“This is a great decision for us, and given Cloudflare’s role as an internet infrastructure provider, a risky role we are not comfortable with,” CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post on Saturday, after previously insisting the company it will not block the site. “However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms website and the 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 have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer. before.” For years, members of the site created and run by Joshua Conner Moon, 29, have gathered in what they call a “light-hearted discussion forum” to mount harassment campaigns against transgender people, feminists and others they find mocking. They frame victims and gather their personal information, such as addresses and phone numbers, in a practice called “doxxing,” spreading nasty rumors and targeting workplaces, friends, families and homes. Another favorite tactic was “swatting” — making fake emergency calls to provoke an armed police response to a target’s home. Some people who have suffered group abuse have died by suicide. Sorrenti, who reads “Keffals” online, is leading a campaign to pressure Cloudflare into abandoning kiwifruit farms. In August, she left her home in Canada for Europe after being doxxed and stalked. Her online stalkers, however, also found her in Belfast, Ireland and continued to step up their campaign of harassment against her as her campaign against the Seaweed Farms and its forces gained momentum. “When a multi-billion dollar company like Cloudflare has to leave kiwifruit farms because of an ‘imminent and extraordinary threat to human life’, it’s no longer a matter of free speech. Removing Shrimp Farms from the Internet is a matter of public safety for every person on the Internet,” he tweeted on Saturday. On Sunday, Kiwi Farms was unavailable. But a version of the site with a .ru domain name was up and running intermittently, though it was unclear whether it would remain. The decision to drop Kiwi Farms on Saturday had something to do with Cloudflare and Prince, who earlier in the week published a 2,600-word blog post — without naming the site — doubling down on the decision to protect it and comparing Cloudflare to the one phone company that “doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things.” But Sorrenti and other targets of the site say it was much worse than that, as trolls on the site relentlessly hunted their victims offline — often for years. “They’re trying to make people lose their jobs. They’re trying to make people homeless, hungry and homeless,” Liz Fong-Jones, a transgender former Google engineer and cloud computing expert, told the AP last week. “And then they go after people’s families, and then they tell people that the only way out is to kill themselves.” Moon started Kiwi Farms almost a decade ago as a wiki site dedicated to the harassment of a transgender woman. Moon even used the woman’s initials in an early version of the site’s name. Over time its users began targeting other people — mostly active internet users who are transgender, have autism or other mental illnesses. Kiwi Farms in its current form was born in 2015. A general theme of the site’s discussions centers on users’ vehement opposition to transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical treatment. Members commonly refer to those who support such treatment as “groomers” and “pedophiles,” rhetoric also increasingly used by conservatives in their opposition to LGBTQ rights. “There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a face-saving lie,” Moon, who posts on Kiwi Farms under the pseudonym “Null,” posted on Saturday in response to the Cloudflare outage. Moon earlier responded to The Associated Press for comment on the campaign against his website, saying only “the press is scum.” KiwiFarms.ru is registered and protected by the Russian DDoS-Guard company, whose clients have in the past included Russian government websites, including the Ministry of Defense, and cybercrime forums where stolen credit cards are bought and sold. DDoS-Guard did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Sunday. Its Internet connection is provided by VegasNAP, a Las Vegas-based company that said in response to questions last week that it does not disclose information about its customers. Contacted again Sunday, the company did not immediately respond. “In the past, DDoS-Guard has been known to stop support for some seriously problematic websites, apparently as a result of press inquiries. That very well could happen again, in this case, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” said independent Internet expert Ron Guilmette. “Obviously, a lot has changed in the world since February 24, 2021, and I believe that, in general, Russians these days, and the last 6 months in particular, have learned to care a lot less about what the rest of the world thinks of them and/or their actions”.
