If it does something illegal, the law can close it down.<p>If it doesn&#x27;t, it&#x27;s should be absolutely no concern of Cloudlfare to police it.<p>That&#x27;s more dystopian than a wacko shooter posting their message there. They could have posted it anywhere, or just posted it on their profile, send it to the news, etc.

Right, suddenly CF cares about &#x27;law&#x27;.<p>Scam (lots of phishing and fake webshops), spam, piracy, illegal pornography, it&#x27;s all chilling on CF&#x27;s network en masse. When they get notified about this, do you think they terminate that client? No, they will just come up with some dogmatic story [1] and ignore every call to action&#x2F;cooperation.<p>&quot;we are rebuilding the Internet, and we don&#x27;t believe that we or anyone else should have the right to tell people what content they can and cannot publish online.&quot;<p>Yes, ladies and gentleman, he said it. In 2012 Mr Prince was trying to build a proprietary internet. These days he would never say that again. I mean, it&#x27;s just laughable that you feel zero responsibility over your clients. Hence they publicly deny this now of course.<p>CloudFlare: it would be great if you start actively participating in abuse prevention, instead of behaving like an offshore&#x2F;bulletproof provider behind red &#x27;n blue curtains.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;thoughts-on-abuse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;thoughts-on-abuse&#x2F;</a>

&gt; 8chan [...] have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths<p>Quite the strong and matter-of-fact opinion, stated as accepted fact, about a direct cause here.

I am really sick of the high horse that this company thinks they are on because of their pseudo-neutrality.<p>What should normally happen if you come across some criminal or reprensible content, is that it&#x27;s possible to figure out who owns the IP space,and if it&#x27;s not already a criminal organisation decide to aid the ISP in running a reputable business and send them an abuse notice. This has the effect that <i>bad</i> actors need to move to <i>bad</i> networks, which you can quarantine at your own network boundary - I get to make a decision as private citizen on what is allowed on my network.<p>That is a process that works.<p>Cloudflare obfuscates the real IP space, which means that the <i>best</i> outcome I can achieve from them is that they will <i>forward</i> my abuse complaint to possibly the mob, which is not a move I am willing to make.<p>In this way they are not just a DDOS protection service, they are business protection for criminals. And because of their size and because they allow them to hide behind their IPs it makes it impossible for me to make a private decision about what to not allow on my networks.<p>If they are so happy about hosting the vomit that the internet has to offer, why not assign an IP block to the easily identifiable garbage that exists.

Well, they&#x27;re at least making their position clear here. They are not a government or a public forum. As such, they can decide who and what they will support on the internet. Can&#x27;t argue with their decision on that point.

Cloudflare happily provides hosting for al-Shabab, Hamas, the Taliban, the PLF, the PKK, al-Quds Brigades, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. They don&#x27;t give one good God-damn about hatred or murder; they care about negative media attention affecting their bottom line. Not that they&#x27;re not entitled to only care about that, but pretending it&#x27;s any other reason makes them liars and hypocrites.

My only concern here is that they&#x27;re giving less than a day&#x27;s notice, which is really uncalled for, and shows a certain lack of professionalism.<p>(Their service terms <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;</a> allow them to do this, but that doesn&#x27;t make it a smart idea.)

This is a very complex situation and a lot of factors need to be considered. Everyone seems keenly aware that 8chan was a place where hateful ideologies could fester and spread, and nobody wants that. But it seems few people are aware of the fact that cutting people off from society usually results in feelings of social rejection that drive people deeper into isolation, bitterness and hatred. Being socially rejected, or believing such, is fairly strongly coorelated with mass murderer psychology.[1][2] This action could actually have the opposite effect of what was intended.<p>There is also an effect similar to martyrdom where whenever some subgroup of society is mistreated they gain in power. Many see being cut-off as over-the-top and thus a mistreatment, irrespective of the fact that the group has a clearly evil ideology. There is a risk this action will embolden their cause, as a natural instinct to protect the mistreated and come to the defense of the underdog kicks in. Read some of the other comments and you&#x27;ll see what I mean. This comment itself is admittedly partially motivated by my instinct to come to the defense of the mistreated (granted the obviousness that the murdered and their families are clearly the most mistreated).<p>Like I said, this is complicated. The simple ideological answers are simply not good enough.<p>So the hard question is this: how do you prevent the spread of their ideology without excising them from (online) society? I believe it is possible, but it is going to take a more nuanced approach going forward. We could start by not labelling people as racists or white supremacists. We should reserve these labels for actions, words and ideologies, not people. Attack the ideas, not the people. Deplatform (censor) the posts (if you control the platform), don&#x27;t ban the accounts. Throttle accounts of repeat abusers as necessary. And always be willing to talk.<p>BTW I always feel queasy posting things like this to HN because I know some people will utterly reject me and downvote me, but I feel this point is just too important.<p>[1] Katherine Newman, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;21787-predicting-mass-shootings.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;21787-predicting-mass-shootings....</a> [2] James Knoll, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;saving-normal&#x2F;201405&#x2F;the-mind-the-mass-murderer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;saving-normal&#x2F;201405...</a>

