The Very Public Dangers of Private Businesses Without Ethics
Why Cloudflare’s Technology Protects 8Chan and Exposes The Rest of Us
Three Saturdays ago, a 19-year-old man posted an anti-Semitic manifesto to 8chan, an anonymous online message board. Two hours later, he took an assault rifle into a synagogue in Poway, California, and proceeded to kill one woman and injure three others.
During the attack, on the same website where his manifesto was published, other posters encouraged the killer to “get a high score.” To kill more Jews.
This in not the first time this has occurred on 8Chan and, sadly, it will probably not be the last. The man who killed 50 Muslims in a Christchurch, New Zealand mosque last month posted a manifesto to the same site. It was this killing and manifesto, in fact, that inspired Saturday’s killer.
This is shocking, but not surprising. 8Chan was invented for this very reason. It’s founder, Frederick Brennan, found the boundaries and Terms of Services for most social networks to be too limiting and wanted to give a platform to even the worst voices in the world, from pedophiles to Nazis to criminals. And it worked. So well, in fact, that Brennan has distanced himself from the site. In an interview after the latest shooting, he said, “It was very difficult in the days that followed to know that I had created that site. It wouldn’t surprise me if this happens again.” But, despite its own founder having profound regrets about what he has created, there’s one company that doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.
It has a total of 900 employees and just secured $150 million in funding in anticipation of an IPO valuation of $3.5 billion.
It’s called Cloudflare, which is responsible for the protection and acceleration of online content. That content could be your sock purchases or it could be the planning and execution of a murder plot. To their CEO, Matthew Prince, it really doesn’t matter. To Prince, his company is, in his words, “content-neutral”. Which means he is happy to accept money from any website.
In the wake of the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, with a nation focused on the rise of white supremacy after the vehicular murder of protester Heather Heyer, the nation’s preeminent neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer, came under renewed scrutiny. Domain registrar GoDaddy! discontinued working with the site along with other tech companies providing services. Only after days of public pressure did Cloudflare finally relent.
Even in the days after dumping the site, Cloudflare CEO Prince still had reservations about having discontinued working with The Daily Stormer. “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet,” Prince said, “ No one should have that power.”
This stance might be a principled one, save for the fact that Prince had readily accepted The Daily Stormer’s money and that the Daily Stormer is still on the Internet today without Prince’s help. When considering Prince’s “free speech” ethos, he neglects to mention his company’s profit motives or the idea that “free speech” doesn’t apply to private companies, it only protects us from our government.
Of course, what can you expect from Prince, whose company has provided protection for content from at least seven groups on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations including al-Quds Brigades and the Taliban? Fuzzy laws around providing material support to these organizations have enabled Cloudflare to keep providing services to these groups even as they threaten American lives both domestically and overseas.
So, knowing that terrorists aren’t an issue for Cloudflare, 8Chan will likely concern them even less. While young people will continue to be radicalized by neo-Nazi groups and egged on to commit violent acts, more manifestos about killing Jews and Muslims will be posted and comments will be posted during said attacks to spur even more death and destruction, Prince will continue to hide behind his fictional “free speech” argument. It is an ideology that he has constructed for himself.
And yet, for this clear breach of responsibility and morality for a business, Prince will still be hailed as a genius on the stage of Techcrunch, investors like Fidelity, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm will hand him even more millions and his IPO will be a smashing success, netting him likely several billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the manifesto from last weekend’s killer on 8Chan which was inspired by the manifesto from last month’s killer on 8chan will inspire next month’s manifesto which will be posted on 8Chan.
And Matthew Prince probably still won’t care.
