I try really hard to avoid using the phrase "free speech" when talking about DW and our content policies and the like, because (in the US at least, and we've been exporting it to the rest of the world lately; sorry about that, y'all) it immediately conjures up a whole host of associated assumptions people carry around about it. That's why I do very deliberately try to always use phrases like "maximum range of expression that we can" or talk about defending "unpopular speech" or the like, because it's like the phrase "free speech" is a tripwire that causes everyone around it to need to roll a d20 for their saving throw against "allcaps ranting", I swear. (Sorry. Can you tell the drugs are kicking in? Lol.)
But yeah: abdicating your content policy decisions to "is it legal" with no further nuance, especially when you're a multinational company, is impossible and dangerous. And I say that as someone who did, literally, start with "is it legal" as the baseline for DW content policy, and still uses it as a major factor! The difference is that although we start with the presumption that legal speech should be permitted, we also recognize that there's categories of legal speech that make the site objectively worse for everyone (spam, trolling, breaking into abandoned accounts and using them for spamming or selling the account names, etc) or that can have severe and pervasive offline consequences (doxxing, phishing, posting financial information, etc).
Some of those legal-but-atmosphere-ruining things we work around with technical solutions (almost every form of unwanted contact is handled like this, with people able to ban accounts and us treating using an alternate account to knowingly evade a ban as a ToS violation); some of them require content moderation actions, like suspending spammers or removing people's personal information from view. We don't make those deviations from "is it legal" lightly, and we only do it when it involves the quality and viability of the site experience for everyone. But those deviations are necessary sometimes, and Cloudflare pretending you can just handwave away two decades of our ongoing professional conversation about when those deviations are vital means that their company values are just so alien to ours that we don't feel we can continue to do business with them.
no subject
I try really hard to avoid using the phrase "free speech" when talking about DW and our content policies and the like, because (in the US at least, and we've been exporting it to the rest of the world lately; sorry about that, y'all) it immediately conjures up a whole host of associated assumptions people carry around about it. That's why I do very deliberately try to always use phrases like "maximum range of expression that we can" or talk about defending "unpopular speech" or the like, because it's like the phrase "free speech" is a tripwire that causes everyone around it to need to roll a d20 for their saving throw against "allcaps ranting", I swear. (Sorry. Can you tell the drugs are kicking in? Lol.)
But yeah: abdicating your content policy decisions to "is it legal" with no further nuance, especially when you're a multinational company, is impossible and dangerous. And I say that as someone who did, literally, start with "is it legal" as the baseline for DW content policy, and still uses it as a major factor! The difference is that although we start with the presumption that legal speech should be permitted, we also recognize that there's categories of legal speech that make the site objectively worse for everyone (spam, trolling, breaking into abandoned accounts and using them for spamming or selling the account names, etc) or that can have severe and pervasive offline consequences (doxxing, phishing, posting financial information, etc).
Some of those legal-but-atmosphere-ruining things we work around with technical solutions (almost every form of unwanted contact is handled like this, with people able to ban accounts and us treating using an alternate account to knowingly evade a ban as a ToS violation); some of them require content moderation actions, like suspending spammers or removing people's personal information from view. We don't make those deviations from "is it legal" lightly, and we only do it when it involves the quality and viability of the site experience for everyone. But those deviations are necessary sometimes, and Cloudflare pretending you can just handwave away two decades of our ongoing professional conversation about when those deviations are vital means that their company values are just so alien to ours that we don't feel we can continue to do business with them.