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”.
Over the last year, the forum has focused on one person in particular: 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.
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.
Free-speech wing of the free-speech party
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, meaning that a failure at Cloudfare can have an outsized effect. A half-hour outage in 2020 took out a substantial chunk of the internet in major cities across Europe and the Americas. Thanks to the systemic importance of the company’s services, even sites that didn’t rely on it directly were hit, as traffic surges disrupted other parts of internet infrastructure that were technically unrelated to Cloudflare.
Still run by founder Matthew Prince, a startup CEO in the classic mould, the company tries to take a firm stance against content moderation, arguing that its role as an infrastructure provider is important enough that it needs to be provided to all, lest too much arbitrary power sit with one company.
And Prince has had to take that stance a lot. Over the years, the company has provided services to al-Qaeda (“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Prince wrote at the time), to the white supremacist news site the Daily Stormer (“I’m almost a free-speech absolutist,” Prince said shortly before cutting off service to the site), and to Kiwi Farms’s parent board 8chan (“We’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive – regardless of the content of those websites,”, he said.)
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.
With Kiwi Farms, the cycle began afresh. If Cloudflare dropped the site, Kiwi Farms would struggle to stay online until it could find another – smaller, more fringe – provider of the same services. If Cloudflare didn’t drop the site, its continued existence would, to a greater or lesser extent, become increasingly attributable to Cloudflare itself, for better or worse.
So Cloudflare danced the dance again. In a 2,500-word blogpost published on 31 August, 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.”
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.
On 3 September, the company took action. “We have blocked Kiwi Farms,” Prince said. “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.”
The fallout for Kiwi Farms is predictable, and will follow a similar arc of other sites in the same situation. The site has spent the last few days bouncing from provider to provider, and the critics have followed it; it signed up for Cloudflare competitor DDoS-Guard over the weekend, and was terminated “without waiting for an official notice” on Monday morning. Some users will bounce along with it, and eventually settle down in a new, smaller home, backed by a provider willing to take the heat. Others won’t. The service won’t die, just as the Daily Stormer and 8chan didn’t die, but its existence will be smaller, less influential and more technically burdensome.
But Cloudflare, and Prince, seem determined to learn different lessons. The blogpost declaring the site’s suspension warns it is “not the end”. “We are hopeful that our action today will help provoke conversations toward addressing the larger problem. And we stand ready to participate in that conversation.”
The company’s approach has differed in one way from its previous tactics in the case of 8chan and the Daily Stormer: rather than simply withdrawing its services, and allowing Kiwi Farms to survive or die without Cloudflare’s help, visitors to the site now see a page declaring the site “Blocked”, and linking to Prince’s blogpost. Kiwi Farms could remove the banner by disabling Cloudflare’s service at its end, but has yet to do so, instead registering new web addresses.
The approach serves both Kiwi Farms and Cloudflare’s ends, in presenting the issue as one of free speech and online censorship. But ultimately Cloudflare is not the internet, and criticism of it for working with violent bigots isn’t unfair. It will happen again. It always happens again. Will Cloudflare have anything new to say when it does?
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