Sorrenti, better known by her online name “Keffals,” launched a campaign calling on Cloudflare to stop providing services to the site. Fearing for her safety after her personal information was posted online, Sorrenti said she left her home in Canada in recent weeks and traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to stay with a friend. However, she says, online harassers managed to track her down there. Police in Northern Ireland are investigating threats against her there, the Sunday Times reported. Cloudflare’s decision comes amid an ongoing debate about what major internet companies and platforms should do about online hate and harassment campaigns organized with the support of their services. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, has long expressed discomfort with his company’s potential role in deciding what can and cannot be online. It’s a position echoed by others in Silicon Valley who argue that it shouldn’t be up to them to police speech online. “This is a great decision to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an internet infrastructure provider, a risky one that we are not comfortable with,” Prince wrote in a blog post on Saturday after Kiwi Farm was blocked. But he said rhetoric about kiwifruit farms “and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the past 48 hours to the point where we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike anything we’ve seen in the past from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.” “Cloudflare provides security services to Kiwifarms, protecting them from DDoS and other cyber attacks. We have never been their hosting provider,” Prince added. In 2019, Cloudflare called for support for the hate-filled forum 8chan after that site was linked to a shooting in El Paso, Texas, that killed 23 people. Last Wednesday, amid mounting public pressure to stop supporting kiwifruit farms, Cloudflare published a blog post attempting to clarify its position. The post did not directly refer to Kiwi Farms, but Cloudflare said its decisions to stop supporting 8chan in 2019 and the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer in 2017 had unintended consequences. “In a deeply troubling response, after both shutdowns we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes trying to get us to end security services for human rights organizations,” the blog post read. By Sunday morning, Kiwi Farms was mostly back up online, finding another service provider to keep it online. Sorretti told CNN on Sunday that she plans to continue the campaign to have all Internet service providers deny the Blueberry Farms business.
