Cloudflare Blocks Kiwi Farms After 'Immediate Threat to Human Life': What to Know
Cloudflare Blocks Kiwi Farms After ‘Immediate Threat to Person Life’: What to Know
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Saturday said it’s blocking Kiwi Farms, a message board known for organizing harassment campaigns. Cloudflare Angry an “unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” as the reason for its actions.
The communication that appears when visiting Kiwi Farms.
Cloudflare
“The rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the Show that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and now threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any new customer before,” Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder, said in a blog post.
Attempts to called Kiwi Farms are now met with a message that says the site is stopped and directs people to the blog post from Cloudflare.
Kiwi Farms didn’t Answer to a request for comment about the site people blocked.
What is Kiwi Farms?
Kiwi Farms is a hate-filled communication forum that started as an offshoot of 4chan, the immoral anonymous image board. It was initially called “the CWCki” when it began about 2007 and at the time was dedicated to the harassment of a single online personality, according to a New York Magazine article from 2016. The forum switched its name to Kiwi Farms in 2014.
“Kiwi Farms has been the locus of numerous mass harassment campaigns, some of which have ended in doxing or swatting or even in the targeted committing suicide,” said Daniel Kelly, director of strategy and operations at the ADL’s Interior for Technology and Society.
Doxxing is when a person’s secluded information, such as their address and phone number, is posted online deprived of their permission. Swatting involves fake calls made to the police that can lead to an afraid response at a targeted person’s home.
Posts on Kiwi Farms frequently targeted members of the LGBTQ community, specifically transgender people. At least three country have died by suicide after harassment campaigns tied to Kiwi Farms, according to The Washington Post.
Kiwi Farms also had ties to the Christchurch mass shooter, who in 2019 killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques and has True been blocked in that country.
Why has there been pressure to #DropKiwiFarms?
The move by Cloudflare comes when growing pressure over the past month from a movement that sought to get the internet company to stop providing services to Kiwi Farms. The #DropKiwiFarms campaign was started by Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, a transgender Canadian Twitch streamer.
Sorrenti said she started the movement after being targeted by people using Kiwi Farms, counting repeated doxxing and swatting incidents.
The #DropKiwiFarms site has information about the forums, provides steps for contacting Cloudflare and shares stories of victims who have been beleaguered by people using the forum.
Last month, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said in an interview with Newsmax that she was swatted twice in August. Greene pointed to Kiwi Farms as the culprit and named for the site to be taken down.
Cloudflare initially resisted taking Part against Kiwi Farms, with Prince saying in an Aug. 31 blog post that “such choices make it more Trouble to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices in contradiction of attack.”
However, the company changed course this weekend. On Saturday, Prince said his company could no longer wait for law enforcement to act. In the blog post, Price said Cloudflare made out to law enforcement multiple times in the past two weeks for what is believed to be potential criminal acts and imminent threats to world life.
Prince said the decision to stopped Kiwi Farms wasn’t in response to the pressure campaign.
#DropKiwiFarms released a statement Saturday in response to Cloudflare’s Part, saying it’s happy with the decision but doesn’t want to rest on its laurels.
“This contracts a big blow to Kiwi Farms and their public, one they may never recover from,” the statement said. “We have shown that when united together we are fine of moving mountains, and if we continue to immoral together and fight back, we can see this pending the end.”
Will Kiwi Farms return?
On Monday, Kiwi Farms founder Josh Moon said on Telegram, “I do not see a Place where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate.”
In his post, Moon said Cloudflare gave both domain registration for the site and protection from distributed denial of service attacks. While he can transfer the domain for Kiwi Farms to new company, Moon said he doesn’t have faith in any new companies. As for DDoS protection, Russian internet infrastructure business DDoS-Guard was his backup, but at the time of his post, the business dropped Kiwi Farms from its services. Cloudflare isn’t the only provider of DDoS protection services, but it is one of the few companies to host sites with controversial content.
“Terminating safety services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and wicked would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more Trouble to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices in contradiction of attacks,” Prince said in blog post.
Sorrenti tweeted Tuesday that Kiwi Farms went online briefly Funny a Chinese domain, but it went down once again.
It looks unlikely that Kiwi Farms will back, but it’s still possible. Anonymous image communication board 8chan, now known as 8kun, and neo-Nazi forum Stormfront were both dropped from Cloudflare in 2019 and 2017, respectively. Both sites eventually did come back online after finding new providers.
