The world should not need Kiwi Farms

The notorious doxxing site might have been the last stand for free expression online

The following is by Corinna Cohn, who you may remember doing this brilliant thing. Corinna sent it in response to the recent piece by Esoteric Histrionics that I also cross-posted on this site.

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Keffals: wagons circling

On September 3rd, the security company Cloudflare dropped the website Kiwi Farms as a customer. Kiwi Farms broke into the limelight in August when victims of police “swatting” blamed the site for coordinating the harassment. Swatting is a potentially lethal harassment technique by which police receive a false report of imminent danger and are prepared to confront a target armed and ready for violence. Cloudflare was previously providing Kiwi Farms a service to shield the website from denial-of-service attacks, a common weapon used to keep websites from being able to serve pages. 

Kiwi Farms is one of the websites right-thinking journalists warn you to avoid visiting. Its users include journalists, lawyers, and academics arguing cheek-to-jowl with white supremacists, fascists, and every other type of rat-eating troglodyte with access to a keyboard. Unlike the highly-regulated social media platforms to which we’ve become accustomed, Kiwi Farms allows discussion of nearly any topic, but typically users flock to forums to document, discuss, and yes, sometimes harass outlandish public figures. The typical tone of a Kiwi Farms post is schadenfreude and sarcasm, and the figures picked out for attention justifiably feel picked on and even traumatized. In August, Kiwi Farms was accused of swatting Clara Sorrenti, a transgender social media personality, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Across its decade of operation, critics of Kiwi Farms have implicated it in the suicide of three individuals (accusations that have been widely reported uncritically as fact). Tom Namako, executive editor of NBC News Digital describes it as “one of the most dire places on the internet, known as the epicenter of vicious, anti-trans harassment campaigns.”

As the story is told in the Washington Post or by NBC News, an innocent transgender video game streamer has been serially harassed by a website full of malcontents and trolls, resulting in the website being removed from the internet. The truth is more nuanced, and the action taken by Cloudflare, now no longer a content-neutral network infrastructure provider, may signal the end of free expression on the internet.

I am a lurker on Kiwi Farms, someone who reads the site on a regular basis. My habit started in early 2017 when I was contacted out of the blue by a member of the Kiwi Farms forum to alert me that my real name had been exposed and connected to my until-then anonymous Twitter account. Up to that point I’d only known about Kiwi Farms by its reputation, which in 2017 was not very different from Namako’s description. I knew that I didn’t want Kiwi Farms taking an interest in me, and I felt anxious and vulnerable having my name appear on the website.

On Twitter, I had been asking the operators of the Trans Lifeline to institute safeguarding measures for their clients. Trans Lifeline is a suicide hotline developed by and for the transgender community. It was Trans Lifeline’s policy to deliberately not conduct background checks for its hotline volunteers. Kiwi Farms had been tracking my public appeals. One of the forum users, a transgender woman, heaped my name on top of the information pile they were gathering. Another forum participant, concerned for my safety and privacy, contacted me through Twitter to warn me.

As it turns out, Kiwi Farms had been accumulating information on the Trans Lifeline, and some of its forum participants had been scrapping with the Trans Lifeline leadership. The forum revealed information about Trans Lifeline that I, even as an active critic, had not known. I learned that Trans Lifeline was not answering many of its calls, which was revealed by Trans Lifeline through its own reporting (when Kiwi Farms took notice, Trans Lifeline discontinued its public reporting). I learned that Greta Gustava Martela, one of the founders of Trans Lifeline, had actually traveled across the country to confront the operator of Kiwi Farms at his mother’s house (Kiwi Farms had screenshots of Martela bragging about owning deadly weapons). This confrontation is represented on Wikipedia as a “decision to directly confront individuals who they believe facilitate transphobia” or, as most people would describe it, an angry stranger showing up on your doorstep to threaten you.

There are plenty of elements of a news story. A suicide hotline for a vulnerable population that doesn’t answer calls, that does not have safeguarding policies, and whose leadership shows up in person to menace critics. Although this is not headline news, it merits some attention from smaller media outlets. However, two forces prevented this story from ever being reported. Kiwi Farms had built a reputation as being a hang-out for miscreants, and no reporter wanted to blemish their own standing by offering a sympathetic angle, and in a post-Trump world, transgender activism had attained an unchallengeable social privilege. 

It would be wrong to say that there was zero media attention of Trans Lifeline. The NBC News website wrote a glossy profile of its co-founder Nina Chaubal. The New York Times also dedicated a sympathetic piece to Chaubal covering her detention by US Immigration on an expired work visa.

