The controversial ‘community of stalkers’ has been kicked off its second security platform in as many days. Shanti Mathias explains what happened.
What is Kiwi Farms and why am I hearing about it now?
Kiwi Farms is an internet forum site that was kicked off internet services and security company Cloudflare on Sunday after a persistent campaign by a Twitch streamer, Keffals, who says she was threatened, swatted (when someone impersonates you and tells the police you’re about to commit a mass shooting), and doxxed by Kiwi Farms users.
The forum, which evolved out of notorious message boards 4chan and 8chan, is known for being a “community of stalkers”; it initially was created to harass an anime artist by documenting her every movement and transaction, calling her house and threatening her parents, and ridiculing her for being autistic and trans. Since its beginnings more than a decade ago, Kiwi Farms has become a community focused on harassing and doxxing online individuals perceived as deviant, especially transgender people and people with mental illnesses. While members of the forum have different ideologies (they’re not universally “alt-right”) they are all interested in gossiping and posting personal information of the figures they fixate on.
Kiwi Farms is also known for refusing to comply with the New Zealand police over hosting footage of the March 15 shooting.
After being removed by Cloudflare, Kiwi Farms moved to a Russian domain; as of Tuesday morning New Zealand time, the Russian company DDOS-Guard has also removed the site from its services.
Who is Keffals?
Keffals, whose real name is Clara Sorrenti, is a Canadian streamer who posts videos to the site Twitch, which is mainly known for video game content. Sorrenti, who is transgender, initially broadcast videos of herself playing video games, but then began speaking about anti-trans legislation in the US.
Sorrenti is also known for “ratioing” right wing figures on Twitter by replying to them and getting more engagement than their original tweets. She’s also run as a Communist candidate in Canadian elections. Like other transgender activists, Sorrenti has been targeted by Kiwi Farms after an extensive online feud with another Twitch streamer which came to a head in March.
At the beginning of August, Sorrenti says she was swatted by a Kiwi Farms member and misgendered by the Toronto police. In response, she and a community of supporters created a campaign, largely exercised on their Twitter and Twitch platforms, asking hosting service Cloudflare to #dropKiwiFarms. The campaign said that Kiwi Farms had been connected to three suicides caused by harassment (which hasn’t been clearly documented), and raised thousands of dollars via a GoFundMe which Sorrenti said she would use for legal fees.
Due to her address being made public, Sorrenti moved to a hotel, the location of which was also discovered by Kiwi Farms members. Sorrenti has continued to stream and post through the debacle, and said on Twitter that she has built a “streaming backpack” so she can continue talking to her haters and supporters on the internet while wandering through Ireland.
Is Kiwi Farms connected to New Zealand?
The name “Kiwi Farms”, and the logo of a kiwi, only became part of the forum in 2014. Initially the website was known as “CWCki”, a reference to the anime artist it was created to document and harass. The forum was renamed “Kiwi” as the scope of the site increased to fixating and harassing others.
While Kiwi Farms and its founder Joshua Moon are American, the website does have some connections to New Zealand. The website of Action Zealandia, a neo-Nazi group in New Zealand, was hosted by 1776 Hosting, a company owned by Moon. When Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, the Action Zealandia website went offline too. Kiwi Farms was also involved in distributing copies of the March 15 shooting video and refused to respond to calls by the New Zealand police to remove it.
Are there more websites like this out there?
The network of angry, miserable people who band into uneasy communities that work together to weaponise the internet is massive. While some of these figures are part of the alt-right or conspiracy theory groups, ideologies are diverse.
While some aspects of these communities play out on public social media like Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter, many of them gather and organise on smaller forums like Kiwi Farms, encrypted groups on Telegram or Signal, or communities on Slack or Discord. This dispersed nature makes it very difficult for governments, researchers or companies to gauge who is out there, and how seriously to take their threats. But there are certainly many more groups like Kiwi Farms that congregate online and don’t receive any attention unless a figure like Sorrenti draws attention to them in public.
But Kiwi Farms is gone now, right?
For the moment, the Kiwi Farms website can’t be used, since two security companies have removed the website from their platforms. But the community of people who want to use the internet in this malicious way will almost certainly have private ways of communicating and organising, either to relaunch the website, or to emerge under a different name and in a different form.
Corporations like Cloudflare or DDOS-Guard are free to remove actors whose behaviour they disagree with, regardless of legislation by government authorities. But the quick switch from Cloudflare to the DDOS-Guard Russian service demonstrates the hydra-like resilience of internet communities: if you get rid of them in one place, they can grow another head elsewhere.
Companies removing websites based on internet pressure campaigns sounds like a free speech issue. Is there anything to learn from this sorry mess?
As a private company, Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are free to make decisions that it thinks will be good for their business and reputation, which obviously included removing Kiwi Farms in this case (but not before a long blog post asserting the right to freedom of speech and then a backtrack).
This course of action exemplifies the difficulty for governments to regulate online harassment and hate speech; the speed at which these events occur and the nuance of complicated motivations by online actors makes it difficult to determine who is in the right and to exercise the levers to stop people from posting. It’s easier for companies to ban bad behaviour, but often digital harassment never reaches the level of publicity that this case has.
Ultimately, this event has been good for both Sorrenti and Kiwi Farms, raising both of their profiles and drawing more people that might agree with them to their platforms. As Sorrenti’s many paid subscribers and thousands of dollars of Go Fund Me money show, online controversy can be lucrative for those who build their lives around digital attention. Perhaps the best take on the event is from trans writer Taylor Stuckey, who said:
“I just can’t believe that the material lives of trans people are made any better by Kiwi Farms not existing. None of the people that use it are gone. None of the public information they’ve collected is gone. None of the data brokers that sell or make that information available for free are gone or close to being regulated.”
The Keffals vs KiwiFarms story exemplifies how the internet creates patterns of harassment, controversy, cancellation and anger, often targeting vulnerable groups and prominent individuals. The details will differ, but this has happened before, and it will happen again.
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