Cloudflare Terminates 8chan (cloudflare.com) 940
"We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time," writes Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.
"The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit." We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we've considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive -- regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.
Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem.
I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan.
Prince adds that since terminating the Daily Stormer they've been "engaging" with law enforcement and civil society organizations to "try and find solutions," which include "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence." Earlier today Prince had used this argument in defense of Cloudflare's hosting of the 8chan, telling the Guardian "There are lots of competitors to Cloudflare that are not nearly as law abiding as we have always been." He added in today's blog post that "We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare's scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem."
"We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often.... Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions..."
"What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. We, and other technology companies like us that enable the great parts of the Internet, have an obligation to help propose solutions to deal with the parts we're not proud of. That's our obligation and we're committed to it."
"The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit." We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we've considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive -- regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.
Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem.
I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan.
Prince adds that since terminating the Daily Stormer they've been "engaging" with law enforcement and civil society organizations to "try and find solutions," which include "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence." Earlier today Prince had used this argument in defense of Cloudflare's hosting of the 8chan, telling the Guardian "There are lots of competitors to Cloudflare that are not nearly as law abiding as we have always been." He added in today's blog post that "We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare's scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem."
"We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often.... Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions..."
"What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. We, and other technology companies like us that enable the great parts of the Internet, have an obligation to help propose solutions to deal with the parts we're not proud of. That's our obligation and we're committed to it."
Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
As a corporate statement, this is one of the more decent, responsible ones I've heard. They tried hard to serve without judging, but draw the line at instigating acts of mass murder.
I can't really see a company going, "meh, supporting people instigating mass murder is ok with us!"
I really can't find much fault with cloudflare on this one.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand why they did it, but the usual issue is by rejecting this one instance, they then may become responsible for everything.
First, you have to absorb the issue wherein you got rid of this one group for obviously bad behavior. But every person capable of absolute outrage over every minor thing is now going to see you as weak and find all possible means to force you to censor opposition to their world-view. There's a lot of these people out there. Most of whom deserved to be ignored completely.
Second, I believe the law has a few serrations in it when it comes to networks and the content they carry. By getting involved at all, you may then be responsible for anything your customers are doing...and obviously that's a bad position to be in for so many reasons.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like I don't share your concern, but I'd rather handle SJW whining than fascist governments or murderous lunatics.
Re: (Score:2)
The solution is to have sensible legislation that reflects properly the real life problems and facts, and not old customs and prejudice. Not being able to do that killed the Roman republic.
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The solution is to have sensible legislation that reflects properly the real life problems and facts, and not old customs and prejudice. Not being able to do that killed the Roman republic.
The issue of hosting 8chan has as I perceived it, been a question of morals. Are you suggesting that morals be regulated by the government to a higher extend or have I missed your point?
Morals? (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue of hosting 8chan has as I perceived it, been a question of morals.
We're talking about murder here. I think the moral component of that is pretty well settled.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
IDK, someone down the thread is saying this is a slippery slope. First they came for the mass murderers, and I said nothing because I was not a mass murderer. Then they came for the serial killers, and I said nothing because I wasn't a serial killer. Then they came for the domestic partner murderers, and I said nothing because I'm not a domestic partner murderer. Then they came for the drug-deal-gone-wrong murderers, and I said nothing because I don't murder my drug dealing partners.
Where will this fascist
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This is exactly how tough on crime laws and asset forfeiture started. It went after heavy criminals, and now people driving across the country with their life savings or a gift from their dad lose all of their money to the police without commiting a crime.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You cannot solve this problem with fascism, which is what censorship is.
You can only solve problems through education and care.
The people claiming that mass shootings are not due to mental illness are off their fucking nut themselves. No well-adjusted individual murders people. Not even one person. More than half of the basic premises upon which psychology is based are unreproducible and/or unsupportable. One of those is that mental illness must have a biological component.
We must educate people as to what
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Fascism isn't censorship. Nor is all censorship fascist. Not that they're orthogonal. But neither are they equivalent. That's a category error.
Some speech isn't protected by the First Amendment. For example, 'fighting words' which instigate violence. Or lies disseminated for profit, falling under fraud. Defamation isn't protected. Neither are threats. Or obscenity, such as child pornography. Lots of speech is legally censored, even in the United States. And that isn't fascist.
https://www.hg.org/legal-artic... [hg.org]
And let's not forget Cloudflare is a global company and must also meet non US government speech requirements too. Such as laws against hate speech, common in the EU. That's also not fascist, being a direct response to actual fascist content by Nazi kooks.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
they then may become responsible for everything.
