Kiwi Farms: What to Know About Cloudflare’s Abandoned Hate Message Forum

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said on September 3 that it had blocked Kiwi Farms, a message board known for running harassment campaigns. Cloudflare cited “unprecedented urgency and immediate threat to human life” as the reason for its actions.

“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 have seen before from Kiwifarms or any other customer before,” Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, said in a blog post.

Attempts to visit Kiwi Farms are now greeted with a message that the site is blocked and directs people to Cloudflare’s blog.

Kiwi Farms did not respond to a request for comment on the site being blocked.

What is Kiwi Farms?

Kiwi Farms is a hate message board that started as an offshoot of 4chan, the infamous anonymous picture board. It was originally called “the CWCki” when it started around 2007 and was at the time dedicated to stalking a single online personality, according to a 2016 New York Magazine article. The forum changed its name to Kiwi Farms in 2014.

“Kiwi Farms has been the site of numerous mass harassment campaigns, some of which have resulted in doxing or swatting or even the target’s suicide,” said Daniel Kelly, director of strategy and operations at the Center. for ADL technology and society.

Doxxing is when someone’s private information, such as their address and phone number, is published online without their permission. Swatting involves fake calls to the police that can lead to an armed response at a targeted person’s home.

Posts about Kiwi Farms frequently target members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people. At least three people have died by suicide after harassment campaigns linked to Kiwi Farms, according to the Washington Post.

Kiwi Farms also had ties to the Christchurch mass shooter, who in 2019 killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques and has since been blocked there.

Why has there been push for #DropKiwiFarms?

Cloudflare’s move comes after mounting pressure over the past month from a campaign to get the internet company to stop providing services to Kiwi Farms. The #DropKiwiFarms campaign was started by Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, a transgender Canadian Twitch streamer.

Sorrenti said she started the campaign after being targeted by people using Kiwi Farms, including repeated incidents of doxxing and swatting.

The #DropKiwiFarms site contains information about forums, provides steps to contact Cloudflare, and shares stories of victims who have been targeted by people using the forum.

Last month, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said in an interview with Newsmax that she was run over twice in August. Greene named Kiwi Farms as the culprit and called for the site to be taken down.

Cloudflare initially resisted taking action against Kiwi Farms, with Prince stating in an August 31 blog post that “such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices from attack.”

However, the company changed course a few days later. Prince said his company could no longer wait for law enforcement to act. In the blog post, he says that Cloudflare has contacted law enforcement multiple times over the past two weeks for what are believed to be potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life.

Prince said the decision to block Kiwi Farms was not in response to the pressure campaign.

#DropKiwiFarms released a statement the same day in response to Cloudflare’s action, saying he’s happy with the decision but doesn’t want to rest on his laurels.

“This is a severe blow to Kiwi Farms and their community, from which they may never recover,” the statement read. “We have shown that when we are united we are capable of moving mountains, and if we continue to unite and fight, we will be able to see it until the end.”

Will Kiwi Farms return?

Kiwi Farms founder Josh Moon said on September 5 via Telegram, “I don’t see a situation where Kiwi Farms is just allowed to operate.”

In his article, Moon said that Cloudflare provides both domain registration for the site and protection against distributed denial of service attacks. Although he may transfer the Kiwi Farms domain to another company, Moon said he does not trust any other company. As for DDoS protection, Russian internet infrastructure company DDoS-Guard was his backup, but at the time of his post, the company removed Kiwi Farms from its services. Cloudflare isn’t the only DDoS protection service provider, but it’s one of the few companies hosting sites with such content.

Sorrento tweeted on September 6, Kiwi Farms briefly went online using a Chinese domain, but went back down.

Jim Watkins, owner of the 8chan anonymous image board, now known as 8kun, helped Moon get Kiwi Farms back online days after it was taken down, according to Vice. The forum is barely functional, and VanwaTech, a Vancouver, Washington-based Internet services company, provides security and domain services for Kiwi Farms. VanwaTech provided similar services for 8kun, and Watkins is involved in the business, according to Vice.

On September 18, in a post on Telegram, Moon said that Kiwi Farms had been hacked. The website URL now displays a message about hacking.

“I don’t know for sure if any user information has been leaked,” he said in the statement. “In my access logs they tried to download all user records at once. This caused an error and no output was returned. I stopped everything soon after. If they retrieved information through another mechanism, I can’t say for sure anyway.”

Moon said the site will be restored from a backup, but that won’t happen immediately.

Before Kiwi Farms was blocked, neo-Nazi forum Stormfront and 8chan were both removed from Cloudflare in 2019 and 2017, respectively. Both sites eventually came back online after finding new providers, but went offline earlier this month. They are also backed by VanwaTech, according to Vice.