The online community known for spreading hatred and encouraging harassment, Kiwi Farms, has been disabled, according to the internet services provider Cloudflare, who cited rising targeted threats as a “urgent danger to human life.”
CEO Matthew Prince of Cloudflare said in a blog post, “We have blacklisted Kiwi Farms.” Any visitor to a Kiwi Farms website that makes use of a Cloudflare service will encounter a Cloudflare block page with a link to this article.
Although we have taken efforts to prevent Kiwi Farms’ material from being accessible via our infrastructure, they may relocate their sites to other providers and relaunch them.
Given Cloudflare’s function as an Internet infrastructure provider, Prince termed it a “extraordinary move” and said that he thought it was “a hazardous one that we are not comfortable with.”
But over the past 48 hours, the rhetoric on the Kiwi Farms website and the targeted, specific threats have intensified to the point where Prince wrote, “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.
Days after Prince and Cloudflare Global Public Policy Chief Alissa Starzak addressed how the business handles harassment, the decision was made.
However, that message implied that services would still be provided to Kiwi Farms without mentioning it by name.
The blog post said that “the popular alternative would be to terminate security services for information that our staff personally believes is ugly and unethical.”
However, over time, such decisions make it harder to defend against assaults material that promotes marginalised and oppressed perspectives.
After openly withdrawing support from the message board 8chan, which is renowned for hosting violent hate speech and where the shooter who murdered 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso wrote his manifesto, Cloudfare gained notoriety in 2019.
The white nationalist website Daily Stormer’s use of Cloudflare’s services has already been discontinued.
For providing security services to Kiwi Farms, whose users have harassed and doxxed transgender people, and where a campaign that specifically targeted a well-known trans Twitch streamer drove her into hiding, Cloudfare, which provides a range of services to digital clients, from cyber security to web hosting, has recently come under fire.
Clara Sorrenti, a streamer and activist also known as Keffals on social media, spoke about her experiences with being doxxed and swatted in videos.
Swatting is a sort of cybercrime in which armed emergency personnel are sent to the property of a victim after a fictitious 911 call. Keffals began the #DropKiwiFarms campaign and spoke about her personal experience.
Keffals praised Cloudflare’s choice in a blog post headlined “The fight is won, but the war is not finished.”
The renowned far-right hate site Kiwi Farms has been removed by Cloudflare today, according to a statement from the #DropKiwiFarms movement.
Threats against human life have increased over the last 48 hours on the internet, and they are occurring far more quickly than law enforcement can respond, as CEO Matthew Prince has remarked.
Never before in the site’s existence, which spans more than ten years, has Kiwi Farms seen this much criticism.
In this historic time, hundreds of individuals have taken a stand against hate and abuse online.
Although they are “glad” with Cloudfare’s decision, the campaign cautioned that “we shouldn’t rest on our laurels.”
“While today is a day for celebration, their community may survive. We have shown our ability to move mountains when we work together, and if we stick together and fight back, we will be able to do so to the very end, the statement said.