Its important that a company distances themselves from this type of behaviour but even slightly spinning it as action against something is disingenuous at best. So much more needs to happen to really address these problems and Im fairly confident a cdn isnt the make or break for shootings in America.

Like I stated here[1], it seems a bit hypocritical for them to cancel service to 8chan when some of the large sites have been complicit also.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20607635" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20607635</a>

So Cloudflare went from hosting everything that&#x27;s not illegal, to kicking people out who claim that Cloudflare supports their ideology, to kicking people out with less than a day&#x27;s notice on a Sunday if a forum attracts user-generated content that Cloudflare doesn&#x27;t like - and the rules for content that they don&#x27;t tolerate may change on similarly short notice with no warning before they decide to terminate your account (most likely based on &quot;has enough media outrage happened&quot;).<p>Also, they stated that they were &quot;cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network&quot;, which makes me wonder what kind of monitoring we&#x27;re talking about here, and whether and where else they share traffic that they&#x27;re proxying.<p>Regardless of what you think about 8chan (I&#x27;m not familiar with the site but there seems to be consensus that it&#x27;s a cesspool), these points are interesting to note.

Same old story. Silence them instead of listening to them, speaking to them, learning from them.<p>You can learn from a baby. Silencing people leads nowhere.

I&#x27;m not a fan of 8chan, but if the person posted his manifesto to Hacker News, would hacker news have been shut down?

&gt; the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan<p>Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?

Coudflare CEO retracts what he said he would not do again:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;cloudflares-ceo-has-a-plan-to-never-censor-hate-speech-again&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;cloudflares-ceo-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;technology&#x2F;8chan-cloudflare-el-paso.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;technology&#x2F;8chan-cloudfla...</a>

&quot;I promise I wont&#x27; do it again&quot; - Guy who does it again.

FBI&#x27;s Phoenix field office in May of this year, published a memo that asserts and discusses &quot;anti-government, identity base, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal or violent activity&quot;<p>And in its appendix it lists QAnon as one such fringe political conspiracy theories.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;420379775&#x2F;FBI-Conspiracy-Theory-Redacted#fullscreen&amp;from_embed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;420379775&#x2F;FBI-Conspiracy-The...</a><p>(page 8)<p>So what&#x27;s Twitter going to do when people tweet or retweet anti-government, identity based, fringe conspiracy theories or theorists, given the FBI considers at the very least that such things are very likely to motivate domestic terrorism? And are only heads of state going to be allowed to do that?<p>Q and movement followers, having moved to 8chan because 4chan was compromised, surely will consider the FBI memo, Cloudfare&#x27;s decision, just move evidence of &quot;deep state&quot; fighting back. In the outlook section of the FBI report, it expects these conspiracy theories to spread, and foster more violence, leading up to the 2020 election.<p>There are other groups listed in the FBI report. 8chan isn&#x27;t one of them. But the FBI field office in Nevada issued a search warrant for 8chan in Reno regarding the Poway Synagogue shooting.

Given:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bellingcat.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;americas&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bellingcat.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;americas&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-el-p...</a><p>I believe Cloudflare&#x27;s action is necessary to try to stem the tide here. Sometimes ... just sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

Easy way out literally noone in the US wants or will support:<p>Get a legal definition of well regulated militia, get it to not map to the national guard or some homebred terrorist group via some ritual like the pledge or whatever, and police the crap out of the gun sales to groups outside this definition.<p>By the Constitution&#x27;s own legitimacy it&#x27;s the government&#x27;s choice to forego this control under those terms, and it musts be the government&#x27;s choice to tighten this control up.<p>Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? For this exact reason: Definitions were established, and strapping guns to drones was deemed a dick move.<p>Same here, define legitimate civillian militias and take all the guns off the hands of every other random guy.<p>Couple years after that <i>maybe</i> we could start having the discussion of why you need armed death squads on your home turf but hey at least the ease of access for the general public is out, and with it a large part of the reason why the US os the only place where this happens day in and day out.

