Both times, people organized a social media campaign to try to get CF to drop services for a site they disliked, and both times CF first refused in the interest of free speech, safe harbor, let law enforcement handle it, etc, then flipped like a switch and dropped their services when the mob didn't go away fast enough.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?
People don't want Stormfront gone for aesthetic reasons. They want Stormfront and similar sites gone because they encourage physical violence against certain peoples.
It is, IMO, a huge strawman to say that people just "don't like" these sites.
And it's a huge strawman to imply I said people just wanted SF gone for aesthetic reasons.
At any rate, if "hate the message" of SF is inappropriate, what would you suggest instead? I, and many other people, strongly disagree with the ideas that most people on SF advocate for. I think that "hate their message" works just fine there.
It is not possible for violence to occur via the internet. And if you believe that posts on the site somehow constitutes harassment to an illegal degree, contact law enforcement.
Now that KF is back up (good job, CF), please find me one post on KF that involves the planning of violence which wasn't either deleted or ridiculed into oblivion by the other posters there. If it's so common, this should be an easy task, right?
Exactly. You can go on Reddit right now and find calls for violence, extermination of various groups, etc etc etc, but you’ll never see cloudfare take action then.
Censorship always starts with the undesirables. It never ends there.
Generally in agreement with you here, but are you aware the specifics around why CF dropped services for Stormfront?
CF were holding the line until Stormfront's people claimed that CF were secretly supporters of Stormfront's ideology... which seems like a totally valid reason to drop their services.
Just as if you hired security guards and started being an abusive jerk to them every day, it seems like a reasonable decision for the security agency to drop their services.
I guess what makes it difficult in this case is that the amount of power CF has is so great that any use of that power is immediately troubling.
It's a bit like if pretty much all security guards were under the control of a single company and that company denied services to a person under threat, and in this analogy there's no government to fill the gap.
But there are alternatives, cloudflare isn’t the government, they don’t even have a monopoly.
How is this different from people complaining about facebook not hosting their content - take your stuff to some other private entity that wants to do business with you, these are not institutions which have any obligation or mission beyond making money - even if they like to make PR noises that may be misconstrued otherwise.
>”wow, if they could do that to nazis they could do that to me (not a nazi)!”
Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.
So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.
”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”
personally, i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.
Your perspective leads to radical polarization between two alternate extremes--what we're seeing happening to political discourse across the entire Western world--and, eventually, war and death.
Do you not understand just how dystopian this is? This refrain to be enthusiastically anti-X reminds me of 1984 and the two minutes hate.
I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.
I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?
>”i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.”
“Anyone who isn’t performatively anti things-I-disagree with is thing-I-disagree-with”
I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.
Correct, if you aren't vocally against hate speech, homophobia, transphobia, etc, you may as well be on the side of it. "the only thing it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" blah blah blah, you get it nazi.
Can I ever have time to do something else, though? Like, can I ever get some work done, or go for a walk outside, or have a conversation with friends or strangers about some non-political topic without constantly have to perform a "I'm against bigotry" dance?
It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.
So would you argue then anyone against mass surveillance supports terrorism? That if you don’t support NSA hardware back doors you might as well fly the planes into the towers yourself?
I’m starting to think this person we are responding to is either a troll or such a one dimensional thinker that they are, in the literal definition of the word, a bigot.
“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”
Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.
Would I argue the same way in a completely different scenario that has nothing to do with what I said about standing against racism and transphobia? No, i wouldn't
This is a serious suggestion: if you are concerned about blanket accusations, it’s helpful to avoid blanket statements like “Activists hurl around the Nazi label…”
Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.
I think this might be a case of language being interpreted in an unintended way.
I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.
In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.
Now you can hate Stormfront's message (I do), and you can hate what people are allowed to say and do on Kiwi Farms, and in that light you can feel that CF's actions are just fine. But just be aware that if your site becomes the next pariah of the internet some way or some how, CF is prone to drop your services as well.
And it's their right to do so, of course, but the way they're saying stuff like "The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies" and that this is a special case are rather ridiculous. How many more times will this happen before it stops being a particularly special case?