People have the freedom to say awful things. That's part of free speech. But shunning then for saying these awful things is also part of my free speech. Calling on others to shun them for saying these awful things is also part of my free speech. You cannot have free speech without also allowing people to be ostracized (even in organized campaigns) for how they use it.
Sure, but the internet's centralized nature breaks this dynamic because the "public square" is being privatized. Imagine if you couldn't print political flyers without active participation from the paper company, or if you couldn't host meetups without the wholesale endorsement of the phone company.
What we are seeing is not a shunning by society at large. What we're seeing is a fight between two radical (and generally unhinged) groups of individuals on the internet.
The real problem is that these technical problems devolve into bureaucratic social problems due to the design of the internet. If there is a silver lining here, it's that more people will be encouraged to learn about censorship-resistant networks like Tor.
I think a return to voluntary communication on a peer-to-peer basis may one day return sanity to the network, because direct-messaging retains much of the IRL social characteristics you've described.
> Imagine if you couldn't print political flyers without active participation from the paper company, or if you couldn't host meetups without the wholesale endorsement of the phone company.
Except, Cloudflare isn't required to run a website. If you are printing 100s or even 1000s of flyers your home printer might be fine. If you are printing millions your probably going to need to make a significant investment or work with a professional printer. The same is true for Cloudflare in this scenario. It doesn't enable running the site, it just helps scale it for cheaper. If the professional printers/cloudflare's of the world decide to shun you, yeah you'll have a harder time getting your message out, but I see that as a feature, not a bug. If I shun someone I don't want someone else handing them a megaphone to scream in my ear.
>Except, Cloudflare isn't required to run a website.
A sizable CDN, which Cloudflare is one example of, is practically required to serve a website seeing any significant traffic in this day and age.
And therein lies the problem.
The internet was founded on a philosophy of decentralization, the fucking thing was designed to withstand all the destructive forces of a nuclear war. If one part of the network is damaged or otherwise inaccessible, the rest of the network will route around the damage to reestablish connections.
But that's not the state of the internet today. The internet today is heavily centralized around a small handful of key players. Cloudflare is one such player. Without the blessings of such players, you have no ability to access or do anything on the internet.
For now the vast majority of people receive and enjoy the blessings and thus aren't compelled to do anything about this fucking gigantic elephant in the room. But those blessings aren't guaranteed, and the fact we must rely on such frivolous blessings is by itself preposterous.
>If you are printing millions your probably going to need to make a significant investment or work with a professional printer.
What we're seeing here is a professional printer refusing services because he doesn't like what's being printed, with no basis on legality which is the only grounds upon which any business may refuse to render services.
Anyone who claims to support free speech shouldn't be happy about any of this turn of events. You don't spread free speech by censoring speech, the results are quite the opposite every single time and these will all add up to come crashing down eventually.
And especially to those celebrating or ecstatic this happened: Be careful what you wish for, because when your turn to get cancelled comes up, nobody might be around to help you.
The whole point of free speech is to protect and guarantee the expression of disagreeable speech, because nobody's going to censor speech they like or agree with.
> What we're seeing here is a professional printer refusing services because he doesn't like what's being printed, with no basis on legality which is the only grounds upon which any business may refuse to render services.
A business can in general refuse to do business with anyone for any reason. There are certain federal restrictions, namely religion, race, gender etc, but outside that refusing to do business with someone is an inherent part of free speech. Advocating for requiring a company to do business with someone they don't want to is advocating against free speech
>Advocating for requiring a company to do business with someone they don't want to is advocating against free speech
Yes, quite so, and in fact I agree that Cloudflare has a right to do or not do business as they please.
The real, fundamental problem is that the internet has become too centralized, such that a few entities can direct the rest with impunity.
However, I think we can agree that fixing the centralization of the internet at this point is a fool's errand.
I recall recently about a story of how a father got kicked out by Google for uploading some pictures to his Google account. Fundamentally, KF getting kicked out by Cloudflare is the same thing: Customers getting kicked out by companies because of disagreeable content; companies which are effectively gatekeepers to the internet at large.
So the next best way, in the interim, to keep the internet working in some fashion, is to have businesses like Cloudflare not kick customers out simply for saying or having disagreeable things.
With great powers come great responsibilities, as the saying goes.
You can't print political flyers without a press. Freedom of the press has never implied everyone is owed access to someone else's press or other services.
There are very narrowly tailored prior restraint on the freedom of association in the US, and outside of those companies have wide latitude. The New York Times is not obligated to donate column inches to the KKK, for example.
> I think a return to voluntary communication on a peer-to-peer basis
That's what we have now; the issue I believe you appear to have is you're not a peer. Most of us never were; how many actually ran their own ISP back in the day or actually entered into a traffic peering agreement?
That's why society is dependent on large companies staying in their lane. If a hospital decides to refuse service to bad people because the world would be better if they died, we'd obviously condemn that. The same is true of some utilities, but general businesses can shun people.
Cloudflare tried to stay in its lane, but it was dragged out of it by the Twitter mob.
> Cloudflare tried to stay in its lane, but it was dragged out of it by the Twitter mob.
That's bullshit. Cloudflare removed the sex worker-friendly social media network Switter over NO complaints or likewise.
Cloudflare seems eagerly anti-sexwork and pro nazi. Except when the whole internet comes out and says "NO".
Cloudflare can play pretend that it's some "core functionality" of the internet, but their core business is "safeguarding booters to DDoS sites" while they provide the DDoS cover as a business racket. One might even describe it as "organized"
I wouldn't call the passing of SESTA/FOSTA "no complaints or likewise". In that specific instance, you can very much put the blame on lawmakers being more anti-sexwork than anti-nazis, if you want to frame it that way.
I don't think I've claimed that these things aren't illegal or that KF is innocent, so please don't suggest I did. thanks.
Cloudflare clearly doesn't care about illegal things their users do unless it becomes a risk or too inconvenient to them. Content on KF might be illegal, but hosting KF with such content is generally not, which is why they could point to Section 230 and stick their fingers in their ears.
Whereas SESTA turned Switter into a massive legal risk for them, because it removed that protection. I bet if a SESTA-style law existed against KFs content Cloudflare would have kicked them off very quickly. And in reverse I think there is a good chance that if SESTA hadn't passed, CF would still host Switter.
(And just to be clear, SESTA is a terrible law, and trying to "fix" CFs attitude by making more such laws is not worth it. But clearly lawmakers decided kicking sexworkers of the internet was more important/worth it than kicking places like KF off the internet when making it)
FOSTA/SESTA was a poorly-conceived law that created a lot of potential liability for the ostensible goal of reducing sex trafficking. Pretty much all sex work is potentially sex trafficking, so any corporate lawyer will tell management to stay as far away from that as possible.
The USA cannot criminalize being a "Nazi" because freedom of political affiliation and political expression is a core right. The USA went through political inquisitions in past decades to root out communism among US citizens, and nobody looks back on that with approval.
As an aside, "Nazi" has devolved into a completely meaningless term, so I'd prefer something a bit more specific.
