Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has indicated it will continue to provide services to a notorious trolling website that harasses and doxxes trans people, admitting it regrets taking action against other sites in the past.
Cloudflare, which provides protection to websites from distributed denial of service attacks, has been under pressure to cease protecting Kiwi Farms, a community forum website that frequently targets trans people online – including by repeatedly posting their personal information.
Most recently, members of the forum have been targeting 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 hoax call emergency services to a person’s house.
Kiwi Farms is blocked in New Zealand for hosting the Christchurch terrorist video, and had been blocked in Australia for the same reason – the Australian block was lifted once the site stopped hosting the video.
The targeting of Sorrenti, as well as other gender diverse people online, led to a campaign for Cloudflare – and website host Fibrehub – to cease providing services to Kiwi Farms.
In a blog post on Wednesday, which didn’t mention Kiwi Farms or the campaign itself, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, and its vice-president of public policy, Alissa Starzak, indicated the company had regrets about taking similar 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 Cloudflare to take similar action against human rights websites.
The pair argued Cloudflare, which claims to provide services to 20% of the internet, should be treated like a utility and should not be asked to take a stance by refusing services to websites they personally find abhorrent.
“Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policymakers and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” they said. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.”
The pair justified their stance by saying that in one instance, where they had provided DDoS protection services to an anti-LGBTIQ+ website, they donated 100% of the fees earned to an organisation fighting for LGBTIQ+ rights.
“We don’t and won’t talk about these efforts publicly because we don’t do them for marketing purposes; we do them because they are aligned with what we believe is morally correct,” the executives said.
The pair also pointed to the company’s terms of use, which include the right for Cloudflare to terminate the service for a site that includes “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public”.
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The post did not specifically address how Kiwi Farms users doxxing people did not fall foul of these terms. Cloudflare had not responded to questions from Guardian Australia at the time of publication.
Cloudflare’s stance is commonplace among tech companies, which have had a reluctance to act as content moderators. The company’s position is similar to that of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter before they began to ramp up their moderation activities in response to the rise of the far right and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The organisers of the campaign against Kiwi Farms responded to the post by saying that by seeking to take a neutral position, Cloudflare was in effect taking a position.
“There is no morally neutral policy … they made a choice based on their own personal ethics and it’s one that allows them to run away from making another ethical choice,” the organisers said.
“Cloudflare’s response to growing pressure on them to discontinue their relationship with far right harassment forum Kiwi Farms is inadequate, inconsistent and an abdication of their moral responsibility.”