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Cloudflare cuts ties with notorious trolling and harassment site Kiwi Farms [1]
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Date: 2022-09-04
Kiwi Farms, founded by former 8chan administrator Josh Moon, has become infamous for using a trove of online data to dox and swat people because of their views on social issues. According to NBC News’ Ben Collins and Kat Tenbarge, trans people have become a particular target for this nest of deplorables.
The forum is a massive archive of sensitive information on their targets, which has been used to repeatedly harass them. Kiwi Farms’ most notorious section is titled “lolcows” and targets transgender people. The archive often features social media pictures of their targets’ friends and family, along with contact information of their employers. The information is used in an effort to get their targets fired or socially isolated by spreading rumors that they are pedophiles or criminals.
This has led a number of experts to express concern that other far-right elements may copy Kiwi Farms’ tactics. Among them is 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan, who has spent years trying to take 8chan down due to its increasingly offensive and criminal content. Brennan believes Moon has made Kiwi Farms far worse than 8chan ever was “because he’s actually targeting specific people.” According to VICE France, at least three of Kiwi Farms’ targets have committed suicide.
Among those “specific people” being attacked by Kiwi Farms is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was swatted last week by someone who identified as a Kiwi Farms user. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d feel any sympathy for the Mad Georgian, but this sort of behavior has no place in our political discourse, regardless of who does it. Still, it seems odd that Kiwi Farms came after one of the most viciously transphobic members of the House. Perhaps the monster created by the puppetmasters of the right is turning on those who created it.
This outfit has become so dangerous that according to a Twitter thread Collins dropped on Friday, a number of extremist researchers actually warned him against writing about it.
x I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now.
For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous.
But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world. — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 2, 2022
What pushed Collins to turn the hot lights on Kiwi Farms was the manner in which it has terrorized Canadian trans activist and Twitch streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti. She ended up on Kiwi Farms’ shit list after she spoke out against the wave of anti-trans legislation in this country. After a Twitch user who spoke out against her got banned, Kiwi Farms users doxed her and her family. They also swatted her, claiming she was planning a mass shooting at the city hall of her hometown of London, Ontario. When police vowed to investigate the swatting, Kiwi Farms doxed the cops as well.
Sorrenti fled to a nearby hotel, only to have the trolls come after her after they identified her hiding place by cross-referencing the sheets on her bed. They then hacked her Uber account, as well as her family’s Uber accounts; Uber is in the process of reimbursing them for rafts of unauthorized charges. She then fled to Europe—only to have them track her there and bombard her with harassing phone calls. In response, Sorrenti started a campaign to get Cloudflare to cut ties with Kiwi Farms, which won the support of the Anti-Defamation League. The hashtags “#DropKiwiFarms” and “#CloudFlareProtectsTerrorists” started heavily trending over the past few days.
And yet, even after all this, Cloudflare initially refused to cut ties with Kiwi Farms even though its content was a prima facie violation of its Acceptable Hosting Policy. Specifically, Kiwi Farms’ stock in trade was “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals.”
In a lengthy statement on its blog posted on Wednesday, Cloudflare adopted a patently insulting rationale—dropping Kiwi Farms could put vulnerable people at risk.
Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks. This isn't hypothetical. Thousands of times per day we receive calls that we terminate security services based on content that someone reports as offensive. Most of these don’t make news. Most of the time these decisions don’t conflict with our moral views. Yet two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan. In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.
This led Cloudflare to conclude that cutting ties with sites that host objectionable content would be like a phone company dropping a customer because it doesn’t like what you say. Never mind that Kiwi Farms is targeting some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. The rate of suicide among LGBTQ youth has spiked dramatically in recent years.
But matters finally came to a head on Saturday night, when Cloudflare reversed course and pulled its services from Kiwi Farms. According to another post from Cloudflare, Kiwi Farms only has itself to blame.
We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign. While we have empathy for its organizers, we are committed as a security provider to protecting our customers even when they run deeply afoul of popular opinion or even our own morals. The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy. We continue to believe that the best way to relegate cyberattacks to the dustbin of history is to give everyone the tools to prevent them. However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of the site became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.
Cloudflare claimed “specific, targeted threats over the last 48 hours” from Kiwi Farms made it clear that there was “an unprecedented emergency and imminent threat to human life.” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told The Washington Post that in his view, the threats were escalating faster than law enforcement could respond. For instance, Kiwi Farms users were posting the addresses of perceived foes and calling for them to be murdered. This led Prince and his team to conclude they had to make, as Cloudflare’s latest statement put it, “a dangerous decision that we are not comfortable with.” It had already pulled customizable error messages from Kiwi Farms after it swatted Greene, and pulled its remaining services on Saturday.
It’s hard to give Cloudflare credit for this. How is this decision more dangerous than people potentially being murdered or driven to suicide? Or, in the words of Harvard Law’s Alejandra Carabello, the prospect of others adopting Kiwi Farms’ tactics of “stochastic terror...being implemented as a part of the culture war,” to the point of bludgeoning LGBTQ people into silence?
Nevertheless, one of the worst outfits on the Internet was briefly forced offline before finding a company disreputable enough to provide security. It proves what Keffals said on Saturday night—this is but one battle.
x Our statement on Cloudflare dropping Kiwi Farms. pic.twitter.com/PrjtnfPLuX — keffals #DropKiwifarms (@keffals) September 3, 2022
And it’s a battle we may be fighting into 2024.
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