Did they suffer any consequences from their mistakes? It's pretty unusual for companies with a history of this kind of abuse to turn over a new leaf, especially without any kind of impetus for the change.
In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.
In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.
Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.
Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.
They outright admit they made the wrong decision on Stormfront and 8chan.
Honestly, that's kind of fine. I don't have a problem if they disagree with people. They're allowed to ultimately have their opinion. The problem was censorship.
They're allowed to believe wrong things so long as they do the right things, like uphold free speech.
I'd prefer businesses/suppliers/contractors not cancel or demean their customers. It's not about believing something wrong, but about publicly shaming people. But yeah I guess that's between them and their customers.
Did they suffer any consequences from their mistakes? It's pretty unusual for companies with a history of this kind of abuse to turn over a new leaf, especially without any kind of impetus for the change.
They say as much in the post:
They outright admit they made the wrong decision on Stormfront and 8chan.
While making sure to take swipes at them by calling them "troll neo-Nazis" and "conspiracy theorists".
Honestly, that's kind of fine. I don't have a problem if they disagree with people. They're allowed to ultimately have their opinion. The problem was censorship.
They're allowed to believe wrong things so long as they do the right things, like uphold free speech.
I'd prefer businesses/suppliers/contractors not cancel or demean their customers. It's not about believing something wrong, but about publicly shaming people. But yeah I guess that's between them and their customers.