Screenshot/YouTube - Keffals
- Clara Sorrenti, also known as Keffals, spearheaded a campaign to get Cloudflare to drop KiwiFarms.
- The fringe forum has an extensive history of targeting and harassing internet personalities.
- After Cloudflare dropped the forum on Saturday, it's unclear how or if KiwiFarms will stay online.
KiwiFarms, a fringe forum known for its history of harassment targeting trans people and hosting hateful content, is facing an existential crisis this week after the security and hosting provider Cloudflare blocked it from using its services on Saturday. Cloudflare's decision cited the increasingly extreme rhetoric on the website as an immediate danger to human life and followed a mass online campaign protesting KiwiFarms.
The campaign was led by Clara Sorrenti, also known as Keffals, a Twitch streamer and activist who grew an online following through her streams discussing LGBTQ issues and politics. The movement against KiwiFarms gained traction in late August and early September after Sorrenti, who is a transgender woman, spoke out about members of KiwiFarms doxxing and threatening her online for months.
"#DropKiwiFarms" became the largest public campaign to date against the forum, which has long been known among extremism researchers as a hotbed of bigoted and radical material. The image and message board was originally launched in 2009 as CWCki, and functioned as a website to catalog and mock the internet personality Christine Chandler. It was later rebranded to KiwiFarms in 2015 and became a hub for trolling and harassment campaigns against internet figures.
The site has faced increasing pressure over the last few years as multiple people whom KiwiFarms trolls allegedly targeted and harassed have died by suicide, as Insider previously reported.
Cloudflare initially appeared resistant to dropping KiwiFarms, stating in a blog post last week that it provides a variety of services and almost never terminates security services for websites. The statement, which was co-authored by the CEO Matthew Prince and Vice President Alissa Starzak, did not explicitly mention KiwiFarms by name.
The post also suggested that Cloudflare had qualms about previously dropping from its services fringe websites like neo-Nazi hub The Daily Stormer and the far-right forum 8chan.
"After both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations," the post states.
After Cloudflare blocked KiwiFarms, a spokesperson for Cloudflare told Insider that during the past two weeks it had "proactively reached out to law enforcement" about criminal threats uploaded to KiwiFarms. The spokesperson said the choice to ban the forum "is not an effective or long-term solution for an infrastructure provider" to take.
#DropKiwiFarms came after a targeted harassment campaign
The campaign against the forum and Cloudflare began in August following Sorrenti saying she had woken up to a police officer directing a gun at her in her London, Ontario home after KiwiFarms members allegedly organized to SWAT her. (Swatting involves people making fake threats or false claims to get armed authorities to raid someone's house and arrest them.)
The 28-year-old Canadian later said she had to go into hiding after KiwiFarms members allegedly continued to track her location and harass her online despite her moving residences.
"I have been the target of an intense harassment campaign now for several months," Sorrenti said in a YouTube video about the harassment on August 19. "I have had friends doxxed, I have had family doxxed, I have had people even loosely associated with me doxxed. But over the last month, things have been escalating."
Since then, Sorrenti spearheaded a public campaign against KiwiFarms and implored Cloudflare to drop the forum from its services. The public outcry was fierce, with "#DropKiwiFarms" and "#CloudflareProtectsTerrorists" both trending on Twitter in late August, according to Vice.
Sorrenti said she continued to be harassed, and tweeted last Wednesday that Northern Irish police had come to her residence after a livestream the day before because of another Swatting attempt.
—keffals #DropKiwifarms (@keffals) August 31, 2022
Multiple human rights-oriented organizations like the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD) have also spoken out against KiwiFarms and Cloudflare.
"Taking action against anti-trans hate and violence should be an easy decision for Cloudflare, and the company needs to put a stop to willfully allowing its services to be used to aggressively harass LGBTQ people and spark real world violence," GLAAD tweeted last week using the "DropKiwiFarms" hashtag.
The Anti-Defamation League tweeted on August 24 calling KiwiFarms "an extremist-friendly forum that has been the breeding ground for countless harassment campaigns."
The movement centered around a letter writing campaign to "increase the pressure" on Cloudflare staff to drop KiwiFarms.
Cloudflare dropped KiwiFarms, sending it scrambling to find another host
Cloudflare blocked KiwiFarms on Saturday. In a blog post, Prince cited increasingly aggressive rhetoric on KiwiFarms as the "pressure campaign escalated" against the forum as a reason behind the decision.
The operator of KiwiFarms, Joshua "Null" Moon, who has referred to Sorrenti using a transphobic slur, has continuously defended the forum amid the backlash. In response to Insider's request for comment about Sorrenti's campaign against the forum, Moon quoted this reporter's pronouns in his email signature and wrote "LOL," and did not address any of the questions.
Moon posted a statement on Monday on the KiwiFarms Telegram account saying he did not "see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate," and that he was looking at a couple of potential hosts for KiwiFarms but did not think they would be able to handle the forum.
"It will either become a fractured shell of itself, like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domain names like Daily Stormer," Moon wrote to the 9,000 users in the channel.
hCaptcha, an anti-bot service that KiwiFarms used for captcha security, also dropped the forum following Cloudflare.
Sorrenti, who did not respond to Insider's request for comment, has over 135,000 and 47,000 followers on Twitter and Twitch, respectively.
Sorrenti has shared daily updates about KiwiFarms' status and celebrated Cloudflare's decision to block the forum.
"This is a historical moment where thousands of people have stood up and taken a stance against online harassment and hate," Sorrenti wrote in a statement on behalf of the #DropKiwiFarms campaign on Saturday after Cloudflare's announcement.
Sorrenti later tweeted saying she was going to take a day to celebrate and then begin working to get FiberHub, which she said services KiwiFams' servers, to block the forum.
Trying to access KiwiFarms as of Tuesday afternoon brings up a blank page that says "Blocked" and links to Cloudflare's blog page about the decision.
KiwiFarms, one of the most hateful places on the internet, may finally be gone for good
Source: Kalayaan News
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