Months before a 16-year-old boy carried out a shooting at Evergreen High School, he joined an online gore forum that featured graphic videos of people dying.
The teenager’s September attack at the mountain high school is one of six attacks over the past two years that has been linked to the gore website WatchPeopleDie. Those six attacks, including five school shootings, resulted in 12 deaths and 134 people injured, according to the , a Jewish advocacy organization that fights antisemitism and other types of hate.
Internet infrastructure company provides a suite of services to the online gore forum that allows the website to keep operating for its five million users, researchers from the Anti-Defamation League found in a published Wednesday. The company could withdraw its services and cripple the website — as well as a handful of other similar extremist websites it enables — but chooses not to, the researchers found.
Cloudflare has faced criticism for years for enabling online extremist websites. The company cut off its services to the online message board 8chan in 2019 after three mass shooters posted there before their attacks. Cloudflare in 2022 also ended its security internet services for a notorious stalking and harassment website after a public pressure campaign. At the time, Cloudflare said the site posed an unprecedented “immediate threat to human life.”
Spokespeople for Cloudflare did not return requests for comment Wednesday.
The internet infrastructure company has previously taken the position that it is not responsible for vetting its customers because it is a neutral “pass-through” service, rather than a website host or owner, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s report. Before the company in 2022, Cloudflare executives defended servicing the website by comparing the Cloudflare that “doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things.”
“We have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” the 2022 post read. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.”
The found that the company’s approach to online moderation is more lax than at least one of its competitors, Amazon Web Services, which has “explicit prohibitions and termination mechanisms for content that incites violence or terrorism.”
Internet infrastructure moderation is different from moderation on social media sites because it is all or nothing, said Daniel Kelley, senior director of the Anti-Defamation League’s .
“For social media, companies can go in and take down a post or an account and they aren’t going to turn off the whole system because one person is being heinous,” he said. “With internet infrastructure, it is a giant on/off switch. You are either providing services or you are not.”
Experts who argue against infrastructure-level moderation point to the and the possible exploitation of the approach to or social activism, since the de-platforming in essence broadly bans whole entities from the internet. Websites that lose access through Cloudflare can also return with new providers, the company noted in 2022.
There should be a high bar for cutting off access, Kelley said, but sites like WatchPeopleDie meet that mark. The Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday called on Cloudflare to reform its policy and practices around violent content and threats and to withdraw its technical support for the sites.
“These are not platforms where there is some hate and the rest of it is cat pictures,” Kelley said. “These are sites that are dedicated to, in some cases, gore and violent extremism, the celebration of violence, the propagation of information from designated terrorist organizations, the support of hateful white supremacist ideologies linked to violence. These are not gray-area-type spaces, and what we’ve seen Cloudflare do in the past is they will provide services to places such as this right up to, or just past the point where there is blood on the ground.”
WatchPeopleDie was one of several avenues through which the 16-year-old Evergreen High School student was radicalized as part of a new wave of online extremism that focuses on using violence to accelerate the collapse of modern society, experts said. The teenager also expressed misogynistic, antisemitic and incel views. The boy died by suicide during the Sept. 10 school shooting. He shot and injured two students who survived.
