The Worst Place On The Web

Kiwi Farms- A place for the worst of the worst to do their worst

Remember when your Mom warned you about places on the Internet where people would do nasty things to others simply because they could? Or because they might get some sad, sick enjoyment out of hurting and harassing others?

Well, it turns out she was describing Kiwi Farms, a website so sick and twisted that when it was finally shut down by their hosting service this week, it was only after years of online stalking and harassment campaigns. Trolls on Kiwi Farms would routinely stalk, doxx, and swat their targets, sometimes to get police departments to do their dirty work and kill them.

And yet, despite finally being shut down,

Kiwi Farms users still think they’re the victim here. A reminder: they’re not.

When the online stalker haven Kiwi Farms was finally squeezed after years and years of harassment campaigns, the resulting sickly green, decomposing juices found their way into the outflowing sewer of the internet. Traveling miles and miles downstream in the few days since they were blocked by digital security providers Cloudflare, the decrepit, off-smelling Kiwi Farms has now flowed out into a lake full of similar refuse. It seems that on the internet, not even the already decayed may truly die.

Well—to reiterate in plain English—Kiwi Farms, the online forum and troll farm coined back in 2014 as an offshoot of 4chan, was renowned for spawning hate campaigns that targeted and harassed folks who drew the ire of the hate machine. After a successful pushback campaign, many of the site’s security hosts dropped Kiwi. After a few days of migrating on and then off Russian servers, Oregon Public Broadcasting confirmed late Monday that the Vancouver-based web firm VanwaTech was now taking over hosting duties for Kiwi.

Sure, there’s a long and sordid history to Kiwi Farms, going back to Internet cesspools like 4chan and 8chan, which existed to harass virtually every group someone didn’t like- Jews, LGBTQ, women, Liberals, foreigners…it’s a long list.

Since Al Gore invented the Internet, there’s been a subculture of trolls with no morals, decency, social skills, and/or willingness to respect boundaries, willing and able to do anything to anyone for any reason. Or no reason whatsoever. Transgender people have always been a favorite target, but any minority without a strong voice makes for a good target.

And for someone who doesn’t respect the boundaries of others, it’s great sport. You can target anyone in the world, and the odds of it getting back to you are slim.

You don’t need to know much about the online hate forum Kiwi Farms. In my first draft of this newsletter, I included a full history of the site, from its days as a spinoff of the far-right message board 8chan that was dedicated to the full-time harassment of a single internet micro-celebrity, to its involvement in the Christchurch shootings and multiple targets who went on to take their own lives. I discussed the detail of whether the site has an ideology that can be pinned down: the extent to which it is far-right, white supremacist, radically transphobic – or simply nihilistic and nasty.

But you don’t actually need to know the grimy details. Suffice to say that Kiwi Farms is, like a long list of similar forums before and after it, somewhere that proudly fights for the label of “the worst place on the internet”.

And that label has been well-deserved, especially over the past years, as Kiwi Farms has focused intensely (though not exclusively) on one target:

Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti, who attracted its ire for using her platform to discuss the wave of anti-transgender legislation sweeping across the US. Sorrenti, who streams as Keffals, was subject to a growing wave of harassment, as Kiwi Farms coordinated takedown requests to Twitch, shared her personal information and contrived to get her “swatted”. A fake shooting threat, sent to police in London, Ontario, where she lived, led to an armed response unit being sent to her house.

Similar attacks have ended in disaster before, and Sorrenti was only arrested and held for questioning. After, she fled to a nearby hotel, and posted a picture of her cat on the bed to reassure followers that she was OK. Forum users meticulously compared the sheets in the photo with those of every single hotel in the area, finding a match through online booking sites and resuming the onslaught of harassment, sending endless pizzas to her, by name, to let her know she’d been found.

Usually, the idea of getting endless pizzas might sound pretty awesome, but it was quite terrifying for Sorrenti. The message being sent to her by the trolls at Kiwi farms was simple: You can’t run. You can’t hide. We can find you anywhere-and we will.

Unfortunately for the trolls, Sorrenti wasn’t one to retire meekly from a fight.

