Cloudflare Drops Anti-Trans Forum Kiwi Farms for ‘Specific and Targeted Threats’

Cloudflare eventually dropped Kiwi Farms, a forum dedicated to doxxing, harassing, and threatening violence against trans people, amid continued backlash against its customer policies.

Kiwi Farms has been around since 2013. The most recent calls(Opens in a new window) for Cloudflare to drop the forum as a customer – which should make it much harder for its doxx users or harass their victims – came as Twitch streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti documented her struggles to protect her family after Kiwi Farms users “crashed” as part of their ongoing campaign against it.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and Global Head of Public Policy Alissa Starzak said(Opens in a new window) in an August 31 blog post that the company, which provided Kiwi Farms with protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and served as a content delivery network (CDN), would not abandon the forum as a customer despite knowing that his users were threatening the privacy and security of many people. Prince and Starzak said:

Today, over 20% of the web uses Cloudflare’s security services. When reviewing our policies, we need to be aware of the impact we are having and the precedent we are setting for the Internet as a whole. Termination of security services for content that our team personally deems disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long run, such choices make it harder to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices from attack.

The company also hid comments, replies and posts on various social platforms calling on it to abandon Kiwi Farms. This scrutiny of Cloudflare’s policies coincided with a sharp decline in the company’s stock. Google Finance says its share price on the New York Stock Exchange fell from a one-month high of $78.61 on August 11 to $58.71 at the time of writing.

prince announced(Opens in a new window) that Cloudflare had abandoned Kiwi Farms on September 3 in a widely(Opens in a new window) critical(Opens in a new window) blog post which clearly shows that the company was not happy with this development. He said:

This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous decision that we are not comfortable with. However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and the specific and targeted threats have escalated over the past 48 hours to the point where we believe there is an unprecedented urgency and immediate threat to human life contrary to what we believe. have seen before from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.

Cloudflare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sorrenti released a statement in response to Cloudflare’s decision:

Tweeter(Opens in a new window)

Defect reports(Opens in a new window) that Kiwi Farms became inaccessible shortly after Cloudflare’s announcement. Visitors were instead greeted with an error page stating “Due to an imminent and urgent threat to human life, access to content on this site is blocked through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.” This error message still appears when trying to visit the site at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, Kiwi Farms has would have(Opens in a new window) moved to the Telegram messaging platform.