No, not really. They become responsible for everything they serve, and this is a good thing. You cannot pretend that what you profit from does not concern you.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, I believe the law has a few serrations in it when it comes to networks and the content they carry. By getting involved at all, you may then be responsible for anything your customers are doing...and obviously that's a bad position to be in for so many reasons.
Interestingly enough, no matter how many times this stupid argument is brought up, it continues to fail to match up with reality; it's nothing more than a talking point of worthless pieces of shit that have finally been kicked off someone else's server because they were a piece of shit to start with. It doesn't work this way... and prefacing a stupid talking point with "i believe" or "they might" doesn't make it anything more than a stupid straw man argument, it only reinforces that who ever spouted the straw man YET AGAIN either intentionally hasn't been paying attention, or is too fucking stupid to pay attention.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand why they did it, but the usual issue is by rejecting this one instance, they then may become responsible for everything.
The law doesn't support that argument, carriers are allowed to censor whatever they like without becoming responsible for it.
Also, at this point they are only reacting to events, not actively policing the site. It sounds like they are thinking about monitoring those sites actively though, but presumably if they do then sites like 8chan will just move to other providers who don't.
Re: Huh (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does anything here have to be a legal argument? Cloudflare is a private company and it can do whatever the hell it likes. Today they'd like 8chan to fuck off, and so it fucks off. This doesn't weaken any other arguments, not legal, not moral.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)
You'd be surprised to know then that contracts are terminated every day, some arbitrtralily or for any number of reasons.
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Re:Huh (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm... so ... if I want a platform gone, all I need to do is publish some stupid "manifesto" on it, then go on a killing spree?
Brb, logging into Facebook.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)
The Christchurch terrorist not only posted his manifesto, he live streamed his crime on Facebook.
Re: (Score:3)
What? Why is Facebook still a thing?
What else must we do... I mean, how much more needs to happen?
ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:4, Insightful)
ITT: morons thinking the First Amendment compels private corporations to give them a soapbox, yet somehow forgetting the right of free association.
..cloudflare is adapting the speech (Score:3)
By doing this cloudflare is adopting the speech. it's like telephone company apologizing for crimes done by telephone company customers.
Why they would just not silently terminate their contract or whatever I don't really get. they get no bonus points for announcing that they're not "proud" of 8chan. why would they need to be proud or ashamed of something that's not their speech and not their pulpit, they were just a wire service provider. Now they're acting like if 8chan was a cloudflare provided service. i
Re: (Score:2)
Because they are a commercial company and as such need customers. They tried the we're only providing a service defense an failed spectacularly, (just scroll down the slashdot stories).
Re:ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the reason we "don't care" is that corporations are not the government, and you're just waving your hands and lying with a false equivalency since most people disagree with you.
If you require the 1st Amendment to be different than it actually is in order to mean something, then that just tells me you're a really weak supporter of the 1st Amendment. It doesn't tell me to stop supporting what the system for free speech actually is.
Re:ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's notable here that 8chan doesn't actually break any laws. They believe in absolute freedom to speak within the boundaries of the law. They bring the hammer down when someone actually posts something illegal. This is the infinity-shaped canary in the speech coal mine. Cloudflare kicked off Daily Stormer and we weren't supposed to care because "muh white supremacists" and now we're not supposed to care about 8chan because "muh trolls" and "freeze peach r not apply to teh private companies!!!11" If you only realized how absurdly stupid you are by parroting that line, perhaps you'd stop being a bird-brained Macaw and understand something bigger than one-liners written by abusive radical far-left derp connoisseurs.
Also relevant, since "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is tightly related: freedom of speech by definition must mean freedom from consequences. [youtube.com]
Re: ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you see, that's different because he sees homosexual assholes who are trying to force their lifestyle on some random bakery as his political team mates but if a Christian couple got turned away from a gay owned bakery then it was be the gay bakers fighting against evil fascist Christians and those gay bakers would be heroes.
There's a word we use for people like that: hypocrite. Cognitive dissonance works, too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can compel me to help you live your lifestyle, then yes you are forcing it on me. Compelled action goes far beyond "tolerance".
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm giving 100000:1 odds that this guy doesn't believe in the right to discriminate when it comes to baking gay cakes, etc.
Baking a lesbian couple a cake doesn't result in innocent people being shot to death.
Re: (Score:3)
The moron is you. Where's the line? Seriously, where is the exact fucking line?
