Please do not make negative generalizations about groups of people, even as examples, in the comments to dw-news.
We have not, nor will we, ever promised that we won't remove content on the site. Every site that accepts user generated content needs to remove some of it, in order to get rid of spam, remove content that exposes us to legal liability, or remove content that causes offline harm. The restrictions we place are as minimal as we can make them, but they do exist.
That having been said: nothing about this change of service providers has changed or will change anything about our content policies. Our content policies remain the same as they have for fourteen years, and those policies are as permissive as we believe we can make them. For the most part, the policies are guided by US law, with a few additional prohibitions to prevent offline harm to people -- for instance, we don't allow people to post someone else's personally identifying information, financial details, credit card numbers, etc. That content isn't inherently illegal, but it causes offline harm, so we don't allow it. We do examine our policies and make small clarifications when we find examples of content that isn't easy to fit into "okay" or "not okay" under the existing policies, because people are very good at finding things that are right on the line and could go either way based on how you read it, but we do so with deliberation and caution. We're choosing to no longer do business with Cloudflare because we don't believe their policies are created with deliberation or with caution, and we believe the blog post they posted yesterday is an incoherent mess of a policy statement that indicates they haven't done much thinking about the questions at all.
Since you mention Russian state censorship, I will also state, for the record, that telling Roskom to go fuck themselves is one of my greatest joys as a site owner, and we do not and will not respond to any legal requests that come from any body other than a United States court after due legal process has been followed. We've never received any requests from the FSB, but if we did, I'd tell them the same thing I tell Roskom: we do not acknowledge they have any authority to request anything from us and we will not comply.
no subject
We have not, nor will we, ever promised that we won't remove content on the site. Every site that accepts user generated content needs to remove some of it, in order to get rid of spam, remove content that exposes us to legal liability, or remove content that causes offline harm. The restrictions we place are as minimal as we can make them, but they do exist.
That having been said: nothing about this change of service providers has changed or will change anything about our content policies. Our content policies remain the same as they have for fourteen years, and those policies are as permissive as we believe we can make them. For the most part, the policies are guided by US law, with a few additional prohibitions to prevent offline harm to people -- for instance, we don't allow people to post someone else's personally identifying information, financial details, credit card numbers, etc. That content isn't inherently illegal, but it causes offline harm, so we don't allow it. We do examine our policies and make small clarifications when we find examples of content that isn't easy to fit into "okay" or "not okay" under the existing policies, because people are very good at finding things that are right on the line and could go either way based on how you read it, but we do so with deliberation and caution. We're choosing to no longer do business with Cloudflare because we don't believe their policies are created with deliberation or with caution, and we believe the blog post they posted yesterday is an incoherent mess of a policy statement that indicates they haven't done much thinking about the questions at all.
Since you mention Russian state censorship, I will also state, for the record, that telling Roskom to go fuck themselves is one of my greatest joys as a site owner, and we do not and will not respond to any legal requests that come from any body other than a United States court after due legal process has been followed. We've never received any requests from the FSB, but if we did, I'd tell them the same thing I tell Roskom: we do not acknowledge they have any authority to request anything from us and we will not comply.