@apalu @ariadne @eff Technically that is correct however you're assuming that the relevant clause of HE.net's ToS/AUP is functionally equivalent to "your company will not produce hate speech".

However this is an agreement between a ISP and a hosting provider so HE.net would be massively negligent in policing their service and managing their reputation if that clause wasn't something more like "you will not _transmit_ hate speech", which means that the hosting provider is agreeing to basically police their users or face consequences.

I'm sure that HE.net is trying to be as reasonable as possible here based on the consequences being _filtering_ not _kicking_, so I'm guessing that this situation has happened because the hosting provider has basically been told "do the right thing or else" and not complied.

And yes there is a big thorny issue here around who is ultimately responsible for - and therefore punished for - hate speech, but ultimately as this is all about agreements between various private entities, a violation can be whatever matches the wording of the contract that the parties agreed to and if people feel hurt by this then they need to negotiate a more favourable contract.

(ETA: this was based on a previous version of the replied post that finished at the emoji and on reading the new version, I think this is a more technical rather than "legal" question. As I understand it, HE.net is filtering the hosting provider's traffic to specifically exclude Kiwifarms' traffic, presumably because they're trying to not boot some random hosting provider off the net over what should be a relatively small issue.)