Over the last decade, Matthew has had to make the call when to stop providing service to websites like those, even as he's championed Cloudflare as a bastion of free speech and a tool used by journalists, activists, and dissidents in authoritarian regimes. It is a profound balancing act, and you'll hear me ask Matthew how he thinks about making those types of decisions and the company values he says drives them.
As an infrastructure company, Cloudflare is one of the only defenses — in some cases, the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. That includes websites for social good, like news organizations around the world, but also means unsavory or downright despicable ones, like neo-Nazi haven The Daily Stormer and hate and harassment breeding ground 8chan.
I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints. Can you give me an example of that? Like, what? Yeah, well, you can't say the word kill on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video's gonna be shown to fewer people, so people turn to alternatives like Unalive.
I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints. You can't say the word kill on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video is going to be shown to fewer people, so people turn to alternatives like Unalive.
You can actually download the real algorithm code that runs in production. You can download the real data, the Community Notes and ratings, run the code on the data to verify that there is no funny business that we're doing on our end. There's no override button.
Streaming platform Deezer reports that more than 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. All that AI-generated music is getting harder to identify and filter out, while at the same time, tools like Suno have become mainstream parts of the creative process for musicians of all kinds.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