&quot; they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness <i>has caused multiple tragic deaths</i>.&quot;<p>What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn&#x27;t ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn&#x27;t change that.<p>I&#x27;ve always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they&#x27;ll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn&#x27;t a causal factor or even help stop them.

Very well written and cogent post. But as they point out, the internet is designed to be open and free. And this type of hateful content will still have a platform. There&#x27;s sadly nothing that can be done about that. You can always suppress and control speech, but the people who want to hear it will also always find a way to seek it out.

&gt; Cloudflare is not a government... [we do not have] the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad... Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions. We will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in their countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.<p>This is a horrifying and immoral position to take. <i>Governments</i> are the entities that have no legitimacy to restrict speech or &quot;make determinations on what content is good and bad&quot;. Man requires free speech because the freedom to think is essential to man&#x27;s existence. The role of government is to protect man&#x27;s rights so that he may think, evaluate ideas, and live a productive life.

I&#x27;m a strong defendant of Internet freedom, but before attacking Cloudflare on this one, let&#x27;s please read this one-paragraph Wikipedia article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Paradox_of_tolerance</a>

Why can&#x27;t law enforcement take a more active role in policing this site rather than leaving it to corporations? It&#x27;s a known catalyst of terrorism at this point, so they know exactly where to look and surely have the resources to investigate suspicious posters.<p>Disappointingly, the last time an incident like this happened, an FBI agent accidentally revealed himself to be actively fuelling the fire by participating in a smear campaign against Russia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceinquiry.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;fbi-8chan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceinquiry.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;fbi-8chan&#x2F;</a>). Looks like law enforcement are watching, but are just making problems worse? Baffling.

This is great news.<p>There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn&#x27;t remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn&#x27;t be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.<p>But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people <i>should</i> consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don&#x27;t need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at &quot;platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design.&quot; But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, &quot;Do we want to be hosting this?&quot;<p>In this case, they said &quot;No.&quot;<p>Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare&#x27;s decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.<p>But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn&#x27;t need to be associated with hosting 8Chan&#x27;s content. I know I feel that way.<p>Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you&#x27;ll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren&#x27;t leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you&#x27;ll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.<p>You&#x27;ll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that&#x27;s great.

I&#x27;d rather companies did this, than governments.<p>Like how some companies won&#x27;t service porn-related ventures.<p>It&#x27;s fine if a company doesn&#x27;t want to make their money doing this, but it shouldn&#x27;t just be, &quot;Oh something bad happened... time to react...&quot; They should take philosophic stances, &quot;I don&#x27;t want to help with un-moderated user content. Show me your moderation policy and plan, and then we can do business...&quot;<p>What bugs me is that the Cloudflare CEO flip-flopped on this like 8 times. They have no coherent policy, other than, &quot;Don&#x27;t give us bad press before our IPO.&quot; Shitty.

In China, there would be no 8Chan at all because if any post is related to massive shooting (probably not shooting because it&#x27;s not that achievable in China, you get the idea), the post will be arrested and the website will be taken down immediately, and the website owner will be seriously questioned.<p>But I guess that&#x27;s not what you want.<p>On one hand, this seems to be a praiseworthy deed, and they took all the credit. On the other hand, it shows corporations are wielding too much power, which probably they can wielding it to other factions they don&#x27;t like.

A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.<p>Cloudfare aren&#x27;t a government. They aren&#x27;t a democracy. I don&#x27;t know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.<p>If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.

Really bad on you cloudflare. I did&#x27;t visit the chans since what feels like a lifetime and probably don&#x27;t approve of the content at hand (getting worse since 200x...), but that isn&#x27;t the topic here. Are you dropping Facebook as a customer if you find objectionable content? Probably not.<p>And while I believe you wouldn&#x27;t do that randomly to other customers, I won&#x27;t recommend your sevice again. It is just not your decision to make and pretty much the exact opposite that I require from a service like yours.

Why do they keep mentioning the shooting in Dayton, Ohio? At this point in time, the Dayton shooting seems to be a completely unrelated incident with no ties to politics.

Quick question for everyone who&#x27;s on board with this.<p>Do we actually KNOW that banning &quot;hate speech&quot; results in less hateful actions in the short and long term as well?<p>I&#x27;ll wait.

Looks like &quot;the competitor&quot; mentioned in the article is &quot;BitMitigate&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitmitigate.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitmitigate.com</a> [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;seattles-bitmitigate-now-protecting-pro-nazi-site-daily-stormer-web-attacks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;seattles-bitmitigate-now-prote...</a>

However Walmart will keep selling weapons and ammo.