There is some kind of logical fallacy there but I don't know the name of it. Just because you can't identify the line doesn't mean you can't identify things that are very far to one side of it. This applies very widely. We can't precisely define what the line for life is, yet you are clearly alive and a rock clearly is not. Yelling "seriously, where is the exact fucking line" doesn't make either of those cases any less clear.
For
Re:ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You should look up that recent Haidt study where the right is way better at describing what the left believes than the left is able to describe what the right believes.
Re: (Score:2)
I see it more the other way around. right wingers are obsessed with how everything makes them feel, but then make up a whole 'common sense' framework so they can pretend that their feelings are 'rational'.
This; That's rasist - I'm just being rational.
Re: (Score:3)
"Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal"
RAH, whose wisdom and insights would have been much missed today. Trump is an uninteresting variation on the theme of Nehemiah Scudder.
Re: (Score:3)
Ben Shapiro is a great example of that. Mr. "facts don't care about your feelings" finds gay people icky, so he found a way to claim that god also finds them icky and then based his "rational, fact based" arguments on that on the assumption that god is infallible.
Re: (Score:3)
I see it more the other way around. right wingers are obsessed with how everything makes them feel,
That is projection at it's finest. Congrats.
Re:ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why the same people complaining about low wages for unskilled workers are the same people asking to open borders and flood the economy with unskilled workers.
Nice straw man ya got there.
I know hundreds of liberals and Democrats and not a single one of them wants anything like what you claim. None of them want 'open borders' or to 'flood the economy with unskilled workers'.
Give me a fuckin' break and stop with your Fox 'News' talking points.
A lot of us whacky liberals just object to splitting up families and putting kids in cages. Crazy, huh? But you, you're fine with it, right?
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Re:ZOMG muh freezed peaches! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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They're blind to their own wallets as well.
An ER visit costs 10x as much as visiting the regular doctor. Yet every day tens to hundreds of thousands of people walk into ERs with toothaches, colds, back pain, etc. Why? Because they don't have good health insurance, and the ER has an obligation to treat them.
And where does the money to treat them at the 10x markup come from? From the overhead of the hospital. And that money comes from our pockets, as we pay stupidly high insurance premiums and hospital costs.
Makes no sense (Score:2, Interesting)
Fox News is the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Fox News that's the problem, a mainstream news outlet spewing extreme views. Remember when they promoted openly carrying guns to Democrat campaign events, until one of their fans shot a Democrat, Gabrielle Giffords in the face at a campaign event.
Then they went all 'thoughts and prayers' and pretending like they hadn't incited it.
Trump does his division strategy, "{group A} you cannot have {right} because {group B} took it from you". Fox News repeats and amplifies the lies until 8channer go out and kil
Re: (Score:2)
Not if shootings have became a ritualized part of a community.
Re: (Score:3)
It makes no sense to shutdown the place where the kooks and criminals hang out. Isn't it better to keep them all in one place?
Except these people aren't criminals. They are big mouths in an echo chamber that consistently gets louder and louder and louder until someone snaps. That one person then becomes a criminal supported by the peanut gallery of internet toughguys.
It's like a full scale riot. The people in the riot aren't all bad but the situation and the concentration of anger amplifies their temperament. Disperse them and the riot calms down. Likewise here, it's better to *not* have all weak minds being subjected to a very wi
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Violence is a very special kind of crime in that the criminal justice system has zero hope of even making victims whole. Withe other types of crime, there can b
Re:Makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
In 2018, 285 people were murdered with a knife in England and Wales. That year, there were about 59m people in those countries.
In 2017 (latest year figures are available), 14542 people were murdered with a gun in the US. That year, there were about 326m people in the US.
If we scale England and Wales up to the size of the US, there would have been about 1575 people murdered with a knife, ie about a tenth of the number of gun murders. Put another way, if the US didn't have all those guns floating about, there'd likely have been another 12,000+ people alive in 2017 who are instead dead.
Turns out the tool matters too, as well as the people using the tool! Who knew! Amazing that. Perhaps that's the US bans private citizens from deploying nuclear weapons, helicopter gunships, cruise missiles and tanks.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure why you think that that, because there are 20k gun suicides in the US on top of 14k gun murders, this constitutes *less* of a reason to institute stronger gun controls. You'll need to spell out that particularly sparkling argument in full. I'm sure it'll be a hoot.
