Alissa Starzak on Cloudflare, Content Moderation and the Internet Stack
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This week on Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alissa Starzak, the head of public policy at Cloudflare—a company that provides key components of the infrastructure that helps websites stay online. They talked about two high-profile incidents in which Cloudflare decided to pull its services from websites publishing or hosting extremist, violent content. In August 2017, after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince announced that he would no longer be providing service to the Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Two years later, Cloudflare also pulled service from the forum 8chan after the forum was linked to a string of violent attacks.
They talked about what Cloudflare actually does and why blocking a website from using its services has such a big effect. They also discussed how Cloudflare—which isn’t a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter—thinks about its role in deciding what content should and shouldn’t stay up.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | If you have a controversial website for any number of reasons, if you don't have an entity |
| 0:39.3 | like CloudFlare, an organization like CloudFlare who can provide a set of services in front |
| 0:43.3 | of you, you probably can't stay up. |
| 0:46.4 | And we actually saw this in the run-up to the Daily Stormer. |
| 0:49.1 | So some of the comments that we got and some of the tweets that sort of came at us were |
| 0:54.1 | basically get out of the way so that we can deduce them off the internet. |
| 0:58.3 | I'm Quintedurusic and this is the LawFair podcast September 3rd, 2020. |
| 1:06.4 | This week on our Arbiter's of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Dwack and I were |
| 1:11.0 | joined by Alyssa Starrzack, the head of public policy at CloudFlare. |
| 1:15.7 | The internet infrastructure company you've probably never heard of but almost certainly |
| 1:20.2 | rely on every day. |
| 1:23.0 | The Fair provides key components of the infrastructure that helps websites stay online. |
| 1:27.9 | And we wanted to talk to Alyssa about two high-profile incidents in which the company decided to |
| 1:32.9 | pollute services from websites publishing or hosting extremist violent content. |
| 1:39.1 | In August 2017, after the White Nationalist rally in Charlottesville, CloudFlare CEO Matthew |
| 1:44.8 | Prince announced that he would no longer be providing service to the neo-Nazi website |
| 1:49.5 | the Daily Stormer. |
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