Cloudflare Bans Sex Worker Platform, Switter. First Notable Ban Since Neo Nazis
A platform called Switter took off 3 weeks ago in response to the FOSTA/SESTA bill which lead to the shutdown of sites/accounts and silencing of accounts on like Craigslist, Twitter, Reddit, Skype and Gmail. With 47,000 members Cloudflare banned the site from their services Wednesday evening without notice.
The last documented time Cloudflare terminated services was when they terminated the account of a white supremacist website last year.
The network, Switter, was started by a company in Australia and runs on the open-source social platform Mastodon at an Austrian domain.
"Cloudflare has now effectively kicked two groups offline: Neo-Nazis and Sex Workers. There is no comparison. One used their site to call for death, the other used theirs to stay alive"
https://twitter.com/AZMos/status/986819643661791233
Cloudflare are still yet to comment on the matter.
31 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 77.1 ms ] threadIf this is due to FOSTA/SESTA, then regardless of Cloudflare's personal views they need to follow it. The fault lies somewhat in Congress but ultimately in the American People for repeatedly failing to appropriately carry out our duties in maintaining our democracy. If you argue that the people simply aren't up for that at all, then you're arguing democracy should be dumped or at least toned down in a further hybridization, and that gets into very, very deep waters. There is no contradiction whatsoever between Cloudflare and other tech companies promoting/lobbying heavily for Free Speech protections, which again are protections against government action, while still acceding to the supremacy of government if it passes laws to the contrary and those laws are still in force (during a legal challenge with no injunction for example, or following a failed legal challenge).
There's nothing wrong in parallel with all this either in all of us working to try to eliminate centralized pressure points and decentralized malicious actor capabilities so on as well, far from it. But that doesn't mean you are justified in your accusations against some specific actor under the control of a jurisdiction that acts contrary to our preferences.
They lobbied specifically for this compromise, because they don't give a shit. These companies are begging for Congress to come in and give them some sweet regulatory capture: you didn't see Zuckerberg overly concerned, for example, he practically asked for regulation. They have the resources to not sweat much of the overly broad chilling effect, especially the ex post facto aspect of this legislation. Small companies and startups that have the potential to topple these players don't have such leisure.
Personally, beyond Rob Portman and the GOP, I blame the people who are getting hysterical over fake news and "nazis", who claim that Facebook et al are "destroying democracy". They have set the tone and made it much easier for this to happen, and they don't give a shit either because there's a fundamental disconnect due to their partisan bickering.
No one wants to put their money where their mouth is and challenge these terrible statutes, despite the fact that Justice did not need them to take down Backpage. The entire legislative package, and the justification behind it (child trafficking), is a sham. The real purpose was to force companies to do exactly what Cloudflare has done today.
Actually independently formed companies would of course help, but they'll have a strong motivation to grow themselves instead of working together with competitors.
This is one of the many downsides of multinational corporations, and I suspect we're going to see a new market for more localized replacements for a lot of these corporations' services abroad.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
What's next?
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
A lot of people will simply say, "Well go use another provider. It's their business and they can run it as they want," but in the case with the Daily Stormer, they were banned from many providers/platforms and even all the major domain registratars.
When so few companies hold such a large market share, they can and do censor content. In the US, we don't allow businesses to discriminate on the bases of race or sex, as far as which customers they're willing to accept. Speech isn't covered, but should it be? Can a Staples refuse to copy a flyer if it has content they don't agree with (so long as the content isn't illegal?)
There are ways to evade this law, like the .bit TLD, but even that would require constantly hopping between IPs and providers. There is no way that I can see to deploy and maintain a stable service in this legal environment.
https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/986562408033521664
Where did you see that the website owner was provided an explanation?
Do you have a source for the explanation?
If switter.at is shutdown, switter.at users cannot login or post, and people most likely cannot see switter.at posts or follow switter.at accounts.
And there's still massive benefit to a Mastodon instance of being able to serve it's content over a CDN for bandwidth cost concerns.
Regulating content online is a terrible role for deep infrastructure companies like Cloudflare to play. And it's far from the end. The same thing is coming for ISPs, registrars, and DNS providers over the days ahead. Ideally, Congress needs to clarify which services are "interactive computer services" under SESTA and which are not. Until then, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Craigslist, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, AWS, Microsoft, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Level(3), and many others will err on the side of caution — and silently sites will disappear from the Internet.
If you're concerned, and live in the United States, please call your congress person and let them know that deep infrastructure companies aren't the right places to regulate what content can and cannot be online.