On September 3, Internet service provider Cloudflare announced that it was ending its business relationship with Kiwi Farms, a website with a reputation for promoting harassment campaigns and fostering a hateful environment. The decision came after weeks of pressure on social media led by one of the site’s targets: a trans Twitch streamer named Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, who was the victim of increasing targeted harassment after her personal information was leaked. will be published in Kiwi Farms.
Citing “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life,” Cloudflare blocked the site from its servers, effectively dismantling its infrastructure and forcing it offline. The #DropKiwiFarms campaign declared victory. “We won,” Sorrenti tweeted two days later. “Kiwi Farms is dead.”
However, six weeks later, Kiwi Farms is back up and running at its original URL. Although the extremist site faltered on its way back to the clear net (a term for the publicly accessible Internet), several security service providers and hosts refused to do business with Kiwi Farms – seems to have been constantly online for almost a week at press time. And its owner, Joshua “Null” Moon, seems certain to keep it that way based on regular website status updates he posts on Telegram, detailing, among other things, multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and a hack of website user data.
12-year-old Kiwi Farms is a proudly offensive hate speech-laden message board that devotes a large portion of its site to tracking the lives and making abusive comments about those it deems worthy of ridicule. These individuals are nicknamed “lolcows” and are “milked” for their content. Many of the site’s favorite targets are neurodivergent individuals, those with disabilities or mental illness, and members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender men and women, who are referred to as “troons” by Kiwi Farms residents.
The site, which was dubbed “the web’s largest stalker community” in a 2016 New York magazine article, is known for misleading his targets in threads, posting sensitive data (including contact information) about the person in question, and often their family members and employers. These repositories of personal information have for years made the site a one-stop-shop for online criminals who want to engage in targeted harassment. The site has been bound to the suicides of three individuals; Moon has vehemently denied Kiwi Farms’ involvement in these deaths in multiple posts on the website.
Currently, the mood at Kiwi Farms is defiant and joyous. “We are back,” wrote one user on September 27. “Cope and boil.” Kiwi Farmers is currently updating the platform removal campaign threads with memes mocking Sorrenti and comments about, and criticism from: the many media outlets that covered the “death” of the website.
So where does this leave those who pushed for his deplatform?
