October 6, 2022

By Bill Berkowitz

What does the name Kiwi Farms conjure up? Perhaps a bucolic setting in the New Zealand countryside where Kiwi birds live harmoniously with kiwi fruit , or a tree-lined kiwi orchard in California’s Lake County, or a communal homestead in Western Massachusetts. Not so fast my friends! In reality, according to Daily Dot’s David Covucci, Kiwi Farms (formerly known as CWCki Forums) “is home to some of the most noxious anti-trans hate on the internet and was dropped this summer by its hosting provider after a prominent online streamer was repeatedly doxed and harassed, leading to outrage on the internet.”

Kiwi Farms was founded in 2013 by Joshua Conner Moon (known as "Null" on the website), a former 8chan administrator. The site reveled in harassing and targeting many individuals, including women, LGBT people, feminists, journalists, Internet celebrities. Katelyn Burns, an MSNBC opinion columnist who had been targeted by the site, described its audience as "terminally online people from a wide range of political ideologies, from far right and anti-trans feminist types to edgy lefties obsessed with consuming internet drama", while noting that "of particular interest to many of the site’s users have been trans people, who they have labeled 'troons', a derogatory portmanteau of 'tranny' and 'goon'" (https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kiwi-farms-made-internet-more-dangerous-trans-people-n1298815).

In early September, WIRED’s Megan Farokhmanesh reported on the case of Clara Sorrenti (https://www.wired.com/story/keffals-kiwifarms-cloudflare-blocked-clara-sorrenti/): “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 councilors 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 You Tube. ‘I feel traumatized.’”

Sorrenti’s harassers were part of Kiwi Farms, “an online community known for stalking, swatting, harassing, doxing, and intimidating everyone from Gamergate targets to far-right congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

Farokhmanesh noted that Kiwi Farms “is connected to the suicides of at least three people who were targets of sustained harassment.”

In response to her swatting, Sorrenti spearheaded a campaign to unplug Kiwi Farms from its digital service providers.   

In mid-September, The Hill’s Brad Dress reported (https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3642685-why-anti-trans-web-forum-kiwi-farms-was-erased-from-the-internet/) that “American cybersecurity firm Cloudflare dropped security services for Kiwi Farms, taking the forum offline by stripping it of needed internet security protections that kept the site running.  A few days later, Russian firm DDoS-Guard also dropped security services for the website, and by the end of the week the country of Iceland had removed the website domain. Internet archive site Wayback Machine even blocked access to archived information on Kiwi Farms.”

Cloudflare was slow to coming to its smack down of Kiwi Farms. According to WIRED’s Farokhmanesh, “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.”

On September 3, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that “The rhetoric on the Kiwi Farms site and specific, targeted threats [against Sorrenti] 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. 

The Hill’s Brad Dress pointed out that “The domino effect has effectively killed the website, marking one of the Internet’s most successful takedown campaigns.” 

NBC News’ Ben Collins reported that Kiwi Farms founder Josh Moon does “not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate.” However, WIRED reported “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.”

Nick Lim is the founder of VanwaTech, a small Vancouver, Washington-based web-hosting outfit. “VanwaTech does provide CDN services to Kiwi Farms, but we have no relationship with the website itself or the posters,” Lim told the Daily Dot via email. (“CDN” stands for content delivery network or content distribution network.)

“We maintain a firm commitment to our role as a neutral provider of internet services and not an internet censor,” said Lim, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist.