Cloudflare: Cybersecurity, or Complicity?
TL;DR It's both.
The tech company Cloudflare, whose motto is “Helping build a better Internet”, has often proved instrumental to the success of hate forums by providing anonymity to these spaces while claiming to remain neutral stakeholders.
As described by ProPublica in May 2017:
The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company — Cloudflare. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. […]
Getting booted around from service to service can make it hard to run a hate site, but Cloudflare gives the sites a solid footing.
Cloudflare’s CEO posted the following screed to the company’s blog in 2013, where it has remained ever since:
A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor…
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