Friday 1 December 2017

Week 6: Cloudflare CEO on Policing Nazis Online: We Never Considered 'People Could Just Be Really Evil' | Gizmodo UK

Cloudflare CEO on Policing Nazis Online: We Never Considered 'People Could Just Be Really Evil' | Gizmodo UK: "“And by the way, whenever any company makes these decisions, it comes down to a small set of individuals making what is ultimately a very arbitrary decision,” he explained. “Because if you don’t believe there are whole bunch of neo-Nazi sites using Google and Go Daddy, you’re not paying attention. But, the crowd isn’t screaming about them.”

Financial pressure is just as effective. Customers may easily choose to run to the competition rather than deal with the PR headache.

“If we’re really honest about what causes Facebook and Twitter to control content, it has much less to do with regulators on the hill and much more to do with the people sitting in Proctor & Gamble’s office, saying I don’t want [our] ads to be next to terrorist content. That drives a lot of decisions.”

 While Prince believes web providers should remain neutral, he had few answers for how the perilous system he described could be fixed. Forcing internet companies to takedown extremist content has a sanitising (and thus distorting effect) on political discourse. Prince urged ongoing conversations to prevent regulating the internet into an anodyne, overly curated space. While Prince still thinks that pulling services from Daily Stormer was the right decision for Cloudflare at the time, he’s troubled by how short-sighted the conversation surrounding the decision has been.

One troubling outcome from the incident: increased notoriety. “There are three times more searches for this content after these guys got taken off the internet than there were before,” Prince noted." 'via Blog this'

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