on 8/4/2019 cloudflare ceo posted publicly on their blog that were now looking at the data going through their pipes and making decisions about taking it down.
The ramble back and forth shows it was a tough decision, but nonetheless they admit to knowing their power controlling so much of the net, and they actively suggest more countries pass more laws to make them hand over even more. They say they do not do anything with the 1st amendment in mind.
At least they say "We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often"
However the pattern I have seen over the years is that lots of noise is made for cloudflare to take something offline, and they say 'we can't, we don't moderate content, we're a dumb pipe' - so lots of groups complain about stuff they don't like, but free speech keeps going. Well that all changed, and now that all these groups will start to know that they will moderate content it's only a matter of the slippery slope.
this part:
"what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained"
Tells it all to me, but I see it as just the beginning. More will come to them and more will be cancelled. They appear to also be engaging with jurisdictions to also change laws to make it so they can say they are forced to give up the data not that they are voluntarily doing it.
The ramble back and forth shows it was a tough decision, but nonetheless they admit to knowing their power controlling so much of the net, and they actively suggest more countries pass more laws to make them hand over even more. They say they do not do anything with the 1st amendment in mind.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
At least they say "We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often"
However the pattern I have seen over the years is that lots of noise is made for cloudflare to take something offline, and they say 'we can't, we don't moderate content, we're a dumb pipe' - so lots of groups complain about stuff they don't like, but free speech keeps going. Well that all changed, and now that all these groups will start to know that they will moderate content it's only a matter of the slippery slope.
this part: "what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained"
Tells it all to me, but I see it as just the beginning. More will come to them and more will be cancelled. They appear to also be engaging with jurisdictions to also change laws to make it so they can say they are forced to give up the data not that they are voluntarily doing it.
At least that's how I read it.