Friday, December 08, 2017




Cloudflare’s CEO has a plan to never censor hate speech again

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince hated cutting off service to the infamous neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer in August. And he's determined not to do it again.

"I'm almost a free-speech absolutist." Prince said at an event at the New America Foundation last Wednesday. But in a subsequent interview with Ars, Prince argued that in the case of the Daily Stormer, the company didn't have much choice.

Cloudflare runs a popular content delivery network that specializes in protecting clients from distributed denial-of-service attacks. The Daily Stormer published a post mocking a woman who was killed during the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. That had made a lot of people angry at the Daily Stormer, attracting massive attacks on the site.

The Stormer was a Cloudflare customer. Cloudflare had ample technical resources to battle DDOS attacks. The problem was that other Cloudflare customers started calling and threatening to cancel their service if Cloudflare didn't cut the Daily Stormer off.

"The pressure to take it down just kept building and building," Prince told Ars. "We thought that was the wrong policy. We reached out to various civil libertarian organizations and said we need some air cover here. People said 'we'd rather not stick our necks out on this issue.'"

So, Prince said, "we needed to change the conversation."

Why Cloudflare is cultivating free-speech allies

Prince's response was to cut Daily Stormer off while laying the groundwork to make sure he'd never have to make a decision like that again. In a remarkable company-wide email sent shortly after the decision, Prince described his own actions as "arbitrary" and "dangerous."

"I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet," Prince wrote in August. "It was a decision I could make because I'm the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company." He argued that "it's important that what we did today not set a precedent."

Prior to August, Cloudflare had consistently refused to police content published by its customers.

Last week, Prince made a swing through DC to help ensure that the Daily Stormer decision does not, in fact, set a precedent. He met with officials from the Federal Communications Commission and with researchers at the libertarian Cato Institute and the left-of-center New America Foundation—all in an effort to ensure that he'd have the political cover he needed to say no next time he came under pressure to take down controversial content.

The law is strongly on Cloudflare's side here. Internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare have broad legal immunity for content created by their customers. But legal rights may not matter if Cloudflare comes under pressure from customers to take down content. And that's why Prince is working to cultivate a social consensus that infrastructure providers like Cloudflare should not be in the censorship business—no matter how offensive its customers' content might be.

SOURCE



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is not any good reason to publish hate !

Brian from Rochester, NY said...

Who defines hate? While I agree that the website in question had abhorrent views and statements, the dreaded precedent here is that if one in charge determines that all right-leaning people or all left-leaning people spew nothing but hate, he or she will have carte blanche to censor anyone found disagreeable.

Take the SPLC, for example: They labeled an entire town as hateful simply because a small group of white supremacists had lunch at an establishment there. No one in the town leadership even knew about it, but it didn't matter. That's the precedent this man is trying to avoid.

Anonymous said...

Anin 2:33,

There is not any good reason to publish hate !

Are you trying to say that a person does not have the right to "hate?" or express "hateful" ideas? Hate the First Amendment much?

As the cited article states, I would much rather see and know who is writing things with which I disagree rather than having those people hide in the shadows. I would rather see speech - even the undefinable "hate speech" - be within the marketplace of ideas rather than be excluded.

Anonymous said...

8:27 PM You have a skewed view of hate. Hate is about people not about activities.

Anonymous said...

Anon 2:20,

So in your world it would be wrong to hate rapists? Thieves? People who batter women? Drunk drivers? Murders?

It is wrong to hate people who espouse what you consider to be hate speech?

Is it wrong to hate people who want to silence, censor and perhaps make it illegal to offer speech with which they disagree?

Is it wrong to hate people who want to deprive people of their rights?