Comment SAN FRANCISCO — Reversing under mounting public pressure, security tech giant Cloudflare announced Saturday it will stop protecting the Kiwi Farms website, best known as a place for stalkers to stage hacks, online campaigns and real-world harassment . Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince, who last week published a lengthy blog post justifying the company’s services defending Kiwi Farms, told the Washington Post that he changed his mind not because of pressure, but because of an increase in credible violent threats originating from the website. “As the kiwifruit farms felt more threatened, they responded by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We believe there is an imminent danger and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to these threats we do not believe is fast enough for us to keep up.” Prince said contributors to the forum are posting home addresses of perceived enemies and asking to be shot. After Cloudflare’s move, visitors to Kiwi Farms were greeted with the following message: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this website is not allowed to be accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.” In a Telegram post, Kiwi Farm founder Josh Moon said Cloudflare made its decision “without any discussion” and said it had not been contacted by law enforcement about threats to the site. “It’s early morning here,” the post said. “My thoughts will be better formulated in the morning.” Kiwi Farms started in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular online forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been linked to harassment coming from the Shrimp 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 faced widespread backlash last week as the campaign to drop the service gained steam and expanded to pressure customers to abandon Cloudflare if it held firm. The company says it provides a number of services, mostly free, that protect nearly a fifth of all Internet traffic. Two weeks ago, Prince said the company stopped selling Kiwi Farms a $20-a-month service to adjust error messages that Web users get when its pages don’t load. On Saturday, it pulled the rest of its free services, which prevent denial-of-service attacks and speed up content delivery by creating copies of the website in multiple locations. Clara Sorrenti, a transgender Canadian Twitch streamer known online as Keffals, started the #DropKiwiFarms campaign after being targeted by Kiwi Farms posters for over half a year. Forum users have repeatedly doxed Sorrenti and her family, posting addresses and more, and last month called in false crime reports to draw police to her home in so-called “swatting” attacks. Sorrenti fled to Northern Ireland late last month and within 48 hours forum users had tracked down her location and started receiving threats. On Saturday, she spoke with The Post minutes after police arrived at her residence following another attempted pursuit. “There are countless people who are suffering because of this site,” Sorretti 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 influencers joining the call for Kiwi Farms to be banned 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 felt uncomfortable leaving Kiwi Farms despite its content and would have preferred to have done so only in response to a court order. However, he said it was easier than his previous decisions to leave the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer and the website 8chan because those two were not hotbeds of specific violent plots. In a post on Wednesday, Prince and another executive wrote that they see the provision of basic security and caching services as infrastructure, like an Internet connection, and should not be held responsible for content without judicial process. They contrasted this with website hosting, which they said should have increased responsibility and discretion. Prince said on Saturday he stood by that reasoning and wrote in a new post that leaving Kiwi Farm was a “dangerous” decision. He added in the interview that it may cause forum users to escalate even further, and that the forum will likely resurface online with the help of Cloudflare competitors. “This could kick the problem way down the road and worse, it could even escalate as posters at Kiwi Farms feel under attack,” Prince told The Post. Some tech experts supported Cloudflare’s resistance to acting. Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Center for Political Governance, cited the recent crackdown on Facebook by India’s current government over content from political opponents. “The question is, which parts of the Internet’s technical ‘stack’ are supposed to be neutral, which are supposed to be moderate in content, and is there some intermediate set of obligations that should apply to the middle layers?” Keller told The Post. But a large portion of technologists disagreed with the previous stance. On Friday, Stanford University’s Alex Stamos tweeted that the position of continuing to serve kiwifruit farms was “untenable”. Cloudflare’s position on KF is untenable and I believe its leadership, employees, shareholders and the rest of the world would do well to proactively recognize this.https://t.co/g3fmWKaCnT — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) September 3, 2022 “Soon a doctor or an activist or a trans person will be doxxed 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 at Kiwi Farms, but said they had escalated quickly along with the criticism on the forum. He said the company had shared details with the FBI and law enforcement in the UK and Australia, but none of those agencies had asked him, even informally, to leave the Kiwi farms. Broader concerns about violent online organizing have been growing for years, accelerating after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Law enforcement and intelligence warnings have also pointed to potential violence around the November election, or even sooner, as former President Donald J. Trump has compared the FBI and other institutions to organized crime. Incitement by others on the Internet about gender issues has inspired recent threats against children’s hospitals. Moon, founder of Kiwi Farm, is a former administrator of 8chan, a forum popularized by conspiracy theorists QAnon. After hosting a video of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 51, New Zealand internet service providers blocked Kiwi Farms after Moon refused a police request for information about posts related to the shooting. Last July, Kiwi Farms was booted from its domain registrar, DreamHost, following the suicide of a software developer named Near who had long been targeted by the site’s user base. “As many trans people report being targeted by this site, I was targeted by Kiwifarms,” tweeted Erin Reed, a trans activist and content creator. “They turned up at the local court to grab my divorce papers. They posted pictures of my house on Google. They’re trying to scare trans people into silence.” But Chelsea Manning, a transgender activist, offered a more nuanced view. “I don’t think the long-term solution to this kind of dangerous speech is to ask hosting providers to have to take these things down,” he told The Post. “We need a more balanced and measured long-term approach.” Lorenz reported from Los Angeles.