In early 2018, the Trans Lifeline board removed Martela and Chaubal from leadership following allegations that the pair had diverted in the neighborhood of $350,000 from the charity’s funds to their own private uses. The organization filed a Form 990 reporting “unauthorized purchases” and an agreement for the terminated founders to repay the misspent funds over ten years.

In a functional media environment, the story of a suicide hotline for a vulnerable population having its funds misspent by its founders should have been a widely reported story. The charity itself should have undergone public scrutiny, and its board should have faced pressure to recover the lost money. The duty of informing the public should never fall to a seedy gossip website known for publishing “dox,” personal contact details, of its targets of interest. Kiwi Farms acted as both a repository of evidence and as a freelance company of analysts for this event.

Kiwi Farms has seen its membership and forum activity double over the past several years. Users from other internet forums come to Kiwi Farms seeking less regulated content moderation. In June of 2020, the administrators of Reddit banned a section of the site called Gender Critical. The Gender Critical forum had over 60,000 users, most of whom were women, discussing a wide variety of topics from women’s hygiene, sex trafficking, reproductive rights, and yes, the conflict between feminists and transgender-identifying people. Reddit’s administrative staff has an outsized proportion who identify as transgender, and tone of the Gender Critical forum could sometimes be hostile or offensive, despite the forum’s own moderator’s efforts to adhere to Reddit’s rules. Kiwi Farms was not the only destination for the Gender Critical exodus: some of the former members of the forum created their own website called Ovarit. Reddit’s actions are in line with other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, that have become more aggressive about patrolling its users’ ability to freely express viewpoints.

As the major discussion forums make it impossible to discuss certain sacred cows (transgender ideology, virus vaccination, and other politicized topics), people have flocked to less moderated spaces where group think more easily sets in, growing insular communities untempered by the need to justify beliefs or opinions to interested onlookers. As Kaitlyn Tiffany noted in The Atlantic, those ejected from mainstream forums carry resentment about their treatment on more open platforms. Persecuting people by banning their speech is a potent recipe for distilling anger at the outside world.

The rise of these outlaw communities has been met with annoyance by some members of the mainstream media. In 2021, Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz tattled on the participants of a Clubhouse room because one of the participants used the word retarded. Lorenz mistakenly attributed the use of the word to Marc Andreesen, and was forced to backtrack when she was corrected. However, it is Lorenz appointing herself the role of arbiter of speech that should raise eyebrows. Lorenz criticized Clubhouse for allowing “unfettered conversations,” instead of imposing overbearing speech regulation. Somehow we have conceded the idea that members of the press have a role in setting the boundaries of acceptable public speech. We should not make such concessions.

Kiwi Farms is not entirely without moderation. Posts can and will be removed, especially if they distract from the purpose of the forum. The site has a “bro” culture where people frequently refer to each other as slurs. Users making their first posts often violate unspoken forum rules, and these “newfags” are corrected by the veteran members. The moderators have cooperated with law enforcement requests at times, but have on other occasions openly mocked the supplicant’s request. The biggest problem with the moderation on Kiwi Farms is that it is not synchronized with the practices of the other major content sites. If you want a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop suppressed before an election, Kiwi Farms is not going to cooperate. If you want to squelch discussion about the efficacy of COVID vaccines, or slap a CDC warning label about misinformation on every page, Kiwi Farms will not comply. And if you’re a public figure like Taylor Lorenz, and you want to have an embarrassing trove of personal criticism deleted from cyberspace, Kiwi Farms will not help you out. If you’re Taylor Lorenz, you need a strategy to get rid of the site altogether.

In March of 2022, Sorrenti, a Twitch streamer also known as “keffals,” came into public notice by feuding with yet another internet celebrity Steven Bonnell, also known as “Destiny.” Bonnell had said something critical about the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Sorrenti bragged about having Bonnell’s channel banned on the premise of transphobia, thereby depriving Bonnell of his main source of income. Bonnell was already an internet celebrity tracked by Kiwi Farms, and Sorrenti’s conduct resulted in Kiwi Farms creating a dedicated forum for Sorrenti. The self-appointed investigators started compiling information about Sorrenti, uncovering an embarrassing past in pornography and some evidence that Sorrenti ran online discussion forums that included and sexualized minors.