What&#x27;s happening is that 8chan is indirectly costing Cloudflare money by hurting their brand and their employees&#x27; morale. Rather than refusing sketchy clients, companies should factor these costs in their pricing. Conversely, universally loved entities (e.g. Greenpeace) should be be offered lower prices.<p>This would create an incentive for companies to be better.

8Chan announces downtime on Twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;infinitechan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158207781427695616" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;infinitechan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158207781427695616</a> And 8Chan is back online: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;8ch.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;8ch.net&#x2F;</a>

So uh, why is everyone focusing on cloudflare?<p>If you really want to take down 8chan, why not reach out to their colo provider? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalrealty.com&#x2F;data-centers&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;200-paul-ave-san-francisco-ca" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalrealty.com&#x2F;data-centers&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;200...</a>

Sorry but a company saying they won’t put up with your bullshit is not in any way censorship. If a company hates puppies and they stop hosting sites with puppies that’s also not censorship. Go learn how to build your own service and put your bullshit there. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. 8chan exorcised their freedom of speech, and now there are albeit small consequences. That’s how the system is supposed to work.<p>People inevitably trot out counter examples that they believe will “own” my “libtard” views like the whole bakery thing. Should the bakery have had to make the cake for the gay customers? Nope. Their a business and can refuse service for whatever reason. Turns out there were some legal things involved. Guess what. Consequences.<p>We have a tenuous and often brittle social contract. The social contract decides what is and what isn’t ok. And once you break the contract there are often consequences. That’s not censorship. That’s existing in a society. Companies and people that don’t like those consequences are free to exit this society and begin their own at any time. But guess what. There’s consequences to that, too. The only real question is if they can be adults about it and accept those consequences. And in most cases they can’t.

And what about the websites that Cloudflare&#x27;s Project Galileo protects <i>against</i> certain governments&#x27; Rule of Law? Presumably they aren&#x27;t shutting that project down, which means they&#x27;re still making arbitrary judgement calls about <i>which</i> Rules of Law are legitimate and which aren&#x27;t.

This is a reasonable move for cloudflare. I can see how keep hosting this website will bring it trouble in the future.

You can&#x27;t ban language because some use it to lie. The censorship idea has eerie cumulative logic built in. Today we ban a site, tomorrow a race. I&#x27;d also like to point out that in the context of declining economies the structures that have ensured democratic processes are inevitably declining with it.

Remember when we used to believe that &quot;the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it?&quot;

A lot of the plot, but my guess the main reason is upcoming Cloudflare IPO[1]. Сan&#x27;t blame them for for doing that.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-september-2019-7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-s...</a>

I have opinions on this topic, but they are unconventional and so almost no one is going to align with or find resonance in the ideas I&#x27;d express.<p>Anyway, when it comes to online communities, almost no one does it right, and so not only is the consensus wrong, but so are all known examples.

And yet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffpost.com&#x2F;entry&#x2F;cloudflare-cybersecurity-terrorist-groups_n_5c127778e4b0835fe3277f2f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffpost.com&#x2F;entry&#x2F;cloudflare-cybersecurity-terr...</a>

it seems like a marketing message about cloudflare... I&#x27;m sure most people don&#x27;t know what &quot;cloudflare&quot; is, how it relates to a message board like &quot;8chan&quot;, and most people don&#x27;t even know what 8chan is, and some people probably know more about 8chan than cloudflare. It would be like Firestone issuing a report saying they are not going to be selling tires to the guy that drove the car to commit the violence, because if they didnt sell him the tires, he wouldnt be able to drive to the mall to commit the violence... when in reality, this is just a marketing message for Firestone about selling tires.

How come Twitter is not is trouble for enabling (or being A loudspeaker for) people that riles up other people, fuels their fire and so on.<p>Trying to understand this from a ethics and philosophical perspective. Appreciate your comments.

A big issue is that we are seeing enthusiasm for censorship. So I hope that people will do some research into the history and current use of censorship.<p>The other difficult problem is that people think that their country is an exception to all other countries and history with regards to censorship and everything else.<p>One other issue: corporations that have as much or more centralized power as governments. In line with the rest of my comment, one reason this is problematic is because it is much easier for governments to assert control over individual companies. And those policies (sometimes good or sometimes very bad) affect masses of people.<p>It really seems to me that we are moving towards a more homogeneous global political system that honestly appears to be modeled after the Chinese one and will probably be controlled from there.

