"A site that someone, somewhere, deeply despises is the type of site that is likely to be attacked. And when sites are attacked, Cloudflare gets better at what it does; its pattern recognition improves. “Putting yourself in front of things that are controversial actually makes the system smarter,” Prince says. “It’s like letting your kids roll around in the dirt.” This is one of the reasons it makes sense for Cloudflare to offer a free self-service platform: By widening the pool of potential invasive agents, it makes the immune system more responsive. “It’s not obvious that a bunch of escorts that aren’t paying you anything are good customers. It’s not obvious that having people who get attacked all the time—including neo-Nazi sites—that you would by default want them to be on your network. But we’ve always thought the more things we see, the better we’re able to protect everybody else.”...
In early May, another story came out—one that Cloudflare could not ignore. The article, by ProPublica, revealed that people who had complained to Cloudflare about the Daily Stormer were getting harassing and threatening calls and emails, including one that told the recipient to “fuck off and die.” The ProPublica piece quoted a blog post under Anglin’s name: “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us. We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.” It looked as if Cloudflare had ratted out decent people to an army of fascist trolls.
Recognizing that it had a legitimate problem on its hands that couldn’t be erased by invoking free speech, Cloudflare quickly altered its abuse policy, giving users the option of not forwarding their identity and contact information. ProPublica also reported Anglin saying that the hate site paid $200 a month for its Cloudflare protection, a point Cloudflare would not comment on. Despite Cloudflare’s pride in protecting any site, no matter how heinous, Prince says he was caught off guard by the Daily Stormer’s attacks on the people who complained. “What we didn’t anticipate,” Prince told me, ruefully, “was that there are just truly awful human beings in the world.”
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