Disaster Under Pressure, Security Firm Cloudflare drops Kiwi Farms Website - Noted LoTT doxer Taylor Lorenz weigh ins

SAN FRANCISCO — Reversing course under growing public pressure, major tech security company Cloudflare announced Saturday that it will stop protecting the Kiwi Farms website, best known as a place for stalkers to organize hacks, online campaigns and real-world harassment.
Cloudfare chief executive Matthew Prince, who this past week published a lengthy blog post justifying the company’s services defending Kiwi Farms, told The Washington Post he changed his mind not because of the pressure but a surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site.
“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”
Prince said contributors to the forum were posting home addresses of those seen as enemies and calling for them to be shot.
Kiwi Farms launched in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.
Cloudflare has faced broad backlash in the past week as a campaign for it to drop the service gained steam and widened to pressure paying customers to drop Cloudflare if it held firm.
Two weeks ago, Prince said the company stopped selling Kiwi Farms a $20 per month service to customize error messages shown to web users when its pages wouldn’t load. On Saturday, it withdrew the remaining free services, which fend off denial-of-service attacks and speed content delivery by making copies of the site in many locations.
Clara Sorrenti, a trans Canadian Twitch streamer known online as Keffals, launched the #DropKiwiFarms campaign after being targeted by Kiwi Farms posters for over half a year.
Forum users had repeatedly doxed Sorrenti and her family, posting addresses and more, and last month they called in false crime reports to draw police to her home. Sorrenti fled to Northern Ireland late last month, and within 48 hours users of the forum had pinpointed her location and she began receiving threats.
On Saturday, she spoke with The Post just minutes after police had arrived at her residence after another swatting attempt.
“There are countless people suffering because of this website,” Sorrenti said. “Kiwi Farms isn’t about free speech, it’s about hate speech. The majority of the content on the site is threads used for targeted harassment against political targets.”
Sorrenti’s campaign against Cloudflare went viral in the past several days, with organizations and influencers joining in the call to ban Kiwi Farms from Cloudflare’s service. The Anti-Defamation League called Kiwi Farms an “extremist-friendly forum that has been the breeding ground for countless harassment campaigns.”
In the interview, Prince said he was uncomfortable dropping Kiwi Farms despite its content and would have preferred a court order.
But he said it was an easier call than his previous decisions to drop neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and the 8chan website because those two were not hotbeds for specific violent plots.
Lorenz reported from Los Angeles.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Archive

 

[MirrorNoir]

2030 will have another more significant impact as it will be the near the end of Solar Cycle 25. With the Earth's electromagnetic field weakening and the Sun going quiescent again, bad juju might be in store in the form of an Above X-Class Solar Flare and then it'll be Adios Muchachos in the form of another Carrington Event. Its the starts/ends of the cycles we have to worry about.....

What is a Carrington Event? Details please?

 

[Brooklyn Red Leg]

The Carrington Event was an Above X-Class Solar Flare in 1859. We really only know about it, as it relates to the electrical grid, because the telegraph wires out West caught fire from the electromagnetic energy dumped into the atmosphere. Auroras were seen as far south as the Caribbean. There was an even larger solar event (called the Charlemagne Event) in in AD 774-775 that resulted in a spike of ~1.2% Carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Again, the resulting auroras were recorded well south of where they should have been.

Solar scientists are saying its not a matter of "If" its a matter of "When". IINM, in 2004, the Earth barely dodged a CME that would have fried the entire grid. The event happened on non-Earth facing limb of the Sun, so we lucked out.

 

[oh no im late for school]

wew lads traffic was real slow and i had to take a completely unfamiliar route but i was able to get here just fine today

 

[Grub]

Cloudflare is fake and gay. Fuck them we're purple now. Purple's awesome. Thanks cloudflare.

 

[oh no im late for school]

i'm pleasantly surprised by the load times. last time i tried to tamanegi my way into anything it felt like sending a letter and waiting for a reply, this is actually real snappy

 

[TurkishOreo]

This is because of a thing called a "derivative shareholder lawsuit", if a shareholder can claim that bad PR has hurt sales, and that bad PR was the result of the executives, then the shareholder can sue the executives.

I surely hope that Cloudflare's decision isn't gonna backfire on them forcing them to drop other sites that are worse than a gossip forum.

 

[AnotherPleb]

I surely hope that Cloudflare's decision isn't gonna backfire on them forcing them to drop other sites that are worse than a gossip forum.

Kiwifarms was an allowed target, just like the Stormer and 8ch was. I fully believe that statement about being pressured to drop protected class sites was nothing more than a fig leaf.

 

[Haramburger]

due to extenuating circumstances(TOR loads like shit), I cannot guarantee the editing or deletion of double-triple-QUADRUPLE! posts without downtime as I do it. I'm going to leave them as is for now. That being said, you're posting like sloped-forehead caveman NIGGERS and it's disgusting. Use the edit button, or just collect your thought into one post like a normal hoho sappenis.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

The unfortunate thing is, you may want to avoid politics, but these days, politics will follow you. You want to have a gossip site? If you gossip about troons, even a little bit, they will come after you with all the time they spend on the computer in their room, and try to get you shut down. If you don't gossip about them, then that was a political decision taken to (try to) stay afloat without controversy.

This is 1000% accurate. I was apolitical not too long ago, but a debate about my use of pepe the frog with some normies I used to know led me down the road to discover what other lunacy awaited in this weird, woke, godless world.

 

[NoSpiceLife]

The unfortunate thing is, you may want to avoid politics, but these days, politics will follow you.

Completely agree. As with Car Won't Crank's comment, up until very recently, coincidentally the same time I joined KF, I was very anti-politics. I didn't want to know anything, made worse by 'trying' out a politics major at uni. I gave up after one semester.

After that though, I started to see politics in literally everything, and as you said, no one can get away from it now.