Why is CloudFlare having to deal with this rather than their ISP?

I am disappointed by Cloudflare. They are involving themselves in politics like any other company. Let authorities do their job, don&#x27;t jump in and get involved. Please!

Isn’t this all predicated on a manifesto that surfaced before the dust even settled? Also saw reports the manifesto was a hoax. Everyone needs to slow the hell down.

Nearly every mass killer in the last 10 years has posted an angry rant on Facebook or Twitter.<p>A couple <i>may</i> have posted on 8chan.<p>Guess which platform is being criticized for allowing hate?

I&#x27;d like to see eastdakotas many comments on HN saying &quot;this will never happen again&quot; next to whatever he will be saying to justify this one.

Check the Disqus comments on the article. You will quickly realize the problem is way more than what it appears to be. Some of it is here as well...

I think it would be fitting if 8chan moved to radwareddoscloud.com which is the NRA&#x27;s cloud protection service.

Why does Cloudflare feel the need to take action here? Only a minority believe that 8chan is the culprit in creating these gunmen, and fewer people have called for Cloudflare specifically to shutdown 8chan.<p>By staying idle the conversation would&#x27;ve moved onto gun control, but now they&#x27;re going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.

For the sake of posterity I would like to point out that 8chan is also the website that Qanon posts on.

Total garbage statements: being a huge ISP doesn&#x27;t mean using that power to moderate the Internet

Hey! You&#x27;re not allowed to say those magic words! - Brilliant, I completely changed my mind now.

&gt; we are terminating 8chan as a customer<p>Probably a good idea, if only to send the message that there is a limit to how much garbage you can allow people to dump on your site before the neighbors decide to do whatever it takes stop the terrible smell.<p>&gt; The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent.<p>That&#x27;s great! Most tech companies seem to prefer the Rule of Men where they try to fix problems behind the scenes with obscured methods and inconsistent (and often arbitrary) policies.<p>&gt; Cloudflare is not a government.<p>While technically true, as your control of infrastructure approaches monopoly, you tend to acquire more and more government-like traits. At a functional level, &quot;is a government&quot; is not a Boolean value.<p>&gt; that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad<p>That&#x27;s true, but your success in the market (&quot;a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network&quot;) gives you a lot of <i>power</i> to make that kind of determination. If that power isn&#x27;t managed carefully (e.g. with a consistent and transparent Rule of Law), it is easy to accidentally use that power in dangerous or irresponsible ways. The fact that you&#x27;re even talking about a Rule of Law means you&#x27;re already acting far more responsibly than most big tech companies.<p>&gt; We will ... engage with lawmakers ... as <i>they</i> set the boundaries of what is acceptable ... through <i>[their]</i> due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.<p>(I&#x27;m interpreting &quot;[their] due process of law&quot; as referring to the lawmaker&#x27;s process, not something implemented internal to Cloudflare. If this is incorrect, ignore this section)<p>Engaging with lawmakers (and other relevant organizations) is incredibly important. I would expect any company that wants to act lawfully to comply with legislated regulations. It is also important to realize that governments are often slow. You cannot simply abdicate responsibility to the government when you <i>de facto</i> have significant power over and involvement with a problem.<p>&gt; We ... have an obligation to help propose solutions<p>Yes, proposing solutions is part of that obligation. If you really are concerned with creating Rule of Law, then you also have to act in ways consistent with that goal. If you&#x27;re going beyond the limits of an uninvolved&#x2F;neutral &quot;common carrier&quot; and terminating a customer for reasons unrelated to the technical services you provide, you need to make sure you <i>have</i> and <i>follow</i> your own &quot;due process&quot;, while the lawmaker&#x27;s solution is still pending and&#x2F;or incomplete.<p>&gt; What&#x27;s hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward.<p>I agree that this is very hard. It&#x27;s also an obligation you accepted when you decided to take responsibility (and profits) for a large piece of infrastructure that many people now rely on. This is where transparency can help a <i>lot</i>; it&#x27;s a lot easier to ask for forgiveness for a mistake if you have a reputation of openly explaining your reasoning.

