On the morning of August 5, in London, Ontario, police put an assault rifle in Clara Sorrenti’s face. Sorrenti is a trans activist and Twitch streamer who provides political commentary under the handle Keffals. Earlier that morning, an impersonator had sent an email to city councillors claiming that Sorrenti had killed her mother and would soon go to City Hall to shoot every cisgender person she saw. “When I was woken up by police officers and saw the assault rifle pointed at me, I thought I was going to die,” Sorrenti later recounted in a video on YouTube. “I feel traumatized.”
Sorrenti was the latest victim of a vicious ongoing harassment campaign driven by Kiwi Farms, an online community known for stalking, swatting, harassing, doxing, and intimidating everyone from Gamergate targets to far-right congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene. Its users are known to single out transgender and neurodivergent people in particular. The site is connected to the suicides of at least three people who were targets of sustained harassment. Users’ tactics are exhaustive. For the past decade, Kiwi Farms has operated with impunity—until now.
In the wake of her swatting, Sorrenti began a campaign, Drop Kiwi Farms, to sever the forum’s access to digital service providers. In particular, she drew attention to its web security provider Cloudflare. Kiwi Farms has been allowed to operate for years as a fringe site, but the campaign pushed it into the mainstream eye as Sorrenti gave countless interviews, launched a Twitter campaign, and gathered supporters to put pressure on Cloudflare.
On August 31, CEO Matthew Prince responded indirectly to the campaign with a post on Cloudflare’s abuse policies. Although it did not mention Kiwi Farms or Sorrenti specifically, Prince wrote that “overbroad takedowns can have significant unintended impact on access to content online.”
“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.”
Historically, Cloudflare has been reluctant to drop even neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer, ignoring pressure from critics and claiming neutrality. It wasn’t until 2017 that Cloudflare acted against the extremist site—notably, after the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2019, in the wake of shootings in El Paso, Texas, the company booted 8chan, a site the shooter frequented. But it took more than a single violent instance to get that response; as Prince noted at the time, 8chan members were also responsible for the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
This history, then, might give some context as to why Prince responded the way he did when it came to Kiwi Farms—and why it’s so unprecedented that he eventually reversed course. Kiwi Farms’ harassment continued to escalate even after Sorrenti got swatted. By August 14, she and her fiancé had relocated to a local hotel. According to the streamer, users spent hours cross-referencing a photo of bedsheets from the hotel she was staying at (she’d posted a photo of her cat). Once they successfully located her, they sent pizzas to her room under her deadname. “It’s the threat they send by telling me they know where I live and are willing to act on it in the real world,” Sorrenti said in another YouTube video. Her UberEats account got hacked and hundreds of dollars worth of food was sent her way; strangers began sending threatening voicemails to her and her family.
Sorrenti left the country for Belfast in Northern Ireland. Kiwi Farms members once again tracked her down. One person posted a photo of a message that contained the date and a reference to Kiwi Farms specifically outside her temporary residence.
On September 3, Cloudflare changed tack. Prince announced that it had blocked Kiwi Farms in “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.”
The company said it did not block Kiwi Farms directly because of Sorrenti’s efforts. In the wake of that campaign, however, Prince wrote that “feeling attacked, users of Kiwi Farms became even more aggressive.” Furthermore, the company said it proactively reached out to law enforcement.
“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,” Prince wrote of the company’s decision to ultimately drop the forum. “We are aware and concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency … the individuals that used the site to increasingly terrorize will feel even more isolated and attacked and may lash out further. There is real risk that by taking this action today we may have further heightened the emergency.”
Cloudflare did not respond to specific questions from WIRED but reiterated parts of the statement posted last weekend. “To be clear, it is not an effective or long-term solution for an infrastructure provider to take this action. We believe we need better legal mechanisms across society to ensure protection of those who come under threat of violence online,” spokesperson Jessie Foster told WIRED.
After being dropped by Cloudflare, Kiwi Farms has scrambled to find the web infrastructure services it needs to stay online. The security service hCaptcha and even Russian host DDoS-Guard have both turned the extremist site away. Kiwi Farms founder Josh Moon has said he expects that the forum won’t be able to stay up consistently anymore. As reported by NBC News’ Ben Collins, Moon does “not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate.” The site has even been purged from the Internet Archive. It appears that, for now, it has found a home with VanwaTech, which also provided services to Daily Stormer and 8kun (formerly 8chan) after their respective Cloudflare bans.
Sorrenti acknowledged that Kiwi Farms may never fully be offline, in the same way that 8chan and Daily Stormer have persisted. But she notes that once a site loses the ability to purchase basic web services from content delivery networks and web security companies, they become “completely impotent” in spite of the extreme lengths they can go to in order to nominally stick around. Whether or not Kiwi Farms has been completely removed, Sorrenti said, “is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have not only been achieved, but have achieved more than we could have ever expected.” Kiwi Farms has lost its access in the visible parts of the web.
“We won,” Sorrenti said. “Kiwi Farms is dead.”
