
Hosteurope.de shut down our servers due to “political incorrectness” - lingben
https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/146757
======
tetrep
Regardless of how the hosting provider feels about the content they're
hosting, it's very unprofessional to terminate a contract so absolutely with
no warning. They could have easily given the site a few days, if not weeks, to
migrate to another service, but they instead chose to immediately kill not
just the hosts of voat.co but all of the hosts under the account, which
included an entirely unrelated blog with scientific papers.

I find it scary that so many commenters find this to be a natural course of
action for a hosting provider to take. A hosting provider caring about what I
host, other than whether or not it's legal, is just as absurd as my ISP caring
about what packets I send (once again, other than the legality of them). While
a hosting provider's role isn't nearly as "utility" as an ISP, it's certainly
close and I would be appalled if the majority of hosting providers actually
took stances like this. A minority is to be expected, no different than a book
publisher only publishing Christian books, but if the average book publisher
was expected to publish only Christian books, I would be quite frightened.

~~~
rndn

        (3) The Client may not infringe statutory prohibitions, moral
        standards or the rights of third parties (copyright law, trademark
        law, rights to the name and data protection law etc.) through his use
        of his website or the banners that appear on the website. […] In the
        event of any infringement of one of the aforementioned obligations,
        the Provider shall be entitled to suspend the provision of his
        services with immediate effect or to block access to the Client’s
        information.
    

[https://www.hosteurope.de/download/General_Terms_and_Conditi...](https://www.hosteurope.de/download/General_Terms_and_Conditions_of_Business_of_HE_english.pdf)

IANAL, but this may count as moral standards of third parties.

~~~
lingben
So hypothetically hosteurope.de could take down almost any fashion blog or
picture of a woman hosted on their servers because in Saudi Arabia it is
illegal to show a woman's body?

[http://observers.france24.com/content/20090601-spot-
differen...](http://observers.france24.com/content/20090601-spot-difference-
saudi-style-album-magazine-covers-censorship-marker-pen)

Yes, a bit facetious but the point is that such a 'moral' clause is so wide
that it can be misused at will. What is moral for one person may not be for
another and what's moral in one society may not be in another.

Beyond that, it must be noted that hosteurope.de did not cite this as their
reason. They did not use the 'moral' clause but their exact words were
'politically incorrect'.

~~~
Twirrim
Yes they could if they choose to. So just don't use them for your hosting if
you have such concerns. I know I wouldn't choose them (though I'm not exactly
in the market for a hosting company at the moment)

~~~
zo1
And those of us who wouldn't have thought too-much about it, will now
_definitely_ not use this hosting provider.

------
danko
For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week
about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were
recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that
voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.

Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no
part of them.

~~~
sergiotapia
Please don't misrepresent what happened. A lot of people, myself included,
left Reddit because I don't agree with the way the CEO is handling things. My
leaving Reddit had nothing to do with fatpeoplehate being banned. I just don't
agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just
don't visit them.

Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop
in the bucket for me and I left.

~~~
Someone1234
> I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful-
> subreddits. I just don't visit them.

Please don't misrepresent what happened.

FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year.
Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles, other Redditors, the
Imgur staff, brigading other subs (inc. weight loss subs), attacking popular
bloggers, YouTubers, and people on Twitter. Often this was just for the
"crime" of being overweight and the abuse was nasty.

I'm tired of people defending this behaviour as being "distasteful" or
"offensive." Even the title of Reddit's announcement was "removing HARASSING
subreddits." And if you don't believe that's what FPH was doing then you
literally didn't spend even one minute on it.

Key Reddit staff quotes:

> subreddit as a platform to harass individuals

> We’re banning behavior, not ideas.

> based on their harassment of individuals

> When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being
> annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and
> women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day,
> because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually
> threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many
> victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit
> to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated
> on our site.

If this is what you support, please leave Reddit. I welcome you gone.

~~~
300bps
_FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year_

Yes, and /r/shitredditsays has been bullying, harassing and abusing
individuals for several years. But that subreddit is allowed to exist because
Ellen Pao (reddit CEO) and admins agree with their politics.

Any other subreddit is deathly afraid to directly link to other comments on
the site because they don't want to be accused of "brigading" votes which is
against the rules and will get the subreddit banned. /r/shitredditsays links
directly and openly vote brigades dozens of times per day. Again, because
their political speech is favored.

------
pki
So they were lying in the github repo about "based in Switzerland, no
censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland" when it was
hosted in Germany on one of the cheapest providers all along, subject to a ton
of speech restrictions in law?