In June of 2022, following a fundraiser Sorrenti hosted for transgender charities, Lorenz wrote a glowing and uncritical profile of Sorrenti. An interesting insight in Lorenz’s piece is a quote from Brenden Gahan, chief social officer of a creative agency: “Conflict equals growth.” It’s impossible to imagine that Sorrenti and Lorenz have not discussed their common enemy of Kiwi Farms. The elevation of Sorrenti to a Washington Post puff piece inflamed the Kiwi Farms forum and ramped up the rhetoric. On August 9th, 2022, Sorrenti was a victim of a falsified police report which lead to Sorrenti’s detainment and seizure of computers and phones. Although there is no evidence to connect this crime to Kiwi Farms, the fact that Sorrenti’s address is published on Kiwi Farms implicates the forum as an accomplice. Sorrenti was able to raise nearly $100,000 from the public to help mitigate the inconvenience of the swatting.

Sorrenti and Kiwi Farms began to play a cat-and-mouse game. Sorrenti would move to “safe” locations, but then post photos that invited Kiwi Farms members to place Sorrenti’s location. Sorrenti would then move to a new location and post new clues. Sorrenti, together with some other individuals previously targeted by Kiwi Farms, began to pressure Cloudflare, a provider of critical internet services, to drop Kiwi Farms as a customer. Although Sorrenti was clearly playing a game, the pressure on Cloudflare was severe. 

The present form of the internet is surprisingly concentrated. A combination of market forces and reactions to mitigate criminal activities have given rise to a small number of providers and services assuming responsibility for serving major parts of internet traffic. Cloudflare is one of these providers, and close to 20 percent of all websites use Cloudflare to service internet services, or use Cloudflare to defend against attacks. Many small websites, which may as well be any that are not YouTube, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, depend on Cloudflare to be able to operate, period. Cloudflare understands its solemn responsibility of maintaining neutrality in serving traffic, and the pressure campaign led to Cloudflare laying out its responsibility to remain neutral in an August 31st blog post.

Cloudflare’s response did not relieve any of the pressure against it. Articles began appearing in Time Magazine, Bloomberg, and NBC News pouring on extra pressure. On September 3rd, citing a an unnamed “imminent and emergency threat to life,” Cloudflare gave in to the pressure and terminated its service to Kiwi Farms. This move was celebrated by Taylor Lorenz, who praised Sorrenti’s bravery and criticized Kiwi Farms’ harm to the “trans community.” Lorenz also credited NBC’s Ben Collins as being “crucial” in the campaign to pressure Cloudflare.  Ben King also crowed about the imminent demise of Kiwi Farms, admitting that it would be impossible to continue operating the site without Cloudflare’s service.

Let’s look at the belligerents and put things in context. There is Kiwi Farms, a forum which publishes personal contact information and enables harassment, but which also collects and analyzes information ignored by the entirety of the media. There is Clara Sorrenti and friends, online drama personalities who are monetizing attention. There is Taylor Lorenz, Ben Collins, and the other representatives of the mainstream media who have repeatedly signaled the desire to control the dissemination of information online. Finally, there is Cloudflare, a critical provider of internet services. At a high level, this is a spat between an internet gossip group, an irresponsible journalist nursing a grudge, and an internet clown. At the ground level, this is potentially the end of open expression on the internet. If providers of backbone services can be moved away from neutrality once, they will be moved again. This will become a recurring tactic to drive unpopular speech off the internet.

As bad as this situation is, it gets worse. NBC News National Security Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director, made a provably false accusation that Kiwi Farms is responsible for three suicides and without any evidence claimed that Kiwi Farms could easily become an “increased threat to domestic terror.” Figliuzzi linked Kiwi Farms to Russian internet services—a move necessary only because Cloudflare was pressured to drop the website. An attempt by a major US press organization to enlist the aid of the FBI to crush an internet discussion forum is a strong signal that traditional notions of a free press are rapidly becoming outdated.

There is more going on here beyond a rogue message board having a tiff with a transgender video game streamer. Journalists are swapping out their duties from reporting news to defining what is information and what is “disinformation.” The media companies, competing for attention first and dollars second, are providing their full backing. The world should not need a website like Kiwi Farms. Instead Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and the myriad other publishing platforms should already be open forums supporting free expression and committed to viewpoint neutrality. But this is not the reality. Kiwi Farms, though it may be a hive of scum and villainy, may also be one of the last places where free expression lives online. The only way to solve a problem like Kiwi Farms is to restore the norm of free expression everywhere else.

2022-09-06 10:27am EDT: An earlier version of this story accidentally referred to Cloudflare as Cloudfront, a similar AWS service.

2022-09-06 2:51pm EDT: An earlier version of this story referred to Steve Bonner, it has been corrected to Steve Bonnell