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Hate sites were chased off of mainstream web after celebrating the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.

The First Amendment now needs a terms of service. 

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August 15, 2017

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Heather Heyer’s tragic legacy is written in the cloud.

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The 32-year-old was counter-protesting a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when she was intentionally run down by a white nationalist as she crossed the street.

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In a vaguely governed digital space where CEOs have more power than law enforcement, Silicon Valley’s response to the Charlottesville chaos and subsequent public outrage appears to have spurred a sudden return to corporate social responsibility, taking a big step towards digital democracy.

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Decision makers at GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare made likeminded decisions to terminate their hosting and security services to The Daily Stormer, a provocative news and commentary site that engages with supporters of neo-Nazi ideology – the very group that organized the rally where Heyer lost her life. The move to cut ties has sparked its own riotous discussion about where the First Amendment starts and stops, and who can decide when it’s gone too far.

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Clean Hands Courtesy of CDA

Free speech advocates maintain that Internet users have the freedom to access content and utilize technology, however polarizing, without service providers interfering with their experience. And there are clear laws to back this up, perhaps most obvious in the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) section that states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

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Criminals and service providers take full advantage of this loophole. This protection has made safe harbors possible for a disturbing grid of illegal activity; the kind that violates the constitutional rights of the innocent people it exploits. And CEOs can sleep at night knowing their asses are covered.

 

CDNs Play Hide and Seek

Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare provide a crucial piece of the cybercrime puzzle. Cloudflare’s technology encourages criminality by allowing crooks and cybervillians to hide behind their servers. For obvious reasons, pirate sites and child pornography rings prefer to utilize technologies that hide their identities and obfuscate their locations.   

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CDNs are attractive to the good guys, too. The same technology that escorts illegal or dangerous content across the web has improved the decent-minded user experience by delineating latency, or wait time, with the help of cached servers placed strategically all over the global map. This precise architecture also provides airtight protection from hackers that would love to take down a site via a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS).

 

As an add-on to this pit-stop approach to content delivery, reverse proxy services, like the one Cloudflare provides, intentionally misrepresent the content provider’s IP address, which bounces users around to different servers all over the world. This creates a wild goose chase for law enforcement and creates the ideal anonymity for anyone who doesn’t want to be found.

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First Amendment Turf War

CDNs allow for a blurry interpretation of the First Amendment. If content is being accessed from an offshore server, does the U.S. Constitution even apply? And if not, are service providers forfeiting their immunity provided by the Communications Decency Act when they transfer content across the U.S. border? And if so, wouldn’t content creators be surrendering their First Amendment rights when user requests are routed overseas?

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Out of Bounds

Not all speech is actually free. When your words, spoken or written, endanger the safety of others or disturb public order, you’re out of bounds.

 

The First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act were designed to enable criminal activity. Vague laws coupled with ineffective terms of service agreements are exploiting and endangering internet users, and since policy makers are clearly running in place, it’s time that business leaders step in where the government can’t.

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Businesses Backpedal

Chasing these perpetrators off of traditional channels hardly scrubs the conflict.

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Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, cut the cord to The Daily Stormer in the days following Heather Heyer’s death in a moment of united conscience among Silicon Valley’s C-suite. Prince delivered an internal email to employees followed by a public blog manifesto that hardly defended his decision (“I woke up this morning in a bad mood.”) and rather hinted more to his regret (“Is this the day the Internet dies?”).

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Backpedaling on corporate social responsibility is the opposite of corporate social responsibility.

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Claiming he was “deeply uncomfortable” with his choice to kick the “assholes” behind the The Daily Stormer offline, Prince undermines the atrocities and social injustices that continue to operate on his watch.

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Hate is Still Not Homeless

Prince doesn't acknowledge the extremists who are still up and running. Fringe cottage industry startups have long been catering to those who aren't welcome on more mainstream platforms.

 

The criminals who are installing malware on the devices of millions of unsuspecting end users, and the perverts distributing child pornography, and the digital pirates who have eliminated hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs in the film industry thanks to illegal streaming; they've been operating underground for years. 

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Chasing hate brands and supremacist content into the arms of a sinister alt-tech underworld won't resolve any radical danger, but rather will likely fan the flames of menacing minds.  

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Gotta Start Somewhere

CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, sees this new crisis as a sign of progress, and believes tech is sending a strong message to hate groups. “People were able to identify this kind of [content] in their ad platforms, and they immediately reacted,” he says of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. “They didn't say, ‘This is okay.’ They didn't say, ‘This is part of the price we pay for the First Amendment.’ They said, ‘This is inappropriate on our platforms,’ and they dealt with it the right away. I don’t know if they would have done that a few years ago.”

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Censoring hate and scrubbing all evidence of revolting thought leadership doesn't purify our world, but creating an industry standard to uphold decency is a start.

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