No Stupid Questions

This reads to me like:

Cloudflare is consistent in their refusal to censor legal free expression by refusing service to those sites. As a result, they serve sites containing offensive, but legal free expression, as well as expression that should be illegal (and may already be - specifically when it comes to). People are mad about this.

To emphasize their refusal to police the content of sites they host, Cloudflare used to simply forward complaints about their customers to those customers. They thought they were making it clear that they were doing this, and maybe they were, but sometimes people miss those sorts of disclaimers and given the subject matter of these complaints, that was a bad process on their part. They haven’t apologized but they have amended their process in the years since.

Did I miss anything?

Now, I get that “free speech absolutist” is a dog whistle for “I’m a white supremacist” thanks to the ex-CEO of a particular social media company, but there’s a difference between

1. saying it and not doing it, and
2. actually doing it

And unlike the aforementioned anti-semitic billionaire, Cloudflare is pretty consistent about this. They refuse to block torrent sites as well, and I’ve never heard of them blocking a site that was legal and should have been kept around. (As opposed to immediately blocking the account of the guy who was tracking his personal jet.)

That all said, Cloudflare did eventually cancel the accounts of The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms.

I wouldn’t feel as strongly about this if the examples of corporations that do censor speech didn’t show that they’re consistently bad at it. I’m talking social media sites, payment processors, hosts, etc.. If Cloudflare were more willing to censor sites, that would be a bad thing. And they agree:

After terminating services for 8chan and the Daily Stormer, "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," write Prince and Starzak in their August 31 blog post.

These past experiences led Cloudflare executives to conclude "that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold," write Prince and Starzak. "Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities."

To be clear, I’m not saying that social media sites should stop censoring nazis. I’m saying that social media sites are bad at censoring nazis and just as often they censor activists, anti-fascists, and minorities who are literally just venting about oppression, and I see no reason why that would be different at a site level instead.

When you have a site that’s encouraging harassment, hate speech, cyber-bullying, defamation, etc., or engaging in those things directly, that should be a legal issue for the site’s owners. And on that note, my understanding is that there’s a warrant out for Anglin’s arrest and he owes $14 million to one of the women whose harassment he encouraged.

Cloudflare said they’re trying to basically behave like they’re a public utility. They’re strong proponents of net neutrality, which is in line with their actions here. There are reasons to be suspicious of or concerned about Cloudflare, but this isn’t a great example of one.

Side note: It’s funny to me that the comment immediately below yours says that one of the reasons to distrust Cloudflare is because of a concern that they may have been abusing their power (due to effectively being a mitm) and censoring particular kinds of content.