She ended up fleeing again, crossing the Atlantic to stay with a friend in Belfast, and the stalkers followed in turn: one reportedly showed up outside the apartment building she was staying in with a handwritten note filled with transphobic abuse. When Sorrenti’s friend posted online about going for poutine, to compare the Northern Irish spin on it with the Canadian original, someone allegedly began coordinating bomb threats to every restaurant in Belfast that serves the dish.

But Sorrenti was also mobilising opposition, keeping the story on the agenda. Sorrenti endure intensifying harassment, but her campaign against Kiwi Farms gained supporters.

And Sorrenti also had a target. Not Kiwi Farms itself – not directly – but the large American company that was hosting the forum: Cloudflare.

Cloudflare provides internet infrastructure for websites, like managing DNS so that people can actually visit a site, handling encryption and overseeing bursts of traffic both benign (like a burst of viral attention) and malicious (like a “denial of service” attack).

The company is tremendously successful, with a market cap of around $20bn (£17.3bn). Thanks to a generous free tier, it is used by around one-fifth of the web[.]

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tries to take a firm stance against content moderation. Prince argues that because Cloudflare’s infrastructure provider services are essential, they should be provided to all. He cautions against the possibility of too much arbitrary power resting with one company.

Calling himself “a free speech absolutist,” Prince and his company have provided services to al-Qaeda, the White supremacist site The Daily Stormer, and 8chan, among others.

He seems nice, eh?

Over and over again, the principled absolutist stance has come crashing into reality. Cloudflare sets out its anti-moderation position, the pressure grows, the evidence of real-world harms increases, and the company folds. “We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design,” Prince wrote in 2019 when he decided to cut off service for 8chan.

And so the cycle began anew with Kiwi Farms. If Cloudflare dropped the site, Kiwi Farms would struggle to stay online until it found a new company willing to host it. If Cloudflare allowed it to survive, Kiwi Farms would become Cloudflare’s problem.

Cloudflare once again began dancing the dance. In a 2500-word blog post published on August 31st, Matthew Prince

and Cloudflare’s head of public policy, Alissa Starzak, laid out again the case for keeping sites online. The post did not once mention Kiwi Farms by name, but the pair noted that “questions have arisen” about the company’s abuse policies: “Our guiding principle is that organizations closest to content are best at determining when the content is abusive … overbroad takedowns can have significant unintended impact on access to content online.”

So, problems with content arise with a specific site. “Questions have arisen” about that site’s abuse policies. Cloudflare attempts to defer to that site as they “are best at determining when the content is abusive.”

After all, Cloudflare doesn’t want to be responsible for an “overbroad” takedown because that can “have significant unintended impact on access to content online.”

Shorter version: Prince and Starzak hope the problem will resolve itself because they don’t want to have to get involved and force Kiwi Farms’ hand. That wouldn’t look good for Cloudflare.

Ultimately, Matthew Prince doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, regardless of how messy, distasteful, and disgusting the behavior of the trolls on Kiwi Farms may be.

Cloudflare had changed its policies since kicked off 8chan, they explained, because they had “concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold … Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy.” Cloudflare will follow legal requirements for termination of services, the pair wrote, but will go no further. “If that content is harmful, the right place to restrict it is legislatively.”

That policy lasted four days. All Kiwi Farms had to do, Cloudflare implied, was behave enough that it wasn’t literally illegal to provide services to. And yet, as the pressure on the site rose, its users responded in kind. Their targets spread from Sorrenti to others posting in support of her campaign; then to former Cloudflare customers who had quit the company over the issue; then to current Cloudflare customers who had posted their unease at the company’s stance.

When Matthew Prince saw that the Kiwi Farms issue was beginning to hurt Cloudflare’s business, he realized he had no choice but to take action. Even as big as Cloudflare is, Prince knew that the stench emanating from Kiwi Farms and the bad PR it would produce would only worsen if he failed to act.

On September 3rd, Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, but even then, Prince wasn’t comfortable with the action taken and was hardly decisive in his statement.

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. However, the rhetoric on the Kiwi Farms 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 we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before.

