Cloudflare vs 8chan

This morning, Cloudflare announced that they would no longer be providing their services to the ‘free speech’-centric message board 8chan, a move that will fairly inevitably lead to it being DDoSed and booted off the internet for some short amount of time. This was Cloudflare’s response to the two recent mass shootings in the state, with at least one of the shooters appearing to have posted his ‘manifesto’ to 8chan.

I think there is a compelling argument to be made that Cloudflare have no right to play judge, jury or executioner, and discontinuing their service to 8chan, as they have in the past with the Daily Stormer, sets a dangerous precedent. I don’t agree though - Cloudflare are a private company, even if they now offer a very public service by propping up a huge portion of total web traffic, and as such are entitled to make any decision they like. While I have never been on 8chan, I’m not going to make any effort to defend it, and think there is a good chance it is every bit as much of a propagator of hate speech as the mainstream media might suggest, and it’s good to know that the decision makers at Cloudflare are scrupulous enough to kick the most extreme sites off their platform.

Well… I say that, but this is 100% a business move, especially with the arguably insensitively timed, virtue-signalling-y blog post. But if free market effects cause companies to do follow some kind of moral code, then I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

The problem though, as acknowledged in said blog post, is that it’s not going to do anything. 8chan will easily find another security provider, and the site will be back up in a matter of days, if not hours. It will continue to provide a safe heaven for the alt right to share their vitriol, and now the genie is out of the bottle, it won’t go back in. 8chan could be chased around the internet, kicked off of every service provider out there, it’d find a way to service, much like The Pirate Bay has. Even if it was shut down, it would inevitably rear it’s ugly head in one form or another shortly afterward. The nature of my beloved internet is such that once born, something cannot die, no matter how despicable and reprehensible it may be.

Cloudflare giving 8chan the boot isn’t the answer to the problem of perpetuating extreme views on the internet, but it pains me to say that I don’t have any better suggestions right now either.