Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)

[denise]

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

Comments

[vit_r]

Happy censorship. When will you start to silence your users?

[denise]

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)_/¯.

[cathexys]

I wish their blog posy had been half as thoughtful as your comment here. It's a really complex subject, but throwing up your hands helplessly or avoiding taking a stand isn't the correct response. Thank you!

[lois2037]

I'm with you all the way on this!

[sockules]

Who are you supporting, the terrorists or the child rapists?

[leo_sosnine]

Were the founding fathers of the US of A terrorists to raise against, get themselves armed illegally, and obviously illegally organize to kill the politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers of their own government?

I'm gonna skip the child rape scenarios, however, just say that there are less clear areas there.

As for DW I'm really upset that they think that CF isn't censorous enough after what CF did to the Daily Stormer (just to mention 1 case). Daily Stormer didn't do anything illegal and anyone who favors the censorship against them and claims to be pro free speech is a hypocrite. DW's stance on "free speech" is absolutely hypocritical.

It's hilarious how Denise calls their decision as supporting free speech when it clearly does the opposite.

Well, the good thing about it is clarity. Good to know, hope DW goes bankrupt and soon. The internet was really better when everyone hosted their own web sites.

[denise]

Please allow me to refer you to my comment here so I don't have to repeat it! It sounds as though your values and ours diverge sufficiently that we may not be the optimal online home for you. We absolutely support you deciding that, just as we've decided that Cloudflare's values diverge sufficiently from ours that we no longer feel comfortable remaining a customer of theirs. I wish you the best in finding a company that matches your values more closely.

[leo_sosnine]

That was a non-answer, but yeah, I'm gonna go my merry way.

[vit_r]

Здравствуйте, товарищ майор. Ловко же вы их купили.

[denise]

We ask that people make their points in dw-news comments in good faith and without hyperbole or attack, please!

[zvi]

Choosing not to do business with people because you disagree with them is exercising one’s own free speech rights, actually. Free Speech didn’t meanI have to give anyone my time, money, attention, or platform

[denise]

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.

[ilyena_sylph]

+cheerful giggling in re: your response to Roskom+

[vit_r]

It is funny that you believe you are more wise than any person that uses your service.

I had not expected that you could understand what is the real problem and I will not explain where you are wrong (or too naive). People who know have already received the message.