Worth noting cloudflare leadership has been fighting this war for years and this is just a small battle.<p>Can you tell us when @Cloudflare will be holding its next &quot;How to Protect Nazi Extremists&quot; workshop? You guys seem to be the experts. 10:25 AM - 14 Aug 2017<p>The recent string of violence has forced their hand here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ncweaver&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124091916520497153" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ncweaver&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124091916520497153</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;klarajk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122625367490146304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;klarajk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122625367490146304</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Riverseeker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122612031234945024" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Riverseeker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122612031234945024</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;slpng_giants&#x2F;status&#x2F;1123592717341200384" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;slpng_giants&#x2F;status&#x2F;1123592717341200384</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NathanBLawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;10562868097418199.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NathanBLawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;10562868097418199...</a>.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NJDemocrat&#x2F;status&#x2F;897147112273608705" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NJDemocrat&#x2F;status&#x2F;897147112273608705</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;InvestMib&#x2F;status&#x2F;1123308004873515015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;InvestMib&#x2F;status&#x2F;1123308004873515015</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jwz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124415034610860033" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jwz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124415034610860033</a>

Tech people seem to get the most worked up when someone shushes them.

Seeing a service censoring a morally-bad community makes me feel sad. How is the executive power (police, intelligence) supposed to monitor extremists if they become forced to move to encrypted, censorship-resistant chats outside of the internet?

I think this paragraph is worth the article:<p><i>We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States&#x27; First Amendment. That is incorrect. First, we are a private company and not bound by the First Amendment. Second, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our revenue, comes from outside the United States where the First Amendment and similarly libertarian freedom of speech protections do not apply. The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.</i>

It&#x27;s ridiculous that this is remotely controversial. &quot;Freedom of speech?&quot; How about the freedom to not obligatorily aid the organizing of white supremacist hate groups? Slippery slope&#x27;s ass.

So rather than quietly update their language to allow for better analysis and detection of malignant content by 3rd parties, they&#x27;re pushing the problem into the darker corners of the internet.<p>Not a great plan.

Good riddance. Everybody who willingly or not provides platform for hate speech is an accomplice. I hope to see the day they will be punished same as the guy that pulled the trigger.

why not disconnect facebook too,they&#x27;ve been a platform for quite a number of these

&gt; The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law? That&#x27;s closer to the situation we have seen with the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They are lawless platforms.<p>This doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense. They are suggesting that it&#x27;s the fact that 8chan is <i>unmoderated</i> that is a problem, and they&#x27;ll similarly refuse service to any unmoderated discussion platform?<p>I actually totally approve of them refusing 8chan as a customer.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is really the reason, or a good reason. Articulating the real&#x2F;good reason is hard. I&#x27;m not sure I can do it either.<p>But when they say &quot;The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent&quot; -- that obligation is actually incumbent upon THEM, cloudflare. What is their own transparent and consistent policy that led to this? The <i>implication</i> is that... any unmoderated discussion forum would be banned, but they don&#x27;t go out and say it, which isn&#x27;t quite &quot;transparent&quot;.<p>And I don&#x27;t think they really mean that (so it&#x27;s not &quot;consistent&quot; either). An unmoderated discussion forum that <i>wasn&#x27;t</i> being used to egg on mass murder, they probably wouldn&#x27;t ban. I think the possible &quot;consistent&quot; approach here would be simply admitting that they dont&#x27; want as customers sites whose owners seem to have no problem with them being used to egg on mass murder.<p>As they said in another statement quoted by media, a site that has &quot;repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.&quot; This is more honest, and really no less vague, than dancing around talking about &quot;actively thwarting the Rule of Law&quot; (I really don&#x27;t know what that means; I&#x27;m not sure you can really &quot;actively thwart the rule of law&quot; without being in the government). And I personally agree it is a fine reason to refuse someone as a customer, that they&#x27;ve repeatedly proven themselves to be a cesspool of hate.<p>They are correct that the first ammendment in fact gives them the right to refuse as customers entities whose actions they find abhorent and whose business they don&#x27;t wish to aid. The principle of &quot;transparent and consistent&quot; requires them to try harder than they are to explain what their standards are in an honest way. (It can be a process, I&#x27;m not totally sure what they should be either, even though I totally support refusing 8chan as a customer).<p>I think calling an unmoderated discussion forum &quot;actively thwarting the Rule of Law&quot; (in all caps nonetheless!), then calling for government discipline of such, is something you gotta back up with more reasoning than they did here, and is not in fact necessary for them to justify denying service to 8chan. They&#x27;re trying to get out of actually explaining their reasoning&#x2F;motivation (what is required for THEM to be &quot;consistent and transparent&quot;) by hand-waving about all-capitals Rule of Law.

This should not have taken years, and many deaths.<p>Don&#x27;t host fascists. Don&#x27;t do business with nazis.

Yea, that ought to do it.

Now 8ch.net is down.

