
Cloudflare Bans Sex Worker Platform, Switter. First Notable Ban Since Neo Nazis - Lola_H
A platform called Switter took off 3 weeks ago in response to the FOSTA&#x2F;SESTA bill which lead to the shutdown of sites&#x2F;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.<p>The last documented time Cloudflare terminated services was when they terminated the account of a white supremacist website last year.<p>The network, Switter, was started by a company in Australia and runs on the open-source social platform Mastodon at an Austrian domain.<p>&quot;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&quot;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AZMos&#x2F;status&#x2F;986819643661791233<p>Cloudflare are still yet to comment on the matter.
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eastdakota
I hate this. SESTA is a poorly drafted law. While it's responding to a real,
serious problem — sex trafficking of minors online — it's lack of specificity
means it will be interpreted extremely broadly and lead to dangerous
precedents. We lobbied against it. I personally spent a lot of time in
congressional offices warning about exactly this outcome. And, just yesterday,
I spent much of my day with our General Counsel pleading about the dangers of
a slippery slope. But, the law is the law, and we need to follow the law.

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.

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djsumdog
I wrote about their previous ban last year and what it meant in terms of
censorship:

[https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-
corporate-...](https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-
censorship/)

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?)

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Mononokay
Self host, direct towards an IP Address.

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LyndsySimon
An IP address issued by whom, exactly? Your ISP? A cloud provider? ICANN?

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.

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toomuchtodo
Cloudflare operates under US law and most likely is concerned about action by
the US Department of Justice against them in the event they continued to
provide services to Switter.

~~~
djsumdog
But they are in international markets and this particular customer was in
Australia where sex work is legal.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Doesn’t matter. Cloudflare is a US corporation operating under US law (as well
as the laws of other countries they have offices in).

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amorphid
I guess the technocracy promotes free speech when it suits them & shuts it
down when they fear it.

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xoa
FFS. Please, please actually think about what you're saying and about the
implications it carries if you game theory it out a bit, that's absolutely
critical when dealing with proposed solutions for wider issues of society.
"The technocracy" _is not_ in fact responsible for creating law, at least not
yet. They are _subjects_ to the law, and while of course they have an input
both in the way any other group does and extra in the way more resources and
education can enhance that, they're not even a dominant player amongst
political powers. They cannot overrule law, nor should they be expected to,
and really is that what you, amorphid, would actually want to see?
Responsibility is tied to power, if you want them to be responsible then
you're necessarily suggesting they have the power too. And that takes us
straight to a world where corporations really are governing powers also, as in
they can legitimately wield physical force against opponents.

If 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.

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srslack
>"The technocracy" is not in fact responsible for creating law, at least not
yet.

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.

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Sir_Cmpwn
They also suspended service to a BitTorrent website without notice:

[https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/986562408033521664](https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/986562408033521664)

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xxdesmus
entirely unrelated, and the website owner was provided an explanation.

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Sir_Cmpwn
Of course it's related.

Where did you see that the website owner was provided an explanation?

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xxdesmus
Again -- entirely unrelated. In the reply that was sent to the website owner.
They received an explanation.

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Sir_Cmpwn
I'm not going to push this unrelated thing any further than to point out we're
talking about two websites who had service suspended on the same day by the
same company.

Do you have a source for the explanation?

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xxdesmus
Check out my profile. I work at the company on the team in question. They are
utterly unrelated.

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Sir_Cmpwn
I see what you mean. You may have suspended the account for entirely unrelated
reasons and may be tracking the issues separately internally. But under the
broader banner of Cloudflare censorship being discussed here, the two are
related.

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johnhenry
Interestingly, the site is based on Mastadon mean that it is, or at least has
the potential to be, federated. If one server hosting the data is blocked or
goes down, another federated server will still hold the data. So, in a way,
they're avoiding a need for something like Cloudflare.

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ocdtrekkie
Mastodon is federated in the sense that users can be on different servers and
interact, and yes, the data from one server ends up incidentally being cached
on others, but those users still only exist on the server they are on.

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.

