There’s an old saying: “You play with the bull, you get the horns.” The users and leadership of one of the most noxious corners of the internet learned that the hard way this weekend. KiwiFarms, a message board notorious for vicious and criminal harassment of vulnerable people—especially trans people—was essentially driven out of existence over the weekend. In the wake of heightened scrutiny over KiwiFarms’ tactics, multiple key service providers cut ties with the site, rendering it all but inaccessible.
The beginning of the end came when Cloudflare, which protected KiwiFarms from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, dropped Kiwi Farms (previously detailed here). Increasingly threatening posts on the site led Cloudflare to reverse its initial decision to continue working with the site. In a span of roughly 24 hours, multiple companies, including KiwiFarns’ replacement DDoS protector, cut ties with the site as well. It has been offline since late Sunday night/early Monday morning, and the site’s founder and administrator suggests it may be a while before it comes back—if ever.
KiwiFarms is infamous for using reams of online data to dox and swat people, with trans people as frequent targets. The site’s harassment campaigns have been linked to at least three suicides.
But KiwiFarms met its match in Twitch streamer and Canadian trans activist Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, who became the target of a particularly relentless campaign of doxxing and swatting after she spoke out against the raft of transphobic legislation in the United States. The harassment continued even after she fled her native Canada to the United Kingdom. Undeterred, Sorrenti started a campaign to get Cloudflare to pull its services from KiwiFarms.
Cloudflare initially refused to do so because—wait for it—it claimed its decisions to pull services from noxious sites like Daily Stormer and 8chan led dictatorships to pressure it to pull services from human rights sites. In Cloudflare’s twisted and patently insulting view, dropping sites like KiwiFarms, the stock-in-trade of which is targeting the marginalized, potentially endangered those fighting for the marginalized. However, Cloudflare reversed course on Saturday night due to the increasingly threatening tone of KiwiFarms posts. According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, while law enforcement was on the case, things were escalating too rapidly for Cloudflare to wait. Translation: Prince knew that his company could have potentially been sued out of existence if Sorrenti or anyone else were gravely injured or killed as a result of KiwiFarms’ tactics.
On Sunday afternoon, Keffals tweeted that another important part of KiwiFarms’ infrastructure had cut the off the site, namely hCaptcha, which provided KiwiFarms with services to keep bots from signing up for accounts.
Kiwi Farms had managed to get DDoS protection via Russia-based company DDoS Guard, but even that was only enough to keep the site online intermittently. By late Sunday night, however, the site had gone offline. According to British Internet security expert Kevin Beaumont, this was because DDoS Guard had pulled its protection.
This was subsequently confirmed by Yuri Litvienko, the media and tech reporter at one of the few independent media sources left in Russia, Kommersant—the Russian counterpart of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and Bloomberg News.
Beaumont later obtained DDoS Guard’s full statement about the decision.
In a lengthy post just before KiwiFarms went offline, site founder Josh Moon claimed that a multitude of problems made it very likely that it will be a while before the site returns. He claimed that as he was typing the post, he was notified that DDoS Guard had dropped KiwiFarms.
Harvard Law’s Alejandra Caraballo saw a similar statement on KiwiFarms’ Telegram feed, and noticed something that made her think the site could be dead for good. Apparently KiwiFarms’ IPs are hosted in Australia, so if APNIC pulls them, KiwiFarms might never come back.
Whether Moon can get back online is the least of his worries. It’s only a matter of time before we see KiwiFarms posters being arrested, and Keffals has given a pretty loud indication that she intends to pursue civil action; she’s started a GoFundMe campaign to fund her legal expenses.
Let’s be frank: This is one site that needed to be canceled. Slate put it best on Sunday night: This is actually a victory for free speech. At risk of sounding like a broken record, an environment in which people are bludgeoned into silence by harassment and trolling is not conducive to free speech.
Yet KiwiFarms has been around since 2013. And on the face of it, it looks like it was brought to its knees in a mere 72 hours. NBC News profiled KiwiFarms’ harassment of Keffals on Friday afternoon, and by Sunday night into Monday morning, it was in a full death spiral.
This, friends, is what democracy with a free press looks like.