This weekend may have given us an enlightening example of what happens when the most deplorable of the deplorables get a dose of sunshine. On Friday afternoon, NBC News told the world about one of the worst sites on the Internet, KiwiFarms. This outfit has orchestrated ugly trolling and harassment campaigns that have led to at least three suicides. Their latest campaign forced a Canadian trans activist to flee to the United Kingdom for safety—only to have them continue cyberstalking her there.
And yet, the company that protected KiwiFarms from DDoS attacks, Cloudflare, refused to cut ties with them despite a Mount Everest-sized list of terms of service violations. But after the intensity of the spotlight led the KiwiFarms trolls to ramp up their threats, Cloudflare cut the cord. While KiwiFarms popped back up after finding a security provider desperate enough to host it, this noxious site has been put on notice: We surround them.
KiwiFarms, 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 KiwiFarms’ tactics. Among those concerned 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 KiwiFarms far worse than 8chan ever was “because he’s actually targeting specific people.” According to VICE France, at least three of KiwiFarms’ targets have committed suicide.
Among those “specific people” being attacked by KiwiFarms is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was swatted last week by someone who identified as a KiwiFarms 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 KiwiFarms 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.
What pushed Collins to turn the lights on KiwiFarms was the manner in which the forum’s users have terrorized Canadian trans activist and Twitch streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti. She ended up on KiwiFarms’ shit list after she spoke out against the wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. After a Twitch user who spoke out against her got banned, KiwiFarms users doxxed her and her family. They also swatted her, claiming she was planning a mass shooting at the city hall in her hometown of London, Ontario. When police vowed to investigate the swatting, KiwiFarms doxxed the cops as well.
Sorrenti fled to a nearby hotel and posted a photo of her cat settling into the room—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 the unauthorized charges. She then fled to Ireland—only to have the KiwiFarms terrorists 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 KiwiFarms, even though its content was a prima facie violation of its Acceptable Hosting Policy. Specifically, KiwiFarms’ 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: that dropping KiwiFarms 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 KiwiFarms 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 KiwiFarms. According to another post from Cloudflare, KiwiFarms 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 KiwiFarms 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, KiwiFarms 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 KiwiFarms after its users swatted Rep. Greene, and pulled its remaining services on Saturday.
It’s hard to give Cloudflare any 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 KiwiFarms’ 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.
It’s a battle we may be fighting into 2024.
Sunday, Sep 4, 2022 · 7:17:56 PM +00:00 · Darrell Lucus
KiwiFarms managed to get DDoS Guard to provide them services and moved to Russian hosting.
According to Sorrenti, apparently the site has been removed from those servers as well; KiwiFarms has since migrated to the dark web, where she predicts less than 99% of users will follow.
Sunday, Sep 4, 2022 · 9:41:03 PM +00:00 · Darrell Lucus
Team Drop KiwiFarms is moving in for the kill—now they’re pressuring ICANN to nuke KiwiFarms’ domain. And KiwiFarms users are crapping themselves. They actually think Tucker Carlson and the right wing blogosphere will save them.
Plus, the site’s Captcha provider has dropped it.