Since inception, we have committed to supporting our users in allowing for the maximum range of expression possible -- to the point where we once spent four months unable to accept payments at all because PayPal, our payment processor at the time, wanted us to censor content that was perfectly legal under US law but that they found distasteful and we refused. We continue to operate under those principles, and that isn't going to change. But that commitment has never been "we will never remove content", because every service that accepts user-generated content has users who post spam, illegal material, and content that skirts the boundaries of legality but causes significant offline harm. We've never allowed people to post other people's personally identifying information such as phone numbers or Social Security numbers, for instance, even though that isn't automatically illegal in most states.

Operating a business that provides service on the internet inherently includes difficult questions about content policy, and operating a business that provides service on the internet and is committed to allowing the widest range of expression possible makes those questions even more difficult. People often report content to us that they find distasteful and think should be removed, and we have clear, concrete policies about what qualifies for removal and what doesn't. Cloudflare's public response yesterday shows that they believe they should not deny security services to any site at all, for any reason, no matter what content that site contains. As a company that's spent fourteen years wrestling with those difficult questions about how to balance user expression with legal requirements and the question of preventing offline harm, we believe we can't continue to do business with a company whose answers to those difficult questions about content policy and content removal is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.