A report from the Center to Counter Digital Hate analyzed more than a million posts. It found an increase in chat rooms about mass murder and increasing promotion of child rape, defamation, self-harm and bullying.
Kiwi Farms is an online forum where men who consider themselves unintentionally celibate or "incels" (a virtual subculture of men who say they are unable to have romantic and sexual relationships with women out of resentment towards them), seek to normalize child rape, defamation, self-harm and bullying, both digital and even offline at times.
A report from the Center to Counter Digital Hate (CCDH) was released last year, analyzing more than 1 million posts on the site and finding a dramatic increase in conversations about mass murder and a growing approval of sexually assaulting pre-adolescent girls.
“This is a new and novel violent extremist movement born in the internet age, challenging the usual features of violent extremist movements that law enforcement and the intelligence community are often used to,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and executive director of the center, according to The Washington Post.
"Our study shows that this organization has a compelling ideology and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women and raping children is a clear part of the practice of its ideology," he added at the time.
According to a recent publication on the website of the US magazine Mother Jones, Kiwi Farms “reaps anguish. It thrives on pain and delights in death. Innocuously named forum users prey on the vulnerable and marginalized (transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially challenged) with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns.”
Such is the case of Julie Terryberry, a young woman who took her own life in 2016 after being harassed by users of the site.
When site members learned that 18-year-old Julie had learning disabilities and used the Internet to make friends, they organized to shut down her social media accounts while mocking her mental health issues.
Two years later, another prominent case was that of Chloe Sagal, a transgender girl who worked as a video game developer and set herself on fire in a public park.
The young woman, who was known for having created the game "Homesick", had been suffering harassment for several years by Kiwi Farms users, after they discovered that she was running a crowdfunding campaign with the intention of raising money to change gender, but using another argument.
A friend of the girl said that when Sagal expressed suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent her private messages urging her to do so.
The pressure prompted Sagal to read a speech on mental health and later set herself on fire, despite the fact that she was rescued, she died from severe burns.
Another similar case was that of David Ginder, an American boy who also developed video games in Japan. He was relentlessly tormented by users of the website for being non-binary.
“I have been harassed, ridiculed and humiliated my entire life,” Ginder explained in her suicide note posted online. “I could only tolerate it with severe depression when using 4chan (another similar website). But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders worse,” she expressed.
The most gloomy thing is that forum users celebrated Ginder's suicide.
According to the CCHR report, forum members post about rape every 29 minutes, and more than 89 percent of those who post support rape.
CCHR's analysis also found that more than a quarter of forum members have posted pedophilia-related keywords and more than half are supportive of child sexual abuse.
The report also cited content that reflected this abhorrent trend, noting that the majority of chat participants expressed their support.
“As incel, there is literally no reason to be against pedophilia,” wrote an anonymous user, according to The Washington Post.
Another thread started by a regular user who had posted over 7,000 times on the forum uploaded an image of a 12-year-old boy with the comment “who in their right mind would take a 22-year-old [woman] over this?”
“Their speech analysis shows that this core group poses a clear and present danger to women and other young people, and reveals an emerging threat to our children,” the report says.
CCHR also found a growing interest in mass murder on the site. Posts mentioning mass killings by incels increased 59 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to the study.
The word “kill” was mentioned 1,181 times on the forum in just one month, which equates to once every 37 minutes. “Shoot” and “kill” are also popular words on the forum.
"After conducting this study, we have no doubt that this community of angry, belligerent and unapologetic men are dangerous to each other, with malignant social dynamics where they encourage each other to worse and worse extremes," he says. The report. “Unchecked incel communities have the potential to become further radicalized.”
Users of the platform "were systematically trying to cause suicides," Yonah Gerber, an activist in the video game industry who has advocated for the closure of Kiwi Farms for more than a decade, told Mother Jones. "I was almost another, because I tried to commit suicide twice."
Kiwi Farms became a trend on social networks and the media in August 2022, when Clara Sorrenti, a transgender girl who streamed on the Twitch platform, reported that a SWAT-type armed group broke into her home to frighten her
Apparently, this is one of the favorite tactics of Kiwi Farms users and other serial stalkers, as published by Mother Jones.
“The cops woke me up and I saw an assault rifle pointed at me,” Sorrenti said in a YouTube video. "I thought I was going to die".
Before the incident that the streamer experienced, the victims of Kiwi Farms had not been as visible and many times they tried to defend themselves but with little success.
Thanks to the fact that Sorrenti, whose alias on the web is Keffals, had a large number of followers on both Twitter and Twitch, the harassment suffered by the victims began to be visualized.
Sorrenti created the #DropKiwiFarms campaign to demand the closure of the forum and the security provider Cloudflare to remove Kiwi Farms as a customer, effectively removing the platform from the website and inhibiting its ability to fully function.
Sorrenti's followers ensured that every time she tweeted about the Kiwi Farms victims, or provided updates about the campaign, her posts garnered thousands of likes and retweets, Mother Jones reported.
But it seems the story of Kiwi Farms is far from over. Despite being taken down by Cloudflare, the forum can still be found on internet search engines and maintains a group of supporters trying to organize to bring the platform back.
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