We do, in fact, restrict the sale of knives in England and Wales in various ways. Some types of knife are banned entirely. Most cannot be sold legally to minors. Etc. Your attempt at a reductio ad absurdum fails at the first hurdle: i
Re: (Score:3)
Canada has about a quarter of the guns per head that the US does: about 13m vs about 400m(!)
Sweden has about a sixth of the guns per head: about 2.3m.
Canada has an extensive and restrictive licensing system for owning guns. Sweden's is even tighter: "To apply and obtain a gun license, the perspective gun owner approaches the local police. The applicant must be in good standing and at least 18 years old ... The applicant must be a member of an approved shooting club for at least six months or have passed a h
Re: (Score:3)
The choice is between "ready access to guns and lots of murders" or "less ready access to guns and fewer murders".
And you've still not addressed the substantive point I put to you: "If US culture is why gun murders are so frequent in the US cf other countries, that's a clear rationale for why guns should be *more* stringently regulated in the US than in other countries"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a drug-gang culture in the inner cities that makes up a bulk of the crime. Its actually being caused by a decline in religiousity, stable families for parenting children and ensuring they study and go to school, and also a decline in the availability of jobs caused by de-industrialization. Guns do not cause crime and you could ban them, and crime would increase because all it would do is take away guns from law abiding people and that would embolden the gangs. So banning a weapon does not take away t
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not assuming that violence depends *only* on the tools available, I'm assuming that ready access to deadly weapons makes it easier for people to kill people.
The rest of your post continues to make my argument for me: Americans already show a greater propensity to kill each other than English and Welsh people. Then fuel is thrown on the flame by making it really easy to get hold of guns. The net net is that Americans are murdered at much higher rates than English and Welsh people, and cutting access for
Guess they don't have the morals (Score:3)
And just kicking the can down the road to a place where less visibility will lead to worse.
Re:Guess they don't have the morals (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The irony of people on the right looking askance at the morality of business decisions. Whatever happened to a commitment to a business's ability to decide its own best course for itself. Next thing, you'll be wanting the government to step in and use regulation to force Cloudflare to host a chat it doesn't want to host.
2. There's no evidence that less visibility will make things worse. It's just a hypothetical argument with some form of rationale behind it ("if people hide, we can't see what they're doing". There is, however, evidence that more visibility for these vile ideas has made things worse, as counted in the increasing number of injuries and deaths caused by people espousing these vile ideas over the past several years. And your argument rather ignores the fact that people who want to plot actual harms may not, in fact, be completely fucking stupid, and so they may choose to pursue such plots in hiding while also availing themselves of the company of like-minded vile people on public boards.
So, that was a lie. (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, that was a lie. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ars Technica article from 2017 "Cloudflare’s CEO has a plan to never censor hate speech again."
And he changed his mind. So what? He can do whatever the fuck he wants with Cloudflare, including enforcing some standards of behavior.
In other words, stop crying. Start your own version of Cloudflare and and then you can support all the Nazi scumbags and pedos you want.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So, that was a lie. (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson to learn from this is a very old one: Never say Never
Oh good (Score:2)
With that out of the way the crazy people will surely stop being crazy.
The first amendment is a hard road (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedom of speech is a hard thing to handle, which is why most people don't believe in it. That's why only the United States guarantees free speech, with a couple of carveouts for public safety.
It's sad, but understandable that Cloudflare would dump 8chan. Taking a principled stand is hard. Standing firm when it sounds like you're defending a bunch of shit-eating anti-social losers is hard. Cloudflare doesn't get paid enough to deal with that sort of crap.
Re: (Score:3)
... That's why only the United States guarantees free speech...
I'm not sure this is terribly accurate. Many European countries are signatories to the ECHR which includes the right of expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. All signatories are obliged to and, for the most part, give effect to these rights. Difficult issues arise when exercise this right simultaneously infringes another - e.g. article 8: privacy. In these cases there's a balance to be made. It's probably fair to say that the US puts more weight on freedom of expression over other rights, compared
Re: (Score:3)
Funny enough, some of the countries that don't guarantee it have more de-facto free speech today than the US.
Yes, my government doesn't "guarantee" it. But then again, no loonie will call my employer and ruin my career because I dared to say something that huwt a widdle feeling.
Hard call (Score:5, Interesting)
That was in some ways a hard call for Cloudflare to make, but in other ways it was dead simple.
Cloudflare has the right to refuse service to them, that's a given, so this argument could end right there. But there's more to it than that.
I'm a free speech advocate, I almost always defend the right to speak and say what you want, period.
