Yes, it’s true, Kiwi Farms, the most notorious hate-mongering forum has been scrubbed by Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company for its continued practice of targeting, lampooning, and using abusive, racist remarks against a certain section of the population be it influencers, journalists and groups and individuals whose ideologies, identities and campaigns seemingly contradict a far-right standpoint.
The mounting pressure for its removal came from the victim of the site’s harassment, Klara Sorrenti, a Canadian trans-activist and political commentator who operates under the username ‘Keffals’. As reports state, Sorrenti was forced to move out of Canada after getting specifically targeted by the website that tried to frame her for murder and death threats.
As a response to this much-publicized harassment committed by the site, Cloudflare blocked the site from the internet, thereby terminating its access by the users. While the positive step taken by the company was met with words of encouragement and accolades, it was definitely not without its shortcomings.
Moreover, protests and negative reactions continued to flow from the site’s users as a response to Cloudflare’s actions. The question is, what triggered the decision to remove this highly racist website from the internet and most importantly, what are the discerning loopholes in this decision? Let’s find out.
Clara Sorrenti’s brutal harassment by Kiwi Farms
Clara Sorrenti aka Keffals’ nerve-wracking exploitation and abuse by Kiwi Farms, resulting in her launching a campaign to terminate its existence from the internet has received enormous media coverage for obvious reasons. In retrospect, she was the far-right website’s easy target given her identity as a trans activist holding a power of position with a voice (that is, she was an activist and a political commentator).
The incident occurred on August 7, when a bone-chilling email was sent to the City Council members that mentioned Sorrenti as the perpetrator of her mother’s murder. It also mentioned Sorrenti’s plan to shoot every cisgender person in the City Hall. Later, she and her fiancé shifted to a hotel room where they received a pizza under her deadname indicating that they were being followed and successfully located by the users of the site.
Commenting on this episode in a YouTube video, she said, “It’s the threat they send by telling me they know where I live and are willing to act on it in the real world”. Things didn’t go easy after that as her UberEats account got hacked followed by threatening messages to her friends and family. The horrifying incident caused her to leave Canada for Northern Ireland but to no avail, as she later discovered that she was being tracked all along.
On Monday, Sorrenti explained in detail her experience as a victim of Kiwi Farms. In an interview with CNN, she said, “When you get your thread on Kiwi Farms it means there are enough people who are interested in engaging in a long-term harassment campaign against you”. She added, “The first thing that they did [when my thread opened] was find the obituary for my dead father and use it to find his memorialized Facebook page. They were able to find a picture of my dad on the front porch of my childhood home and from that use Google Maps and figure out where that was located”.
Exhausted by a series of threats, abuse, and running that resulted in a group of armed police showing up at her place, Sorrenti decided to start a campaign to get the site off the internet. What was earlier perceived as a fringed website now transformed into a mainstream issue. This happened due to her active engagement in bringing her incident to the public attention. She appeared in countless interviews to state her story and launched social media campaigns to gather supporters for the movement. Finally, Cloudflare dropped the site from the internet archive.
Sorrenti’s story posed quite a lot of questions about the site’s past actions and cases of harassment and a few cases have been brought to focus. In 2013, users of Kiwi Farms began a hate campaign against a transgender game developer Chloe Sagal for developing a popular indie horror game called Homesick.
She used funds for gender reassignment surgery making her the perfect subject of the site’s harassment and lampooning. They called her out, posted abusive remarks, and constantly tracked her down causing her to die by suicide in 2018. Adding injury to the horrible insult, the CEO of the site Joshua Moon posted a live video where the website’s users were shown celebrating her death by mocking Sagal.
Cloudflare removes the site from the internet
As a response to Sorrenti’s allegations, the tech security company Cloudflare decided to block drop the site from the internet due to “imminent danger” caused by the site’s online harassment and threats that claimed the lives of its intended targets.
The decision was taken a few days after Chief Executive Matthew Prince supported the company’s decision to protect the site. This happened on August 31, when Prince took charge of the situation and without specifically mentioning either Sorrenti or Kiwi Farms stated that “overbroad takedowns can have significant unintended impact on access to content online”. He went on to add,
“Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy.”
Prince’s comments were met with backlash and criticism as it was mentioned that his opinions align with Cloudflare’s history of reluctance to even bring down neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer. He changed his take on the subject a few days later saying that the decision to block Kiwi Farms arouse out of “feeling attacked” as the site’s users “became even more aggressive”.
Speaking to The Washington Post last Saturday, Prince said, “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up”. The Company also reached out to Law Enforcement and commented,
“The rhetoric on the Kiwi Farms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before,” Prince wrote of the company’s decision to ultimately drop the forum. “We are aware and concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency … the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.”
Responding to WIRED, the Company did not make its position clear and firm but provided a vague response. Spokesperson Jessie Foster said,
“To be clear, it is not an effective or long-term solution for an infrastructure provider to take this action. We believe we need better legal mechanisms across society to ensure protection of those who come under threat of violence online”.
Albeit taking a firm decision to remove the site from the internet, the Company’s vague stand on the matter has led to the belief that the site may never fully be removed, an opinion that’s shared by the victim and activist Sorrenti. However, it also needs to be considered that it would be difficult for the site to regain its former position as the recent events have completely destroyed its potency.