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.
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.