2 providers sever ties with Kiwi Farms site
SAN FRANCISCO — A Russia-based provider cut web protection services on Monday to Kiwi Farms, becoming the second provider in two days to abandon the site and leaving it inaccessible on the public internet.
“Having analyzed the content of the site, we decided on the termination of DDoS protection services” for a version of the Kiwi Farms site with a Russian .ru domain name, D-DoS-Guard said. The .ru site, registered in mid-July, had been running intermittently after Cloudfare cut off services on Saturday.
Cloudfare cited an “immediate threat to human life,” in its decision to drop the site from its internet security services after an online campaign started by transgender Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti.
“This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post Saturday in an about-face after earlier insisting that the company would not block the site. “However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike what we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.”
For years, members of the site created and operated by Joshua Conner Moon, 29, have congregated on what they call a “lighthearted discussion forum” to, critics say, harass transgender people, feminists and others. Among the tactics of which they are accused is pooling personal details such as addresses and phone numbers of victims in a practice called “doxxing,” and spreading rumors and targeting workplaces, friends, families and homes.
Sorrenti has been leading a campaign to pressure Cloudflare to drop Kiwi Farms. In August, she said she fled her home in Canada for Europe after harassment from the site. Her online stalkers, however, found her in Belfast, Ireland, where she said they continued to their campaign.
“The decision to drop Kiwi Farms on Saturday was an about-face for Cloudflare and Prince, who earlier in the week put out a 2,600-word blog post — without mentioning the site by name — doubling down on the decision to protect it and comparing Cloudflare to a phone company that “doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things.”
But Sorrenti and other targets say it was far worse than that, as trolls on the site relentlessly pursued their victims offline — often for years on end.