From Nazis To Incels: How One Tech Company Helps Hate Groups Thrive

[Judi Lynn]

Cloudflare refuses to regulate the sadistic content it optimizes and protects online.
By Jesselyn Cook
07/25/2018 05:46 am ET

By all standards, the forum Incels.me is a hate group. Littered through well over 1 million messages is a cascade of posts calling for women to be raped, decapitated, stabbed, starved, poisoned, skinned, cannibalized, blinded, mutilated, sodomized, tortured, beaten, burned, enslaved and otherwise brutally killed, simply because they are women. (Unedited excerpts from some of these messages appear below. Readers may find them disturbing.)

Many of Incels.me’s 6,800 members ― sexually frustrated men who identify as involuntarily celibate (incel) ― are strikingly candid about their violent misogyny. Posts such as “I wanna rape her then behead her,” “We have to strike back at all these whores,” “I have groped girls against their will, you should try it” and “I want to kill [women] so fucking bad. I want to take their lives. I want them to fucking suffer” are standard fare on the rapidly growing website.

Its sister site, Incelocalypse, is a message board for incels who want to make women and children their “rape-slaves.” As HuffPost uncovered in May, it was created by Nathan Larson, a congressional candidate in Virginia who is an openly pro-rape pedophile. The page has been dumped and temporarily forced offline by multiple web domain registrars (most recently Russia’s RU Center), but it resurfaces each time. Its members have repeatedly encouraged each other to commit crimes including kidnapping, rape, incest and homicide.

One man on the Incelocalypse forum attempted to commission a guide on “how to rape” for $100 last month, noting “the guide should explain how to lure a victim, kill it, what to do with the corpse, and anything else that you think is important.” Another said he would rape female toddlers because “they will all become worthless sluts.”

More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/incels-cloudfare-online-content-protection_us_5b491632e4b022fdcc597327

[Fla Dem]

1. I didn't even know what incels were.

I didn't even know a pathetic group like this existed until yesterday. I saw some mention of an icel group. Thought, what the hell is that, another terrorist group? So looked it up.

Incels (a portmanteau of "involuntary celibates" ) are self-identifying members of an online subculture[1][2] who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom.[3] Self-identified incels are mostly white, male, and heterosexual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

These are literally the guys living in their mother's basements on the computer 24/7. Why anyone would want to be identified with this group is beyond me

[BigmanPigman]

2. I didn't know about it until a few weeks ago on DU

when someone mentioned that Stephen Miller was an Incel and educated me on the definition. I had no idea an internet site promotes murder and this is somehow legal and there are more than one!

[CousinIT]

3. Self-entitled males whining that women wisely want nothing to do w/ them. n/t

[marble falls]

4. They don't meet women because they won't go out or off the freaking computer.

[marble falls]

5. Also: Judi, this is an important bit of information, thanks for posting this!

[Hortensis]

6. Bet the judicial system and FBI find such gathering places useful.

From what I read on Snopes, seemingly the grandparents of Nathan Larson's infant daughter went to court to keep him from getting custody and evidence included his on-line activities.

Apparently Incelocalypse was closed down by its server, DreamHost, but close one and others open.

Another interesting article about Cloudflare and how it works on Wired:

WHY CLOUDFLARE LET AN EXTREMIST STRONGHOLD BURN

... Cloudflare is part of the backend of the internet. Nearly 10 percent of all requests for web pages go through its servers, which are housed in 118 cities around the world. These servers speed along the delivery of content, making it possible for clients’ web pages to load more quickly than they otherwise would. But Cloudflare’s main role is protection: Its technology acts as an invisible shield against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks—hacker campaigns that disable a website by overwhelming it with fake traffic. ...

There have been dark wells of hate online since the Usenet era, but back then, misanthropy was distributed across thousands of different platforms. Even if you felt some speech was objectionable enough to silence, it was a practical impossibility to get rid of it all. No single entity could silence an idea. But in a world where Facebook and Google count their audiences in the billions, a decision by one of those big players could, essentially, quiet an unpopular voice.

... Prince’s argument does get philosophical support from civil liberties groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has taken a stand that what it calls “intermediaries”—services like Cloudflare and GoDaddy that do not generate the content themselves—should not be adjudicating what speech is acceptable. The EFF has a strong presumption that most speech, even vile speech, should be allowed, but when illegal activity, like inciting violence or defamation, occurs, the proper channel to deal with it is the legal system. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

We need laws and special courts with mandates to both scrupulously protect free speech and limit internet content. Private industry should not be making these decisions, nor should the righteous and not-so-righteous hackers CloudFlare protects against.