Cloudflare Reverses Long-Held Policy to Remain Content-Neutral, Ends Service to the Daily Stormer

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Cloudflare Reverses Long-Held Policy to Remain Content-Neutral, Ends Service to the Daily Stormer

By CircleID Reporter
August 17, 2017, 6:58 pm PDT Views: 15,280 Add Comment

Cloudflare on Wednesday reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and terminated its service to neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer. Kate Conger reporting in Gizmodo writes: “Prince explained in an internal email to staffers that he doesn’t think CEOs of internet companies should be in the position of policing content on their networks ... that’s a job that should ultimately be left up to law enforcement if the content violates the law—but felt pushed to act because the operators of the Daily Stormer are “assholes.” ... Prince wants to spark a conversation about how tech should respond to abhorrent content, and whether content should be policed by registrars, browsers, or social networks.”

— “Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We’ve stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites,” Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post yesterday. “The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.”

— Apple and PayPal disable payment support from websites selling white nationalist and Nazi apparel. Apple confirmed has also confirmed that it has disabled Apple Pay support for various websites selling sweaters with Nazi logos, T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “White Pride,” and a bumper sticker showing a car plowing into stick figure demonstrators.

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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