American logic: let&#x27;s ban websites, not army-grade weapon.

Feels like trying to treat symptoms rather than the illness...

That&#x27;ll fix&#x27;er.

so much for being pro-NetNeutrality

Nice PR

That site supported a Nazi in his efforts to highten his terrorist attack.

Who is going to deplatform Facebook and Twitter? After all plenty of shooters have used them too. Before the usual: &quot; But 8chan is a cesspool of bla bla&quot; Probably it is, but, either the users are doing something ilegal in the site and you close it if the owners refuse to comply with a legal request, or they are not doing anything illegal so they have to be left alone.<p>For the &quot;Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company&quot; brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.

It&#x27;s like the paper mill refusing to sell paper!

I love how everybody is having a cow over a website where the rhetoric isn&#x27;t really all that much worse than a &#x27;mainstream&#x27; site like twitter. For example in twitter you can find guys who call for children to be fed into wood chippers because they wear Maga hats and hundreds&#x2F;thousands of people including corporate accounts like Burger King cheering assaulting people. And they almost all receive absolutely no punishment. And not a single one of all the sensitive bearded men pouring their hearts out in righteous fury at 8chan here seem to care. And I&#x27;m pretty sure a ton of killers use twitter.<p>When I was a child I used to think the ideals of freedom of expression were ingrained in this society. But apparently all it takes is the MSM running a few hitpieces and the &#x27;intellectuals&#x27; are all &#x27;lol 1st Amendment technically applying to government means it is not only permitted but great that all censorship is now offloaded to megacorporate oligarchies! fuck free speech!&#x27;

So much hypocrisy. When war mongering governments like US, Russia use Cloudflare for war propaganda websites that enable their wars and killings of lots and lots of people it doesn&#x27;t bother Matthew Prince. Or when websites behind Cloudflare promote and sell lethal weapons that are the actual reason behind mass shootings even being possible, still doesn&#x27;t bother him. But no, a dissident free speech activist website is somehow necessary to censor and blame for this, how convenient. Gotta love covert government censorship and covert government-corporate partnership.

&quot;It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate.&quot;<p>To me this seems like the broader context that&#x27;s necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren&#x27;t just going to go away or get healthy.<p>Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it&#x27;s harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.<p>I don&#x27;t know. I don&#x27;t have the data and I&#x27;m certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn&#x27;t intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.

Rice Purity Test is one of its time enduring survey that incorporates inquiries on different parts of life, for example, medications, indecencies, and violations.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eduflex.info&#x2F;rice-purity-test&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eduflex.info&#x2F;rice-purity-test&#x2F;</a>

For effective gun control, there needs to be effective border control.

1428 comments and no one points out that the QAnon movement used 8chan for communications.

OK, but where does it stop now?

What kind of free speech are we exactly advocating here? The freedom to spread cheap hate, fake news and bigotry against minorities? I&#x27;m sorry but moderating such offenses isn&#x27;t a limitation to free speech. For the same reason why, if you start shouting nig<i></i> or monkey to black people in a shopping mall, the police is likely to intervene and take you away - and I don&#x27;t think that any sane person would argue that they&#x27;re violating your freedom of speech. Popper taught us that we can&#x27;t be tolerant towards intolerants, if we really want to protect our tolerant rule of law.<p>You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don&#x27;t spread - because if those things spread then they leak into the real world as death. 8chan has been shut down not only because it hosted hate communities, but because it refused to apply any moderation there.<p>However, the problem is not 8chan alone. It&#x27;s good to shut down websites where hate speech proliferates without constraints, but a couple of days or weeks later new *chan websites are likely to pop up to replace them, or maybe they&#x27;d make a Telegram group. The root problem is Americans. And I&#x27;m honestly not sure of how to fix the problem with a whole population that has become so irrational, polarized, ignorant and sensitive to hate speech.

This is terrible.<p>The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual <i>free</i> expression.<p>Here, if you post something that someone doesn&#x27;t like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion.<p>Case in point, I posted &quot;Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?&quot; and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I&#x27;m pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I&#x27;m sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes.<p>The &#x2F;pol&#x2F; board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists.<p>This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that.<p>The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Christchurch madman livestreamed his vile murders using Facebook. Isn&#x27;t it long past time we removed that hate site, a nest of debauchery, from the internet as well? Of course there will be evil persons that will disagree and support the existence of hate sites, but it is not necessary for sane individuals to listen to anything they say.