~~~
fragsworth
It's not necessarily a lie. "Based in" usually just means that's where they
operate. The servers can be anywhere. I wouldn't fault them for assuming a
modern Western country had enough freedoms to let them host their servers.

~~~
pki
It would mean they didn't do even the most basic research though, as Germany
isn't the first place you would look - it's reasonably common knowledge about
their ideas of free speech and how certain subjects are really touchy

------
geofft
The thing I've found completely baffling about the apparent Voat exodus
(although not from any Reddit communities I'm a part of, as it happens) is
that nobody knows what the organizational structure or credibility of Voat is,
and nobody even reliably knows who's behind the site.

The most that you can find is the GitHub source, which says it's "based in
Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland".
This may or may not be true. This was certainly not _usefully_ true, if
there's a German host with censorship powers.

The user agreement
([https://voat.co/help/useragreement](https://voat.co/help/useragreement))
calls itself "a legal agreement between you and us", with no definition of
"us". It also has a DMCA response policy, which strikes me as odd for a
Switzerland-based company (but maybe this is normal?).

The about page ([https://voat.co/about](https://voat.co/about)) claims it's a
project from two Swedish college students. Even assuming that this is true,
this isn't such a best-case scenario: we've seen many examples of sites
(4chan, Reddit, etc.) where the founders were in high school or college and
were at least somewhat in favor of unrestricted speech, but as their sites
grew, and as they themselves grew, they've changed their minds. (Incidentally,
parts of the brain that regulate appropriate social behavior, like the
prefrontal cortex, only fully develop by age 25.) Even if everything Voat says
about themselves is true, we should worry that in a couple of years they'll
grow a conscience too.

~~~
arfliw
I don't believe his identity is public but unless Atko has been spinning an
elaborate lie, plenty is known about him and Voat. He's a Swedish student who
went to college in Switzerland and this was a side project that blew up on
him, not unlike how Facebook started. He just graduated from college, went on
vacation with his family and is now headed back to Switzerland to run this
like a real company.

I agree that the best case scenario for Voat is to inevitably do exactly what
reddit is doing now, whether he realizes it or not. That's how it works. Right
now Voat is amazing. I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

------
mootothemax
Is it really _that_ surprising that a hosting company doesn't want to host a
site containing a tonne of hate speech?

There's no amount of money Stormfront could pay me to host their vile
outpourings; why should a small site hosting hate speech of every type kick up
a big fuss about similar treatment?

~~~
ramy_d
Then don't take their money. They didn't want to host voat then that's fine.
There's a way to do get out of that too. Cutting cords and stiffing clients
_is_ surprising.

~~~
bduerst
Yeah it seems that the big no-no here is that they pulled the plug suddenly
and without notification.

That's not a good track record to have with your customers.

------
c_prompt
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fvoat.co%2Fv%2Fannouncements%2Fcomments%2F146757)

------
thaumaturgy
Hah. In that thread they have a comment near the top complaining about
"censorship and outrage culture", and then on their home page they have a
popular thread recommending that they all contact hosteurope.de's customers
([https://voat.co/v/whatever/comments/146949](https://voat.co/v/whatever/comments/146949)).

------
adventured
I'm curious if someone with a lot of experience hosting in (or knowledge of
hosting in) various countries in Europe, would opine on which are the least
restrictive when it comes to speech?

~~~
pas
Always host stuff that's "problematic" opposite from where it's problematic.

For example at least one European far-right site is hosted in the US.

You can host US critical stuff in the US, but if you start to attract a lot of
traffic and active individuals, move out of the US. (Russia?)

------
seivan
It's very unfortunate and reminds me of
[http://paulgraham.com/say.html](http://paulgraham.com/say.html)

------
davidgerard
Hosteurope notes that this claim was completely false:
[https://archive.is/TqQDn](https://archive.is/TqQDn) It appears to have been a
lie from Voat to solicit funds.

------
saintx
Freedom to assemble doesn't guarantee access to private venues. Contrary to
intuition, all spaces on the Internet are private spaces.

~~~
ramy_d
That's not the issue.

~~~
wvenable
Free speech does not guarantee you a soap box to stand on. If nobody anywhere
is willing to give you a soap box that's your problem. Now there is an
argument to be made that speech isn't truly free if you have nowhere to say
it. However even with the laudable goal of ensuring all speech as a home
somewhere, that still would not obligate any private person or organization to
supporting it.

There is no public unowned property on the Internet.

If you downvote this comment it probably means you disagree with the sentiment
but still choose to suppress this speech to express that disagreement.

------
OBAMA_THE_NOOB
You stupid shmendricks!

Hosteurope is a German hosting company.

And we Germans have only very limited freedom of speech here!

------
zajd
Good. It's getting tiring seeing bigots, racists and assholes hide behind the
veil of "free speech"

~~~
lingben
if you feel that way, then reddit is by far the larger community when it comes
to bigots, racists and assholes than voat.co because they are the home to
/r/GasTheKikes and /r/coontown and many many other reprehensible subreddits

even so, you are still wrong because free speech means exactly that, speech
that you or I may not agree with.

if it were limited to speech that only some or the majority aligned with then
it wouldn't be called 'free speech' would it?

~~~
s73v3r
Free speech is freedom from government censorship. A private company is not
obligated to host your filth.

~~~
chazu
Free speech also refers to a closely-held cultural value in the US, that is to
say the respect for private citizens to hold and espouse beliefs which others
find distasteful or offensive.

Saying "free speech only refers to the government censoring you" (at least in
the context of America) is like saying that American society and culture
consist _solely_ of the official bureaucratic proceedings of its constituent
governmental bodies. In other words, its intellectually dishonest.

~~~
s73v3r
No, it isn't. Further, why is the company obligated to associate themselves
with your filth? Do they not have the right to not be associated with it?

