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Cloudflare Pulls the Plug on Hate Site
Photo by Jason Henry for the New York Times
Photo by Jason Henry for the New York Times
In the wake of the mass shooting in El Paso, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince (MBA 2009) announced that his web performance and security company was terminating service for the 8chan message board—an online forum where the alleged shooter had posted his manifesto.
In a blog post, Prince detailed the company’s rationale, noting that 8chan appeared to have inspired previous mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at a synagogue in Poway, California. "The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” wrote Prince. “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit."
In an interview in the New York Times, Prince told the newspaper that the decision was complex, noting that “(i)t’s dangerous for infrastructure companies to be making what are editorial decisions.” In the end, though, 8chan’s focus on hate and flouting of incitement laws pushed him to enact the ban, he told the Times. “If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some obligation to do that,” he noted.
Prince cofounded Cloudflare in 2009 with classmate and current COO Michelle Zatlyn (MBA 2009). You can listen to the two discuss how they created the company after meeting at HBS in this recent episode of Skydeck. Zatlyn also discussed the challenges of Silicon Valley’s “digital ceiling” in a March 2015 Bulletin article; Prince discussed his work on the front lines of the cyber war in the June 2016 issue of the Bulletin.
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