Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare says it has “blocked” a notorious trolling website that harasses and doxxes trans people, days after indicating it had no plans to do so because it regretted taking similar action in the past.
Cloudflare, which provides protection to websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks, had been under pressure to cease protecting Kiwi Farms, a community forum website that frequently targets trans people online.
In a blog post on Wednesday, which didn’t mention Kiwi Farms or the pressure campaign, Cloudflare’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, and its vice-president of public policy, Alissa Starzak, suggested the company regretted taking action against the far-right websites 8chan and Daily Stormer in 2019 and 2017, saying there was a “deeply troubling” response afterwards from authoritarian regimes calling for the company to block human rights websites.
But on Sunday, Prince said in a tweet and a blog post that the company had reversed its decision.
“We just blocked Kiwi Farms,” he said in the tweet.
“The threats on the site escalated enough in the last 48 hours that, in spite of proactively working with law enforcement, it became enough of an imminent emergency we could no longer wait for them to act.”
We just blocked Kiwifarms. The threats on the site escalated enough in the last 48 hours that, in spite of proactively working with law enforcement, it became enough of an imminent emergency we could no longer wait for them to act. Details of our decision: https://t.co/xNnSXn65R6
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) September 3, 2022
In the blog post, Prince said that while it “would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action.
“Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent. The policies we articulated last Wednesday remain our policies.”
Members of Kiwi Farms have recently targeted Clara Sorrenti, a Canadian Twitch streamer and trans activist who has had her personal information posted on the site repeatedly. Sorrenti has also been swatted – where people make hoax calls to emergency services to a person’s house. She subsequently founded the #dropkiwifarms campaign.
Prince said Kiwi Farms could come back online if another provider agreed to protect it and he noted “the emergency threat to human life” may actually be made worse by Cloudflare’s decision.
The website remained available online on Sunday using a slightly different URL.
“Finally, we are aware and concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency. Kiwi Farms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online, as the Daily Stormer and 8chan did themselves after we terminated them.
“And, even if they don’t, the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize [sic] will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is a real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.”
In a statement, the #dropkiwifarms campaign said it welcomed the decision but its fight was not over and it could now target the Las Vegas-based company that hosts Kiwi Farms on its servers.
“Kiwi Farms has been around for over a decade and at no point in the site’s history have they come under this much fire,” the statement said.
“This is a historical [sic] moment where thousands of people have stood up and taken a stance against online harassment and hate. This deals a big blow to Kiwi Farms and their community, one they may never recover from.”
Cloudflare’s midweek stance not to intervene was similar to many tech companies reluctant to act as content moderators. The company’s position was similar to that of social media platforms Facebook and Twitter before they began to ramp up moderation in response to the rise of the far right and the Covid-19 pandemic.
