If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.
If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.
These mass conversations quickly devolve from debates to name-calling and the click-incentivized media is quick to encourage it (more outrage = more clicks = more ads = more $)
Being called e.g. a feminazi by right wing nutjobs happens every day. I don't believe CloudFlare has ever canceled the registration of a feminist site because of it.
This situation was different. It was more serious. The crimes were more obvious, and more hateful. And it's simply not about the name-calling that you think you see against whoever your favorite group (gonna guess "not feminists") on the internet is.
And when serious evil shit happens, I want to live in a world where I can trust moral people to agree that it's serious and evil, and not equivocate to make a bunch of glibertarians feel better.
You don't need to infer who my "favorite groups" are. I'm more interested in actual discussion than playing team games. Some of my favorite people in the world to talk with have complete opposite viewpoints from me. We may not agree, but being able to hold a civilized discussion helps each of us learn. That would never happen if we didn't talk and just called each other names.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kkk-klu-klu...
It honestly seems like you're saying that companies like CloudFlare can't take a stand against real-life, actual nazis because Godwin's Law happened.
And that's why folks like me are so utterly horrified by the behavior of our seemingly moral counterparts on the right. We watched political discourse go off a cliff in the past few days and you guys all want to just wave it off as no big deal and have an argument about statues and domain hosting and stuff. It's a big deal. Not something to Godwin about.
Sorry, who has lost domain hosting because of an unfounded accusation of nazism? This sounds like a straw man to me, informed more from a tribal allegiance than an actual concern.
This doesn't address the fundamental point: that if you declare a willingness to censor anyone, then you'll immediately have a whole lot of people trying to convince you that their personal enemies fall in the censor-worthy category. I don't trust domain registrars or CDNs to be the final arbiters of Who Really Is a Nazi.
How is that what happened, though? This is explicitly an internal decision. CloudFlare made it on its own, without input. They didn't "declare" themselves "willing" to do anything.
Isn't their behavior exactly the solution to the problem you're straw-manning? You allow individuals in the private sector to make their own moral decisions about hosting. Problem solved.
I mean, I'll just say it again: if you can't trust a hosting/distribution agent to make their own decision about white power racism, then you live in a bleak world without any effective morality. That might work within your safe spaces on the internet, but those of us in the real world need to trust each other to get stuff done.