For someone claiming the moral high ground enfranchising speech, you seem pretty free basing arguments on knowing that certain voices should be ignored. Fortunately, we can skip the boring discussion about the character of different activist groups because it's the listener's opinion that matters -- in this case, the platforms who thought these folks (or their ideas) were worth listening to.
> Speaking of Cloudflare...
I brought up Prince as evidence that platform managers are making their own decisions, not being bullied by crowds. Framing them as victims belittles their agency, ignores their responsibility, and perpetuates this BS chain of victimhood that is required by your arguments in order to make deplatforming look like a conspiracy rather than a big swath of society trying to spend less time with a few jerks.
And of course Cloudflare (or FreeDNS) have the same right to provide services to Gab that others did to deny it. Digressing for a second, I'm personally glad that Prince et al. hold a steeper standard for cutting service than Facebook or even PayPal. DDOS'ing is an infringement of freedom of speech in a way that deplatforming isn't, and right now we're all depending on a very few companies like Cloudflare to be the equivalent of a police force that maintains any notion of commons.
> ...By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
PayPal felt Gab itself was getting paid, through PayPal, to run a platform that promoted hate speech. That's related to the transaction, and related to the TOS. You can disagree with them, and people can post potentially irrelevant screenshots, but both are sideshow.
> the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way
Yet again, you're resorting to ad-hominem about the long-term behavior of a group you're barely bothering to define. You don't know anything about me outside this conversation. Lots of different people support or are fine with deplatforming, and many of us also care about the quality of the commons on which the deplatformed can continue to exercise their speech.
But instead of yet another conversation about which broadly defined online group says the most dumb things, why don't you put forward a concrete vision of what your definition of free speech is? It seems to me like it involves something like a right to an audience (sincerely, how is that not a right to force people to interact with to you?). Or perhaps some sort of protected class situation, where you want to clearly define the difference between "passively" enforcing TOS and singling someone out (what would that look like?).