At the same time though, I recognize that speech has consequences, including real-world consequences. Tolerance of the side-effects of free speech has to have a limit, especially when it gets people hurt or killed.
I have to stand on the side of Cloudfront, despite my belief in the importance of free speech.
It seems that when it comes to baking a wedding cake for say, a lesbian couple, conservatives always defend denyning them the cake by saying things like, "It's okay, they can just go to another baker..."
Well, 8Chan can just go to another provider.
And when there are no more providers, that'll mean they have no place in society, that they are by definition the abnormality, and they'll cease to exist in the marketplace of ideas because they're universally unwanted.
Re: (Score:3)
Speech does not have consequences, poor education and mental health issues have consequences that can be triggered by speech or various other forms of stimuli.
Many people have read various propaganda that promotes violence, but only an extremely small percentage ever actually carry out such attacks.
There are videos online which tell you its possible to fast charge your phone by putting it in the microwave... It should be obvious common sense to anyone that this isn't going to work, and yet people still do i
moronic (Score:3)
[quote]civil society organizations[/quote] ah those organizations who think what they believe is what everybody should believe and everything else is bad..
targetting these 'hate' (according to those civil society organizations ofcourse, the rest of us says 'free speech') is stupid and never works, you should let these people have an outlet to talk about stuff they have in their mind, this has multiple advantages, freeing their mind of this 'hate' so it doesn't stay bottled up, and you can keep track of those people..
Bigger problem is still, how did these people get their guns soooo easily, oh wait it's because they just bought them in a store... the US is the country in the whole world with the highest kills due to 'legal' weapons, and yet they still believe it's a good thing to have normal citizen walking around with weapons... Maybe they should start thinking about removing weapons out of the hands of 'normal' citizen instead of trying to block forums like 8chan...
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Organizing and cheering on real-world violence is so far beyond the pale.
Time to cancel the NFL, then!
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Organizing and cheering on real-world violence is so far beyond the pale.
What part of 8chan is organizing real-world violence? I skimmed through it a bit [8ch.net] and it seems like mostly people talking to themselves. (It's also only marginally worse than youtube comments.)
I would bet that most people who have been calling for 8chan to be banned don't even know why they don't like it.
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8chan, the company, did not violate the letter of the law.
8chan, the users of the site, have violated countless laws, and use the site to help facilitate such actions.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Lock them up for what? Free speech is still a thing. Incitement purely on speech is a tricky thing to litigate and most likely not what the government is capable of, at best you can make the case in a civil suit but not criminal.
The FBI and other agencies, with all their spy powers can't even get actionable intel an open message board - that's where the problem lies.
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But by policing one group, you immediately get dragged in the mud for not policing another group. It's easier to defend a position where you are not removing service for anyone.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So more killings then? (Score:5, Interesting)
A word about the Fairness Doctrine.
What the Fairness Doctrine did was ensure that evidence-based sources of info were made available to people who are exposed to charlatans like flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, etc.
Ignorant people have always existed. Providing balance in the form of evidence-based info helps diminish ignorance.
The Fairness Doctrine was abolished and Fox News is the result. Running a fact-free propaganda channel keeps people ignorant.
Re:So more killings then? (Score:5, Insightful)
No it wasn't. The Fairness Doctrine was a partisan attempt to cull the rise of AM radio talk that was decidedly anti Democrat. Nothing more. It was an attempt (a naked attempt) by government to compel speech. It violated the 1st amendment both literally and in the spirit it was intended.
If Fox News was the result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, then so is MSNBC, Vox, Vice News, TYT, and so forth. I do not, and never will, need my government to "show me" what is fact and what isn't. It's my job to do it. That's why we have a Bill of Rights. So you don't get government-controlled and compelled speech.
Re:So more killings then? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't believe you are correct. The differences in free speech globally is not so much worse in the US that it can explain the number of shootings, there simply is no correlation and if there is it's negative.
What I'd say is different about the US is that shooters are so common they have been fetishized. Resent shootings seemingly have the quality of public performances grounded only superficially in white power etc, but in reality I believe they have become the rituals of a community.
Re: (Score:3)
Sites like 8chan etc are available globally, not just in the US...
The larger numbers of shootings in the US has more to do with the availability of guns.
Getting a gun legally in most other countries is very difficult, and while getting one illegally is still possible it tends to be a lot harder and more expensive because of the much more limited supply. This means that while organised crime groups can still get their hands on guns easily enough, a random crazy guy is unlikely to even know where to look.
