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SAN FRANCISCO – Reversing course under mounting public pressure, tech security giant Cloudflare announced Saturday that it will stop protecting the Kiwi Farms website, best known as a place where bullies stage hacks, online campaigns and harassment in the real world
Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince, who published a lengthy blog post last week justifying the company’s services to defend Kiwi Farms, told The Washington Post that he changed his mind not because of pressure but because for an increase in credible violent threats from the site.
“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, it has reacted by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We believe there is an imminent danger and the rate at which law enforcement is able to respond to these threats we believe is not fast enough to keep up.”
Prince said forum contributors were posting home addresses of those considered enemies and calling for them to be shot.
After Cloudflare’s move, visitors to Kiwi Farms received this message: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, access to the content of this site is blocked through the Cloudflare infrastructure”.
In a Telegram post, Kiwi Farm founder Josh Moon said Cloudflare made its decision “without any discussion” and said he had not been contacted by law enforcement about threats to the site. “It’s early morning here,” the post read. “My thoughts will be better articulated in the morning.”
Kiwi Farms was launched in 2013 and quickly became a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been linked to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum believe it is aimed at driving their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.
Cloudflare has faced widespread backlash in the past week, as a campaign for it to drop the service gained traction and increased pressure on paying customers to leave Cloudflare if it stood firm. The company says it offers some services, mostly free, that protect nearly a fifth of all Internet traffic.
On Aug. 24, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), called for Kiwi Farms to be taken down after she was hit by a person who claimed to be affiliated with the site. “Isn’t it worrying that this website exists?” Greene said in an interview with Newsmax. “This website should be taken down. There should be no business or service of any kind where you can target your enemy.”
That’s when the company stopped selling Kiwi Farms a $20-a-month service to customize the error messages shown to web users when its pages failed to load. On Saturday, it pulled the remaining free services, which prevent denial-of-service attacks and speed up content delivery by making copies of the site in many places.
Clara Sorrenti, a trans-Canadian Twitch streamer known online as Keffals, launched the #DropKiwiFarms campaign after being targeted by Kiwi Farms posters for more than half a year.
Forum users have repeatedly doxxed Sorrenti and her family, posting addresses and more, and last month called for fake crime reports to lure police to their home in so-called “stalking” attacks. Sorrenti fled to Northern Ireland late last month, and within 48 hours forum users had tracked down his location and started receiving threats.
On Saturday, he spoke to The Post minutes after police had arrived at his residence following another attempted hit.
“There are countless people who are suffering because of this website,” Sorrenti said. “Kiwi Farms is not about free speech, it’s about hate speech. Most of the content on the site is threads used for targeted harassment against political targets.”
Sorrenti’s campaign against Cloudflare has gone viral in recent days, with organizations and influential individuals joining the call to ban Kiwi Farms from Cloudflare’s service. The Anti-Defamation League called Kiwi Farms an “extremist-friendly forum that has been the breeding ground for countless harassment campaigns.”
In the interview, Prince said he was not comfortable leaving Kiwi Farms despite its content and would have preferred to have done so only in response to a court order.
But he said it was an easier call than his previous decisions to drop the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer and the website 8chan because those two were not hotbeds for specific violent plots.
In a post on Wednesday, Prince and another executive had written that they viewed providing basic security and caching services as infrastructure, such as Internet connectivity, and should not be held responsible for content without legal proceedings. They contrasted this with website hosting, which they said should have increased accountability and discretion.
Prince said Saturday that he stands by that reasoning, writing in a new post that letting go of Kiwi Farms was a “dangerous” decision. In the interview, he added that it could cause the forum’s users to increase even more, and that the forum would likely come back online with the help of Cloudflare’s competitors.
“This can go a long way in fueling the problem, and worse, it may even escalate as Kiwi Farms posters feel under attack,” Prince told The Post.
Some tech experts supported Cloudflare’s resistance to action. Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, cited the recent arm-twisting of Facebook by the current Indian government over content by political opponents.
“The question is, which parts of the Internet’s technical ‘stack’ are supposed to be neutral, which parts are supposed to moderate content, and is there some intermediate set of obligations that should apply to the intermediate layers? ” Keller told The Post.
But a large part of technologists did not agree with the previous position. On Friday, Stanford University’s Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter that the position to continue serving Kiwi Farms was “unsustainable.”
Cloudflare’s position on KF is not sustainable and I think their leadership, employees, shareholders and the rest of the world would be better off if they proactively acknowledged this.https://t.co/g3fmWKaCnT.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) September 3, 2022
“Soon a doctor, activist or trans person will be targeted and killed or a mass shooter will be inspired there. The investigation will show the killer’s links to the site and Cloudflare’s business base will evaporate,” Stamos wrote.
Prince said in the interview that he could not provide the number of new threats he had seen on Kiwi Farms, but said they had increased rapidly along with the forum criticism. He said the company had shared details with the FBI and law enforcement in the UK and Australia, but that none of those agencies had asked him, even informally, to leave Kiwi Farms.
More general concerns about violent online organizing have been rising for years, accelerating after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Warnings from law enforcement and intelligence have also pointed to possible violence around the November election, or even before, as former President Donald Trump has compared the FBI and other institutions with organized crime.
Online bullying of others over gender issues has inspired recent threats against children’s hospitals.
Kiwi Farm founder Moon is a former administrator of 8chan, a forum popularized by followers of the extremist QAnon ideology. After hosting a video of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 51 people, New Zealand’s internet service providers blocked Kiwi Farms after Moon refused a police request for information about related posts with the shooting.
Last July, Kiwi Farms was booted from its domain registrar, DreamHost, following the suicide of a software developer named Near, who was a longtime target of the site’s user base.
“Like many trans people who came out as targeted by this site, I too was targeted by Kiwifarms,” Erin Reed, a trans activist and content creator, tweeted on Saturday. “They showed up at my local courthouse to get my divorce papers. They put pictures of my house on Google. They’re trying to scare trans people into silence.”
But Chelsea Manning, a trans activist, offered a more nuanced opinion. “I don’t think the long-term solution to this kind of dangerous speech is to ask hosting providers to remove this stuff,” he told The Post. “We need a more balanced and measured long-term approach.”
Lorenz reported from Los Angeles.