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Ask HN: Thoughts on journalists blaming cloudflare for the el paso shooting?

by mr_puzzled on 8/4/19, 5:47 AM with 10 comments

First of all, the el paso shooting is disgusting and I pray that the survivors find strength to heal.

I came across this tweet by a guardian journalist : https://twitter.com/juliacarriew/status/1157835371016671232

I'll leave out my opinion on this matter, but what responsibility should corporations take for their platfroms used for illegal activities, even though cloudflare itself does not host the content? Do you think once companies start giving in to social media pressure, it might become a weapon to censor people? What practical measures can we take as tech companies and more generally the government to bring mass shootings to zero?

  • by bifrost on 8/4/19, 6:07 AM

    Censorship is disgusting, we should all oppose it.

    Its literally removing the ability for the populace to educate itself.

    Journalists blaming cloudflare should be ashamed of themselves, they've just basically called out their lack of intelligence and we should shun those journalists.

  • by thosakwe on 8/4/19, 2:39 PM

    This is a pretty un-charitable/misleading reading of the original Tweet. The journalist in question did not say that CloudFlare was responsible for the shooting (that would be a pretty outrageous claim), but that 8chan is able to still exist, in part, due to the fact that they are a CloudFlare customer. Two fundamentally different things.

    That being said, the wording that 8chan "receives protection" from CF is also a bit misleading, because it's not a gift from CF, but a service the admins presumably pay for.

    I don't think CF should be receiving the blame for this incident at all - DDOS protection isn't what's hosting hateful content, letting it sit and fester unmoderated, letting terrorists get their hands on high-powered weapons, sitting in Congress avoiding taking any actual action, etc.

  • by luckylion on 8/4/19, 7:06 AM

    What a weird angle. "If CF didn't protect them from DDOS, we could take care of the issue vigilante style".

    The only issue I have with CF in that regard is their anonymization service: you can generally hide behind their shield both technically and legally. As I understand, that's not the issue with this 8chan site? If it's known who is running it, go after them the normal way the legal frameworks provide.

  • by lm28469 on 8/4/19, 11:22 AM

    Imagine the mental gymnastic you have to go through to convince yourself that shootings are caused by cloudflare....

    It's a societal issue, there are literally hundreds of measures that should be taken before even considering banning websites for wrongthink.

  • by ratsmack on 8/4/19, 4:49 PM

    In many of these shooting instances, I have noticed a bit of hypocrisy in that small sites like 8chan are attacked as being highly nefarious and evil, but the mainstream sites that have hosted accounts of several mass shooters are mostly given a pass by journalists and Silicon Valley, et al... I don't understand why they are not all treated the same.

  • by duxup on 8/4/19, 1:20 PM

    Knowingly hosting credible threats of violence I think carries some responsibility (although I wouldn't enforce it by law).

    Beyond that I think it is a dangerous idea to take it much further.

  • by bitxbitxbitcoin on 8/4/19, 1:10 PM

    Would you want to live in a world without Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the real question. The journalist seems like he would. I wouldn't.