Of course, the problems at Kiwi Farms hadn’t “escalated over the last 48 hours.” They reached the point where Cloudflare could no longer ignore them. If Clara Sorrenti hadn’t decided to fight back, the trolls at Kiwi Farms would still be on Cloudflare doing their worst and getting away with it.

If nothing else, Kiwi Farms has made it far more dangerous for transgender people to be on the Internet. Yeah, Mama must be SO proud.

If you go to kiwifarms.com today, this is what you’ll find:

Even kiwifarms.ru shows a site not found page. It seems as if Kiwi Farms may have proven itself too toxic for any neutral hosting service to touch. So VanwaTech, a hosting firm across the river from me in Vancouver, WA, has agreed to take on Kiwi Farms. VanwaTech was started by a group of guys notorious for their involvement in 8chan.

As the Daily Dot reported last month…Clara Sorrenti aka Keffals, launched a widely publicized effort to deplatform Kiwi Farms. The message board’s internet security provider, Cloudflare, initially stood by Kiwi Farms but later backed down and dropped it. The Russian company DDoS-Guard then briefly provided Kiwi Farms with service before dropping it too, prompting Sorrenti to tweet, “We won. Kiwi Farms is dead.”

Now Kiwi Farms is back. It’s being serviced by VanwaTech, an internet service provider whose clients have included some of the internet’s most popular havens for conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, such as 8kun and the neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer.

VanwaTech’s young founder, Nick Lim, confirmed that it is providing service to Kiwi Farms.

“VanwaTech does provide CDN services to Kiwi Farms, but we have no relationship with the website itself or the posters,” Lim told the Daily Dot via email Tuesday morning. (“CDN” stands for content delivery network or content distribution network.)

“We maintain a firm commitment to our role as a neutral provider of internet services and not an internet censor.”

Lim has consistently insisted that he isn’t an extremist but a free-speech absolutist and entrepreneur. Last year, Bloomberg described his claims to be an “apolitical” businessman as either “naïve” or “preposterous gaslighting.”

The good news, such as it is, is that VanwaTech may be hosting Kiwi Farms, but the site has been rendered hors de combat. Ah, but let’s not pop that champagne just yet.

To say that the worst place on the Internet is forever done and dusted is almost certainly overly optimistic. It will take virtually no effort for Kiwi Farm to reconstitute itself as a new entity under new management, perhaps even on Cloudflare. Terrible people will always find a way to make their presence known so they can continue to do terrible things.

Still, a win is a win.

Kiwi Farms founder Josh Moon has said he expects that the forum won’t be able to stay up consistently anymore. As reported by NBC News’ Ben Collins, Moon does “not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate.” The site has even been purged from the Internet Archive. It appears that, for now, it has found a home with VanwaTech, which also provided services to Daily Stormer and 8kun (formerly 8chan) after their respective Cloudflare bans.

Sorrenti acknowledged that Kiwi Farms may never fully be offline, in the same way that 8chan and Daily Stormer have persisted. But she notes that once a site loses the ability to purchase basic web services from content delivery networks and web security companies, they become “completely impotent” in spite of the extreme lengths they can go to in order to nominally stick around. Whether or not Kiwi Farms has been completely removed, Sorrenti said, “is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have not only been achieved, but have achieved more than we could have ever expected.” Kiwi Farms has lost its access in the visible parts of the web.

“We won,” Sorrenti said. “Kiwi Farms is dead.”

Kiwi Farms may be dead, but the idea and the terrible people who made it the worst place on the Internet are still out there. Unfortunately, this battle will continue; it’s the nature of the Internet and one of the sad, distasteful side-effects of technology and social media.

That the Internet is still, after all these years, not unlike the Wild West, isn’t exactly breaking news. However, it’s sad that there are still so many poorly-mannered moral midgets who refuse to play well with others and who get off on harassing those who’ve done nothing to deserve mistreatment.

I sincerely hope that Kiwi Farms goes the way of the buffalo and dies an excruciating death, but that only means something very similar will pop up somewhere else. It will once again become the absolute worst place on the Internet, a site where the worst will do their worst to those who don’t deserve it.

Who says the Internet isn’t a vast cesspool (broken up by the occasional cat video)?