&quot;Hate online is a real issue. Here are some organizations that have active work to help address it:<p>- Anti-Defamation League<p>...<p>...&quot;<p>Wikipedia:<p>&quot;The ADL has faced criticism for its support for Israel, charges of defamation, spying allegations, its former stance on the Armenian Genocide, and possible conflation of opposition to Israel with antisemitism.&quot;<p>Thanks a lot Cloudflare. First you are complaining about hate and online discussion and then you share shit like this. It seems there is nothing but lies ja propaganda these days. Either far-right or far-left or some other far-shit.

Bullying people is the worst way to get them to agree with you.

Good. Next step: CAs should revoke and stop issuing certificates for these sites.

I do not support 8-chan, but by doing this and what they did with the daily stormer they are no longer a neutral platform. A neutral platform is like a utility, barring illegal activity, users have a right to use the service as long as they pay for it. Once it is curated, it is not. This is why efforts are afoot to have companies that do this to not get section 230 protections for content hosted on the platform.<p>The last thing I want is a large, un-elected, tech company moralizing about content hosted on it. Frankly, they are not good at it. If what 8-chan is doing is illegal this can be addressed through the legal system. Also, as needed, laws to address this can go through democratic processes that have checks and balances instead of this. Yes it may be slower, but due process is important.<p>At some point left un-checked they can and will target other content they disagree with, IE: labeling other fairly main stream right wing stuff as &quot;hate speech&quot;. That is ultimately bad for everybody.

Wow, protection from ddos attacks and from unsavory opinions? What more could one ask for?

Now if we can only get Antifa resources shutdown, since the Dayton shooter has been using them and was an active member<p>-no one

I&#x27;m always prepared for but ultimately annoyed by HN&#x27;s take on stuff like this.<p>I legitimately get angrier reading this shitty site more than just about anything else.<p>I wish whatever dopamine hit I got from reading this place would go away.

Seems to me like a lot of the arguments against why this shouldn&#x27;t happen or isn&#x27;t effective basically amount to some sort of whatabouttery. Well done Cloudflare, I hope their next host takes the same attitude or can be induced to.

Silicon Valley and the left in this country should take it a little easier and slow down the censorship.

Really disgusted by how the internet is shaping up. Monopolies all over the place and deplatforming free speech websites left and right.<p>This ain&#x27;t the internet I was promised when I was 11.

8chan didn&#x27;t cause the incident. The shooter did. If we find out that the shooter played a specific video game that a previous shooter played..should it be banned as well?<p>I&#x27;m old enough to remember all of the court cases that involved distressed parents blaming hard rock&#x2F;metal bands for influencing their children&#x27;s suicides.<p>These sorts of incidents are starting to remind me of the religious right&#x27;s censorship crusade in the 90s...this time it&#x27;s coming from the left.<p>Banning these sites will only push them underground. They aren&#x27;t going away. The end result will be absolutely no way of knowing when and where a shooting may occur.

As bad as the content on 8chan is, it is deeply distressing how Cloudflare has attached itself to the internet as what amounts to a mafia organization collecting protection money. Almost all the non-deep web tools to abuse sites are behind Cloudflare. They really are playing both sides to create a necessary business. I have other theories about them being the most efficient NSA collection site to exist due to TLS MITM and their horrifically insecure &#x27;flexible SSL&#x27; but those theories remain unsubstantiated until the next Snowden.

He should fire his PR. Terrible writing and hard to read. And probably 4-5 times longer than needed.<p>Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.<p>And he didn&#x27;t managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.<p>Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.

I&#x27;m pretty sure more Twitter and Facebook users have become mass killers than 8ch users.<p>The first comment to the guy on 8ch who posted the manifesto was &quot;hello FBI&quot;. Not a 8ch user but they don&#x27;t appear to support shootings. I&#x27;m more familiar with 4chan shenanigans and they <i>definitely</i> don&#x27;t support it, with any threat of real-life violence being met with something along the lines of &quot;[alphabet agency] fuck off&quot;. Not saying they don&#x27;t have crazies but every &quot;social media&quot; (and 8ch is social media, just an old fashioned version of it) site has crazies.

&quot;Some&quot; will condemn this ban by appealing to freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not absolute. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, as per the Guardian:<p>&quot;I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.&quot;[0]<p>As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;global-development&#x2F;2015&#x2F;apr&#x2F;24&#x2F;katie-hopkins-cockroach-migrants-denounced-united-nations-human-rights-commissioner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;global-development&#x2F;2015&#x2F;apr&#x2F;24&#x2F;k...</a><p>Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By &quot;some&quot;, I don&#x27;t mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.