Re: (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So more killings then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gets to define "extremist"? Who is the gatekeeper of "extremism"? That's the problem with any of this. I'm not accusing, I'm asking. It's not a loaded question, either. :)
The solution to wrong speech is more speech, not less. But you are absolutely correct in that the El Paso shooter is the one who is at fault. Not rhetoric. Not guns on TV. Not "Nazi views". The idiot who drove to El Paso to shoot brown people bears the sole responsibility for his actions. And we have, in our lust to blame "them" (them being political opponents) lost sight of that. Even the venerated slashdot, with its often misguided AC trolls, has lost sight of the power of speech to be a great equalizer and a way to come together and discuss, argue, yell, but eventually to new insights not possible under governments that suppress "wrong" speech.
I don't want the world to devole into islands of silence. Western Civilization has come too far to let it regress to half-witted idiocy.
Re:So more killings then? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll have to forgive me for thinking further than which idiotic cunt pulled the trigger and trying to understand the underlying causes.
What I do is look at things like https://reclaimthenet.org/twit... [reclaimthenet.org] and ask myself where the people being silenced are going to end up, and whether they're going to feel their views are respected or not.
There is clear censorship of specific politics on major social platforms and that sadly leads to terrible consequences. Try addressing things before they get that far instead of merely looking to hide the problems that the explicit censorship of very obviously moderate viewpoints are causing.
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At least I shared my thoughts with them and didn't fly to the US, buy a gun from Walmart and shoot them in the head with it. Or indeed a milk shake, or a bike lock.
I'm not telling them to shut up. I'm not banning them from the site. I'm not preventing them spreading their idiocy. I'm merely helping them understand another perspective, the existence of which is a genuine shock to some people.
But I was lucky, I didn't go through the whole education system being told my sex and skin colour were inherently evil
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"Posted as AC to avoid the hate I'm sure this comment will attract."
I am a fan of hypocrisy myself
~Humanity
Do tell... your post seems to be covertly praising cloudfare for finally doing something after a long chain of doing nothing but that they are also wrong for finally doing something now that they have had their own breaking point?
And then you post as AC to protect your reputation? What is the purpose of your position? It is contradictory?
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A simpler way to avoid hate: Turn off reply notifications.
Let them hate in the dark, by themselves.
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We didn't have facebook then in 1919 and we won't need it in future either
Then GTFO and move your shit elsewhere.
Re: Boom. (Score:3)
Why is Hitler's ideology so attractive these days to so many people who would have been gassed as defective and degenerate if he had won?
Re: Boom. (Score:5, Interesting)
"The people" who "culled" the Nazies were the Soviets, a totalitarian regime that shared most of its operating characteristics with Nazi Germany and supported Hitler in his wars in Europe in order to weaken the European democracy and prepare it for the "proletarian onslaught". It was the totalitarian ability to mobilize without regard for human cost that lead to the WWII win, but at a horrendous cost.
Luckily for "the people", Hitler realized he'll be stabbed in the back by the SU eventually and decided to stab first, pushing the Soviet Union into an unlikely union with the rest of the world, a union which lasted almost up to the day the WWII enemies were defeated.
How a war will develop is unpredictable, and calling for "culls" makes you look stupid, ignorant and just as dangerous as the neo-Nazis you reply to. The proper way to deal with Nazis is to not let them get hold of political power in the first place.
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"Google to prove me right" is the same as "I'm full of shit", AC.
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Pretty sure the role of any one single grandfather in the culling of the Nazis wasn't particularly important.
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Oh please. I'm a white man and I have more than enough power... shit tons in fact. I can get away with all kinds of things that I would never be able to get away with if I weren't a white man.
White men aren't losing shit... but there are a bunch of people who are paid very well to write articles and rant on 24 hour news stations about how white men are losing everything just because they made a woman superhero, or a black one... or because a muslim woman managed to get elected to congress... oh my how can
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Why do you speak my language you fucking leech?
It is called "an education", look it up. Takes up less time than 8chan, and does miracles for your worldview and your chances in life.
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I had a great uncle that was in the klan during the '50s. He didn't hate anyone, black, brown, or Jewish. But where he lived he had to be a member to get a job. Much like many common Germans where during the war, but worse. You had to be a member of the nazi party or you couldn't work, buy food, and where later rounded up and shot.
One of my political science professors once told me that 90% of the people don't care who rules them or what system of government they life under. Just as long as they ar
Re: what next (Score:5, Interesting)