Except the warnings are anonymous, and don't mention who, when, or where.
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
> What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
Yes, it is, and that’s why the demonization of men’s rights groups is not only counterproductive, but completely irresponsible. You may disagree with specific grievances or talking points, but you shouldn’t discourage groups who feel aggrieved from airing their grievances in a nonviolent way and trying to work within the system to achieve their goals.
There's very interesting psychology research on the topic of radicalization as well as de-radicalization that could come in handy. As well as similar techniques in cult exit counseling.
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
> 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," [the CEO] told Ars. [...] "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,"
So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
> Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes).
Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
Hence the quotes. And if you read the arstechnica article, it's understood the CEO himself realizes he had to make an exception from that position.
You and the poster I responded to are picking nits with absolutes. Aside from pedantics, is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
> is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace. I don't recall AWS ever claiming to be pro free speech yet I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
> I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
I was trying to be generous by assuming the real reason was economic pressure, but yes the way this is worded makes it sound very unprofessional.
> Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace.
AWS can be the honey badger b/c they can afford to not give a crap. I get the impression Cloudflare doesn't have the same luxury yet. I very much admire Lavabit for folding the company on a moral stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit, but not everyone can afford to send employees packing for their belief. You are correct, he compromised, but let's admit 99% of us have limits.
That's a pretty warped view, 8chan is the support system for radicals which in all likelyhood gives them the motivation to commit mass murder since they have an audience to play to and support for their demented views.
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
Motivation is part of it, but there's also an extensive practical support system that provides advice on technique, target selection, troubleshooting and so on.
That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
This. Having this content out in the open means we can monitor it. I totally get why Cloudflare would not want to do business with 8Chan, but every step towards pushing 8Chan and it's members underground is less visibility into the kind of people who operate on the site.
Less visibility for those not already on it looking to join in too though. If it gets forced so far underground that law enforcement can't figure out a way in I don't see how some disaffected youth somewhere could either.
It's not that it would go too underground for law enforcement to find it, it's that it would be limited to terrorist cell networks that mass shooters don't even post in.
They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? And not instead just pushing them further and further into their ideological bubbles (complete with a new self-fulfilled victim complex) on platforms where they are the only ones and they get to police their own wrongthink?
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
> So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums?
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
This is allowing perfection to be the enemy of the good. It's not necessary for an action to completely solve a problem to make it worth doing, it's OK if the action just helps.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a numbers game, just the same as bombing your opponent's barracks or airfields in a conventional war. It doesn't wipe out their capacity but it degrades their infrastructure and communications.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
Yes, but 8ch users have been expecting this since Christchurch, and in any case chan culture has a long history of people on one site raiding an other and causing it to collapse with DDOS or contraband or whatever. It's not hard for people who regularly monitor it to figure out where people will move to.
Perhaps the authorities will closely monitor people who make obscure & dramatic claims online. There's probably an effective scoring system & NLP in place anyways. We think "social credit" only applies to China...
I don't get it, either. Even New Zealand deep-state spy bureaucrats followed around a pro-democracy protestor just to win some favor with the Fijian government. These systems are already abused like this. The Intercept runs a series called Trial and Terror where they pick up on people like this so we know they are doing it. How is NZ following around a pro-democracy protestor and not the NZ shooter? Let's hope it is incompetence. Source, btw: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...
Right, and in order for that to happen they have to be actionable.
If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a
very pro-big government belief structure).
8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.
They don't tend to advertise the means by which they stop terrorist activities that are still in use, to be honest. If you had the best honey trap in the world, would you go on the television and announce it?
Political *chan culture drives mass shootings in the first place by radicalizing antisocial people more. You'd likely have fewer mass shootings you'd need early warning about in the first place.
